by Sarah Smith
He swung her onto the dance floor in something like a dazed waltz. The floor was crowded, too many people on it to have dancing room for anyone; she said something to him, but over the noise of talking and the music, he couldn’t hear it. They were pressed together, body to body, and he felt the imprint of every soft inch of her.
She spoke something. “What?” He couldn’t hear her, just feel her breath in his ear.
“Who ... I’m sorry, I have to ask. What was in the barn?”
She hadn’t known and he hadn’t thought to tell her. Someone jostled against them.
“Come out of here,” he said, breaking off the dance and leading her toward an exit door close by. “We’ll go on the terrace,” he meant it, no farther; they would walk, and talk, and he would do no more than hold her familiar hand.
They found themselves in a service corridor behind the ballroom. Like the ballroom, the walls were mirrored, so that the dim corridor looked spacious. Sometimes, clearly, it was used for entertaining; banquettes lit by small electric candles lined recesses along one wall. Tonight it was deserted but for a big silver coffee um brewing on a rolling cart, and, on another cart, piles of clean spoons and gilt-edged cups and saucers.
“Jay,” he said.
She gave one long, heaving sigh. “Not you.”
“Not me in any case.” Now he was lying to her.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
She walked a few steps away from him, holding her hands fisted by her sides and shaking her head. “I don’t want to think of it. We were talking Shakespeare on the next floor down for weeks—and Harry will—I don’t want to think about that.”
He recognized his own reaction. “It complicates everything.”
She nodded.
“Would you like to walk, or go back to the dance? Whatever you like.”
“It’s awful, but I want to dance. If we go back into the ballroom, I’ll have to stay with Harry. Will you dance with me here?”
The music came clearly, but muted, from the ballroom next door, the rhythm a little stronger because of what the wall did to the harmonics, one-two-three, one-two-three, a heartbeat. He said nothing but took her in his arms, in the classic dance position, and began to dance with her. Plain box step first, what he had done with a little girl in Gilbert Knight’s music room yesterday, a thousand years ago; and then as they got the rhythm of each other he began to do turns with her, singly at first, then in a series, so that the corridor dizzied a little around them. He told her always to look at one thing, not to get giddy; but the place must have been too dark for her, so that she only smiled and as the music slowed she leaned her head against his arm, her breast brushing his arm. His heart beat and he held her a little more closely. The music went on with hardly a pause: a single violin, playing a slow and simple waltz, and then the whole orchestra coming in behind. He recognized it, new that year, and so popular that even scientists in Switzerland had heard it: the waltz from Lehir’s Die lustige Witwe, The Merry Widow, bittersweet, irresistible, and Viennese.
O komme doch, O kommt ihr Ballsirenen—
They began to do turns again, the simple ones and then the Viennese turns that are a whole new category of motion, spiraling outward, circling inward to stillness. They danced, danced until they were dizzy, and the dizziness spread out of them and the world whirled, but they were as quiet in the center as two candles burning together. Their bodies were warm against each other. He put both hands on her waist, at the curve of her hips. She gave a great sigh, and their bodies fitted against each other as naturally as the rhythm of their dancing. He could not tell her body from his own. The music must have stopped at some time, because they moved more slowly; but he could not let her go, and she shuddered, and put her arms around him.
He led her over to one of the banquettes. They sat with their arms around each other. He tilted her head up. She was pale, her eyes were closed; she was panting as if she had run a race. “No?” he asked her gently, “or yes?” She nodded her head, silently, yes, as if she were taking a dare; his lips touched hers, and they were kissing desperately, the two of them enlaced in each other’s arms. He stroked down the length of her side with the tips of his fingers, and felt her generous hips and thighs beneath the silk of her dress. She kissed him as if he were a wonder; kissed almost like a little girl still, half taught, half awakened. He touched the hollow at the base of her neck, ran his hand down the softness of her inner arm, touched the crook of her elbow and her shoulder blade, made her tremble. She touched his arms and his chest; moved down as far as his waist, blushed, and stopped. Every inch of his body was as sensitive to her touch as fingertips or tongue. She moved her hands to his face again, touching his face all over; she trembled and pressed her whole body against his. His need for her ached like his heart. He moved his fingertips over the round tenseness of her breasts. He wanted to go inside her as innocently as a bee inside a flower; he wanted to force her, hurt her, love her, explode inside her like a bomb; and he took her by the shoulders and gently moved her away from him.
“We had better stop now,” he said, “or we’ll go wrong.”
Harry’s Perdita. She drew one hand away and held it over her face as if she were ashamed. He wanted her to be older so that she would understand or younger so that he could simply comfort her; but he could not say the banalities that one says to women who have gone further than they intended and are ashamed. He had gone too far himself and he was no comfort to her.
In the old days in Vienna he had finished with such moments by helping the woman to rearrange her flowers and dress. One of the snaps of Perdita’s beaded collar had opened and he pressed it shut. The knot of her hair had come half down. He used his own clean comb and between them they twisted it into a good approximation of the knot it had had. He looked for hairpins on the banquette, remembering a woman whose husband counted her hairpins at the beginnings and the ends of dances. He smoothed her silk dress back into its folds, trying the impossible job of touching the dress without brushing the skin beneath it. She retied his tie and had to do it twice because her hands trembled. He combed his disordered hair. They held hands. In the mirrored walls they looked the same as before and impossibly different; whatever they did, they could do nothing to change the bruised look about their mouths or the luminescence of her skin. In the mirror, as Reisden watched her standing beside him, knowing they made too obvious a couple, he saw the door from the ballroom open and Charlie Adair come through.
Reisden shook his head; no, go away. The two men’s eyes met in the mirror. Charlie Adair turned away, pale, sickened, and silent. The door closed silently to Reisden’s ears, but Perdita turned. “There’s no one here,” Reisden told her, not knowing how to protect her for this evening except by making her believe she had not been seen. He would have to talk with Charlie.
When they stepped back through the door into the ballroom, Harry had stopped dancing with Efnie, but the two were still laughing together.
Anna Fen; Perdita breaks a promise
That night, Reisden told Anna Fen that Jay was dead. She sat in her private sitting room, on one of her deep, pillowy couches beside him, still in the gauzy deep-cut dress that she had worn to the dance, with the butterflies still in her hair. She snatched up one of the chintz pillows and screamed into it silently, and the butterflies trembled on their wires while she sobbed. When she let the pillow drop, her makeup had run, black runnels down her cheeks like theatrical tears; but her face was square and lined with real grief. She turned to him. “Please, hold me, just hold me.”
He held her in the dark perfumed silence of her house. Outside in the heat the frogs sang.
“I had red silk knickers,” she said, “and he used to have me get dressed up like a housemaid and wear those underneath. Usually we met in your barn. That night he had me come over to your house.”
“You were there,” Reisden said.
“I was upstairs and so was he when we heard the first shot. He got
up—I mean—you know what I mean. He said he’d go find out what it was. I heard his voice from downstairs, he was shouting to someone, and there were more shots. And he kept shouting. He sounded surprised and then mad. He didn’t come back.” She shook her head. “I knew, didn’t I? I waited for him, then I went straight down the backstairs and out the kitchen door. No one noticed me because I was wearing a housemaid’s uniform. I just walked home. If—if everything had been all right, I thought he’d come to my house.” She gave one more shuddering sob and then another, and cried in his arms for Jay French.
She cried in his arms, and the room was dark and perfumed, and the couch was as deep and soft as a featherbed, and eventually she turned and sobbed, rather more pointedly, as if for an audience, against his chest. Reisden knew what was expected of him; Mrs. Fen wanted comforting. It was a long time since he had been shocked at what happened after funerals. He should have done it. Every muscle in his body was tight for a woman; why not, why not? The easy and pleasant and generous thing would have been to give her what she wanted, what his body wanted too. But it didn’t happen; he gave her confusing signals and watched himself doing it and wondered why; he was charming and tender and just a little obtuse, and inwardly furious at himself. When he had left her, he walked back down Island Hill Road, past the Clinic, where Perdita’s window was dark, and stood by the edge of the water on the Knights’ shore, watching the last lights go out, one by one, on the other side of the lake. He picked up some of the flinty stones on the edge of the shore and cast them savagely out over the water.
And while he stood there, a light went on in the ground floor of the Clinic, someone no more able to sleep than he; and he heard a piano, and the music was the waltz they had danced to. He did not know whether to be afraid or exultant. He felt everything, fear and joy, want of her, need of her, need to protect her against himself, delight, estrangement from himself, as if they were data points charting a reaction, distinguishable but not separate. He could not say what he was but only I am. In his confusion it took him a full minute to realize that Perdita had broken her promise to Harry.
Charlie goes to church
The next day, Sunday, August fifth, was Perdita’s birthday. Gilbert and Harry got ready for church; and Reisden, who didn’t go to church, walked with them as far as the Clinic, where they would pick up Perdita. Reisden wanted to talk with Adair about last night, but when Perdita came down the stairs, blushing, dressed like a woman in a long dress and with her hair up, Adair announced that he had taken a fancy to go to church with them today. So Reisden came too.
Charlie Adair had decided on attending the Episcopal church as an act of desperation. Only the Catholic Church was a proper place for Catholics; but in mortal sin, with Jay French’s murder unconfessed on him, Charlie could not take communion. Attending another church’s services meant as little as a shadow in the nighttime, and it helped him to have Perdita under his eye.
She could not have done anything that she could not take to church, Charlie thought, watching her as she sat, eyes downcast, in the pew between Gilbert and Harry. But how could she have done as much as he had seen?
She wanted what Reisden told her she could have, her music. Heaven knew they were all shaken by finding Jay—Bert had said that he had got drunk with Reisden Friday night—and she had been in the barn and helped to find that dreadful thing that had been Jay. Under the brim of her straw hat her eyes looked sad and bruised. Child, dear niece, I want no nightmares for you. You shall marry Harry and be happy, you shall be a good girl. Everything that happened once shall not touch you.
The sermon was from Acts, St. Paul saying that the apostles had been called to be witnesses of the truth. The minister preached that it is holy and good and pleasant to be called to witness the truth, and that the apostles had great joy doing it. Lord, Charlie prayed, would it help if I confessed? To You I can: I killed Jay French. I thought I only shot at him, to get him away from us.
I confess that I have taken communion many times in a state of mortal sin. I regret coming into Your Presence in a state offensive to You. Tell me what I should do to come into Your Presence again.
He stared at the stained-glass windows. Jesus among the children. What would the Clinic do for money if Charlie told Gilbert he had killed Jay? The Clinic had no endowment, it lived from year to year. Gilbert might stick by him, but the police would want to know, and then all the good ladies who sent the hundred-dollar bills at Christmas would know; and they’d ask next what happened to William Knight, and finally what happened to Richard. And would they believe Charlie when he said he didn’t know where Richard was?
Stand up anyway, the Lord tempted him, and tell them you killed Jay French, and then you’ll have it over with, my boy.
Ah, and wouldn’t that feel fine. Confess to the priest, who would say, “Go to the police.” Peter O’Connell would understand, but Peter O’Connell was dead these many years.
And what about the next girl in South Boston who didn’t bring her baby to the Clinic because the doctor was a murderer in jail? And the next, and the next? You gave me Richard to save, for my redemption, over and over again, in all my Clinic children; and are You going to take him back from me and leave the children nothing?
If You will damn me for a murderer, I will die and be damned rather than hurt the children.
Behind the altar the stained-glass window showed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. This was Charlie’s Gethsemane, and how could he deal with it? How can I choose between my soul and the children? Is this Your work, Lord? I won’t drink this cup; it’s bitter; You can’t make me.
The congregation stood for a hymn. Next to Charlie, Reisden was so sunk in thought he didn’t notice; Charlie touched him on the arm and he jumped. He stood but didn’t sing, looking over Charlie’s head toward Perdita at the other end of the pew.
Confess to Richard, Charlie thought. Who doesn’t remember anything and wants to know.
Ah, if Reisden were Richard.
In the churchyard after the service, Reisden took Charlie’s arm and walked aside with him. “What happened between Perdita and myself last night was my fault,” Reisden said. “It won’t happen again.”
But at the very moment Reisden said it, Charlie saw that the man was looking across the churchyard to where Perdita stood talking.
Among the loosestrife; Gilbert’s dream
Charlie had no chance to talk with Harry until they were back at the Clinic. He took Harry into the small parlor and looked out the window. Gilbert was out on the lawn with Reisden and Perdita; for the moment she was safe.
“You must take special care of Perdita just now,” he said hesitantly to Harry. “She is young and may have her head turned.”
Harry looked out the window, his hands clenched. “You mean him.”
Charlie said nothing.
“He’s—” Harry pounded his fists against each other. “I tell you, Charlie, I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him. The thing is, we have to know that Richard’s dead. We have to get Gilbert to declare him dead, or find his body, or even find Jay French and get him to tell that Richard’s dead.”
Charlie’s skin crawled cold. Jay French was found.
“Which is more important, Richard’s death or your life with my niece?”
“She isn’t realistic about getting married,” Harry said, “she isn’t the way she used to be. He tells her she’s going to be a famous musician and she laps it up. She’s distracted from me.”
He doesn’t answer me, Charlie thought, and looked out the window too. Reisden and Perdita were standing together, talking. “You must be very kind to her,” Charlie said urgently, “but stay close to her, close. Look after her, Harry. She is only a girl.”
“She’s got to stop listening to him,” Harry said, “or she’ll be no girl of mine.”
