Tales for a Stormy Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “You sound awfully down. Do come and see me.”

  “Actually, I’m up. Have a nice weekend, Amy.”

  Have a nice weekend: that was the coup de grace. Amy went to the kitchen and got out the martini jug. She closed the refrigerator door on an eight-dollar steak. The cat, her paws tucked out of sight where she sat on the table, opened her eyes and then closed them again at once.

  Amy returned to the living room by way of the dining-room door. As she entered, she discovered a man also coming into the room, he by the door to the vestibule. She had not locked up after Mike’s departure.

  “Hello. I did knock,” he said, “but not very loudly. I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “You have, and now that I’m surprised, get the hell out of here before I call my husband.”

  “Funny. Ginny didn’t tell me about him. In fact, she said you didn’t want one.”

  “You’re Allan.”

  He had stopped. They both had, in their tracks, on seeing one another. They now moved tentatively forward. He was handsome in an odd way: his quick smile and his eyes did not seem to go together. The eyes, she would have sworn, took in everything in the room while not seeming to look directly at anything, even at her when they came face to face.

  “Yes, I’m Allan. So Ginny’s told you about me? I’m surprised, though come to think of it, I shouldn’t be. She’s told me a lot about you, too. Where is she?”

  Damn Ginny. “She’s gone for a walk.” She regretted at once having said that. Now it was reasonable for him to expect to wait for her return. “Don’t you think, Mr.—” She stopped and waited.

  “Just Allan,” he said, which she did not like either, the familiarity of it. No. The anonymity: it was more like that.

  “Mr. Allan, don’t you think if Ginny wanted to see you, she would have arranged it?”

  “It takes two to make an arrangement, Amy.” His eyes, not really on hers anyway, slipped away to the glass where Mike had left it. Her glass was on the side table near which she stood, the martini pitcher in her hand. He might well have arrived in time to have seen Mike leave.

  He then said, “Should I confess something to you, Miss Amy—I guess that’s what you’d like me to call you, but it certainly rings strange against the picture Ginny gave me of you—let me tell you the reason I crashed this party. I wanted to see the cottage, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get an invitation, leaving it to Ginny. It’s pre-Revolutionary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you need an architect?”

  That disarmed her—he was a man with humor at least. “Will you have a drink?” She swirled the contents of the pitcher. “A martini?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll get a glass.”

  A few steps took him to the table where Mike’s glass sat “If this was Ginny’s glass, I don’t mind using it.”

  No more lies. She hardly knew now which were hers and which were Ginny’s. “It wasn’t Ginny’s glass,” she said.

  He brought it to her anyway. “Whose ever it was, it won’t poison me.”

  All the same, those eyes that just missed hers saw everything that passed through her mind. She wanted to escape them, however briefly, in the time it would take to get a glass from the other room. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Sit down, Allan. That chair is better for your long legs than this one.”

  His movements were such that she thought him about to take the far chair as she had suggested, but she had no more than stepped into the dining room than he was behind her.

  “What a marvelous old room!”

  Of all six rooms this was the plainest, with nothing to recommend it except the view of the garden and that was not available at night. One end of it had been chopped off in the nineteen-twenties to provide space for a bathroom. She took a glass from the cupboard.

  “May I see the kitchen?” he asked, throwing her a quick, persuasive smile.

  “Why not?” This time she stepped aside and let him go on by himself. The kitchen was straight ahead, not to be missed. He had an athlete’s build as well as one’s lightness of step, she observed as he passed her.

  “Puss, puss, puss,” he said, seeing the cat. She came wide-awake, stood up, and preened herself for him.

  Amy kept trying to tell herself that it was she who was behaving oddly, letting her imagination run wild. She tried to think what he and Ginny would be like together. They were similar in a way she could not put her finger on. Then she had it: Ginny never seemed quite able to hit the nail on the head. God knows, he was direct enough, but his eyes slipped past what he was presumably looking at.

  Well, he had made it to the kitchen and if there was something there he wanted—a knife or a hammer—there was no preventing his getting it. She turned into the vestibule, that entrance to it opposite the bathroom, with the purpose of making sure the shotgun was in its place alongside the porch door, more or less concealed by her old Burberry coat and the umbrella stand. She could not see it where she stood, but that did not mean it was not there. For just an instant she thought of making a dash to the front door.

  “Amy?”

  They very nearly collided, him coming in as she turned back.

  “Is the kitchen fireplace a replica of the old one?”

  “Probably.”

  “Afterwards I’ll show you where I think the old one was.” He caught her hand as though he were an old friend and led her back to the living room. When she tried to remove her hand he gave it a little squeeze before letting go.

  She poured the drinks shakily. “I should have got more ice.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  “I’m harmless enough. You’d have to know that for a fact from Ginny’s having anything to do with me.”

  She laughed, thinking how obviously so that was. If she knew Ginny. Sometimes she felt that she knew Ginny so well she could not possibly know her at all. Maybe there were two Ginnies. “Cheers.”

  The drink was strong enough, but it was going tepid.

  “Would you allow me to get more ice and give these another stir?” he asked.

  “I would allow it.” She poked up the embers under the half-burned log. The sparks exploded and vanished. Ginny ought to have come even if she didn’t believe the story about the story. It was funny how sure she had been that Allan was imaginary. Nor could she remember anything Ginny had ever told her about him. Had she told her anything? Or had Amy simply turned it off, doubting that there was a real live Allan?

  He returned with the pitcher and the glasses, having taken them also to the kitchen. They now were white with frost. He poured the drinks, touched her glass with his, and said, “What else would you allow?”

  Harmless? She said, trying to strike a pose of propriety without overdoing it: “I’d allow as how—I wouldn’t allow much.”

  He shrugged. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  He started to shuffle across to the chair she had appointed his, then turned back. “What’s much?” Having again amused her, he bent down and kissed her as she was reasonably sure he had never kissed Ginny. “Perfectly harmless,” he said and trotted over to the chair while neatly balancing the glass so that he did not spill a drop. “Does she often take long walks at this time of night?”

  “As a matter of fact she does.”

  “And if I’m not mistaken, we’re at the full moon.” He helped make the lie more credible. Knowingly? “Has Ginny talked about me?”

  “Well now,” Amy said, avoiding a direct answer, “I almost suggested that she bring you out for the weekend.”

  “How intuitive of me then to be here.”

  “I suppose Ginny has given you a complete dossier on me?”

  “We do talk a lot,” he said in a sly, wistful, almost hopeless way that again amused her. “Have you anything to suggest I do about it?”

  She knew exactly what he meant. “A marriage proposal?”


  “That’s a bit drastic.”

  “It sounds archaic when you set it off and listen to it by itself—a marriage proposal.”

  “Or the title to a poem by Amy Lowell,” he said. “You weren’t by any chance named after her?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “She did like a good cigar, didn’t she?” he said, deadpan.

  Amy sipped her drink and gave a fleeting thought to Mike, to the steak in the refrigerator, to the Haut Brion ’61. And to the rumpled bed in the room back of the fireplace.

  He put his glass on the table and got up with a sudden show of exuberance. “Shall I bring in more wood? I saw the pile of it outside.”

  “Not yet.” Amy put the one log left in the basket onto the fire. While she swept in the bits of bark and ash, he came and stood beside her, bent, studying the fire, but stealing glimpses of her face. He touched his fingers lightly to a wisp of hair that had escaped one of the braids she wore in a circle round her head. “Your hair must be very long and beautiful.”

  “I’ve been told so.”

  “Ginny said it was.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Ginny.”

  “I wasn’t either. Except in the way you hang onto somebody in the dark.”

  When they had both straightened up, he waited for her to face him, and then he lifted her chin, touching it only with the backs of his fingers as though to take hold of it might seem too bold. He kissed her. It was a long kiss which, nonetheless, didn’t seem to be going anywhere until she herself thrust meaning into it. She had not intended to, but then the situation was not one open to precise calculations. He tasted of licorice as well as gin.

  He drew back and looked at her. At that proximity his eyes did not seem to have the disconcerting vagary. He was, despite these little overtures, agonizingly shy: the realization came in a flash. Someone had prescribed—possibly a psychiatrist—certain boldnesses by which he might overcome the affliction. Miss Amy: that was closer to his true self.

  He said, averting his eyes once more, “Ginny said we’d like one another…even though you don’t like men.”

  “What?”

  “She thinks you don’t care much for men.”

  “What kind of woman does she think I am then? The kind who gets paid?”

  Color rushed to his face. He backed off and turned, starting back to his chair in that shuffling way—a clown’s way, really, the “don’t look at me but at what I’m doing” routine which reinforced her belief in his shyness.

  “I don’t want another drink,” she said, “but if you do, help yourself. I say what’s on my mind, Allan. People who know me get used to it. By the sound of things, Ginny speaks hers too on occasion. I’d never got that picture of her.”

  “I shouldn’t have blabbed that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.” She started from the room, thinking: God save me from middle-aged adolescents.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the bathroom for now. Then I’ll decide where else.”

  She had not reached the door when he caught her from behind and lifted her from her feet, holding her close against him, her arms pinned to her sides. He kissed the back of her neck and then with his teeth he removed, one by one, her plastic hairpins and let them drop to the floor. “Please don’t be so fierce,” he said, his mouth at her ear. She felt the dart of his tongue there, but so tentative, as though he were following a book of instructions.

  “Put me down. Your belt buckle’s hurting me.”

  Her feet on the floor, she faced him. “I don’t have to be fierce at all,” she said and loosened the braids, after which she shook out that abundance of rich brown hair.

  He ran his tongue round his lips. “It’s just too bad that Ginny’s going to be walking in.”

  “She’s not.”

  “She’s not?” he repeated. Something changed in his face, which was certainly natural with that bit of news. “I don’t believe you,” he said, the smile coming and going.

  She motioned to him with one finger as much as to say, wait, and going to the phone, she dialed Virginia’s number. With each ring Amy felt less sure of herself, less sure of Ginny. Then, after the fourth ring, came the gentle slow-voiced, “Hello.”

  Amy held the phone out toward Allan. He simply stared, his head slightly to the side. I could not have been more than a second, but it did seem longer before Ginny repeated more clearly, “Hello?”

  He was about to take the phone. Amy broke the connection, pressing her finger on the signal, then returning the phone to its cradle.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “It was a change of plan. That’s all.”

  “And not anything to do with me?”

  “My dear man, I wasn’t even sure you were real.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” he said, and smiled tentatively. It seemed flirtatious.

  Amy threw her head back. “There’s one way to find out.”

  He gave a funny little shudder, as though a chill had run through him. Or better, something interestingly erotic. He wet a finger and held it up as to the wind. Unerringly he then pointed to the closed door of the bedroom back of the fireplace. He motioned her to move on ahead of him. Had he looked in through, say, a part of the drapes at her and Mike? Or had Virginia told him that Amy slept downstairs? There did not seem to be much Ginny had not told him. With interpretations.

  “Don’t turn on the lights,” he said.

  Amy was not surprised. “We can always turn them off again.”

  “No.” And then: “I’m able to see you the dark.”

  A good trick. She said nothing. It was beginning to irritate her that Ginny had said she did not like men. Liking sex and liking men deserved a distinction, true. But she did not think it one Ginny was likely to make. And she had loved Mike. She had. Now it was over, ended. Nothing was beginning; nothing was about to be born. Except that you couldn’t really tell. That was what was so marvelous about an encounter such as this: you couldn’t really tell.

  She bent down to remove her slippers. She felt his hand running lightly over her bare shoulder, sweeping the hair before it. A jolting pain struck at the base of her skull. Then came nothingness.

  She awoke to the sound of voices and with a headache worse than any she had ever suffered. A woman’s voice said that she was coming to. Like hell, she wanted to say; not if she could help it, not with all this pain. There was other pain besides that of her head, and with the awareness of it she began to realize what had happened. She tried to put her hand between her thighs. Someone gently pulled it away.

  “Amy?”

  She opened her eyes to the familiar ceiling beam with its ancient knot, the eye of the house. She turned her head far enough to see Virginia’s round and worried face. “What are you doing here?”

  A woman in a white uniform hovered alongside Ginny. She was filling a hypodermic needle from a medicine bottle. When Ginny glanced up at her, she moved away.

  “On the phone,” Ginny said, “I couldn’t hear anything except the clock, but I’d know its tick anywhere. Remember when we were kids: ‘take a bath, take a bath, take a bath, take a bath…’ I decided I’d better catch the next bus out.”

  Amy gave her hand a weak squeeze. At the door of the room were two uniformed policemen, one of whom she thought she remembered having once talked out of giving her a speeding ticket. “How did they get in on the act?”

  “I called the ambulance,” Ginny said, and leaning close, she murmured, “You were”—she couldn’t bring herself to say the exact word—“molested.”

  “I guess,” Amy said.

  One of the policemen said, “When you’re strong enough we need the full story, miss. Did you recognize the intruder?”

  The intruder. In a way he was, of course, long time in answering. “Is there any way I can be sure he’ll get psychiatric attention?”

  The cops exchanged glances. “The first thing is to identify him so we can bring him in.”

  “And then I
have to swear out a complaint against him?”

  “If you don’t, ma’am, some other woman may not get the chance to do it.”

  “To some extent it was my own fault,” she said, not much above a whisper.

  The cop made a noise of assent. Neither he nor his partner seemed surprised. “All the same, we better get him in and let the shrinks decide what happens to him. Okay?”

  She thought of telling them of the point at which she had been knocked out and decided against it for the time being. “Okay,” she said.

  “Can you give us a description? Race, age, height, color of his eyes—”

  “Ginny, I’m sorry. It was your friend Allan.”

  “Oh.”

  It was a little cry, scarcely more than a whimper.

  “Would you give them his name and address? You won’t have to do anything else.”

  “But, Amy, I can’t. I mean, actually I’ve never seen Allan. He calls me and we just talk on the telephone.

  1975

  The Last Party

  THE WINTHROPS HAD A tremendous collection of Big Band records—Miller, Lombardo, Harry James…But then, the Winthrops had a tremendous collection of almost everything, and when they gave a party, Tom Winthrop’s measure of its success was the variety of his possessions to which his guests found their way. His hospitality was excessive: champagne, the best of liquors: the dining-room buffet—replenished throughout the evening, with monster prawns, half-lobsters, mounds of succulent beef, crisp vegetables, mousses, and soufflés, melons, cheeses, and the most delicate of pastries.

  The trouble with the Winthrops’ parties was that nothing ever happened at them; paradoxically, too much was going on. There was a billiard room in the basement for those not drawn to the dance. Next to the billiard room was the gun room, with its trophies of ancestral hunts. Tom liked to tell that it was part of Sally’s inheritance. Her great-grandfather was supposed to have gone big-game hunting with Teddy Roosevelt. The younger residents of Maiden’s End had a modest reverence for that Roosevelt, but their politics, for the most part, were in the tradition of his cousin Franklin. Nor did they have much taste for guns or the hunt. It was generally by accident that a guest found himself—or herself—in the gun room. Or he might pass through it on his way to a room Winthrop called “The Double Entendre,” where he housed his collection of pornographic art.