The Dark House

by John Sedgwick

  She didn’t look at the cash. “I shouldn’t take this.”

  “Please,” Rollins told her. “I want you to.”

  “Well, okay then.” She smiled and brought her other hand lightly against his chest. It was only the briefest contact, but something about it caused a change, as he sensed they both knew. A sort of molten heat surged within him, and he nearly reached for her, despite himself, despite Marj. The whole encounter seemed so dreamlike, as if she didn’t really exist, and therefore wouldn’t mind if he touched her, even if he touched those full lips of hers, or between her prominent breasts, so smoothly outlined by the folds of her shift. Only an overwhelming desire existed. Shameful, unexpected, inappropriate, but undeniable. But before he could think this through, she had retreated back down the hall, her skirts swishing.

  Rollins was sitting in his leather chair, trying to calm himself and regain a fix on things, when he heard her come down the hall a few minutes later. She spoke quietly—to her child presumably—as she started down the staircase, the carpeted steps creaking under her. “It’s all right, Heather,” he heard her say. “Don’t you worry.”

  Rollins was suddenly afraid for them, stumbling out into the dark, where so many hazards lurked. At the last moment, he opened the door and rushed after them. He must have made a bit of a racket on the stairs.

  “Oh, God, it’s you, Mr. Rollin,” Tina exclaimed. “You scared me.” The little girl, Heather, was in her arms. She seemed to be about four or five, her round face was pale and sweaty, her dark blond hair sticking to her temples. Rollins reached down to her and swept a few damp hairs off her forehead.

  Stephanie on the tile floor, stone cold. He could tell by the color—pale blue—around her mouth, and at the tips of her fingers. A pale blue, like a shadow.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Rollins said. “I shouldn’t have been so unhelpful before.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Rollin. The taxi is here. We’ll be fine.”

  “Please, let me carry her,” he said, reaching for the child.

  “I’ve got her. It’s okay.” Tina continued on down the stairs, Heather’s head rocking uneasily with each step. Rollins couldn’t bear the idea that something might happen to the little girl. He trailed after them, not knowing what to do. “At least let me get the door,” he said finally, and lurched toward the door handle.

  “Sure,” Tina said.

  Rollins drew open the front door for them, and stepped out ahead of them onto the front stoop. A fine mist was swirling, dampening his bathrobe and pajamas. He looked out into the wet gloom: The taxi was waiting by the sidewalk, its headlights bright, its wipers beating. Before he let Tina and Heather pass by him, he checked around the sidewalk and the street beyond. No sign of Sloane or the gaunt man.

  Stephanie’s hair in ringlets where she lay dripping. Nothing moving but the water off her. And all his fault.

  “Let me go with you,” he told Tina.

  She looked at him and laughed. “Like that?”

  Rollins had forgotten he was still in his pajamas. “It’ll just take a moment to change.”

  “We’ll be fine. Thank you, Mr. Rollin, really.” This time, she sounded truly grateful.

  Rollins opened the taxi door for her, although the rain was beginning to seep through his nightclothes to his shoulders. She slid inside the car, the child on her lap.

  He leaned down toward them. “The name is Rollins, actually. With an s. That’s what people call me, just Rollins.”

  She smiled up at him as though she had accomplished something. “All right. Rollins.”

  Rollins turned to the front of the cab. “Go to the MGH,” he told the driver. “And hurry—please.”

  “Yes, the MGH. Of course. Thanks,” Tina told him.

  “You’re entirely welcome.” Rollins shut the door.

  As the cab roared off, little Heather shot Rollins a wave through the back window.

  Rollins watched the taxi go down Hanover Street. When it was out of sight, he checked around again for the gaunt man, or Sloane, or any other fury that might be pursuing him. But, once again, the street and sidewalks were empty. Rollins climbed up the stairs and closed the door, then glanced behind him once more from inside, just to be sure. Then he hurried back up the dark stairs.

  Rollins arrived at Johnson the next morning on the stroke of eight-forty-five, which should have qualified him for an award. When he entered his office, he lowered the venetian blinds and lay his head on his desk to rest for a moment. He had not been able to get back to sleep after the lunacy of the night before. He’d kept waiting for Tina’s tread on the stairs. Just to make sure that the little girl was all right, he assured himself. And he did fear for Heather, she seemed so hot. But he’d heard nothing the whole night. Afraid he might have nodded off and missed them, he’d listened at Tina’s door first thing this morning. Again, nothing. He’d held off knocking, though, for fear of waking them in case they were home after all. Besides, what would he say? Hello? Good morning? Everything all right? He was sure he’d made a complete fool of himself last night, first with his absurdly lustful thoughts (which he feared had been only too transparent), and then with all his belated, unwanted offers of help.

  As he lay there at his desk, his nose buried in the sleeve of his jacket, the stiff material pressing against his cheeks, Rollins heard a light tread on the wall-to-wall carpet. He knew it was Marj. He might have been a heat sensor: She was a steady warmth that was moving toward him down the hall. Now that she was so close by, he was mortified that he could have let his thoughts stray from her, even for a moment. And after he’d seen Marj just a few hours before. It was appalling! Would he end up like his father, flitting like an insect from one woman to the next and the next? He should have turned to face Marj, but he couldn’t right then. He sensed her slowing as she passed his door, then resuming her pace again as she moved on down the hallway.

  He saw her later that morning when he passed her desk on his way to the bathroom. She was on the telephone, coiling the cord around her index finger. Their eyes met for a moment, and he thought he heard her voice catch as he went by.

  In the men’s room, he washed his face with cold water, trying to bring down a slight puffiness around his eyes. When he returned, she wasn’t in her cubicle. An e-mail message from Msimm@jinv was waiting for him back at his desk.

  Wat’s the matter, u sick?

  m

  Rollins didn’t know quite what she meant at first. Then he figured she’d seen him resting. He sent back:

  Just tired.

  Another e-mail from her came a few minutes later:

  Me too. I culdn’t sleep last night. No more litle notes under my apt dor, pls OK? They mkae me real nervus.

  m

  Rollins’ fingers trembled as he typed his reply:

  OK. Sorry.

  It rained for the next three days, a steady drizzle punctuated by several terrific downpours that flooded the narrow North End streets and caused colossal traffic jams downtown. Now, the time seemed like the rain itself—interminable, pointless. He kept checking for signs of Tina and her daughter, but saw nothing of them. More agonizing, he wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to see them or just wanted to know where they were, the way one wants to know where a loaded gun might be. He asked an upstairs neighbor, a tall man he knew only as Pete, if he had seen them, but Pete knew nothing, and Rollins quickly dropped the subject, lest Pete begin to wonder why he was so interested. Still, the Mancusos had taken up residence in Rollins’ head, and he felt the need for the sense of liberation that he normally found in his pursuits. But, after the scary experience with the Chrysler, he had vowed not to venture out onto the road for at least another eighty-six hours.

  That first night, a Friday, Rollins tried to lose himself in talk radio, a relatively new vice. He had an old Stromberg-Colson radio that his mother had always listened to while she brushed her hair before bed. And while it didn’t measure up to the current standards of high-fidelity, talk sh
ows came through fine. The subject this evening was the difference between love and friendship. For some reason, the show was not attracting the usual quantity of earnest callers, which left the host with a lot of airtime to fill. Rollins was tempted to call himself, to offer his opinion that love was not a matter of degree, as the host had argued, but of kind. Rollins was ransacking his memory for some wisdom from the ancients that would back up his point that love was rare and exalted beyond anything offered by mere buddyhood. (He liked that phrase, “mere buddyhood,” and was sure it would go well over the air.) He even thought he might consult his Latin texts, sure that he’d find something from Horace or Catullus that would drive his point home, and, for the first time in a while, he started pulling those tiny red volumes off the shelf, running his eyes along the much interlineated verses.

  The telephone rang. Rollins looked at the phone for a moment before he approached it. It was past ten, late for a call by almost any standard. The telephone rang twice more, then Rollins picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  He received no answer. He listened for the sound of breathing, but heard only dead air. “Marj?” he asked finally. “That you?” He had a queer feeling that it was, but there was no response from the other end of the line. Rollins clutched the receiver with both hands, as if it were Marj’s hand. “Marj?” he asked again, a little quieter this time. Still no answer. He almost replaced the receiver, but then couldn’t bear to break his tenuous connection to this sylph. He brought the mouthpiece close to his lips, spoke softly. He wanted these words to enter her consciousness the way her breath had filled his car. “I never know what to say to you, Marj. I always say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing.” Then it occurred to him that it might not be Marj at all. It might in fact be Sloane, or the gaunt man, calling to frighten or to plague him. He froze for a second, then he hung up the receiver and stepped back from the telephone, eyeing it.

  A few minutes passed. His eyes were still fixed on the old-fashioned phone when it rang again. Extraordinary. It felt as though he had somehow willed the telephone to ring. He watched the phone ring once, twice, three times. Rollins finally picked it up. “Hello,” he said warily.

  “It’s your mother.” Her aristocratic voice, with its cool elegance, brought back the full image of the woman who had always styled herself a great lady. Even at this hour, Jane Rollins’ voice had pearls in it, freshly polished silver, and thick linen napkins folded just so. But it did nothing to allay his anxieties. He was grateful, at least, that she hadn’t addressed him by name.

  “Everything all right?” Rollins and his mother didn’t speak very often. Hearing her, he had to think that there must be some family crisis afoot.

  “I just thought I’d give you a chance to wish me a happy birthday.”

  “Oh, that.” Rollins lightened momentarily, but then he felt disturbed all over again that he could have forgotten such a thing. He quickly checked the little calendar that was propped up on a shelf in the bookcase. Today’s date, the twenty-ninth, was surrounded by a jagged square of red he’d placed there at the first of the year. “I’m awfully sorry, Mother. Happy birthday.”

  Rollins was suddenly alarmed at the thought that his mother might have heard his cries for Marj. “You didn’t just call, by any chance?”

  “No, why?”

  “The phone rang but there was no one there.”

  “Oh, I get those all the time. I just hang up.”

  On his birthday calls to Mother, Rollins sometimes sang a bit of the “Happy Birthday” song, slightly off-key. As the oldest child, he’d always led the singing in the family, after his father had left. It had cheered him to think that he had a few family traditions to fall back on. But now, he didn’t quite have the heart for it. Without that routine, though, Rollins realized he was obliged to say something personal to his mother, something beyond “Hello,” or “How are you?” He wished that he could merely stay on the line with her without speaking. For as long as he could remember, words had been a strain between them.

  “You sitting down now?” Rollins asked.

  “Why, has something happened?”

  “Oh, no. I just wanted to be able to picture you better, that’s all.”

  There was a playful quality to her reply: “Well, if you must know, I’m on the red sofa by the telephone in my living room.” He envisioned her in her apartment there at her retirement center, Maple Hill. A small place, crammed with elegant furniture. While he saw her in Boston every few months, he had visited her there only once, two years before. It was shortly after Richard (always better at doing the right thing) had helped move her in following the death of their stepfather, Albert Crossan, a retired concrete supplier whom his mother had met at a bridge party when Rollins was in his late teens. It was Crossan who’d lured her down to Farmington, where he had a big modern house with a swimming pool. Rollins had found Maple Hill utterly depressing, what with all the ghostly geriatrics drifting down endless corridors or going through the motions in the dining room as they waited for the end to come. He suspected his mother did, too. Still, admirably, she had managed to retain a bit of grandeur there, even in her reduced circumstances.

  “You remember, it used to be in the library in Brookline,” his mother continued.

  “I remember it well.” Rollins could see her sitting there by herself before dinner in front of the fire in the postdivorce years. A highball would be in her hand, one of the fine crystal ones that were not to be used by the children. She was not to be bothered, that was clear, but she could be watched, slowly sipping her two fingers of bourbon, heavy on the ice.

  “I’m on my leather chair,” Rollins told her.

  “Oh, that old thing you got at the dump.”

  “It was a rummage sale, Mother.”

  A light exchange, but it brought back other, heavier ones—accusations of hers that he had parried, more or less skillfully, through the years. Aftertremors of the one great shock of their lives—that’s how he thought of them.

  They discussed the weather for a few minutes, and his mother caught Rollins up on the news that Richard’s wife, Susan, was thinking of going back to her job managing a chain of high-end housewares shops. “Now listen,” his mother concluded. “I’m coming to Boston tomorrow to see Mr. Grove”—he was the family trust officer at Richardson Brothers—“about some investment decisions. I thought we might get together for lunch afterward.”

  It didn’t surprise Rollins that his mother would take such an active role in her financial affairs at her advanced age, or that she would be able to arrange to meet with Mr. Grove on a Saturday morning. It surprised him only that she would save this piece of business for last. He wondered if their conversation had actually been some kind of test—and if this final overture had meant he’d passed or failed it. Had his mother detected some changes in him, ones that she thought she’d better monitor closer at hand?

  “That would be fine,” Rollins told her.

  They worked out the time: Eleven-thirty in the grand Richardson offices at Post Office Square. “Please don’t be late, darling,” Mrs. Rollins closed. “You know how I hate waiting.”

  Afterward, Rollins couldn’t get comfortable as he lay down on his bed atop the covers. He returned to the telephone and after consulting directory assistance for M. Simmons in Brighton, he dialed Marj’s number. He’d extinguished all the lights except for the lamp by the telephone chair. He needed near darkness for this. He was wearing only his pajamas, a fresh white pair, with pale blue piping around the cuffs. When the call went through, he leaned back on the big leather chair. His right hand held the receiver; his left lay on his soft belly as Marj’s phone rang—with a seductive, purring sound—four times. Then there was a click and an answering machine came on: “You know what to do.” That was followed by a long beep. Rollins hung up without a word, then dialed her number twice more, just to hear her voice.

  Eight

  Rollins felt feverish that night. He was afraid that he’d caught somethi
ng from young Heather. He slept little, and his few dreams seemed rushed. In the morning, the sheets were tangled and damp with sweat.

  It was still raining. He could hear the steady, static-like hiss outside his windows, and there was a grayness to the light around his shades. Since it wasn’t yet seven on a Saturday morning, he lay in bed until his old worries returned, starting with the Mancusos. Once again, he hadn’t heard them come in during the night. But then, he had slept some this time.

  He splashed some water on his face, pulled on his bathrobe, and crept down the hall to listen at their door. He heard nothing. “Tina? Heather?” he called out. “You there?” He kept seeing the little girl’s pale, moist face as she descended the stairs.

  When no one answered, he returned to his apartment and picked up the telephone. He dialed the patient information line at the MGH. When the operator came on, he told her he was trying to reach his daughter, Heather Mancuso. Lying was becoming automatic now. Rollins could hear the click of keys in the background, then a pause.

  “How are you spelling Mancuso?”

  Rollins told her with a c and an s. He couldn’t think of any other way.

  “I’m sorry, there’s no listing. You sure she’s an in-patient?”

  “Yes, of course. Her mother brought her in.” Rollins felt almost indignant.

  “And when was that?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  Rollins heard more keys click.

  “I’m sorry. We have no record of a Heather Mancuso on that night either. Perhaps she went to another hospital?”

  “Her mother said the MGH.”

  “Well, we have no record of her being here, sir.”

  Rollins hung up and tried four other hospitals in the area. He described himself as Heather’s uncle, godfather, and twice as her elementary school principal. No other hospital had any record of Heather Mancuso, either.