The Stone Bull

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Brendon made a movement that suggested suppressed violence, and I leaned forward in my chair. “Loring, why are you so anxious to believe there was some sort of guilt on Ariel’s part? Who are you protecting?”

  His look seemed almost triumphant. “All of us, of course. We can’t afford to have this look bad for anyone connected with the hotel.”

  I sensed the rising anger he was trying to control. Clearly nothing was to be done now. The arguments were left suspended, and in some strange way it was as though we all mutually agreed to postpone the real battle, and I said nothing more about going to the police.

  When Brendon left, Naomi went off with an oddly secretive air, as though she might know more than she was telling. I glanced back at Loring as I followed them and caught the look of pleased malice in his eyes. How he disliked us all.

  I wandered alone back to the house and found it empty, except for the usual maid with her buzzing vacuum cleaner. I smiled at the girl as I went upstairs and shut myself in my room, to sit staring at the yellow carpet.

  What was to be done now? I found myself thinking of the young man I had just talked to—Maurice Kiov. At least he had not been one of her lovers—he had only worshiped at the shrine. How easy it had always been for her. A smile, a gesture, an enchanting look, and they came to her. Until she threw them away—as she had thrown Brendon—leaving her discards to figure out how they could live without her. How convenient I had been for Brendon!

  “Stop it!” I cried the words aloud as I paced around the room. This was self-indulgence and I didn’t need it. What I did need was to cut through all my own self-pity and self-delusions to what might remain that was real between Brendon and me. But how was I to do that when he had so clearly put me out of his life? Or was I out of his life because of my own words, my own behavior? Where did the truth lie, and how was I to find it?

  There was one place that remained where I could go. The place I had told myself I never wanted to set foot in again, even though I was aware of its insidious pull. Perhaps this was the time, when the house was empty, and Naomi was busy over at the hotel. She wouldn’t be needing her sitting room now.

  It was a little like pressing the pain of a toothache. Why should that forbidden room, the room that held only hurt for me, draw me with so strong a demand? What could I do there but founder into images I didn’t want to invoke, into memories that were not mine?

  I went into the hall and listened at the top of the stairs. The cleaning was going on at the front of the house, and when I was sure I wouldn’t be seen, I stole down and followed the lower hall to the rear. The china doorknob was cold under my hand as I turned it and let myself into the room.

  It was empty, as I had known it would be, and I closed the door softly behind me. In the gray murk of the coming storm that would send hotel guests scurrying inside in dismay over lost hours, the room was dim and colorless. But someone had readied logs on the hearth and I knelt and set matches to kindling. In moments, flame licked upward, and the room began to glow red in the firelight—red with all the touches Ariel had made. I moved about, looking at everything as I had not done before, but never once glancing toward the picture of Hagar over the mantel.

  I had no sense of invading Naomi’s privacy, because she herself had already invited me—with malice—to use the room, and she would be pleased to find me here. She would recognize at once the journey I was trying to make back to my sister, and she would be glad if it gave me pain.

  On a small rosewood table in a corner rested a brass incense burner with a small temple dog on its top, and I recognized it as a gift I’d made Ariel one Christmas when she was going in for a Japanese period. I felt no hurt because she had given away my gift. Nothing could be more natural to her than to give away anything she might have enjoyed briefly and tired of. Like a man. Were she here, I didn’t think she would even begrudge me Brendon.

  A pellet of incense rested in the burner and I lighted it and sniffed sandalwood. What was I doing here? What game was I playing? A not too distant rumbling made the window panes rattle. Thunder? I went to a window and looked out at the darkening pine trees behind the house. The room felt chill and I was glad of the rising fire warmth behind me.

  On I went in my idle searching—without real purpose, yet with my senses open to any impression they might receive. So easily could I visualize her in this room. But I saw her always alone. I wouldn’t open the door of my mind to Brendon. I wouldn’t allow the pictures Naomi had put in my thoughts to surface. I wouldn’t look at the red patterned rug that lay before the fireplace. No—I hadn’t come here to torture myself, but to try to understand something, though I wasn’t sure what it was I must learn to accept and understand.

  Not until I had wound my way around the room, examining bric-a-brac, looking at pictures, did I come at last to the mantelpiece and the photograph above it. Only then did I see Ariel’s toe shoes resting there on the white marble surface below her portrait. I might have known that Naomi would retrieve them. Just as she had the red fleece robe.

  Idly I picked up one slipper and thrust my fingers into the blocking to feel the lamb’s wool that had briefly cushioned Ariel’s magical toes. The life of such slippers was so short. They could be finished in a single dance, and new ones must be broken in constantly. What dance, I wondered, had her feet brought to life while she was wearing these particular shoes? I turned the slipper over in my hands and saw that down the length of the narrow, barely soiled sole ran a scrawl of writing made by a felt-tipped pen in green ink: “For Naomi—to remember Giselle. Ariel Vaughn.”

  I had forgotten that she sometimes gave her slippers away to favorite admirers, autographed on the sole. What a marvelous Giselle she had been—up there with the classic bests who danced the role. With the slipper still in my hands I turned my back on picture and hearthrug and sought a carved Victorian chair in a far corner of the room. It had no arms, its back a faded oval of crimson velvet. Had Ariel ever sat in this chair? Probably not. I had never known her to seek the outskirts of any room, but always the center. The center of any stage.

  14

  Now that he has gone, I am sitting here still, the tears drying on my cheeks. I am alone and desolate, and there is nowhere to turn. Yet what could I have done to escape this encounter?

  I hadn’t dared to move when he walked in, though all I wanted was to be out of this room before he discovered me. To have him find me watching him would be dreadful. Yet I could only sit quietly in my corner, waiting for whatever must happen, helpless to stop time or events.

  If he noticed the scent of incense he must have attributed it to Naomi’s use. A glance apparently reassured him that the room was empty, and he did not see me in my shadowy corner. He went to stand before the fireplace, looking up at Ariel’s picture above the mantel, his back turned to me. But though I couldn’t see his face, I knew his pain by the drooping of his shoulders as he studied her photograph. After a moment he picked up the twin to the slipper I held and stared at it—as though he too tried to hold something of her essence in his hand. My heart seemed to break into tiny bits, and I knew a worse hurt than I had ever felt before. It was one thing to imagine that he loved her, but far worse for me to see how intense his loving had been.

  Finally he dropped onto the sofa before the fire and sat there, holding her slipper. It was shameful to watch him suffer, and it was torture for me—yet it would be worse if he found me here. More humiliating for us both. Thunder crashed, and a flash of lightning flicked through the room as rain slashed against the glass. Oddly, I thought of young Kiov driving down the Hudson toward the bridge that would take him to the highway on the eastern side. Another one who had loved Ariel in his own way. And suffered guilt for her death.

  Brendon hadn’t moved, his head still bent, the slipper between his hands. If only I could assuage his pain. If only I could go to him and give him the comfort of my love. But that was no longer what he wanted. The illusion that had nurtured our marriage had been shattered, and
the pieces could never be put together again. What was I to do? What could I possibly do?

  All unwittingly, and out of my anxiety, I must have made some sound. Brendon startled me by jumping to his feet and looking around more carefully. Now he saw me, sitting in my dim corner, prim and quiet in a velvet chair, with the mate to the slipper he held in my hands. Across the gloom of the room that Ariel had brightened with so much red, he stared at me, and his face seemed utterly white, as though all life had drained from it. There was nothing I could do or say that would help, but I had to try.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I faltered. “I thought I’d be alone here, and—”

  He stood very still, staring at me. “You might have let me know when I walked in.”

  “I was afraid.” The words were only a whisper.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To find her,” I managed. “To try to find her. The way she used to be. When we were young and she was my marvelous older sister. The sister I could never be like.”

  “If only she could have been a woman first—and a dancer second,” he mused.

  How strange it seemed that we should be talking about her quietly like this. We two whom she had damaged. If he had stormed out of the room in a fury, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but to have him stand there leaning against the mantelpiece, each of us with one of Ariel’s slippers in our hands as we spoke of her—it seemed strange and unreal.

  “I’d never met a witch before,” he said.

  I almost smiled at the word, because I knew exactly what he meant.

  “She was a witch,” I agreed, “… bewitching others. You had only to see her dance—”

  “No!” The sound was explosive, repudiating. “I hated her dancing. I wanted her to be something apart from it. A woman.”

  “Then you didn’t accept her as she was—since she always had to be a dancer first.”

  “Until she came here. Here with me she was a woman. Yet she always had to go back.”

  “Of course,” I said in surprise. “If you couldn’t understand that, you didn’t know her. Not really.”

  “But I began to know her. In the end I began to know her. That’s why I sent her away.”

  I stared at him. “You—sent her away?”

  His look seemed uneasy, dropping after a moment. “You never gave me the opportunity to tell you that. She had decided to marry me—after all my asking. She had decided to take the chance. I think she loved me a little—you’ll have to grant me that. But I had to be wise enough for both of us. I had to accept the fact that it would never work.”

  “It was you who broke it off?” Something that had died in me a little began to come to life again.

  “Come here, Jenny,” he said. “Come here to me.”

  I moved slowly because I was afraid. Hurt was something I’d suffered long enough and I didn’t want anything to start it up again. Yet I moved toward him while rain slashed the windows, and thunder rumbled farther away.

  “I’ve missed you, Jenny,” he said, and his arms opened for me.

  I stopped before I reached him, still afraid, and saw the tenderness in his eyes.

  “We were both angry the other night,” he went on. “And you wouldn’t have listened if I’d tried to tell you. What could I say to you then? That I walked into a theater and saw the Ariel I had wanted to love? And that I knew at once you were everything she was not—everything I really wanted. There was no deception—I fell in love with you from the beginning.”

  I don’t know why I hesitated. He was saying all the things I wanted to hear, wanted to believe, yet I was still afraid, distrusting. Something in the very sound of the words made me uneasy.

  “I watched you come into this room just now,” I told him. “You stood before her picture, you took that slipper from the mantel, and you sat on that sofa, mourning her.”

  “No, Jenny. Mourning you because I thought I’d lost you. Only blaming her and trying to see a way out.”

  I stayed where I was, unable to move into his arms, where I wanted to be. He tried again.

  “What I at first thought I loved in her never existed. I had to make her understand that in the end. She doesn’t exist for me now. She was never anything but a mirage.”

  With a sudden quick gesture he turned, and before I could cry out he flung the pink slipper into the fire. I could only stare in hypnotized shock as flames caught pink ribbons first, blazing up for an instant, and then began to char satin and leather, burning slowly, not consuming all at once. For me it was as though he had thrown some living part of Ariel into the fire.

  He came to me then and pulled me into his arms, put his cheek against mine, holding me fiercely, tightly. And I knew. Gently I released myself and stepped back to look into his face—to see the agony there. He had tried to rid himself of Ariel by sending her away. He had tried just now to fling the very memory of her into the fire. And he had failed. When he reached for me again—reached for the anodyne, the opiate—I held him away.

  “Wait,” I said. “Please wait.” Very carefully I placed Ariel’s other slipper on the mantel, where Naomi would find it. Then I turned back to him. “Did you know she was going to have a child?”

  He stared at me blindly, out of a pain that I could understand all too well.

  “You didn’t know, did you?” I went on. “I didn’t think you could have. When Naomi told me, I phoned Mother, and she said that Ariel had had an abortion. There was a baby coming.”

  He closed his eyes and put a hand against the mantel. “It wasn’t mine. She wasn’t pregnant at the time when I told her we couldn’t see each other anymore.”

  “Why did you give her up? Why did you let her go?”

  This time he looked at me directly—in surprise at my lack of understanding. “She wanted me to leave Laurel. She would never have stayed here. She could never have made it her life, as it was mine.”

  So now I understood—everything. He had never stopped loving Ariel, but he had thought that in me he could have Ariel and Laurel too. But at this very moment when he had made his desperate gesture of casting her away, she was more alive to him than I had ever been.

  I had to be gentle with him, I had to be kind, even when my own heart was hurting, but I had also to tell him the truth.

  “Ariel won’t go up in flames for you, any more than she will for me. Loving a mirage can be very real.” I knew. I too had been in love with a mirage. “Look!” I said, pointing.

  In the fire the pink slipper had turned black, with only sparks of red glowing here and there. He looked—and again I saw his face. For a moment longer he stood before the fireplace and his gaze wandered to the portrait above. When he turned and walked out of the room, I knew he would never come back to me.

  A little time has passed and my heart is no longer thumping wildly, painfully. It seems a heavy, inert thing that hardly beats at all. I sit here with tears drying on my cheeks because I can’t even cry for long. In the fire, resting upon a flaming log, the slipper is only a black shape, not yet fallen into ashes. I pick up the iron poker and thrust it into the form of the slipper so that it falls to nothing, leaving only a few red sparks that quickly die.

  How long I remained before the fire in Naomi’s sitting room I don’t know. After a time I walked out of the room, still unable to think clearly, moving only by instinct. When I went to the front door and looked outside, I saw it was still raining hard. An old slicker hung on a rack near the door and I caught it up and pulled it around me.

  As I ran down the steps, and started along the road that led past the hotel, rain beat upon me, wetting my unprotected hair, gathering in streams across my face. I ducked my head and ran again. The Mountain House loomed huge above me in the murk, scores of its windows lighted against the gray day. None of the guests was out on the balconies and their glass doors were closed upon the chill. I had no desire now to go inside. Even though I was cold, it didn’t seem important. For some reason I must hurry, hurry—because there was only o
ne place that might hold answers for me now. Answers about my sister Ariel.

  As I walked around the end of the lake, its surface shone with dancing steel needles of rain. A memory of icy death threatening returned to me for an instant, but I cast it away. At that moment I would have walked heedlessly into any danger that might threaten without counting the cost.

  The forest paths were wet, the bushes moisture-heavy as they slapped against me. All this was another face of Laurel—that Laurel to which Brendon must always give his first devotion. I came upon an open place high above the lake where I found leaves and small branches scattered across a small space of ground as though some great fist of wind had thrust through the area, ripping away leaves and branches and flinging them across the path. I stepped over the debris and went on.

  My way took me up through the glen and I found the bull standing in the center of his ring, black and wet as I had imagined him. Magnus’ work remained on its stand, covered against the rain, waiting for my return, but I had no time for it now. I hurried on to the second clearing, where the house stood, and saw with relief that blue smoke rose from the chimney, blowing first this way, then that. No truck stood beside the cabin, so Magnus was alone. I ran up the steps and banged on the door, suddenly aware that I was wet and cold and felt a little sick.

  Magnus pulled the door open and wasted no time in astonishment. He jerked me into the room without gentleness, had me out of the oversized slicker in seconds and plumped me down on cushions before the fire. When he had brought a towel and begun to dry my wet hair roughly, I started to talk.

  “I’m sorry—I mean sorry to burst in on you like this. But he threw her slipper into the fire—and—and I understood everything. I couldn’t bear it!”

  “Just shut up and get warm,” he said. “Talking comes later. Do you like mulled cider? Never mind. That’s what you’re having because that’s what there is.”

  He brought me a brown mug and it warmed my hands, and sipping the tart brew with its hint of cinnamon seemed to thaw a little of the ice that had coated me inside. Magnus sat down on a worn hassock nearby, a second mug in his own hands, his eyes very green and his red hair and beard ashine in the firelight. But this was no small, tame fire in a Victorian grate. Magnus’ hearth was wide, and huge logs burned in its heart, throwing out a fierce heat that was beginning to warm even my icy reaches.