Poinciana

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  She stopped herself eventually, and came smiling to sit beside me. “Isn’t it a lovely party?” she said.

  “It’s the most beautiful party I’ve ever seen,” I told her, “and you’re the most beautiful hostess.”

  She smiled at me benignly. “Thank you, my dear. I’m sorry, but I’m not sure of your name. There are so many …”

  My heart did a turn as I realized that this wasn’t make-believe for her. She had slipped entirely back into another world, and lost all touch with the present one.

  “I’m Sharon Logan,” I said. “I’m Ross’s new wife.”

  Once more that puzzled her. “But Ross’s new wife is named Brett.” Her hands fluttered lightly, uncertainly, and I took them in mine.

  “It’s time to come home,” I said gently. “This is another day. Ross and Brett have been divorced for years. And of course you—you do remember Gretchen?”

  “Gretchen? I don’t know anyone named Gretchen. Really, this is becoming a foolish conversation. Will you please find Charles for me? Our guests are beginning to leave, and we must be together to bid them good night.”

  I almost envied her. She had slipped into the past more completely than I had ever seen her do—a past in which there was far less pain than the present. There seemed no way in which I could call her back. I held her hands more tightly, frightened for her because she was living in a happier time, and the return to today would be all the more terrible. Yet I couldn’t leave her in the place to which she had gone, lest she never return.

  “Allegra, please come back,” I said again. “Of course you remember Gretchen, your granddaughter. You must have seen her this afternoon in the tower rooms.”

  “No, no, stop it! I don’t like to play games like this.” She drew her hands from mine and looked eagerly about the room. “I can’t think where Charlie can have gone. He was here only a moment ago.”

  How could I tell her? How could I tell her that Charlie was long dead, and Ross more recently, and that now Gretchen might very well be dying?

  “Let me help you upstairs,” I said.

  She was growing bewildered, and her mind was still far away. She allowed me to raise her to her feet, and we walked out and stood for a moment in the center of that vast parquet floor. I looked from arch to arch of the doorways, wondering how to get her quickly back to the main part of the house.

  “I want to take you up to your rooms,” I said gently. “Miss Cox will be waiting for you.”

  That only drew a blank. “Miss Cox?”

  “You do remember the rooms, don’t you? Your beautiful silver-gray rooms that you enjoyed so much?”

  “My gray rooms? Yes, I think so.” Her bewilderment was growing, but she made an effort to recover her air of authority. “Of course—my gray rooms! I’d like to show them to you. Come along—this is the simplest way out.”

  She led me down the great ballroom, not toward one of the doors, but to a panel in the wall. She touched it lightly and it swiveled in. Without faltering, she reached for a switch that lighted a narrow interior passageway which ran back toward equally narrow steps. She was laughing a little now.

  “Charlie used to worry about me. He said I would get lost in my own house and never be found if I kept using my secret routes. Come along, dear. Don’t drag your feet.”

  I wondered who she thought I was by this time, but I went with her, feeling claustrophobic. The panel had closed behind us at a touch of her hand, and the passageway smelled of musty dampness and mice. There were probably all sorts of insects too, this being Florida. Allegra picked up her chiffon skirts, not letting them brush against the walls or floor, and moved lightly ahead of me. Not walking like an old lady now, but like the young, strong woman she had once been. So much for what our minds could do for us! Believing herself young, she walked with the lightness of youth, and climbed the stairs without faltering. I followed her, hating the tight walls that seemed to press in upon us, the airlessness, and the horrid sense that if anything happened we really could be lost in here, as Charlie had said—and never be found.

  At the top, the passage came to an end and Allegra reached out to push another panel. Again the wall swiveled and I saw that this was where Keith had popped out at Ross and me that time. She waited courteously for me to step through, and then touched another switch that turned off lights that were strung all the way from the ballroom. The panel pushed shut behind her, and there was only a trompe l’oeil doorway painted on the wall.

  Only then did she falter and grow uncertain. Youth crumbled away in an instant, and she seemed to age before my eyes. Yet the change brought only bewilderment with it, and no recognition of the passing years, or of my identity.

  “We’ll go to your rooms now,” I said gently. “You’ll want to rest. You must be tired from dancing.”

  She tossed her head and careless hairpins went flying. “Of course I’m not tired! I never got tired the way the others did—not even when I danced the whole night through.” She broke off and looked at me piteously. “No—you’re right. I am tired. Why is that?”

  I put an arm about her and drew her along the corridor. After a few steps she resisted me, and clutched at her breast in a sudden frightening gesture, so that I wondered if her valiant heart had at last betrayed her.

  But she wasn’t clutching at her heart. She slipped a hand into her low-cut bodice and drew out something small and oblong, like a flat box.

  “I forgot about this,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  She held the box out to me, and I saw that it was a cassette tape. Uncertainly, I took it from her. “What is it? What do you want me to do with it?”

  “I finally found the tape!” she cried, suddenly excited, and I heard the triumph in her voice. “I’ve been trying to remember what I did with it. I used to come to the house from the cottage to search for it sometimes, and today I found it—right there in a corner of the armoire, under my ball gowns.”

  With surprising ease she had slipped from past to present, and was with me in reality again. The small flat case seemed to have a life of its own in my hands, and I knew that I was afraid of whatever it contained.

  “Help me,” she said, and clung to my arm as she had not before. “I want to sit down. My—my knees feel very strange.”

  We went along the corridor to her own gray and crimson parlor. Even with the dark rain at the windows and the ocean stormy beyond, the Turkish rug glowed with its muted colors.

  At the sight of Allegra in her primrose chiffon, Coxie dropped her knitting and jumped to her feet.

  “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” she cried. “What have you gotten into now? Where have you been?”

  “Never mind,” I told her sharply. “Mrs. Logan wants to sit here and rest a little.”

  “I’ll put her to bed at once! Come along now, dearie. Coxie will help you.”

  “No!” I said, and led Allegra to an armchair, lowered her into it. Then I faced the nurse. “Just go away for a while.”

  Clearly, I’d outraged her, and she drew herself up to her bulky height. “I don’t take orders from anyone but—”

  “You’re forgetting,” I said. “You take orders from me. So go downstairs and talk to someone. Find Mrs. Broderick. Something has happened that you should know about. But don’t come back here for at least an hour.”

  For a moment she looked shocked and a little frightened. Then she ducked her head and almost ran from the room. Allegra sat very straight, with her bright dress fluffed around her, looking incongruous now, her unrestrained locks coming down about her face.

  “Good for you!” she cried. “I’m glad you told her off—whoever you are. I don’t know when that woman came into my life—I can’t remember. But she’s a dreadful nuisance.”

  When she leaned back and closed her eyes, I was afraid she would slip away too deeply into the past again. Pulling a hassock close to her chair, I sat down and touched her hand.

  “This tape, Mrs, Logan—tell me what it is.
” Strange, I could call her Allegra when she was in the past, but not in the present.

  “I don’t know,” she said without opening her eyes. “I’ve never listened to it. I’ve never wanted to know what it contains.”

  “But where did you get it? Why did you hide it?”

  Her time sequences might be confused, with lapses of memory bewildering her, but a thread of sense ran through her words.

  “Pam Nichols gave it to me only the other day. She said I mustn’t show it to anyone unless something happened to her. But of course nothing will happen to her—will it?”

  I could almost lose myself in Allegra’s mixed time periods. “I—I don’t know,” I said. “What else did she tell you when she gave it to you? Try to remember, please.”

  Her effort was clear in her face. “She told me that—that someone was trying to kill her. She told me that she had put all her suspicions down on tape, so that if anything happened, the guilty person would be accused.”

  “And then what? Try to remember.”

  She turned her head from side to side in anguish. “I don’t know. I was sick for a long while afterwards. I’d put the tape away, and when I was well again I couldn’t remember where it was. I tried to get that little boy, Keith, to help me find it, because he knows all the hiding places in the house. But he never could. Of course, he didn’t think of looking among my dresses up in the tower.”

  “You still don’t know what’s on it?”

  “No. Pam asked me not to play it unless—unless—I don’t remember. And then when I was well again, I couldn’t find it.”

  “Have you told anyone else about its existence?”

  “Yes—I think so.” The fogs were slipping away a little now. “I told Gretchen. And I think I talked to Brett about it. And perhaps to others. Ross was married to her when Pam was in that accident, you know. She did die, didn’t she? But no one ever found the tape—until I did myself—today!”

  “Do you want to hear what it says?” I asked.

  There was a long silence while she considered painfully. “No, I don’t think so. He’s my son. I don’t want to know. Because if I know I might have to do something about it.” Her look was suddenly wise, perhaps a little crafty. “That’s too often the way, isn’t it? We have a choice and we do nothing. And then suddenly it’s too late. Afterwards, we don’t dare admit what we haven’t done.”

  “What do you want me to do with the tape now?” I asked.

  This time she didn’t hesitate. “I think you must play it. I think you must know whatever there is to know. You’re Ross’s wife, aren’t you? I remember now. You need to know how dangerous he can be. You need to know, for your own protection. But you mustn’t tell me. I’m too old to bear any more. Ross was always an impossible boy. We hoped for so much for him. We gave him so much.”

  Everything except understanding, I thought with sudden clarity, seeing for the first time a lonely small boy lost in the grandeurs of Poinciana, fearful that he could never live up to all this, yet driven for all his life into trying—in no matter how unscrupulous a way—because he couldn’t believe in himself. This would be something that Allegra could never understand. Her generation had not been given to much self-awareness. That was difficult enough for a far more psychologically oriented age to come by. We could only make beginnings out of ignorance.

  She spoke to me again. “The tape is yours now. Your responsibility.”

  I wasn’t sure this was a responsibility I wanted to accept, but the small, frail woman in the chair sat up straighter than ever and fixed me sternly with eyes that were quite clear. She was Allegra Logan, and hers was the authority that ruled this house.

  “You have no choice. I had a choice. For a long while I had a choice, but I did nothing. Then when I knew that Ross meant to put me away in some terrible place, so that no one would listen to anything I said, I decided. I told Brett and Gretchen they must find the tape and stop Ross from what he meant to do. I’m sure they searched and searched, but neither of them found it. So now you have no choice. Take it away and listen to what it says. Listen to it right now!”

  I sat on the edge of the hassock, with the cassette in my hands, and knew I would have to obey. But first there was something else I must ask, something that I’d postponed out of my own fears. I must face it now.

  “Will you tell me, Mrs. Logan—when you were in the tower room today, did you see Gretchen there? Did you talk to her?” I took the little mermaid from my raincoat pocket and held it out to her. “What do you know about this?”

  Before my eyes, she seemed to crumple in upon herself, shaking her head from side to side. “No, no! I didn’t see anything! Where is Gretchen? I want Gretchen to come to me right away!”

  Either she had seen nothing, or she had blocked out whatever had happened in the tower. Blocked it out then and there, so that she could journey into the past and dance in her ballroom again. I knew I could urge her no further now.

  “Let me help you out of that dress,” I said. “I’ll find a robe for you, and—”

  Once more she stiffened, recovering. “Go right now!” she ordered. “Before anything happens to stop you. I’m perfectly comfortable here, and after a while Coxie will come and see to me. She irritates me, and sometimes I fight her. But I’m used to her, and she does look after me.”

  “All right,” I said. I kissed her cheek, and she reached out to pat my arm vaguely, again not quite sure who I was.

  There were several tape recorders around the house, and one was in the library. So that was where I would go.

  On my way downstairs, I met Coxie hurrying up, and knew by her face that she had been told about Gretchen. She hadn’t waited out her hour.

  “This will kill Mrs. Logan!” she cried. “She can’t take any more, poor old thing.”

  “She’s not a poor old thing,” I said, “and she’s probably tough enough to outlive us both. But don’t you try to tell her.”

  The nurse fled from me up the stairs, intent on succoring her charge. I knew by now, however, that Allegra had her own means of escaping from whatever might disturb and injure her, and I could almost envy her that facility.

  For me, the library was filled with memories, and Ysobel’s recording was still in the machine. I took it out and replaced it with the first side of the unlabeled tape that Allegra had given me. Outside, the storm was growing stronger, slashing against window panes, bending the palm trees, banging a shutter somewhere in the house. The air seemed close inside, yet I felt cold and a little ill. Allegra’s voice still commanded me. Play it now. I reached out and pressed the lever.

  The voice was clear and sweet and filled with sorrow. I listened with all my being.

  “Someday, Jarrett, you will hear these words I’m recording. And so will others. Because all the family must know. I watch you now, and I suffer for both of us. I know that you know, and I can see how hopelessly you are trapped. As I am trapped. You’re angry with him—with Ross—and you’re sorry for me because you know how foolish I’ve been. I think the time will come when you’ll leave Ross because this is more than any man can bear. But it mustn’t come to that. You will surely find a way to stop him.

  “I know how much depends on you. There are all those people out there who will be damaged if you leave Ross. Because he doesn’t care. None of what you’re doing means anything to him. I’ve heard the callous way he talks. I know how indifferent he is. Yet he needs you to keep him in power, and he depends on you, much as he hates this very thing. You’re the man he would like to be—perhaps that’s his tragedy—and he can never forgive you for being what he isn’t. So you are bound together, despising each other—and trapped. The thing I am most afraid of is violence. From either one of you.”

  “How did it happen? I mean between me and Ross. You have a right to know, and yet I’m not sure that I can tell you. It happened—that’s all. Perhaps it was his revenge against you. But that’s not what this tape is about. It’s not what I’m trying to tell y
ou now. I’ve loved him and hated him, and I have never stopped loving and admiring you—but in a different, healthier way. Let it go. As you’ll have to let me go. But you must not let Ross get away with everything.

  “He’s grown tired of me, as he grows tired of anything that comes within his grasp. He always thinks he has to reach further. And perhaps Allegra is to blame for that. I know that part of my appeal for him lay in spiting you, but he has become like a drug for me, and I don’t know how to go on living without him. So—foolishly—I’ve tried to threaten him. When he said he wouldn’t meet me again, I told him I would go to you—inform you of everything. He laughed at me—but with that look in his eyes that told me he wasn’t laughing inside.

  “I think—I know—that he means to be rid of me, stop me from talking. Somehow he will make it look like an accident, but I want you to know that it won’t be one. Perhaps I could prevent this. Perhaps I could find a way to make him really afraid. But I shan’t try. I don’t want to go on living like this. I don’t want you to go on living in this terrible way. So—I will let it happen, whatever it is. And I will not go to you as I threatened. My greatest sorrow is that I must leave Keith. But you will be a better father to him than I have been a mother. And someday you’ll find another woman to mother him. Just make him understand always how much I loved him.

  “Yesterday I saw Ross in the garage when Albert and the others were gone. He was working on my car. I went away and said nothing. Very soon I will drive out again—and then who knows? It will be best for all of us if it happens. For me and for you. And Ross will at last be exposed for what he is, because when you hear this tape you will have to act against him. It would be foolish to say I’m sorry. That would only be weak and useless. But I wish you had never gone to work for Ross Logan.

  “Try not to hate me. You are the finest man I’ve ever known. I will put this tape in Allegra’s hands to give to you if anything happens to me.