Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Thus, along such intemperate lines, Xavier spoke to himself, with but a peripheral knowledge of what he said. How queer it was, that, as always at such times, delight, and dread, fought for ascendancy in his heart: as linked, indeed, as the inhalation and exhalation of breath: or the systolic rhythm of the actual heart. As, by inches, he progressed through Valentine’s downstairs rooms, and, on his pained knees, made his way up the narrow curved staircase, it came to him that his delight must be his dread: for where else,—how the brooding young man taxed himself!—might delight arise? And of what earthly value was mere delight, if not springing from dread?

  He recalled his hellish “baptism” of sorts, in the quicksand, or mud, many days previous; and, many years before, within the lugubrious walls of Glen Mawr Manor. But of such things, at the moment, he knew it unwise to think.

  The door to the master bedroom was locked; but, as Xavier, though the son of a gentleman, had long ago trained himself in the dexterous manipulation of a skeleton key, this presented no obstacle whatsoever: and he halfway wished that Valentine, off at the races in Saratoga Springs, might be granted a moment’s vision, of this triumph. The bedroom suite (or boudoir, as its fanciful trappings, and mirrored walls, and odor of heavy incense, suggested) was a spacious area, yet so crowded with furnishings, it had an oppressive air; nor did the peculiar hue of the French wallpaper,—a glazed plum-black—liven the atmosphere; nor an inordinately detailed engraving above the fireplace mantel, by an artist named Toorop, of whom Xavier had never heard, of a vast city of the dead, in which, in childlike yet sinister fashion, naked maidens and youths languidly disported themselves, amidst graceful little mounds of bones. In near-ribald contrast to the somber wallpaper, Valentine’s enormous bed was covered in crimson velvet, with numberless brocaded pillows scattered untidily about: the canopy was of creamy satin: and not, Xavier’s keen eye discerned, remarkably clean. Indeed, did not the boudoir give off a scent of staleness, an air of the unwashed and the despoiled—? And how Valentine’s expensive cologne stank, in these close quarters—!

  Yet Xavier forced himself to proceed with his customary thoroughness, though his head rang with pain; and the riddle gripped him, as to why on earth he was here, in a murderer’s malodorous boudoir, when, in truth, he would rather be virtually anywhere else, for the solace of his soul!

  His search, however, was initially disappointing, as no blood appeared to have been spilled in this room; or, at any rate, no stains remained. Valentine’s commodious clothes closet, that ran the full length of the room, and was jammed with a fop’s resplendent attire, yielded, to Xavier’s discerning eye, and to the potent magic of his magnifying glass, no clues whatsoever; nor did a squat bedside table, whose veneered drawers contained, of all surprising things, tinsel-wrapped bonbons and chocolates from the Charity Street Sweet Shoppe. (Xavier’s lips curled with a disgust he did not clearly comprehend when, upon examining several of the candies, he discovered that they had been bitten into, showing the impress of Valentine’s small teeth, and then fastidiously rewrapped—!)

  Atop a second bedside table Xavier discovered a large, unwieldy book of Japanese etchings, covered in fine Belgian linen, whose contents quite shocked him. Indeed, he had never seen anything quite like them: shamelessly frank, yet unfailingly graceful, images of Eros: a diversity of arcane posturings, involving both human beings and beasts; fornications in pairs, triples, quartets, and en masse; ceremonial beheadings and disembowelings,—which particularly offended Xavier, as very little blood was depicted, and that which was, possessed a fraudulent sort of daintiness. “A repulsive amusette,” Xavier inwardly murmured, with a shudder, “yet altogether appropriate as a bedside companion for Valentine.”

  He wondered what loathsome practices the room’s enormous mirrors had witnessed, their glassy focus being, all remorselessly, upon the luxuriant canopied bed; and to what purpose the heir of Ravensworth Park had traveled about the world, squandering his family’s money, in the acquisition of winking, leering, tawdry, distasteful, yet, doubtless, highly expensive works of art. On display, as if in a private museum, were jewel-encrusted (and somewhat dusty) statues of nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, and the like, ill-executed, and engaged in cheerless erotic acts; on the fireplace mantel a most revolting depiction, in flawless white marble, of the subject of Laocoön,—the serpents richly imbued with small precious gems, the human beings contorted in postures of unspeakable agony. Yet more perversely still, Valentine had hung close by his bed a coarse gravestone rubbing in Gothic letters, taken from the tomb of a Westergaard ancestor:

  LET YOUR LIGHT SO SHINE BEFORE MEN

  THAT THEY MAY SEE YOUR GOOD WORKS

  & GLORIFY YOUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN

  Behind a Japanese screen was a writing desk, in laminated carved rosewood, whose drawers, being carefully searched, revealed naught but divers scraps of papers, and scented stationery, and part-crumpled sheets of poesy, scribbled in a lazy hand. Several poems were dedicated to “the naughty Angel E.”; one, which caused Xavier to start, was dedicated to “my sweet Doppelgänger X.,”—containing these lines:

  O Ecstasy of Death & Priapus,

  Our Lord of Saintly Pain—

  —which aroused an especial sensation of disgust in the detective.

  “It cannot be that this sickly creature thinks of me as a double, still less as a brother,” Xavier said, hurriedly returning the sheets of paper to the desk, and closing the drawer with his gloved hand. “Nay, it cannot be anything but idle literary posturing, the product of a diseased sensibility!”

  At last, however, his search yielded fruit: and extraordinary fruit indeed.

  It was in an immense Regency chest of drawers, in a shadowed corner of the room, that Xavier discovered all he might have wished, in his most greedy dreams: one drawer yielding an untidy heap of women’s apparel (chemises, garters, ripped stockings, soiled ribands, and, most damning of all, a cotton petticoat stiffened with bloodstains); another, the long-sought murder weapon itself,—for surely this heavy dagger was the murder weapon?—carelessly wrapped in a turquoise dressing gown, and faintly stained, yet, with the blood of an innocent victim. So excited was Xavier with this discovery, he stood for some seconds staring, and staring, his numbed lips shaping the words So it is: I have you, so it is: I have you, while Valentine’s mantel clock daintily chimed the hour. Indeed, the detective’s nervous exultation was such, he did not recall that this weapon in its physical actuality had been prefigured by his own dream-anticipation of it, in the Devil’s Half-Acre: the which curiosity I feel I should mention in this space, as so much vulgar attention is given to “Zachariah Kilpatrick’s” rare intuitive and extrasensory powers, in the fictionalization of the case, while in real life, Xavier was scarcely aware of these powers, and would have blushed to hear them attributed to him.

  So it was, at this moment of triumph, Xavier gazed upon the Westergaard heirloom with both delight and dread pounding in his ears, and coursing furiously along his veins. Ah, at last!—at last he had “got his man”!—and now he must leave everything exactly as he had found it, and hurry to the chief of police, and to the District Solicitor, and bid them make haste to Hazelwit Square, that the priceless evidence might not vanish—!

  Postscript

  It occurs to me that I have neglected to explain the way in which Xavier Kilgarvan saved himself, or was saved, from a most pitiable death in the quicksand, in early August: the unadorned reason for this being, I do not know.

  Yet my discomfiture is not uniquely mine: for, so far as I have been able to determine, no other authority on the life and career of Xavier Kilgarvan knows either!—the wily detective having been most careful, through the years, to keep the details of that awkward experience to himself. Of course, it may certainly have been the case (as Mountjoy Price, and one or two others, suggest) that a mysterious and unnamed personage, who had been spying on Xavier Kilgarvan for some minutes, at last came,—ah, near-belatedly!—to his rescue; and, by brute strength, and a c
ertain felicity of movement, hauled him free of the loathsome muck. Then again,—and here, I am afraid, no significant mystery is involved—my firsthand examination of the probable patch of quicksand, into which Xavier so unwittingly stepped, suggests that the substance, though, to this day, foul enough, and doubtless treacherous, was not, indeed, quicksand in the strictest sense of the word: but only an uncommonly soft, viscous, abhorrent species of muck: and the area itself but a kind of pond, of decidedly finite, and not infinite, dimensions. Which is to say, my experimental measurings with a sturdy tree limb, that could be trusted not to snap, revealed that the pond’s bottom was probably no more than five and a half feet below, at least at the time (admittedly, many years after Xavier’s accident) of my measurement. Thus, is it not reasonable to suppose that, after so many minutes of near-unendurable panic, and terror, and humiliation, and, indeed, physical torture, Xavier Kilgarvan simply touched bottom?

  And how he afterward maneuvered himself free of his confinement, in which, as the reader might recall, he had sunk to his very chin; how, with what desperate, inspired, tortuous manipulations of his arms, he at last succeeded in grasping something stolid enough to hold his weight; and how many minutes,—nay, hours—were required, of strain, and toil, and panting, and weeping, and sobbing, and mumbled prayer, to haul himself free: none of this information is available, not even to the detective’s most faithful devotees.

  Albeit we must content ourselves with the fact that Xavier did survive the “baptism of the muck,”—at least in a manner of speaking. As to whether he shook off the chill wisdom derived from that sudden and irreversible shifting of planes, and violation of the fabric of Reality itself: that is another matter entirely: and the reader must form his own judgment.

  A Romantic Interlude

  It was shortly before Valentine Westergaard’s trial for first-degree murder was scheduled to begin, in late November,—and, indeed, but a few weeks following the much-celebrated nuptials of Bradford Kilgarvan and Miss Miriam Burke—that Xavier, of a sudden, declared to Perdita that he could not live without her at his side, and wished to make her, with as much dispatch as possible, his lawful wedded wife: with what ambiguous results, the reader will learn.

  Through the autumn the young lovers (if it is not a sentimental exaggeration to call them thus) had been meeting, sometimes in the presence of others, but, more often, in secret: as Mrs. Spies had let it be known, with no excess of diplomacy, that she would not permit a charge of hers to “keep company” with Xavier Kilgarvan,—nay, she would never again allow that low, deceitful, conniving creature, that self-declared Anarchist, into her drawing room. “For he means to bring us all to shame: it is a long-delayed eructation of his half-breed heritage,—make no mistake about it! ah, make no mistake!” Thus the corpulent invalid sighed, and fumed, and fussed, and vigorously fanned herself, as if, by the nervous strokes of her wrist, she might drive all thought of Xavier Kilgarvan away from her household.

  All wisely, the shrewd Perdita held her tongue, and feigned acquiescence, though, in truth, she had,—alas, so very oddly, and powerfully!—succumbed to some indefinable spell, or aura, in her cousin: seeing even in his habitual scowl, or the ironical twist of his lips, or, withal, the eerily luminous scar, of the approximate size of a nickel, that sometimes declared itself at his left temple, a species of,—ah, how to describe it! how to calibrate its potency in her maiden’s heart!—a species, it might be said, of uncommon manliness; and urgent charm. His numerous missives and cards to her, she bitterly regretted not having prized, over the years: nor had she, until very recent months, sufficiently valued his gifts. (Albeit Perdita had devoured, in the privacy of her dressing room, and with untrammeled relish, the several boxes of chocolates, bonbons, walnut fudge, and the like, Xavier had had delivered to her from the Charity Street Sweet Shoppe; and, with gloating pleasure, she had, all surreptitiously, dabbed “his” cologne on her delicate wrists, or behind her ears. After the death, by inanition, of the smaller of the pair of turtle doves, Perdita had severely charged Mrs. Spies’s maid, that the piteous incident should not be repeated. Indeed, finding the opalescent-feathered creature dead at the bottom of its cage, one chill autumn morning, and its mate quite agitated and forlorn, circling, with a drunken sort of grief, its lifeless body, Perdita had experienced one of the heart-rending pangs of her young womanhood: and stood for some numbed minutes staring into the cage, in voiceless grief, that this,—this outrage,—Death itself—should have so violently confounded the morning’s sanctity; and roused certain memories, long quiescent, she had wished to erase forever.)

  “At least, with God as my witness, the second of the doves shall not die!” Perdita vowed, as stinging tears sprang from her eyes, and streaked her blanched cheeks, “else I myself will deservedly die as well.”

  Elderly Mrs. Spies’s heated animadversions against Xavier, which Perdita forbore, with many a hidden wince, and a clasping of her hidden hands, the less artful Thérèse could scarcely countenance: as, it seems, that loyal young woman yet nurtured, in her innermost heart, her love for Xavier,—albeit possessed of uncommonly keen insight, and the habitude of interpreting her sister’s moods, passions, obsessions, and the like, over many a year, Thérèse knew well how the forbidden romance blossomed: by what stealthy art billets-doux were sent, and received; in what exhilarated trepidation “chance” meetings were contrived, at the public library, or at the Armory’s watercolor exhibit, or even,—so emboldened were the lovers!—at Reverend Bunting’s Wednesday evening services, to which, pleading her divers infirmities, Mrs. Spies declined to go. Being of a resolutely pious, upright, and trustworthy character, Thérèse would have willingly thrust her bared hand into a candle’s licking flame rather than stoop to the ignominy of spying: yet, though making not the whit of an effort along such lines, and, indeed, turning her eyes swiftly away if, perchance, she came upon a crumpled sheet of stationery bearing her sister’s hand, nonetheless it somehow came about (whether by an osmotic process of sisterly communion, or by a careless or random word dropped by Perdita) that Thérèse knew when, and where, the illicit lovers planned to meet; and, afterward, the approximate degree of emotive exchange at such meetings. Doubtless such knowledge deeply pained Thérèse, who saw how scant were her chances with the dashing young detective: assuredly such knowledge distressed her that, all inadvertently, she was privy to certain secrets of Perdita’s life. More than this, the knowledge of a romance that thrived in the interstices, as it were, of her sister’s outward behavior, greatly puzzled her: as, from childhood forward, Perdita had ever been capricious, and wanton, and fickle, and susceptible to a wild diversity of notions,—save constancy. And, in her evident feeling for Xavier, abloom these many weeks, there did seem to be an element of constancy: and even an air, wondrous in Perdita, of somber meditation and self-scrutiny. Oft-times, when the sisters were alone, Perdita sighed, and rubbed with such ferocity at her face, Thérèse flinched at the distension of her pretty features; and observed that she “scarcely knew of late who she was,—or what the world required of her,—or how, granted her own weaknesses, and penchant for error, she should prove capable of living a morally coherent life: or even (God grant her mercy!) capable of living out her life to its natural completion.”

  When Perdita lapsed into so queer a mood,—partaking of both self-pity and a chilling species of indifference—Thérèse trembled to answer her, in dread of provoking a blasphemous dialogue (for it was self-slaughter to which Perdita obliquely alluded,—the very sin that had overcome both their mother and their elder sister, Georgina); or, what would have discomfited Thérèse yet more, and caused her to blush crimson to the roots of her hair, a discussion of the forbidden infatuation. For just as it was known, yet not explicitly known, by Thérèse, the tumultuous nature of Perdita’s heart, so it was known, yet not altogether explicitly, that Thérèse knew: and a precarious sort of diplomacy obtained, in regard to which the dowager Mrs. Spies prattled on in ignorance. Yet Thérèse shrank from any
precipitant revelation, or, what would have been yet more distasteful, any heartfelt confession on Perdita’s part: for she abhorred so unlicensed a passion as Perdita harbored, with no less vehemence than she abhorred it in herself.

  So it was, as the autumn darkened, Thérèse nursed in her heart certain troubling sentiments; the which were hardly macerated by the near-ceaseless buzz of news, gossip, slander, and outright falsehood that circulated about Xavier Kilgarvan, hardly less than the infamous Valentine Westergaard. Indeed, Thérèse hesitated to confide in her diary, even in code, in case, in one of her reckless storming moods, Perdita essayed to read it: and to expose all that crouched hidden in Thérèse’s heart. “Ah, how she should mock and laugh, if she knew!” Thérèse inwardly shuddered. (In addition, I suppose it should here be noted, in the interests of fairly supplying the reader with clues, that Thérèse had come to be, all inadvertently, the recipient of certain confidential information, pertaining to Valentine’s guilt, or innocence: which came to her unsought,—indeed, unwished—by way of young Roddy Spies, whose tutor she was at the present time. Knowing not, of course, whether this “information” be strictly accurate or riddled with error, Thérèse nevertheless recorded it, in codified form, in her diary,—and would have been greatly distressed if Perdita, or anyone, blundered upon it.)