The Winter People

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “I did a piece in black marble,” he told me. “But it was dark inspiration and wrong for me. I hated it after it was finished, no matter how many other people praised it. But if I could do you … and I believe I can … Dina Blake, give me my chance!”

  What else could I do but agree? He was sweetly, teasingly persuasive, having seen that the high-handed alarmed me, and I was going down for the last count. The sound of sparklers sizzled in my ears, though I suspected there was no promise of anything but hurt ahead for me. Glen Chandler was in love with what he could create in white alabaster if I would pose for him, but I doubt if he saw me as a person during those first few days. Even if he couldn’t really see me, my imagination was fired and I could see myself. There I’d be, posing for a great work of art, inspiring a true artist to creativity. I did not even struggle to escape. I was like a fish on a hook—swallowing the bright bait willingly, danger and all.

  I moved about my job in a daze during that brief time. Glen would call for me and take me to lunch, to dinner. We did not get to work at once, though an empty weekend presented itself when I was free from my job. Perhaps Glen was afraid to put himself to the test immediately. The studio behind his art gallery waited for us, he told me, yet he would not take me into it and begin. Instead, we walked the streets of New York in brisk November weather and he talked to me endlessly. He seemed hungry for someone who would listen, and since he was never dull I gave him my fascinated attention. He told me frankly that Chandler money had bought the art gallery for him when he found he could not work with his own talent. He was proud of what he had done with it, proud of the paintings and sculpture he presented there. He was always ready to encourage young, promising artists. Several of those he had discovered were already making names for themselves.

  On the third evening we were together he took me to see the gallery and opened it up for me after hours. It was a long narrow room, plain and very beautiful, with polished floors and wood panels that winged out from the walls to show the lighted pictures to best advantage. He spoke with enthusiasm of the work of this artist, that sculptor, and the soft lighting touched the red highlights of his hair as he moved, so that he looked darkly beautiful in a way that was wholly male, and I trembled a little with dread and longing.

  Nevertheless, for all his enthusiasm, I sensed the pain that walked with him because it was the work of others he must show, and never his own. This was part of his appeal for me—that there was a flaw in his self-confidence so that I ached for him at the same time that I admired his courage and tenacity. He was only thirty-four. Why shouldn’t it begin all over again for him? Why shouldn’t he build on a more solid basis this time, not relying on inspiration alone, but combining it with the technique that was now his through almost too careful practice? I was rapt as any disciple, giddily ready to sacrifice myself to his art if I could serve him.

  But now—when I think of his gallery—there is just one picture I remember. The picture which should have warned me.

  It did not hang in a particularly prominent place. It was not even very well lighted, but somehow it drew my eye. The scene was of an ice-covered lake in wintertime, with bare gray trees wooding the rise above the far shore. At first glance it seemed a pretty scene, with blue skies overhead and brightly dressed figures skimming the ice. I might have looked at it briefly and moved away, if I had not seen what the picture really meant.

  The style was reminiscently primitive but the little figures which inhabited this scene were not pretty at all. Each seemed to have some minute ugliness when one looked closely, for all their gay clothing, and all were engaged in actions that were anything but innocent. A line of skaters cracked the whip, and a girl at the end had been released to go sailing toward a rocky bank and imminent disaster. Beyond the skaters a bonfire burned on the shore, and a small boy was pushing another child into the flames. On the frozen lake a tall youth held a gun to his shoulder, about to shoot a small brown animal fleeing toward the safety of the wooded shore. The boy was depicted in careful detail—plaid jacket, blue jeans, checkered cap in red and black. All around his feet were the tiny carcasses of animals he had killed, and each could be identified—deer, fox, raccoon, rabbit, woodchuck.

  I supposed that any hunter might be shown like this in an effort to expose a cruel truth, yet here it was more than that—and somehow evil. Each tiny horror was depicted with relish, and the effect was wicked—sick. Yet it was strangely powerful. No name had been signed to it—only scrawled initials, difficult to make out.

  Glen had gone to the front of the gallery to speak to someone at the door. When the man had gone, he returned to find me staring at the scene of the ice-covered lake.

  “What a dreadful picture!” I said. “Who painted it?”

  He seemed to bristle, unaccountably. “In its way it’s a masterpiece,” he told me. “Do you see the house at the top of the hill there on the left?”

  I had not noticed the house. Sunlight fell upon the lake, but clouds threw the hilltop into shadow, and the tall gray house was almost lost among the gray skeletons of winter trees. Now that I saw it, I found that here, too, were tiny details that hinted of evil—in pointed towers like pricked ears, in pale windows which wore the strange reflections of anguished faces, in the minute and grotesque carving of the era of Carpenter’s Gothic.

  “That is High Towers,” Glen said. “I’ve told you about the house where I grew up. The Chandlers own all that land on the far side of the lake, so in a sense Gray Rocks Lake is ours too. Though there are those who would like to spoil it, take it away, if we don’t stop them.”

  There seemed an eerie prickling at the back of my neck and I bent to look more carefully at the scrawled initials signed to the picture. This time I made them out: “G.C.”–and I straightened to stare at Glen.

  “The painting is yours, isn’t it? But why, Glen—why? Is this the sort of thing you used to do?”

  He pulled me angrily away. “No, it’s not mine! Stop looking at the beastly thing. I own it, but I didn’t paint it. Come away!”

  I resisted his hand. There was something here that I did not understand and that seemed suddenly urgent for me to know.

  “Why don’t you want me to look at it? It’s really very good, even though it sickens me a little. You needn’t be ashamed of it, if you—”

  His grip hurt my arm. “I’ve told you it isn’t mine. And I don’t want you to look at it because it might prejudice you against the lake and High Towers. I don’t want you prejudiced, Dina, because I’m going to take you there. You will come with me, won’t you?”

  He swung me around to face him and I looked up into burning dark eyes that held my own; half-challenging, half-pleading. My uneasiness grew.

  “Why should I go to High Towers?” I asked.

  “Because I need to begin work on the alabaster head that I’m going to do of you, Dina. I need to begin soon, before I lose this feeling that’s so hard to come by.”

  “But I’ve agreed to pose for you here,” I said. “You told me you would work in the studio behind this gallery. I thought we were going to start this week.”

  He put both hands lightly on my shoulders, and my flesh seemed to lift to his touch, yearn toward his hands. I could not help myself.

  “It isn’t going to work here,” he told me. “The place is wrong. All I have behind me here is failure. Years of horrible failure. I can’t risk it this time. At High Towers I’ve the right piece of stone to work with, too—clear white like ice, with the faintest hint of green. And the place is right. Emotionally right.”

  I found myself troubled and confused, finding it hard to deny him anything, yet uneasy, nevertheless. High Towers was in northern New Jersey. I didn’t want to go to northern New Jersey, just as I didn’t want Glen to have blue eyes and black hair. There’s a theory that a woman who falls in love once, thereafter falls in love all her life long with the same type of man. I knew that wasn’t true. I wanted to escape all likeness forever to Trent McIntyre, who
had come from northern New Jersey. I wanted to forget forever that long stride which had walked away from me.

  But Glen, I have a job here in New York,” I reminded him. “I’ve only a toe in the door of what I want to do. They’d never let me off with a leave of absence now. They’d let me go for good. I must think of me, Glen. I must!”

  “No,” he said, calmly and without arrogance. “This time you must think of me. Of my work. This is life or death for me, Dina. You know that, don’t you?”

  I knew it. He had convinced me. Yet I was afraid. What would happen to me when he had carved his alabaster masterpiece? Of what use would I be to him then? I stepped back from his hands, turned from the dark pleading in his eyes. Turned away and ran. In that last moment before utter capitulation the need for escape was paramount.

  He caught me before I reached the door of the gallery and his mood had changed, as it could so quickly. He overtook me with a triumphant exuberance that whirled me down the long room, whirled me behind a protruding wing where pictures were hung, and out of sight of the street. There he kissed me, half-teasingly at first, then more demandingly. I gave up and kissed him back. None of my doubts were lifted, none of my fears had lessened, but this was where I wanted to be—here in his arms, no matter what the future held.

  “We’ll be married before I take you home,” he told me. “We’ll be married here in New York with as little fuss as possible. There’s no one at High Towers now except Aunt Naomi, so we can go there for our honeymoon. Then I can start work at home. I want to show you our lake and hills. Winter’s coming and there’s nothing more beautiful than Gray Rocks when the snow closes us in. Not dirty city snow, but snow a girl from California has never seen.”

  I was suddenly quiet in his arms. “You don’t have to marry me because you need me as a model,” I said. “I’ll go with you to High Towers. I’ll pose for you there. No need to—”

  “There’s every need,” he said and held my head against him, his long fingers caught in my hair.

  A whisper went through my mind. How could I marry anyone? How could I give up my foolish dreaming? But I would not listen to such whispering. That was over long ago and there had never been a chance for me anyway. So why shouldn’t I substitute new dreams? I let him press my head against him, heard the strong beating of his heart.

  “I’m not buying you as a model, my darling,” he said. “You’re the answer to a great many things for me. You’re freedom, escape, success—everything. I can’t bear not to have you in my life forever.”

  What strange words he used—“freedom,” “escape.” I should have challenged them, questioned them. Though of course he would have told me nothing if I had. He was purposely telling me nothing, lest I be frightened off for good. So I gave in joyfully and did what I wanted to do. This was no matter of skyrockets and sparklers that would burn out in a little while. This was love as it should be—a generous love that I must give to someone who needed me. If I was the giver, and Glen the taker—that did not matter. Often it must be like that, and neither the worse for it. Certainly it was far better than an old painful giving to someone who did not want.

  With all my heart I longed to give Glen whatever he needed to make him whole, to make him free of whatever held him back, so that he could work again. That was what he meant by freedom, I told myself—the ability to work, to recover the lost talent that would make him a whole man once more. Besides, I wanted to be free too—free of a man who had once held me in his arms, let me weep on his shoulder, and then put me quietly and firmly out of his life.

  The museum was not unduly heartbroken at my resignation, and the next few days were a whirl of activity. Glen would not wait and there was little time for me to get ready properly. Apparently his assistant at the art gallery was accustomed to taking over whenever it was required, so there was no problem there.

  We were married in the drab surroundings of the Municipal Building, yet I did not feel at all drab because Glen made it a gala occasion, so gay and vital and alive was he. I felt myself swept along like the tail of a soaring kite that sailed the upper atmosphere wild and scarcely fettered. Thoughts of the future were my last concern. The past I blanked out altogether. The skyrocket had gone off.

  I had written my mother a long, enthusiastic letter, and had received a brief note in response. It was a loving note, but she was not able to write very clearly these days, and my aunt added her own words of congratulations, so that I had some family send-off.

  Once Glen’s plain gold band was on my finger—a ring I chose because I disliked the more elaborate ones he might have bought me—he sent a cable to his father, off somewhere in Portugal, painting the portrait of an exiled king. Glen’s mother had died when he was five, and Colton Chandler had never married again, so there was only his one parent to notify. Glen lacked his exact address, but the American Express office in Lisbon would reach him eventually.

  “What will your father say?” I asked while Glen was wording the cable. For the first time I wondered seriously what the formidable Colton Chandler, the world-renowned artist, would think of his son’s sudden marriage to an unknown girl. For the first time I felt those misgivings I might have had earlier about Glen’s father.

  Glen wrote the last word on the form and answered my question without smiling. “Colton will be deliriously happy, and after he has seen you he will think he invented you,” he said, and I heard something dry in his voice. “My father wants an heir to carry on his name, and hopefully, his far-flung fame. So far I’ve disappointed him.”

  “I’d like children,” I said warmly.

  Glen looked startled. “Let’s take our time about that. I want you to myself for a while.”

  I could not quarrel with that.

  When the cable had been sent we went back to Glen’s apartment and he phoned “Nomi,” as he called his aunt. Again I waited, while he talked to High Towers. Miss Naomi Holmes, his mother’s older sister, seemed to take his news in stride, though I thought it inconsiderate of him to give her so little warning that we were coming. But I had already resigned myself to the fact that consideration and forethought were not to be expected from Glen. He enjoyed acting on lively impulse and I loved him for it.

  His aunt seemed to accept his news calmly enough, and Glen talked swiftly, affectionately—coaxing her, winning her over. Nevertheless, he did not put me on the line to speak with her, and when he set the phone down he cocked an amused eyebrow.

  “She’ll turn the house upside down,” he said. “She’ll do three spring cleanings in one to welcome us.”

  “But what did she say?” I asked. “What did she say about your marrying me?”

  “She said I was the last man in the world to take on the responsibility of a wife, but if I’ve chosen the right woman, she’ll be glad of it. Nomi always speaks her mind. She hopes you’re a sensible girl who’ll see to it that I’m not given my head completely. Are you, Dina? Are you a sensible girl?”

  I shook my head a bit wildly and went into his arms. “I haven’t any sense at all,” I told him with my lips against his cheek. “And what’s more, I couldn’t care less.”

  2

  It was the last week in November on a late afternoon when we set off for New Jersey in Glen’s car. I loved the drive, even though the countryside was drab and brown, with autumn colors faded, leaves hanging dead on the trees, and the snow not yet come to make everything beautiful again.

  I sat beside him, feeling glamorous in the outfit he had bought me before we left New York—white wool coat, furry white wool hat, white boots that came to my knees. I’d never have dressed like this myself but he said I must not ignore my northern blood. I had never had a chance to bring it out before, but as soon as the snow came I would come into my own and I must be ready for it: “You’re my winter girl. From your boots to your ice-blond hair, Dina. And don’t forget it.”

  I didn’t know about my northern blood, or all this white glamour, but my feeling was wholly one of joy. I had ne
ver been so loved, so loving, and I was filled with fine promises that I made to myself and to Glen. I meant to love High Towers and Gray Rocks Lake. Whatever Colton Chandler and Naomi Holmes might feel about Glen’s marrying me, I meant to love them too, and try to please them in every way. No one could quarrel with me, disapprove of me, when I wanted so much to please. All my treasured independence was gladly tossed away. No feminine mystique for me! I was born to serve.

  Glen was pleased with me. He led and I followed. I had never dreamed I could be such a chameleon, taking on his coloration, his zest and gaiety, even something of his jaunty manner. I was playmate and lover, co-conspirator—and sometimes, a little to my surprise, I was a mother as well. Glen had his dark moods when he frightened me with the depth of some despair that seemed both to drive him and hold him back. Perhaps that was when he saw the will-o’-the-wisp of inspiration vanishing, and I knew he was afraid that when he faced the block of white alabaster which waited for him at High Towers, when I actually sat before him in just the pose he wanted and he took his chisel and hammer in hand, the entire bright dream would dissolve as a rainbow dissolves when you near it. In those moments he was sure that he fooled himself most of all, and it was my task to keep the vision bright and untarnished in his mind, so that when the time came it would not forsake him.

  For the most part I succeeded, and when we set out that late afternoon on the long drive to northern New Jersey our mood was zestful and merry. I loved his car, just as I loved everything else. It was a low-slung Jaguar, built for speed—a creamy white, arrogant sort of car that shouted down all other cars on the highway. Of course Glen would never have driven a dark car. He had found me to match the car, he said, and we laughed together and could not have been more carefree. Too carefree? Too heedless?