The Winter People

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  As we drove, I went on asking him questions. Learning all I could about my husband was endlessly fascinating. He had been born at High Towers, lived at Gray Rocks Lake as a boy, and he loved this country area. His memories, oddly enough, were more of winter fun and sports than of the lazy summertime. There was skiing in Sussex County, and of course skating on the lake, and sledding on the hills. He spoke of the Christmas season with special feeling, and I knew he was looking forward to that holiday this year. Yet in everything he told me I sensed a gap. Almost as though he left out something important, held something back. But if there were deliberate gaps in his story, I could hardly object when there were gaps in my story too. We weren’t children.

  “Is High Towers really your family home?” I wanted to know. “And for how far back?”

  He laughed at me. “For as far back as Colton. An old friend of his who lived across the lake at the time—he’s died since—told him about the property when it went on sale, and he bought it just before I was born. But you’d think to hear Colton that it was a Chandler who built it eighty years ago. And, by the way, you’ll have to call him Colton too. He doesn’t hold with much fathering.”

  The neon jungle of the commuting area was left quickly behind, and the towns grew smaller, less closely clustered. There were long stretches of country road winding through brown November hills. I watched the names of the towns. We passed the turn-offs to Kinelon and Smoke Rise, and a few miles later we reached Stockholm and were in Sussex County. Gray Rocks and High Towers were in Sussex.

  We stopped for gas at Franklin, a town, Glen told me, that was famous for its mineral ores, and we had dinner in a comfortable restaurant that had once been a governor’s mansion. It was dark when we set off again. This was Hamburg Mountain we were crossing now, he said. Like so many American towns, the place names told of early settlers—German, Swede, Englishman, Austrian—those who remembered their homes with nostalgia and named the villages in the new land for the cities they had loved.

  We would make a stop in the town of Sussex, Glen said. There was an errand he must do there, but he would leave me in a warm place to wait for him. Just before we reached the town, he turned off the road into a parking place before an auto supply shop that apparently served as bus terminal as well. I stepped out into half-frozen slush, spattering my white boots. The cold dry air was bracing, and overhead stars were bright and clear.

  Glen took me inside the brightly lighted shop and nodded to the man behind the counter. “Hello, Sam. Mind if I leave my wife here for a few minutes?”

  I was aware of a sudden silence in the shop. The few people who were making purchases stared at me guardedly, and the shopowner came from behind the counter to shake hands with me.

  “So you’ve married a Chandler?” he said. I could sense that Glen was suddenly edgy and anxious to get away.

  “I’ll be fine here,” I told him. “I’ll wait for you.” I did not even wonder about his errand, or question it.

  Sam echoed my words. “She’ll be fine,” he said, and escorted me gallantly to a bench reserved for bus passengers, waving me onto it: “Make yourself at home, Mrs. Chandler.” I sat down feeling conspicuous in my cover-girl white wool. Conspicuous and overdressed and out of place.

  Gradually the heads turned away and I sat stiffly, with a small smile pressed onto my lips, wishing that I had waited in the car. Only one person in the shop did not cease to stare, and so intent was his look that it drew my eyes and I finally turned my head a little haughtily to return his glance. I supposed it was natural that I should be a curiosity in a small town, having newly married into a famous family, but I was beginning to feel that this particular stare was more rude than interested.

  The eyes I met were those of a boy of about sixteen. He wore a checked red and black cap over a shock of dark brown hair and his long legs were encased in blue jeans, his feet in short, rugged leather boots. He had already outgrown his jacket at the wrists and his hands hung from sleeves that were too short for him. Nothing about the boy distinguished him from others his age, except perhaps his knowledgeable eyes. They were wide and dark-lashed, intensely blue beneath the upward stroke of his brows, and they were fixed upon me with the stare that a rabbit might give a cobra. Or was it the other way around? He looked avidly curious and not a little hostile. Something had to be done to break that stare. I smiled and spoke to him.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Dina Chandler. Who are you?”

  He blinked brown lashes and touched his lips with the tip of his tongue, deciding. Then he came to my bench and sat beside me.

  “I’m Keith McIntyre,” he said—and waited, his eyes still intent, as though the name should ring some bell with me, startle me in some way.

  But he couldn’t have known! He could not know that to me McIntyre was a name out of the hurtful past. There were many McIntyres, and I did not so much as blink my recognition of the name.

  “How-do-you-do,” I said, stiffly polite. “Do you always stare at newcomers like that?”

  A slow flush crept up his young smooth face, and his brows drew into a scowl. “You’re a surprise,” he admitted. “Does Glynis know about you?”

  Everyone in the store was listening again. Not staring, after what I had said to the boy, but not talking either.

  “I don’t know anyone named Glynis,” I told him. “Should I?”

  A buzz of whispering commenced, and everyone stared, as if unable to help whispering and staring. I wished myself outside. Wished that Glen had not left me here without any warning about the stir I might cause among the townspeople.

  I looked around the shop with the same pseudo-haughty regard I had given the boy, and everyone became at once very busy. The boy flung me a look of astonishment and went off to make some purchases of his own.

  Relieved that curiosity had at least been momentarily veiled, I sat very still, trying to attract no further interest, wishing Glen would hurry. No one was paying any attention to me when the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall and broad-shouldered and black-haired. He wore rough country clothes, as did the boy, and his eyes were as intensely blue. A black-haired Scottish father he’d had, and an Irish mother with blue eyes. I ought to know!

  He looked at me—the cover girl in dazzling white—and looked away without interest. Then back again. Recognition lightened his eyes and he came straight toward me.

  “Bernardina!” he cried. “Bernardina grown up!”

  It was his look of unguarded pleasure that undid me. I went hot all over, and then cold. I felt as though my face was blazing at the same time that my hands had turned to ice. My mouth was dry and my palms perspiring. The violence of a purely physical reaction was like a blow. All these pins and needles and sudden sick churning because of a man I had not seen for eight years! A man with whom I had been wildly, foolishly, headstrongly in love at sixteen! I folded my hands together, idiotically hiding my wedding ring.

  “H-how did you know me?” I asked lamely, trying to still the churning, trying to catch my inner balance.

  “A good question,” he said, “considering that the last time I saw you, you wore an old pair of shorts you’d outgrown, a blouse you’d just torn on a nail, and you were showing a great deal of golden skin the color of a California peach. Now all I can see is Madame Igloo, wrapped around in white. But I knew you.”

  He used to talk like that sometimes, rolling words on his tongue as though he tried them out before committing them to paper.

  “I wondered how you’d grown up,” he went on. “I wondered if your hair would darken—has it? I can’t see under that hat. And if you’d lose your lost-little-girl look that bowled me over. Have you?”

  I was beginning to collect myself in an uncertain sort of way. I hoped he had not seen too much.

  “I’ve lost it,” I said lightly. “I only looked like that because you broke my heart and threw me over. All that sixteen-year-old puppy love—and you threw it away!”

  “You were a darling pu
ppy,” he said gently, and I remembered his unnerving gentleness. “I was flattered that you should think yourself in love with me. I even hoped—a bit selfishly, I’ll admit—that you wouldn’t recover with too much speed. Did you?”

  “I recovered,” I said, and heard the false note in my voice. Perhaps no woman ever really recovers from first love. She simply grows up a bit and goes on to other things. More important things, she hopes.

  The boy came back from making his purchases and confronted us both. “Hey, Dad—do you know her? Do you know who she is?”

  So this was the son who had been eight years old when I knew Trent McIntyre. The son about whom I had not wanted to think, and whose mother I’d hated without ever seeing her.

  “Of course I know who she is,” Trent said. “She’s an old friend of mine—Miss Bernardina Blake.”

  “Oh no she’s not!” The boy was emphatic. “She’s Glen’s wife—that’s who she is Glen Chandler’s wife!”

  The same odd stillness that had earlier smitten the shop settled over the boy’s father. I saw the tightening of his facial muscles, the hard line of his jaw. I had never seen him look like that. He had changed too—a very great deal. His blue eyes studied me, took in my glamour-girl outfit, my high white boots already streaked with muddy slush—and it was as if a blind were pulled down somewhere behind his eyes. As if a door closed suddenly, implacably, in my face.

  “She doesn’t know who Glynis is,” the boy said with wonder in his voice.

  The man stirred and held out a hand to me—but the blind stayed down, the door was permanently closed. “Welcome to Sussex,” he said. “I’m afraid my son has forgotten whatever manners he was presumably brought up with. We’re your neighbors in the stone house across Gray Rocks Lake. At least my son lives there with his grandmother, and I’m home for a month or two, working on a book.”

  He did not mention his wife—and it made no difference. Not any more.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about the lake yet,” I said. “Or about the people who live there. Glen said it was because of an old friend that Colton Chandler bought High Towers years ago when he was first married.”

  Trent nodded. “Colton and my father were old friends, and Dad used to bring him out here when they were boys. Small world. How long have you been married?”

  “Since early this week,” I said, somehow hating to tell him. As though, in some curious way, I had been faithless to my true love. Which was certainly absurd.

  “Glynis always comes home for Christmas,” the boy broke in: “So you’ll meet her then.”

  I spoke to Trent. “Who is this Glynis your son thinks I should know about?”

  He answered me curtly. “Perhaps you’d better ask your husband about Glynis. Come along, Keith. If you’ve found what you want, let’s get going. We’ll probably see you again, Dina.”

  Dina, he called me. Not Bernardina—not ever Bernardina again. I knew that now.

  The boy picked up a paper sack from a counter, but before he reached the door, Glen opened it and walked in. The two men met face to face and I sensed a leaping hostility between them before they exchanged a cool greeting. Then Trent McIntyre turned to give me a last straight look from eyes I remembered too well.

  “If you find yourself lonely, Mrs. Chandler, come around the lake and call on my mother. She’ll enjoy having you visit her.”

  “I won’t be lonely,” I said valiantly. “But thank you, anyway.”

  He had not acknowledged knowing me in the past, and I let the chance to clarify slip by. After all—what could I say?

  He and the boy went out the door, leaving a rush of chill air to pour in behind.

  Glen smiled at me and held out his hand. And as suddenly as that everything was right again. My world stopped tipping uncontrollably sideways, and I knew who I was.

  “Come along, darling,” he said. “We’ll go straight home now.”

  I jumped up and rushed out of the shop with him, hurrying to leave all those eyes behind, wanting to be alone with my husband. I felt relieved—so terribly relieved—because after all that churning, and burning with ice, I hadn’t been sure what would happen when I saw Glen again. But it was all right. Some lost young girl in me still remembered Trent McIntyre. But the woman knew Glen Chandler. I was Mrs. Chandler.

  Neither of us spoke until we were in the car. “Sorry to drop you into the enemy camp back there,” he said as we turned onto the road and headed out of town. “But I had another cable I needed to send and I got it off by phone.”

  “What do you mean—enemy camp?” I asked.

  “The McIntyres.” He shrugged expressively. “Our local feud. Dora McIntyre—Pandora, we call her—is determined to open up the lake to a development she wants to build. Fortunately, she doesn’t own the land—we do. Her son’s aiding and abetting her, of course. He’s a journalist—turns out the biography type of thing. The everything-there-is-to-know-about-the-Roosevelts sort of thing.”

  Indignantly, I almost spoke up. I knew those biographies—every one of his collected pieces. My father was written up—and beautifully, honestly—in his book on great teachers. Something of my joy over this homecoming to High Towers had gone out of me. I would hate this feud. I wanted no part of it.

  “Forget about the McIntyres,” Glen said. “There’s time for all that unpleasantness another day. Dina, my darling, we’re going home: We’re almost there.”

  The road was winding again, the town lost behind us as we left the main highway and took a secondary road branching into the hills. I sat in silence, stiff and unrelaxed, somehow threatened. On either hand woods crowded the road and the car began to climb, but I could take no delight in the approach to High Towers. The name that had been spoken back in the shop kept ringing through my mind.

  “Who is Glynis?” I said at last.

  Glen slowed his speed abruptly and glanced at me in the light from the dashboard. “Where did you hear her name?”

  “That boy back there. Keith McIntyre. He asked if Glynis knew about our marriage.”

  “And Keith’s father? What did Trent say?”

  “Nothing. He told me to ask you.”

  Glen laughed softly. “And he frightened you badly, I suppose? That’s like him. You needn’t worry, darling. Though it’s because of Glynis that I stopped in town. She’s in London and I sent her a cable. I wanted it to come from Sussex, not from New York. Glynis is my sister, Dina.”

  I couldn’t have been more astonished. “Your sister? But why haven’t you told me you had a sister?”

  He reached across to cover my hand with his. “Wait, darling. Let Glynis go for now. This time is ours—it doesn’t belong to my exotic family. Here—I want to show you something. I want to show you why I used the term feud when I spoke of the McIntyres. Our lake is out there just beyond those trees, though you can’t see it in the dark. We’re at the north end of it here.”

  We jolted over a narrow rustic bridge that crossed a stream, and Glen turned the car into a wide clearing before a long, low building that could not be High Towers. The headlights cut a swathe across the rambling, many-windowed redwood structure and came to rest upon a sign prominently displayed: GRAY ROCKS INN.

  I turned in puzzlement to Glen. “But I thought you said the lake was wild, almost uninhabited?”

  “It used to be,” he said curtly. “Until Pandora—Trent’s mother—built that monstrosity two years ago. ‘Pandora’s Box,’ we call it. Fortunately, it hasn’t done much business, though she’s gaining a clientele that comes out from New York during the summer months, and she opens it up for winter party dinners when she gets an order. If she could have her way and build the development she plans along the east shore of the lake, our wilderness will be gone for good. But we still own enough of the land on both sides to stop her. Or at least my father does.”

  I stared at the sign in dismay. In my mind I had pictured a heavenly seclusion—woods and hills, with the lake lost among them, enclosed by their reachi
ng arms, shutting out all the noisy world.

  “But if you own the land so she can’t go ahead, doesn’t that settle it?” I asked.

  “Colton is unpredictable. But the matter must be settled soon. He’ll be coming home for Christmas. Then we’ll persuade him to stop the McIntyres.”

  “And Glynis comes home for Christmas too? Your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s unpredictable too.” He started the motor and then slipped an arm about me, drew me close, pressing his face into the soft white wool of my collar. “At least I am predictable! And you know what I’m predicting for us—the beginning of a marvelous honeymoon—with High Towers and Gray Rocks all to ourselves. Our side of it, at least. What’s more, tomorrow we’ll start work. You’ll pose for me and everything will go beautifully. It’s still with me, Dina—the vision. And I don’t mean to lose it this time. Before Christmas comes we’ll be safe. You’ll see.”

  Safe? Safe from what? I wondered. But I did not ask. I turned my face for his kiss, and we left the redwood inn behind and wound along a hillside road to the foot of a drive. The car bumped over muddy ruts onto its white stone surface and we began to climb steeply, winding through weedy spruce and up into tall cedars that looked black in the shining headlights.

  By the time we reached a wide cleared space at the top of the hill, the moon had risen above the pines and its light shone full upon the gray house with its tall, pricked ears. As I got out of the car and stood looking up at lighted windows, at turrets and cupolas and high balconies, the imprint of the picture I had seen in Glen’s gallery was sharp in my mind. I did not want to remember but I had the feeling that having seen it, I would never be free of that dreadful, wicked picture, signed with the initials, “G.C.” Looking up at the windows, I could almost see the reflections of anguished faces pressed against the glass, peering out at me—the faces of old, never-to-be-forgotten suffering.