The Winter People

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  The explosion must have sounded loudly within the house. Both Colton and Nomi had come to the doors of their rooms. Colton understood first what had happened and he came to me swiftly, touched my cheek, drew away his stained finger.

  “You’ve been cut,” he said. “And your hair is full of glass.”

  The sound still rang in my ears, and I could not speak. He strode to the door of Glynis’s room and looked at the scattered shards of glass that lay upon the floor. She had not moved from where she stood when she hurled the ball. Her face was quiet, expressionless, except for the wild shining in her eyes—a wild, animal shining—that I could see, even from the hallway. Before Colton could speak to her, Glen came down the attic stairs and saw us standing there.

  Nomi moved toward him. “Glynis threw one of her precious witch balls at your wife,” she said dryly.

  Glen saw the blood on my cheek, came to brush a scrap of glass from my hair—and his own eyes were a bright, angry jet. He strode to where Glynis stood beside her bed.

  “If you ever try to hurt Dina again—” he said, “—if you ever lay a finger on her, I will do to you exactly whatever it is you’ve done to her. Will you remember that?”

  At her brother’s words her face crumpled, dissolved into the pain of that usually hidden emotion that Glen had caught when he carved her face in black marble. She looked like a child bereft of everything, her defenses down, her guard destroyed, so that only torment and suffering looked out of her eyes.

  For an instant I had feared that Glen might strike her, and I did not want that. But now his hand fell to his side. His back was toward me, and I could not see his face. Colton shrugged with a massive gesture and went back to his room.

  “Glen,” I said, “please let it go. Perhaps I made her angry and—”

  I think he did not hear me. He was looking into his sister’s face, seeing there what he had once carved in marble, and she must have seen a change in his eyes. Her lips quivered, and she put out a tentative hand—then she was in his arms. He held her close, murmuring over her brokenly, as though he comforted a child. They were together, inseparable.

  “Come,” said Nomi, her hand on my arm. “Come along with me, and I’ll bathe that cheek, help you brush the glass from your hair.”

  Colton’s door was closed, and I went with Nomi to her medicine shelf, let her minister to me. I felt too shocked and numb to do anything but obey directions. She did not speak as she worked—as though there was nothing more to be said. I had seen how it was—and that was that. But her hands were very gentle with me, even though I had never seen her face so sternly cold. She would not forgive Glynis as easily for this new offense as Glen had.

  That night I waited for a long while within the dark, curving arms of the huge bed, but Glen did not come to our room until after midnight. He did not turn on the light, perhaps hoping I was asleep. He undressed in the dark, and slipped quietly in beside me without touching me.

  “I wasn’t hurt,” I said to him. “But I might have been.”

  He turned to me at once, slipped an arm beneath me so that I could roll my head into the hollow of his shoulder.

  “Don’t hold it against her,” he whispered. “I love you very much. I need you. But we must give her time. No one has ever taught her not to explode. It’s her only way to release the things that wound her. She wouldn’t really have struck you with that ball. She missed you on purpose. We must forget it now. Pretend it never happened.”

  How could I pretend? I knew better than he what she had intended. Someone who exploded into reckless violence had to be controlled. But Glen was close to me, his lips and arms demanded my attention. I loved him very much. I loved him enough to try to understand the closeness of his relationship with his twin sister, try to accept it.

  We fell asleep in each other’s arms, and for a little while I was comforted.

  The next morning the house bustled with activity. The weather had turned very cold overnight and there was a first coating of ice over the lake. Not one of us stepped outdoors all morning. Nomi worked about the house and did not come near the attic. Colton occupied himself in his own studio, getting a number of pictures together for a coming New York show, then went downstairs to write letters in order to borrow other pictures for the show from those who had sat for him.

  Keith McIntyre arrived on time to pose for Glynis, rifle in hand, dressed in old jeans and his plaid coat and checkered cap. Glynis, quite recovered and cheerful, went to work sketching him. I had missed her at breakfast, but when we passed in the hall she said, “Good morning,” to me as pleasantly as though nothing had happened, and she offered no apology.

  Glen had begun to work seriously on the alabaster head. Now he was ready and eager to coax my face from the stone. Sometimes he walked about the head, to view it from every light, seeing it in the round, visualizing every feature in relation to all the others. Sometimes he would turn from the stone to walk about me, even to use calipers to get the measurements right. Sometimes he talked to me, but always about his work. It was the nose, more than anything else, that gave character to a face, he said, but the ears were the most difficult to capture. He would leave them for later—perhaps cover them entirely with the loose fall of my hair.

  I became utterly fascinated by what he was doing and was grateful that he chose to educate me as he worked.

  Some sort of pact appeared to have been made between Glynis and Glen, because neither one stepped across the invisible line that separated their studio areas during this time. Neither tried to see the other’s work, and all hostility seemed to have been wiped away between them.

  This pleasant aura of peace lasted from day to day. After a while I ceased to watch the head as it emerged from stone because I was losing all perspective about it. I would wait—fearfully!—to see the finished work. Glen talked of how the expression of my eyes must be captured, not in the eyeball itself, but by the use of planes and indentations around it. The highlight of a plane properly placed gave life and expression to the eyes.

  During this time Colton took long tramps through the woods and did little work of his own. He planned to be off again soon after the first of the year, and this was a rest and a vacation for him. Once he made a sketch of my face and I saw the genius with which he could bring a likeness to life. He signed it for me with his initials and gave it to me, but he told me not to show it to Glen. Not yet. Glen must see me in his own way, Colton said. So I put the sketch with my possessions as something to treasure, and did not let Glen know about it.

  During these December weeks that moved us toward the holidays, Nomi began to make Christmas preparations. She commandeered Keith to bring her evergreen boughs from the woods, to find her holly out on the hill above the swamp that marked the far end of the lake. When I said I had no gifts for anyone but Glen, she drove me through brown Sussex hills to the nearest town where I could make a few purchases. She seemed cheerful, almost happy, and she talked to me about the white Christmases she had seen at Gray Rocks Lake when her sister was alive. I joined her in watching the skies for signs of snow.

  We saw little of the McIntyres during this time, except for Keith. Sometimes Glynis kept the boy with us at lunchtime and gave herself to charming him still more completely. She began to throw out vague promises to take him with her to New York to live when she went away—promises I suspected she did not mean to keep. I watched uneasily, considering his state of probable rebellion at home when this maternal phase began to bore her and she went back without him to her city life. How were Trent and his mother to deal with what Glynis left behind? I wondered.

  Often at mealtime the subject of the changes the McIntyres planned came up for discussion, and Glen and Glynis argued heatedly with their father. Nomi and I were silent, and so was the boy, though he listened avidly to everything that was said. I wondered if he took any of this discussion home to his father and grandmother. Colton simply marked time and did nothing, but I sensed that he would make a decision about the lan
d before he left in January. The matter never seemed very real to me. I had yet to interest myself in it.

  Every night the temperature dropped into the teens, and was often in the low twenties during the day. The lake was freezing and I watched the process with interest—saw that the surface of ice was never smooth and unmarked, but that a pattern of frozen ripples and cracks made designs all across it. Sometimes it seemed as though a wave had broken across the surface and frozen there. Often during the day during temperature changes I would hear the ice “talking.” It would make a loud, breathy whomp-whomp-whomp sound that sped from one end of the lake to the other, raising echoes. All because of underwater thawing and freezing that opened cracks as the level changed.

  There was still no snow, and several times Glynis and Keith went skating. Glen urged me to go with them, since he wanted to take no time from his work just now. I had no wish to skate with Glynis, or to skate alone. Several times I saw Trent out on the ice, and I wondered what it would be like if I put on my skates and went out to him. But Trent belonged to another life, and I made no effort to see him.

  Glen appeared to have forgotten the incident of the witch ball and forgiven his sister entirely. In his work he seemed to be hurling himself against some invisible deadline that I did not understand. Stone could not be hurried, but he gave nearly all his waking hours to his work. And during this time I seemed to move in a state of suspension, with no real world about me, or anything solid to grasp hold of.

  I saw Keith nearly every day, yet I think he was hardly aware of anyone outside of Glynis. All his eager young worship centered about his mother—a mother so little known to him that she could be nothing like other boys’ mothers. She was never a parental authority, a restraining hand. She was far more like a teasing playmate, and indulgent to an extreme. Whatever youthful rebellion he felt was directed toward his father and his grandmother, and it was Glynis who encouraged his flight from the real world on the other side of the lake. There was no one to convince him that Glynis was a mirage, that the world she offered was tinsel as far as he was concerned, and something to be thrown away with tarnished Christmas decorations after the holidays.

  Once or twice I tried to discuss this with Glen, but his attention scarcely surfaced during this last week before Christmas. He turned inward blindly, and I no longer had a gay; demanding companion or a lover who put me ahead of everything else. Not that I expected his interest to focus on me when his work so absorbed him. For the moment I knew I scarcely existed for him except as a model. The head that was emerging from the ice of its alabaster prison was all that was important. Later my husband would come back to me. But in the meantime I was still a bride—and lonely. Lonely and more than a little apprehensive.

  I took long walks along the shore of the lake and found a winding stretch of path beyond the twin towers of gray rock that became my favorite walk. It led to the swamp area, where a narrow stream meandered into the lake. Here brown hummocks of swamp grass crouched like long-haired goblin creatures, with their feet rooted in frozen mire.

  It was a time of waiting—an uneasy time because I did not know what I waited for. Sometimes when we were not working in his studio, Glen would give me a look that made me wonder if he might be listening to his sister, perhaps looking at me with a changed vision—as she wanted him to see me. Yet I had no weapon to use against Glynis in those last fateful days before Christmas.

  Once, while Keith posed for his mother, and Glen and I worked in the studio across the attic, Glynis cried out angrily and flung down her palette, scattered her brushes. She must have frightened Keith, for he ran to our side, calling for Glen. But before anything could be done, Glynis shouted to her son to go home and went storming out of the attic.

  Glen spoke to the boy quietly. “Don’t worry. She has bad days sometimes, when the work won’t come right. Go home for now, and when you come back, pretend that nothing has happened.”

  The boy went away downcast, and had I been free I might have walked to the lake with him and tried to find some beginning of friendship between us. He was lonely too, and uncertain of his mother. But Glen needed me for the rest of that morning. He was working on my hair now, and I must wear it over my shoulders, loose and free. It seemed both to fascinate and frustrate him as an artist. More than once he came to lift its strands as though by sensing texture and weight in his fingers he could transfer the sense of them to inert stone.

  By midafternoon that day he threw down his tools and let me off. Since the weather was bright and cold, I dressed in slacks and a warm jacket, pinned back my hair, and went down the hill for my usual walk. When I reached the path along the water, I turned away from the inn and moved toward Gray Rocks. Across the lake I saw Pandora walking the road in front of her stone house. She waved to me and I considered crossing over to visit her. Only the thought of Glen’s displeasure held me back. I particularly did not want to anger him now.

  Down on the ice a skater came into view, and I saw that it was Trent McIntyre. He moved with confidence, bending forward and taking long smooth strokes, yet always alert for cracks across the ice. He did not see me. I watched until he was lost to view around a bend in the lake. Apparently his working hours were at night, for when I looked out my bedroom window sometimes after dark I would see him at his typewriter, sitting before an upstairs window, and I would hear the clatter of typewriter keys—an incongruous sound to mingle with the sighing of country winds. As I walked along I wondered about his book and who he wrote about this time. When he had been working on material about my father he had sometimes read snatches and paragraphs to me, and I had been a wholehearted listener, loving to watch him as he read. It was not the same watching Glen as he worked. I wondered if I had turned into the sort of woman who could only love when she was touched and paid attention to. No—that wasn’t true! I was eager for love whenever Glen wanted to give it, but lately when all his interest and excitement seemed concerned with his work, I still loved him very much indeed.

  In my walking, when I came to the great protruding base of the Gray Rocks pinnacles, I crossed it easily, as I did nearly every day. The woods and lake were familiar to me now, and I gave no thought to Keith’s warning about loose rock on the tower above. When the rocks were behind me and the path straightened, I moved more freely, lifting my face to a brisk wind that swept along the hillside.

  The shoreline was irregular, curving out into the water, then cutting back to form small coves and inlets. As I rounded one of these turns I saw something shining in the sun of the path ahead of me. A mass of dead leaves had blown down from the hillside to lie gathered across my way, and in the midst of them lay an old soda bottle, gleaming in the sunlight. It was an odd place to find litter, but though the land was marked with NO TRESPASSING signs, strangers sometimes wandered in and left trash along their way.

  I wore a new pair of green suede walking shoes that Glen particularly liked, and I suppose it was these which saved me. Because I did not want to step into that dusty litter of leaves, I picked up a branch from the hillside and reached out with it, meaning to roll the bottle to where I could pick it up, and then use the branch for sweeping the leaves out of my way into the water.

  But as my stick prodded at the center of the leaves where the bottle lay, everything flew into the air with a loud, whirring clang. Something sharp grazed my ankle and the stick was wrenched from my grasp. I stared stupidly at the disturbed bed of leaves and saw that the bottle had broken in two and rolled to the water’s edge, while my stick was grasped firmly in the steel jaws of a trap. An animal trap of no small size, into which I might easily have thrust my foot. I was suddenly aware of stinging pain in my ankle and looked down to see that my stocking was torn, with blood seeping through nylon threads.

  Escape from having my foot crushed by those steel jaws was so narrow, that I felt shaken. I sat down on a rock and stared at my throbbing ankle. It hurt from the blow it had received, but I could move it. I didn’t think any bones were broken.

>   A voice called to me from the lake, and I looked across the ice to see Trent McIntyre skating toward me.

  “What’s wrong?” he shouted as he neared the bank where I sat. “I heard something like a trap go off—are you hurt?”

  “There was a trap,” I said. “It was buried in those leaves, but it only scraped my ankle when it closed.” I extended my foot for him to see.

  He had been skating with his shoes strung about his neck, and he was out of his skates and into them quickly. He tossed the skates onto the bank and came up to my rock, knelt beside me to examine my foot. In a moment he had rolled up the trouser leg and ripped away the torn stocking to reveal scraped, bleeding flesh, and with a clean handkerchief he bound the wound swiftly and neatly. Still kneeling, he balanced my foot in the palm of his hand and looked up at me.

  “Small bones,” he said. “A small, narrow foot. That trap would have broken it easily.”

  I could hardly bear his nearness, his tenderness. He was only a memory out of the past and I had no business thinking him real just because he was kind to me.

  “Don’t!” I shook my head. “It didn’t happen. I’m all right.”

  He rose and held out his hand to me. “Can you walk? I’ll help you back to the house if you can make it.”

  I tested my foot, put my weight on it. It hurt quite a lot, but I could manage with his arm to lean upon. When he was sure I could stand, he left me to bend over the trap, pulling it toward him by means of the branch caught squarely in its jaws.

  “That seems a strange place for anyone to put a trap,” I said.

  Trent’s dark head was bent over the steel, and when he looked up at me I saw anger in his face. “It’s one of Keith’s, I think. But Keith would know better than to set it out here. We’ve all seen you walking this path.”