Truth and Consequences

by Alison Lurie

  “I must see it,” she interrupted.

  “Not now.”

  “Please.” Delia gave him an almost absurdly seductive smile.

  “It wouldn’t be right. I’m sure you don’t publish your stories before they’re finished.”

  “Please.” She pouted like a hurt child; her soft mauve-red lower lip trembled. “I’ll only be here in Corinth for a few months; I may never have another chance.”

  “Well. All right,” Alan heard himself say. He led the way farther down the lawn, past two old apple trees and a tall, thorny mass of blackberry bushes that were now turning a dark, smoky red. “There you are.” He indicated a long shingled building with a low tower. Only part of the roof and two and a half walls were standing, the latter overgrown with a tangle of climbing roses. “I didn’t build the original structure,” he said. “It was the chicken house when this was a farm.”

  “But now it’s a ruined church,” Delia said. “A miniature Tintern Abbey.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked him full in the face, her silver eyes wide. “Amazing. You’re a real artist.”

  “Thank you.” No, it’s not so bad, he thought, looking at the three miniature Victorian Gothic window frames he had installed along the side wall. Even if I never write another book, I can be proud of this.

  “I want to walk around it.”

  “All right.” Alan turned toward the blackberry bushes, but Delia did not follow.

  “No, no!” she cried. “We mustn’t go that way, that’s widdershins.”

  “What?” He stopped.

  “Widdershins, against the sun. You must never walk widdershins around a church.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “What they say back home is, the Devil will carry you off. Or you could just disappear. It’s a superstition, of course. But you never know.” She laughed lightly.

  “But this isn’t a real church,” Alan said. “It’s an abandoned chicken house. It’s not consecrated or anything.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t want to do it anyhow.” She turned resolutely in the other direction, and Alan, shaking his head, followed her. Clearly, Delia Delaney was a flake. At the same time, though he was not and had never been superstitious, the memory came to him of the church in New Mexico where he had seen the lizard, and he recalled that he had in fact walked around it in what Delia Delaney, if she hadn’t just been joking, would consider the dangerous direction.

  Completing the circuit, Delia stepped over a heap of grass into the center of the building. “ ‘Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,’ ” she quoted, looking around.

  “Well yes, I suppose so. Or clucked. After all, they were chickens.” He followed her, and they stood where the altar would have been—its absence, or presence, suggested by a hummock of stones, grass, and tangled dark-green creeper.

  “I don’t recognize the original—is there one?”

  “Yes, partly.” Alan had the sense that he was recklessly giving away secrets. “Thyme Chapel, on campus. It’s Victorian Gothic, built about 1880.”

  “Oh. I haven’t seen that yet. I really haven’t seen anything on campus but the library and the Center. But your chapel is perfect anyhow.”

  “It’s not finished, you know. I wanted to build up that third wall a bit more. And maybe fill in some of the windows with stained glass.”

  “Yes, I can see it,” Delia breathed. “All purple and gold and cobalt blue, with swirling iridescent Tiffany flowers.”

  “That’s sort of what I planned. There’s several like that in the campus chapel. But these would be original designs.”

  “With the Holy Ghost as a white chicken.”

  “That’s an idea.” Alan laughed. She’s witty as well as beautiful, he thought.

  “I love the wild roses.”

  “I can’t claim credit for that. They were always here. I think they were just waiting until the chickens left.”

  “You’re lucky. And will there be more follies?”

  “I don’t know. Not now. I once thought I might do the Plaza fountain, or an Italian Renaissance bridge over there by the brook.” He gestured widely and unwisely with his sore arm, and winced. “But then my back went out—” For almost fifteen minutes, Alan realized, he had forgotten that he was in pain.

  “And after that?”

  “Oh, I had plans for a lot more—drawings and site elevations and everything. But now—” As if he had deliberately recalled it, a spasm struck him: the lizard dug its claws deep into his spine. Suppressing an ugly moan, Alan turned aside, staring out toward the distant lake. He didn’t want to leave Delia, but he needed more codeine and he needed it now. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go back to the house,” he told her.

  Slowly, leaning on his cane and breathing hard, not looking at Delia in the stupid hope that she would not look at him and see his ugly grimaces of pain, Alan made his way through the old apple trees. There were lumpy, unsprayed pale-green apples among the branches, and here and there he could see a spray of chrome yellow, predicting autumn. Delia, silent now, followed, her gauzy white skirts trailing in the long grass. As he started up the slope of the lawn, he saw Jane break away from a group of people and come toward him.

  “I thought you’d gone inside,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “All right,” Alan lied, grinding his teeth against the pain. “I was showing Delia the ruin.” In this last word he heard another lie, one of omission—the omission of a single letter, the letter s. Unfortunately, he realized at once, it was a lie that would instantly be exposed.

  “Yes, it’s just delightful.” Delia laughed lightly. She said no more, but it was clear to Alan that she had heard his lie and recognized it, and that she had deliberately decided not to mention the ruined chapel. He looked at this smiling, innocent-seeming woman with some astonishment. They had only met fifteen minutes ago, and already they were in a conspiracy.

  Jane’s own smile faded. “It’s not a joke, you know,” she said, clearly trying to keep her voice pleasant. “It’s a historical reproduction. It took months to build, you have no idea how hard Alan and his students worked.”

  “Oh, I can imagine.” Delia laughed again and rearranged her shimmering fishnet shawl.

  “Alan’s published a book about ruins and follies, you know.”

  “Yes, Ah’ve seen it.” Delia’s Southern accent seemed to deepen, and she smiled even more pleasantly than before.

  Jane did not reply. Even in the increasing grip of his pain, it was clear to Alan that there was not and probably never would be any meeting of minds between Delia and his wife, who had already complained to him about the difficulty the former’s demands were causing at the Center. An awkward silence began, but it was luckily broken by the arrival of several other guests, all apparently eager to meet Delia, and one who seemed to know her well already.

  “Hello there, darling,” this man said, putting a heavy arm around Delia’s creamy bare shoulders. (Did Alan imagine it, or did she flinch slightly?) “How’s it going?”

  “Just wonderfully. . . . This is my husband, Henry Hull,” she told Alan. “Alan Mackenzie.”

  Alan registered the presence of a muscular person in a checked shirt who was several inches shorter than him. “How do you do,” he said resentfully.

  “Hi,” Henry Hull said, as if identifying some neutral object. He took Alan’s cool, long-fingered hand in his broad sweaty one and gave it a painful shake. “You have the office across the hall from Delia’s at the Center,” he remarked.

  “That’s right.” Suddenly the implications of this fact became clear to Alan. He would see Delia again; he would have plenty of chances to see her again. For the first time in several minutes, he smiled. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’m afraid I have to go back to the house now.”

  FIVE

  In a downtown coffee shop, Jane Mackenzie was having her regular beginning-of-term lunch with the chairman of the Humanities Council, a bach
elor professor of music in his sixties called Bill Laird. There were several more convenient places on campus, but since the purpose of this lunch was to exchange confidential information, Bill had always ruled them out.

  “So how are you?” he asked, leaning forward over the little glass-topped table. Today he was wearing a pink and white candy-striped shirt that brought out the natural pink and whiteness of his face and hair, and his bright blue eyes were alight with interest.

  “Fine, thanks.” Jane gave the standard response with what sounded to her like forced enthusiasm.

  “And how’s Alan?”

  “He’s doing all right,” Jane lied. “About the same, really,” she amended. Though the move to the Unger Center had relieved her husband of the need to climb stairs and teach courses, it had not relieved his constant pain—even though he had begun doing some exercises again.

  “Working, I hope?”

  “Oh yes.” This was not so much a lie as a hopeful assumption. Jane had no idea whether Alan was working in his office at the Center—but, after all, what else could he be doing there all day long?

  “And how’s everything else at the Center?”

  “Not bad. There’s always a few problems at the start.” Jane smiled a bit tightly—she liked and trusted Bill Laird, but she didn’t want to begin with a complaint.

  “Of course there are. For instance?” Bill stirred two packets of brown sugar into his iced tea and smiled with an equal sweetness.

  “Well, there’s a big hole in the kitchen ceiling; I sent you an e-mail about that.”

  “Oh yes. Luckily there was no asbestos involved. . . . Thank you, darling, that looks wonderful,” he told the waitress, contemplating a red pepper and mushroom omelet.

  “No, that was a relief. But it means Buildings and Grounds won’t fix the ceiling until next month. And the copier’s not working right, as usual.” This machine was an ongoing problem: Vinnie Miner, a professor of children’s literature who had now retired and moved to England, had named it the Copy Monster. It would have been retired too, even sooner than Vinnie Miner, but it was sneaky. It never broke down completely, and for days or even weeks at a time it gave no trouble. It had been Vinnie’s theory that whenever replacing the copier was discussed at a council meeting the machine somehow knew about it and behaved better for a while.

  “As usual,” Bill agreed.

  “And then yesterday Delia Delaney kidnapped one of the Emerson Room sofas.”

  “Really?” Bill laughed. “Why would she do that?”

  “Because it turns out she has migraine headaches, and when they come on she needs to lie down. Her husband told me about it before Delia moved in, and I arranged for her to have the little horsehair sofa from the front hall. But then yesterday morning Delia apparently decided that wouldn’t do, and without waiting to ask me or anyone she somehow persuaded two of the other Fellows and a custodian to take it back downstairs and carry up one of the big red velvet sofas from the Emerson Room. It wouldn’t fit in the elevator, so they dragged it up the front stairs somehow, and it got stuck, and they cracked one of the banisters in half.”

  “Really!” Bill repeated. It was clear that he was amused rather than distressed.

  “Delia’s going to be difficult, I’m afraid. Or else she’ll get other people to be difficult for her. Just yesterday her husband came around again with two down pillows and a special reading lamp for her office. I mean, doesn’t he have anything better to do?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Bill said. “Delia described him in one of her letters as a freelance editor, whatever that means, and I heard somewhere that he published a couple of books of poetry once.”

  “Really,” Jane said. For some reason that she had not bothered to analyze, not only Henry Hull himself, but the idea of Henry, made her feel edgy. “I can’t decide what to do about the sofas,” she added, contemplating a tuna fish salad sandwich with indifference. “I mean, I could call B and G and get them moved back.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Bill said. “I think you should just ask for someone to mend the banisters.”

  “But it wasn’t right what Delia did. It was so rude. She didn’t even leave me a note, I had to hear about it from Susie.” Under the table Jane clenched her small tanned hands into fists.

  “Of course she should have asked you,” Bill said soothingly. “But we have to think of the reputation of the Center. If we cross Delia Delaney there could be trouble.”

  “How could there be trouble? She’ll still have a sofa.”

  “Not the one she wants.” Bill smiled. “You’ve got to realize, Janey, that woman is armed and dangerous.”

  “Armed?” For a moment Jane saw Delia taking a pistol out of her big tapestry handbag and pointing it, and she felt a sharp imaginary pain in her chest. “You think she might have a gun?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.” Bill laughed again—clearly he did not suppose this. “But she’s armed with her celebrity. And her computer. If she felt like it she could write an article for the New York Times—”

  “Delia doesn’t use a computer,” Jane interrupted, embarrassed at her brief panic. “She writes by hand with an old-fashioned pen and ink.”

  “Even worse. She could stab us with a goose feather. She could tell the world how cold and uptight and full of regulations we are. When she was suffering we wouldn’t even let her lie down.” Bill looked at Jane. “I’m surprised you should even think of trying to take a sofa away from someone like Delia Delaney. You’re an experienced administrator, and she’s this year’s star.”

  “I suppose you’re right. But she gets my goat sometimes.”

  “Your goat?” Bill smiled. “That’s an odd phrase. You don’t have a goat, do you?”

  “Nobody has a goat,” Jane said impatiently.

  “Well, not many people at the University do, I expect. But all the same, why a goat?”

  “I have no idea,” Jane said. She was used to Bill Laird’s fascination with language, but did not share it. “But you know, sometimes I wonder how long I can bear this job.”

  “Come on. You know you love it, really.”

  “Well. I suppose so. At least I used to. But this year—”

  “Think of it this way. Every autumn fate brings the Center a new collection of entertaining characters, and then, before we can get tired of them, it takes them away.”

  “Except I’m already tired of one of them,” Jane said. “You know, usually I like all the Fellows. But there’s something about Delia—I don’t know how to describe it—It’s not as if she’s pretending to be someone she isn’t, like that professor who came to the Linguistics conference last year, who said he’d graduated from Oxford and had published two books that didn’t exist. With Delia, it’s like she’s pretending all the time to be who she is.” Jane sighed.

  “I know what you mean. But that’s part of what makes her interesting, you know. Delia’s a phenomenon. Great beauty and great egotism—that’s a winning combination. And that wonderful mezzo Southern voice. I can’t decide who it is she reminds me of—it’s not Joan Sutherland, in spite of the height and the hair.” Every other year, Bill gave a famous lecture course on the opera. “Is it Cecelia Bartoli?”

  Jane, who had never heard this name, shrugged.

  “She’s a real diva, though. I haven’t seen anything like that close up for years. I expect a lot of people will fall madly in love with her.”

  “Are you going to fall madly in love with her?”

  “Heavens, no.” Bill laughed. “But I admit I’m intrigued. It’ll be fun to watch her in action. I wish I could have been there when she got them to move the sofa.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be fun for me,” Jane said, giving up on her sandwich and pushing it aside.

  “Well, maybe not,” Bill admitted. “But never mind, she won’t be here long.”

  “She’ll be here until the end of next May,” Jane sighed.

  “I don’t think so.”

 
; “But she has to be. She signed the contract, like all the other Fellows.”

  “I doubt she’ll stay the course,” Bill said. “The Corinth winter will drive her away if nothing else does. She’s a summer creature, you can see that by looking at her. Like me. The minute the first flakes fall I want to be in Key West.”

  “You really think she’d walk out on the Center?”

  “I’d bet on it. Would you like a little dessert?”

  “No thanks.” Jane smiled, hoping Bill was right, then frowned. “But if she does go, what will we do?”

  “Oh, we’ll sigh with regret, and with relief, and plow the rest of her stipend back into the endowment, and buy you a new top-of-the-line copier.”

  “That’d be nice.” For the first time that day, Jane laughed spontaneously.

  “Any other problems?”

  “No; everything looks good. Even Susie seems happy: she’s not so lonely now that the Fellows are there.”

  Back at the Center, Susie, wearing a white T-shirt and tight pink cotton slacks—too tight, in Jane’s opinion—was reading People magazine.

  “Hi,” she said. Then, lowering her voice and gesturing with her head toward what had once been the long drawing room of the mansion—it still contained its original Victorian furniture and pictures, but was now called the Emerson Room and used for lectures and receptions—“Mrs. U is here.”

  “I’ll go speak to her,” Jane said with a certain amount of apprehension. Lily Unger, the widow of the man after whom the Unger Center was named, was not only still alive but often in evidence. Though it had been six years since her husband died, and four since she and her three Persian cats had moved into the former carriage house, she still apparently considered the main building her property. When she was in town, she often wandered over to “see what is going on,” as she put it. Without calling ahead to announce a visit, she would tour the rooms downstairs, and any upstairs office whose door was open. In the past, this had caused problems. “I looked up from the computer, and there was this little old lady in a hat standing in the middle of the room. She’d walked right in, as if it was her own house,” one Fellow had protested last year. “Well, it was her own house for fifty years,” Jane had told him.