A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “And what, pray tell, would the dark, brooding Mediterranean do with you in a severe winter, I’d like to know?” I asked.

  “Take me south, I suppose.”

  “Now, Harry, I didn’t call just to talk about me. Are you sure you’re all right? I really, really would take it as a personal favor if you’d go see your doctor tomorrow, or at least sometime this week.”

  “Faith, my dear, I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Actually, this is a rather good day. I got a present this morning.”

  “What?”

  “No pain whatsoever!” he crowed. “You have no idea what a wonderful gift that is at my age.”

  The words betrayed his lightness of manner. I was stung once again by the thought of losing him.

  “Oh, Harry, I can’t bear to think of you in pain. Are you in pain a great deal?”

  “Not excruciating pain, no. Just a dull, monotonous sort of thing, like the hum of an air conditioner. You get used to it, but when it suddenly clicks off once in a while, you think—ah, silence—what a relief . . . Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing Rodney and maybe even having a little fun with our case. You take care of yourself now. Get to know Frances Griffin—I want you to tell me everything about her. And I’ll keep you posted.”

  Toward the end of June I began driving out to The Haven six days a week. In those early days of summer, Mrs. Griffin, trailed by Pom-Pom, strolled over to the ballroom almost every day to watch me work. She would come in sometime during the mid-morning, stand at the top of the stairs, and announce, “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “No, of course not,” I’d say, lying.

  The truth was her presence made me rather uncomfortable and unable to concentrate well on what I was doing. I made many more mistakes when she was observing me than I did when I was alone. I hoped this would become evident to her and she would withdraw. On the contrary, however, a mistake gave her the opportunity to open up a conversation with me. She seemed to enjoy it when I had to rub something out and start all over again, or when Pom-Pom got into some mischief with my paints and brushes—anything that took me away from the work at hand and made me available for casual conversation while I cleaned up the mess.

  Above all, Mrs. Griffin seemed eager for me to get to know her. I felt as if she wanted me to take even more of an interest in her than she was taking in me. Whenever she asked me a question about myself and I responded, she didn’t seem satisfied until I, in turn, had asked a similar question of her. She pouted and sometimes appeared genuinely hurt if I answered her curtly and got on with my work.

  Very often, without the slightest encouragement, she would begin to reminisce, recounting some fantastic story, or simply rattling on about the great people she’d known and the grand places she’d been. She had an endless supply of amusing anecdotes about celebrities and socialites, pretenders to thrones and heads of state, artists and intellectuals, most of whom she’d entertained in her heyday. I thought of her forays into the past as excursions away from her loneliness of the moment, and sad attempts to hold on to the glamorous life she’d once lived.

  After a while, the stories and the famous people all began to sound alike. She seemed only remotely connected to them, as if she’d been witness to a huge pageant that had passed in front of her without stopping. She rarely mentioned her husband or her daughter. I got the feeling she’d had countless acquaintances and very few friends. The friends were all dead, and the acquaintances didn’t seem worth bothering about. She would stay and talk until she got tired. When she left, I found myself thinking about all the things she’d told me, concluding that her life was now as empty as it was privileged.

  My work began to suffer as a result of the increased time Mrs. Griffin was spending with me. By mid-July, I’d fallen seriously behind schedule, yet I was reluctant to ask her to stop coming around to visit me. However, my increasingly blunt responses to her questions and my apparent inattention to her stories must have made her realize her presence was too much of a distraction. When she suggested it might be better if she left me alone for a time, I offered no resistance. I simply thanked her for being so understanding. She immediately stopped coming around.

  Falling back into my own comfortable rhythm, I worked through the summer, watching the estate bloom into a lush, green paradise. Every day the grounds seemed to sprout new blossoms and leaves. The main house peeked out from behind a proliferation of foliage. Though the temperatures often reached the nineties, it was always cool inside the ballroom. I worked there happily, listening to a chorus of chirping and buzzing outside, thinking occasionally about John Noland, treating my encounter with him as if it had been a bad dream. If he still lingered on in my imagination, it was just as an old lover I’d seen once too often and would never see again. The nostalgia and the longing were gone.

  I didn’t see Frances Griffin for a long stretch of time, but I always asked Deane how she and Pom-Pom were getting on. One particularly hot and humid Monday morning he came into the ballroom, looking wilted and visibly shaken. He told me there had been some bad news over the weekend.

  “Little Pompy is gone,” he announced with tears in his eyes.

  I put down my brushes immediately.

  “Oh no!” I cried. “What happened?” I thought the poor little dog had been run over.

  Deane hesitated slightly, as if it pained him to say what he was going to say.

  “Mrs. Griffin gave him away.” He hung his head in despair.

  “Gave him away? Why?”

  “Too many accidents,” he said sadly. “He got loose and marked up a chair.”

  “You’re not serious. You mean she gave him away because he peed on a chair?”

  “Well, it was Louis Seize after all,” he said. “One of her favorites.”

  The whole thing sounded absurd to me.

  “Oh, Deane, I know how fond you were of the little man.”

  “I told her I’d leash him up with me in the kitchen, but she was worried he’d escape again. I would have offered to keep him myself at home, but I don’t have anyone to leave him with.”

  I could see how upset Deane was. His decision to confide in me made me feel closer to him.

  “I’m so sorry, Deane, I really am,” was all I could think of to say.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “it’s terrible, a terrible thing.”

  Deane extracted a large white handkerchief from his back pocket, shook it out, blew his nose, and patted his eyes.

  “Anyway,” he said, regaining control of himself, “Mrs. Griffin would like to see you.”

  I followed Deane through the garden, into the house, upstairs to the Chinese Room. He rapped twice on the door. From within, a voice said, “Come in.” As Deane opened the door to let me enter, I touched the sleeve of his coat gently and gave him a sympathetic nod, as if to reassure him. He smiled faintly, closing the door behind me. Inside the room, I turned and saw Mrs. Griffin, wearing an elaborately embroidered silk robe. She was sitting in one of two large carved wooden chairs, staring out the window at the garden below. The sun, streaming in the window behind her, framed her in a strange aura.

  “How have you been getting on?” she said without turning toward me.

  “Fine, thanks. I’m sorry to hear about Pom-Pom.”

  “Deane told you?”

  “Yes, he did. I think he’s quite upset.”

  “Deane was too attached to that dog,” she said.

  “He was an awfully cute little thing.”

  “Far too much trouble,” she retorted. “I don’t want to talk about him. More importantly—tell me about your work. I apologize for not having been around to see you.”

  I knew it was pointless to pursue the subject of the little dog any further. However, I was chilled by her apparent indifference to a former love object.

  “Well, I think the next phase ought to be finished and read
y for your inspection quite shortly,” I said. “I’m anxious for you to see the main panel in particular. I’ve worked hard on the figure of Cassandra. The dress you gave me was a great help.”

  “Was it? Yes, it’s a beautiful dress, isn’t it? I had it made for Cassa in Paris. I helped design it because, you see, I was always the best judge of what looked well on her even though she had other ideas. She never showed herself off to her best advantage. She insisted on wearing things that hid her body and accentuated all her weak points. She hated that dress . . .” Her voice trailed off in a current of irritation.

  “That’s too bad because I think the dress is very beautiful and in her picture she seems to look so well in it.”

  Her voice a monotone, Mrs. Griffin continued as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

  “She had no sense of her own style. She had the most awful posture. She didn’t walk, she sort of . . . trudged. I was always telling her to stand up straight, stop slouching, look life in the eye . . . Not that she was a beauty, by any means, but when she carried herself well, she looked elegant, regal . . .”

  She shifted around in her chair and faced me.

  “I’d like you to put that dress on for me one day,” she said. “I’d like to see you in it. You have tried it on, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”

  “And it fit, of course.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “I knew it would. You’re the same size. Tell me, do you like this robe?”

  I looked at the rich garment more closely. It was a Chinese Imperial costume made of vermilion silk, loose-fitting, with a high collar and voluminous sleeves. Three fierce, golden thread dragons slithered across a sea of undulating needlework.

  “It’s amazing.”

  “It belonged to Tz’u-hsi, the dowager empress of China. Do you know about her?”

  “The Boxer Rebellion?” I said, unsure of myself.

  “Exactly. She was an absolutely remarkable woman. A genius at the art of statecraft, despite the failure of the Boxer Rebellion. They say that when she was a child she escaped having her feet bound, which made her mobile, unlike the other women of her class. But being crafty, she pretended they were bound so she could sneak around the palace and eavesdrop and no one would ever suspect her. Like many women, she found her real power in feigning helplessness.”

  Mrs. Griffin rested her head on the back of her chair and continued speaking as if she were in a mild trance. I had seen her in this mode before, and I grew wary.

  “They also say she had her son killed so that she could appoint her nephew to the throne, even though he wasn’t in the direct line of succession,” she droned on. “She didn’t love her son. She loved her nephew because she knew she could control him. Do you think it’s true that we love the things we can control more than the things we can’t? I have three of her robes. She had over ten thousand.”

  I didn’t say anything. I let her go on even though the effort of talking seemed to fatigue her.

  “I got this one in China in 1948, just before the Communists took over. Some of the furniture in this room is from the Forbidden City.” She made a weak gesture with her hand. “Do you like the wallpaper?”

  She referred to the vivid, hand-painted wallpaper depicting myriad scenes of noble life in old China.

  “I found it in an antique store in London years ago. Some of the panels are original and some of them I had copied to match because there weren’t enough. Can you tell which is which? Go on, walk around, study them, try.”

  I walked around the room inspecting each panel carefully. The colors, the quality of the draftsmanship, the texture and design of the various scenes were all superb.

  “Well?” Mrs. Griffin said. “Can you tell which ones are copies and which ones are real?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  She raised her hand and pointed to one wall.

  “That’s all original. All the panels on that wall. The rest are fakes.”

  I studied the real wall, comparing it to the others.

  “It’s impossible to tell the difference.”

  “If you look really closely, you can see that all the scenes on the fake panels are simply repetitions of scenes on the real panels, mixed up so they don’t look too uniform. The artist who painted the fake panels for me had a fit because he wanted to make up his own scenes, from his imagination. But I said to him, ‘I don’t want your imagination. I want their imagination.’ He was very offended,” she said, smiling. “But in the end, he admitted I was quite right.”

  “Well, it certainly is an extraordinary room.”

  Mrs. Griffin paused for a long moment as if she were debating whether or not to tell me something. Finally she said: “It was Cassa’s room originally.”

  I suddenly realized I was standing in the very room in which Cassandra Griffin had been murdered.

  “Your daughter’s room?”

  “Yes. The room in which she grew up. The room in which she died . . .”

  Her monotonous voice combined with the gruesome symmetry of events made me shiver. She read my mind when she said: “You’re wondering, I suppose, how I can stand to be in here after what happened?”

  Her directness made me equally direct.

  “Yes, that’s just what I was wondering.”

  Mrs. Griffin began playing with the voluminous sleeve of her robe, stroking it, twisting it around her fingers. Her face was as rigid as a mask.

  “For a long time after it happened I pretended this room didn’t exist,” she said. “I had it boarded up, the door plastered over and painted so it looked like part of the corridor. You never would have known it was here, except from the outside—the dark windows. Even so, I avoided this part of the house.

  “But when Holt died and I was left here all alone, I decided it was time to unseal the memories. The ancient Chinese filled their tombs with the essential objects in their lives. I needed to see this room again because there were such objects here. As one gets older, memories become the real furniture of one’s life. The only difference is, you can’t get rid of the bad pieces. You can’t give them away or trade them or sell them off. They continue to surround you. I came to the conclusion that it was better to take an inventory of my memories rather than board them up in locked rooms.”

  She gripped the sides of the chair with her hands, kneading the smooth wood with her palms.

  “I watched them tear down the wall to this room. I felt like they were opening my tomb. I felt the pain here—” With a tiny fist, she thumped the head of the golden dragon on her heart.

  “When I walked inside for the first time,” she continued, “I nearly fainted. It still smelled of death after all those years. Think . . . Everything strangled out of the air but that terrible smell of death. Who was it who defined insanity as remembering everything at once? I remembered everything about her death in one horrible flash. The terror of it . . . I’m the one who found her, you know. Did you know that I was the one who found her?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “She was lying there—”

  Mrs. Griffin pointed in the direction of a long black lacquer table abutting the far wall.

  “That’s where her bed was. She was lying on the floor, soaked in blood. Her eyes were so wide . . . She looked so young, so astonished . . . I tried to hold her, tried to gather her up in my arms . . . But things are so much heavier when they’re dead.”

  She paused, then said: “May I show you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said, feeling certain I’d misheard her.

  “I want to show you what happened,” she replied, articulating each word as if she were speaking to a child.

  “If you like.”

  I let her direct me. I could see that every movement was an effort for her.

  “The room’s all dif
ferent now, but if you go and stand just there—”

  She lifted her hand and again pointed to the table. I walked across the room.

  “I’ll show you how I found her.”

  I stood in front of the long table. Daylight flickered through the bamboo blinds, casting a net of sharp shadows over the room. Mrs. Griffin edged herself out of the chair and walked slowly toward the door. The material of her robe made a hissing sound as it dragged across the floor.

  “Lie down,” she said, as she reached the door.

  “What?”

  “Please. Lie down. Just there. In front of the table. Facedown.”

  She was deadly serious, having become the director of her own passion play. I did as I was told. I lay on the carpet in front of the table, facedown.

  “A little to the left,” she said. I shifted around until she was satisfied. “Yes,” she nodded, “that’s right. That’s perfect.”

  With that, Mrs. Griffin left the room, closing the door behind her. I was all alone on the floor, face down in the exact spot where Cassandra had been murdered. Though I was struck by the absurdity of the situation, I couldn’t break free of the old woman’s singular spell. And, more to the point, I couldn’t wait to see what she was intending to do.

  Presently, the door opened. Mrs. Griffin entered in her dragon robe and stood immobile for what seemed like an eternity. She was carrying an object of some sort. I couldn’t make out what it was. Her hands were hidden in the folds of the robe. Finally, she walked over to me in slow, mincing steps. She knelt down beside me and began stroking my hair with one hand, concealing whatever object she was holding in the other. Her hand brushed against my cheek. It was icy cold. I shrank from her.

  “There, there,” she said, responding to my involuntary reaction. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I was staring up at her out of the corner of my eye, but the angle made it difficult for me to see her.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” she said in a low, caressing tone which sounded oddly menacing.