A Trick of the Eye

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Yes . . . It wouldn’t have been a hardship for you, would it?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “She put it on. She looked beautiful. And then the next thing I knew—it was off. She threw it at me. Threw it at me!”

  “The dress?”

  “Said it was all for me, not for her. She said I didn’t love her, I only loved myself. Can you imagine? Myself? I never thought of myself, I only thought of her. Only of her, from the time she was born. I built the ballroom for her, planned everything for her—for her—only for her! She said such terrible things, about me, about her father . . . She kept screaming, ‘You don’t believe me! You don’t believe me!’ Over and over. How could I believe her? How could I?!”

  Mrs. Griffin started coughing and gasping for air. I tried to steady her by holding her close.

  “Please, you mustn’t upset yourself,” I said, hugging her. “There, there . . .”

  I kept stroking her and gradually she became calm. “She never even saw it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The ballroom.”

  “What?” I was bewildered.

  “She never saw it. Not that night, anyway.”

  “What night?”

  “The night of her party,” Mrs. Griffin said. “Cassa never showed up.”

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.

  “Cassandra never came to her own coming-out party?” I asked, incredulous.

  “No.”

  “But the newspapers, the pictures—”

  “No pictures of her at the party. Just studio photographs. The evening was conducted without her,” Mrs. Griffin said regally. “We told everyone she was ill. I don’t think they believed us. I think they felt sorry for us.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Gone. Out of the house,” she said with great resentment.

  I felt a pang of sadness for the old woman.

  “You must have been very upset,” I said.

  “Holt had been so looking forward to escorting his daughter.”

  It took a while for me to digest this information. After a time, I said, “Mrs. Griffin, why did you hire me to paint the ballroom? It wasn’t a happy memory for you.”

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “I wanted to change it,” she said simply.

  Suddenly, she hauled herself up on her elbows, saying imperiously, “I do not like things the way they are!”

  That effort seemed to sap all her energy. She collapsed back down into the pillows. Tears ran down her cheeks like rivulets in furrowed soil. I was used to intimate contact with her now. It felt perfectly natural to hold her, stroking her head, trying to soothe her.

  “Tell me who killed Cassandra.”

  Mrs. Griffin cried out! “I can’t . . . ! I want to but I can’t . . . !”

  She raised her arms weakly as if she were trying to prevent something unseen from descending on us.

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe. I’m with you,” I assured her.

  She was breathing very hard, almost hyperventilating.

  “Am I . . . Am I . . . ?”

  “What? Are you what?”

  “Am I . . . presentable?” she said finally.

  “Yes,” I answered nonplussed. “Of course you’re presentable.”

  “All right then . . .” she said. “Let’s go!”

  Before I could ask her where she wanted to go something rattled in the back of her throat. Squeezing her eyes shut, she gripped the sheets and gasped for air, stiffening all over. Her body pressed down into the bed in an involuntary contraction. She exhaled fiercely and went limp all over.

  “Mrs. Griffin? Mrs. Griffin?!”

  I shook her gently but she didn’t respond. I stared at her thinking she must be dead. I couldn’t see her breathing. She was so very, very still. I knew I had to go quickly and get help. Feeling slightly disoriented, I stood up and ran out of the room, down the stairs, through the house. Entering the kitchen, I saw the staff sitting around the large dining table having their afternoon tea. At first they didn’t notice me.

  “Get the doctor!” I said breathlessly.

  Everyone stopped and turned to look at me. I repeated myself, louder this time, and more in control.

  “Get the doctor. I think Mrs. Griffin’s dead.”

  Deane shot up from the table and bounded out of the room, followed closely by the private nurse. The others just stared at me in stunned silence.

  “Where’s the doctor?!” I cried.

  “Just gone,” one of the maids replied.

  I left the kitchen and walked back upstairs to Mrs. Griffin’s room. Deane was on the telephone ordering an ambulance. The nurse was standing over the old woman, holding an oxygen mask to her face, adjusting the valve. When Deane hung up the phone, he said, “What were you doing up here?”

  “I just wanted to say good-bye to her in case she had to go to the hospital.”

  “You should have asked permission.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” I hung my head.

  We both focused our attention on the nurse, who, looking somber and concerned, continued to administer the oxygen. Gradually, the folds of the sheets started moving almost imperceptibly as Mrs. Griffin began taking deeper and deeper breaths. Finally, the nurse looked up at us with a nod of encouragement, as if to say, “We caught her in time.” We all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Deane turned to me and smiled slightly.

  “It’s a good thing you were here,” he said in a consoling voice.

  The ambulance arrived and took Mrs. Griffin to the hospital. Later that evening, Deane called me at home to report that she was resting comfortably but not allowed any visitors. He said she was expected to recover from this particular bout, at any rate, and that she would be home in a few days.

  “That’s the thing about death,” he said. “You can’t count on it. It’s always quicker or slower than you think it’s going to be.” On that note, he hung up.

  The next day, I went out to the house again and wandered around the ballroom, smoking, looking at my nearly finished mural. For the time being, I’d lost the heart to work on it. It all seemed like a curious sham. I lay down on a drop cloth in the middle of the floor, folded my hands behind my head, and stared up at the ceiling.

  What I still couldn’t figure out was why Mrs. Griffin had hired me to re-create what had obviously been one of the most disappointing nights of her life. If it were true that Cassandra hadn’t shown up for her party and that the ballroom had been constructed for what turned out to be such a hollow event, then why would Mrs. Griffin want to remember it? Was it linked, in some way, to Cassandra’s murder? To the secret?

  And who was this shadow, Cassandra? Clearly, she was not who I’d first imagined her to be, a shy, innocent girl in a white dress reluctantly obeying the conventions of an insular society. On the contrary, now it seemed she was a powerful personality, defiant, and maybe even a little dangerous. As I thought about these things, I fell asleep.

  When I awoke it was nearly dark. All the figures on the wall were as gray as twilight—save one: the faceless Cassandra, prim and stately in her long white dress, still glowing in the fading light.

  Chapter 11

  Their mistress gone, the staff fell into lethargy. Without Mrs. Griffin to tend to they became aimless and demoralized, sitting for hours in the kitchen eating, drinking, and talking. The less work they had to do, the more they neglected their duties. Ill and reclusive as she was during the past few months, the old woman had still been the focal point of all activity.

  I saw very little of Deane, who found one excuse after another to do errands outside the house. I, too, became increasingly restless and unfocused, feeling sad about Mrs. Griffin and confused about my work. It stru
ck me as odd indeed that the principal figure in my mural had never gone to her own party. The question gnawed at me day in and day out. Why on earth was I commemorating an occasion that had never happened, at least not the way it was supposed to have happened?

  I found myself staring across the garden at the house for long periods of time, wondering if somewhere inside it was the key to Frances Griffin’s obsessively guarded secret. The house began to transform itself into a living presence in my life, changing faces in the light, a creature with a hundred eyes and no heart. The more I tried to banish it from my thoughts, the more it occupied them. Finally, one morning I couldn’t stand it anymore. I put down my brushes and walked across the garden.

  Though it had only been three weeks since Mrs. Griffin’s departure, everything inside the house seemed sad and untended. I walked through the rooms slowly, running my fingers over the surfaces of things, glancing through the mail (all bills and circulars), listening to the ponderous ticking of the elegant old grandfather clock. I noticed a thin coat of tarnish creeping over the once-gleaming silver and tiny tumbleweeds of dust growing in dark corners. Smelling of damp and in need of a good airing, the house was heavy with the silence that settles on a place when no one lives there. I wandered around among all the beautiful objects and paintings and pieces of furniture, a collection of inmates in a magnificent prison.

  After an hour or so, I began to explore the back halls and corridors which honeycombed the house, hidden passages for the servants. On the top floor, I happened upon a door which had a dark stairway behind it. I climbed up the narrow steps, terrified that one of them would split in two and I would be sent hurtling down to the landing. But they were sturdier than they looked. I reached the top and opened a diminutive door made of cedar. I was greeted by a pitch-black void and the faint aroma of camphor. I groped for a light switch on the wall and found one. I turned it on.

  There was a brief flickering overhead; then the place lit up under the cool hue of fluorescent lights. A vast room with no doors or windows stretched out in front of me. It was filled with—I could hardly believe my eyes—clothes! On rack after rack hung countless dresses, suits, and coats, each in its own clear plastic bag. An immense oblong structure in the center of the space was fitted with cubbyholes and drawers to accommodate the dozens of hats, handbags, gloves, and shoes housed there in an orderly fashion. These accessories seemed dated but new, as if they had hardly, if ever, been worn. The hats, for day and evening, rested on individual hat racks. There were dozens of feathery concoctions with veils and trimmings, dozens more of felt or fur. Lined up in a row, they reminded me of a fashionable, decapitated audience.

  I opened several of the plastic bags and took a look at the dresses inside. They were mostly evening clothes—so many, that I wondered if Frances Griffin’s entire life had been spent going to parties. Some of them showed such remarkable workmanship they were works of art: ball gowns embroidered as heavily as tapestries, jewel-encrusted dresses glittering in the stark light, fancy dress costumes intricately constructed with hidden bones and stays. I’d never seen anything quite like them before.

  I wondered as I browsed through the endless belongings, for whom had she saved them? Cassandra? Herself? A museum? She’d certainly saved things on an awe-inspiring scale. Just at that moment, I felt in some odd way as if she’d saved them for me so that I could understand something about her.

  I left the attic and walked downstairs to the basement, where I found yet another collection. The basement was built like a bunker with thick cement walls. Its endless space harbored antiques, paintings, china, silver, old books, and decorative objects packed away in crates, cached under sheets and plastic, or just lying out in full view. There was enough stuff there to furnish a dozen houses, just as there’d been enough clothes in the attic to dress a dozen women.

  Having roamed around the house all day undisturbed, I finally went outside and had a cigarette. Sitting out on the lawn, I stared with new eyes at The Haven, which looked bleak, even in the warm afternoon sun. It didn’t seem to me to be a home, but a tomb, a pharaonic monument to material life. It was devoid of the casual photographs, cheap knickknacks, and little mementos which mark the moments of a life lived among people. There was no sense of human congress, only of wealth and acquisition. I was sorry for Frances Griffin. It was as though she’d spent her days collecting life rather than living it. She’d buried herself alive among all her possessions. And like the treasures of the pharaohs, only those possessions would outlast her. She left no other legacy.

  In the dwindling light, I thought of her alone in the hospital in failing health with none of the things that had defined her and through which she had defined herself. She was at long last being forced to travel inward. And from what I’d seen, the journey was proving unbearable.

  I finished my cigarette and went back inside the house. I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, but I felt sure I’d know it when I came across it, whether it was an object or a document, a picture or an insight. I went upstairs to Mrs. Griffin’s bedroom. The room itself was so pale and musty I had the impression a fog hung over it. It smelled faintly of potpourri. The bed, covered with a rose satin bedspread, looked like a small reflecting pool at sunset.

  I sat down for a moment at the dressing table and examined the ivory toiletry set laid out neatly on top of the glass, tracing Frances Griffin’s gold script initials on the back of each piece with my finger. Everywhere I looked, I was arrested by vignettes of wit and beauty: a collection of tiny trees and flowers in jade pots, all made of precious and semi-precious stones, artfully arranged on a lacquer table; an intimate grouping of English miniatures hanging from blue velvet ribbons on the wall; a pair of gold candlesticks flanking a carved onyx seal reclining on a floe of diamond snow. Over the mantelpiece hung a famous Renoir, a beautiful young bather with flowing gold hair and seductive eyes, luscious in her youth, a picture I’d seen reproduced so often I couldn’t quite believe I was in the presence of the original.

  I went into her bathroom. It was the only room in the house I’d never seen. The room was an ice palace of mirrors. Walking in, I was hit by glittering accordion images of myself reflected in a hundred pieces of mirror. There were mirrors everywhere, on the walls, the ceiling, the door—strips of mirror pieced together so seamlessly the effect was to fold and dismember the viewer in countless ways, countless times.

  I stood for a moment, disoriented, trying to sort out where I was. I began to walk around the dazzling maze. The room was large, L-shaped, divided by a partition, and because of the reflections, completely unnavigable. I kept bumping into myself. There was no up, down, or sideways, no clear path to anything but myriad images of myself in motion and isolated parts of my body ever diminishing in a thousand reflections. Every time I moved, a thousand of me moved. Sweeping my hands over my head like a dancer, I watched a thousand of my hands sweep over a thousand of my heads in perfect unison, an endless corps de ballet stretching back forever into a cold, clear infinity.

  I ran my hands under cool tap water and dabbed my face with refreshing splashes. Suddenly, I wondered what would it be like to take a bath in this room? The thought intrigued me. What would it be like to immerse myself in Frances Griffin’s own bathtub, to emulate her in the most private of rituals?

  I took off my clothes and stood nude in the middle of the room. The sight of my naked body multiplied so many times over made its flaws irrelevant. It became an object, a thing, a possession of mine.

  Filling the tub with hot water, I watched scallops of steam flare up and subside, coating the mirrored walls in an irregular design. I stepped in and slid down the back of the tub until my body was submerged. Little whirlpools swirled around me for a time; then the water was still. I looked up at the ceiling and gazed at my reflection, a bodyless face floating on a bed of wet and tangled hair, a living bas-relief on a flat rectangle of cloudy water. Occasional drops of water fell into the t
ub, making a light, tinkling sound. I closed my eyes, feeling warm, covered, safe, immune to the cares of the world.

  Drifting off to sleep, I dreamed of the Medusa, snake-haired and hideous. I awakened with a start, displacing waves of water all around me. I was frightened because I was beginning to understand how I, too, could be seduced by material comforts. Like the Medusa, they could turn you to stone.

  Suddenly I felt a draft. I shivered. Then I saw part of a face reflected in the mirrors. In horror, I twisted around to see who it was. Deane was there peering into the bathroom, looking at me with a dull expression on his face. I reared up, folding my arms over my breasts. I gasped. For a split second, the two of us froze. He looked me up and down, not lasciviously, but as if to say, “What in God’s name are you doing here?” I sensed a kind of bewildered outrage in his manner and tried to say something to him, but I couldn’t utter a word. Neither could he. He simply bowed out of the room and closed the door behind him. The encounter couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t leap up from the bathtub the moment Deane left. Instead, I settled back down into the tub again, feeling somewhat indignant at having been disturbed. I felt that Deane had interrupted me in a most private moment, and any embarrassment I might have caused him was his own fault. I turned on the tap and ran a new stream of water to warm me. Instead of feeling like a usurper, for some reason, I felt I was supposed to be there.

  I continued my bath at a leisurely pace, pouring various unguents and perfumes into the water from the cut crystal bottles on the shelf above the tub. I watched my fingertips become little relief maps of puckered skin. I ran my hands over my thighs and torso. My skin felt as smooth as silk under the milky water. Steam knitted my eyelashes together. With half-closed eyes I watched slivers of sunshine scurry over the water like racing minnows made of light. I felt as if I were floating inside a kaleidoscope. I lay still for a long while, listening to the water lapping against the sides of the tub, surrounded by glittery shapes.