The Other

by Thomas Tryon

  Thomas Tryon (1926–1991) was born in Hartford, Connecticut into a family whose New England roots stretch back to the seventeenth century. After serving in the navy during World War II, he attended Yale, and upon graduation began an acting career that would take him from a made-for-television Disney western to Hollywood, where he was featured in several B movies as well as Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal. Preminger’s treatment of Tryon was so cruel as to become a Hollywood legend, and Tryon turned to writing. His first book, The Other (1971), was an immediate success, spending more than six months on the New York Times best-seller list and allowing him to quit acting for good; a film adaptation, with a screenplay by Tryon and directed by Robert Mulligan, appeared in 1972. Tryon wrote two more novels set in the fictional Pequot Landing of The Other, Harvest Home (1973) and Lady (1974), before turning to works like All That Glitters (1986), that explore the dark side of the golden age of Hollywood. At the time of his death Tryon was working on a historical trilogy set in early nineteenth-century Connecticut.

  Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Stay Awake, a short-story collection. He is the author of the novels You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, as well as of the story collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and Literature.

  THE OTHER

  THOMAS TRYON

  Afterword by

  DAN CHAON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Afterword

  Copyright and More Information

  For my mother and father

  Part One

  How old do you think Miss DeGroot really is? Sixty, if she’s a day, wouldn’t you say? She’s been around here as long as I can remember—quite a stretch, if you calculate it—and I know she goes back a good many years before that. Which should give you an idea of how old that spot on the ceiling must be, because she says it’s been there as long as she can remember, Miss DeGroot. See it, that damn blotch up there in the plaster? It’s from seepage. The rain drips in through the roof, see? Only they won’t fix it. I’ve been after them for years, but you can’t get them to lift a finger around here. Miss DeGroot always says they’re going to, but they never do. Miss DeGroot says that, to her, the blotch—it’s a water stain, really—has the outlines of a country, someplace on a map—I can’t remember which, but some particular geographical location she’s got in mind. She has a good imagination, don’t you think? Maybe it’s an island. Tasmania, perhaps? Or Zanzibar? Madagascar? I can’t remember, really. I heard recently they’d changed the name of Madagascar. Can that be true, I wonder? I must ask her—Miss DeGroot, that is. Hard to picture a world without a Madagascar, isn’t it? Well, that’s no large matter.

  The mark on the ceiling grows bigger and darker year by year. Big ripply rust-colored stain. Like that other stain, the one over his bed. Odd, how I recall that, isn’t it? You never saw it, probably, but—well, confidentially, this one in this room reminds me of that one in that room. Only to me it doesn’t look like any place on a map, as Miss DeGroot suggests, to me it seems to be—you’ll think I’m crazy, but to me it resembles a face. Yes, actually—a face. See the eyes, there, those two dark round spaces? And then the nose just below? And there’s the mouth, there—see how it curls slightly at the corners? Rather benign, it seems to me. I am reminded of—never mind; you will think I’m crazy.

  Unseasonably dry this year. No rain in months now, so the blotch hasn’t spread much lately. But it will, I suppose. It’s inevitable. Death, taxes, and that damn stain. I guess if it were up to Miss DeGroot they’d probably do something about it, but Miss DeGroot, I’ve decided, doesn’t wield a great deal of influence around here. What’s one more water mark on the ceiling to them—for the likes of me. The dislikes of me, I should possibly say. I do dislike this place. Why? Ask Miss DeGroot; she could tell you. Funny cheery hopeless Miss DeGroot. (How old must she be? I don’t even know her first name—is it Hilda? Olga?) I guess some day the whole ceiling will be one big brown stain, if I live long enough. And then it will all cave in on me. Except for one thing—I won’t live long enough to see it. Not that that would matter to anybody.

  It’s evening. Can you see that bit of sky through the window? (As if anyone could see through the window—it’s too dirty.) But I can, kind of. Lilac, amethyst, mauve . . . indigo, perhaps, that bluish-purple hue, but of the palest shade. Any one of those, possibly a mixture of all, the color I can see beyond the clouded glass, carefully, geometrically divided into nine oblongs by those rigid black mountains, while I lie here on my bed, staring out at that one small piece of sky visible to me. (Miss DeGroot tells me I’m lucky to be living up among the roofs and chimneys; it’s quieter, she says; maybe she’s right. And you can see the moon when there is one. Yes, I think possibly there’ll be a moon.) Lilac. Amethyst. Or lavender; rose, almost. Lying here, I can see how the light is fading slightly, already deepening, a trembling, opalescent light. The crepuscle, if you care for the poetic. No, I’m not poetic, particularly. He was, of course; not that his imagination was any better than mine, to be truthful. Soon it will be dusk, then dark again. Always the loneliest part of the day to me, that painful, slowly descending interval before the night ultimately comes down. What the French call l’heure bleue, a time of rare conviviality, gaiety, bonhomie—things all lost to me in this place—people eagerly planning, over apéritifs, their evening rounds—carousal, rendezvous, dalliance—bright lively figures, tingling with anticipation, surging forth upon the boulevards, shimmering in the public dark, their reflections wavering in puddles of light.

  I know what you must be thinking: Madness. You’re thinking, He’s never been to Paris. You’re right. I never have. But there’s a TV downstairs in the community room, and sometimes in the newsreels—the six o’clock news; they never let us stay up late enough for the eleven o’clock—I see scenes of Paris. And I’ve read a lot of books, oh yes, watched some movies. The rest is all my imagination, true. Miss DeGroot has nothing on me, nor does he, for that matter. No, I have never been anywhere; nor ever will. Will never, I fear, leave this small, very precise world I inhabit. A lonely place, you are doubtlessly thinking. You’re right there, too. Yet, what should I do about it? I miss—what? What is it I feel, what do I sense that I miss? This vague distress, this malaise? I think, in some strange, awful way, I miss—him.

  This is a terrible place. I hate it. The steam clanks in the radiator, the sink taps abound with rust, the ceiling, as I have noted, is stained. It has been colder this month, cold, cheerless, shabby; an inhospitable season. And quiet. Once there was a time when, even from this height, you could hear the streetcars; they are all gone now; the buses today are less noisy. I used to watch for the streetcars; I recall that little song that always made me think of them. I miss them. There is not much for me to do here. If I join the others they laugh at me, make fun of my name, and there is often trouble. No, not violence, at least, not all the time. But as a result, I keep to myself; a tedious existence, you will agree, but Miss DeGroot says it is better so. Trust Miss DeGroot. (She has promised to bring me some tobacco for my pipe—Prince Albert, a brand which I have been smoking since I was eighteen; that’s over thirty years now.)

  Later. Still lilac, the sky. No—clover; yes, more that clover shade. I remember there used to be a patch of clover that grew beside the well behind the house, the clover she loved so much
—it was her wedding bouquet, you know—and she would stand and stare at it, and you would ask yourself why? And for how long? How she loved the clover! Did she plant it there beside the well, I wonder, or had it sown itself wild? I don’t suppose anyone else ever gave it a second thought.

  Do you know about the well? That dark and secret place where the accident happened—one of the accidents, I should say. The hanging. No, not that kind, but in its way nearly as horrible. Can you hear it, the noisy grating of the pulley as the rope travels through, spinning the rusty wheel, dropping its burden down, down into the blackness? The savage cries; terrible, shocked, outraged cries of fury, of horror. No. I said it was not that sort of hanging, not one of those state executions—well, yes, execution of sorts, but only because Holland didn’t like cats. Hated them, in fact. Yes, it was a cat; didn’t I mention that? Trouble, the old woman’s animal, her pet. Got this rope around Trouble’s neck—he could make a noose with ease—dragged it across the drive and hanged the cat in the well. For spite. The trouble was—excuse the pun—he darn near hanged himself. Poor Holland.

  Niles, the brother (he was playing cowboys and Indians near the pump), saw it all, heard the caterwauling—miaow! miao-o-ow!—ran to help.

  A frightful scene, as you can imagine, the cat clawing, spitting, Holland chuckling—fiendishly, as it were, and now, amidst the horrible caterwauling, crying out as his body tumbled over the brink of the well, the animal with him—miaow! miao-o-ow—and there was one who thought, for a quick moment, that Holland was—but no, he told himself, no, he’s only hurt. “Help! Somebody help! He’s hurt! Holland is hurt! Help!” And surely there was time yet; the well was dry; the cat, poor creature, was dead as a doornail, and there was the end of that. But Holland—a patch here and there and he’d be fine, though sore for a week, which is what comes of hanging cats in wells. (“Are you sore, Holland? Does it hurt?” “Sure it hurts, what didja think?”) But accidents, he said, will happen. Funnily enough. And, for action above and beyond the call of duty—What? A present, you fool. Behold a gift! From Holland; no, I take it back, gifts, not gift.

  And beware of Greeks; an eminently suitable maxim in this instance.

  Poor cat.

  You don’t remember the Perry place, do you? It’s gone now, they tell me. All of it, gone. The well has been filled in and sown over with grass, but it might just as well have been salt, for all that remains. The outbuildings—the barn itself, the apple cellar beneath, the icehouse, the spring- and carriage-houses, the corncribs, the cider mill, all those are gone. Sad to contemplate; they say I wouldn’t recognize the place today. The Lutherans bought the property and for a time the house served as a church but even that has since been demolished and replaced by a newer, larger building. There is a television antenna on the roof. The bogs have been drained, the meadows subdivided into tracts, and where we used to wade the brooks, streets are now laid out, with light poles, sidewalks, chain-link fences, and two-car garages. Of what was, nothing is left.

  It was an ancient house, two hundred years or more old, built on a sweeping breadth of land dipping from Valley Hill Road down to a cove on the river. Back in the old days of course it had been a proper farm—both Granddaddy Perry and his father before him having been known thereabouts as the Onion King. That was before my time, but you could picture how spidery carriages with cracker-thin wheels would come whispering along the gravel drive; how Yankee captains navigated their boats upriver to load onions at the landing, prosaic, field-grown onions by the ton, in sacks of red string for all the exotic ports of the Caribbean: Jamaica and Trinidad and Martinique. And in Pequot Landing didn’t the Perrys prosper!

  Pequot Landing—I’m sure you know what that’s like, a typical Connecticut river town, small, unpretentious, elderly. Splendid elms forming shady aisles over the streets—before the Dutch Blight, this was—spacious, well-kept lawns, promising in June, scorched by September, houses of wood or brick or stucco, sometimes all three. The Perry house, stalwart, large, rambling. Once-white clapboards grimed to gray, paint blistered on green shutters framing tall windows, the glass pitted and watery, the patinated gutters pocketing last October’s leaves. A comfortable house: veranda, pillared portico at one end, fireplaces in most of the high-ceilinged rooms, everywhere lace curtains, even the attic dormers. Watermarks on the plaster overhead.

  The barn was venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road. Up on the rooftree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed. This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.

  With the passing of Granddaddy Perry—just after the First World War, that was—the farm had ceased altogether being a farm. Except for one hired man, old Leno Angelini, all the hands were laid off, the livestock disposed of, the plows and harrows sold or left to rust. Neither Vining nor his younger brother George entertained notions about onions, nor about husbandry in any shape or form. The earth lay fallow, the farm moribund, while each working day Vining left his family—his wife, the boys, Holland and Niles, Torrie, his daughter—and drove his REO to a successful insurance business in Hartford. The Perry place had by this time become home for that quiet and most purposeful tower of strength—Ada Vedrenya, who, as the children grew and their demands increased, closed up her own house in Baltimore and came to live in Pequot Landing, to relieve her daughter, Vining’s wife, of all household burdens. George had moved away to Chicago and by 1934—the year of Vining Perry’s death—you could tell that the place had a decidedly rundown air; the icehouse was an abandoned shell, the barn below the house was empty, the stables, too, except for a pair of horses, the chickenhouse tenanted by only a derelict rooster and some laying hens, the implements hung away in Mr. Angelini’s tool shed, and the cider mill alone remaining in operation, pressing each autumn the orchard fruit that was too bruised to be marketed or used at home.

  Perhaps you read about the accident, that cold November Saturday when Vining Perry, father of the twelve-year-olds, Holland and Niles, met his death while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage. Everyone considered it a great tragedy. And in the eight months following Vining Perry’s funeral you weren’t allowed to play down there. But come June, after school had let out, with discipline relaxed and the history and geography books put away, when Daylight Saving Time had commenced, with the grown-ups occupied elsewhere, and the afternoons pleasantly long and perfect for apple cellar doings, there were those who ignored the interdict. How cool and dark and silent it was! And secret, too. The room held a strange fascination—you could positively feel it, and not only because it was down there that death had shown its face.

  I’ve told Miss DeGroot all kinds of stories about the apple cellar. She says it’s a spooky place; she’s right. Buried deep in the heart of the barn, with thick walls of New England traprock, and no electrical illumination, the room was a marvelously clandestine place. For six months of the year, October to March, the bushel baskets stood in rows, brimful with apples; onions dug out of the kitchen garden swagged from the rafters, and garlands of dried peppers, and along the shelves lay bunches of beets, parsnips, and turnips. But during the remaining months, its store of provender spent, the apple cellar served for other, more devious, employment. Shut away from the light, free from intrusion, you felt it was such a place as could be peopled by a boy’s imagination with all the creatures of his fancy, with kings, courtiers, and criminals—whatever; stage, temple, prison, down there seeds were sown, to grow magically overnight, like mushrooms. A place whose walls could be made to recede into airy spaciousness, the ceiling and floor into a limitless void, wood and stone and mortar dissolved at will.

  But in June, with the whole of the summer stretching endlessly before you, the apple cellar was forbidden and you had to be close and cunning not to get caught. You had matches hid
den in a Prince Albert tobacco tin and a candle butt stuck in a Coca-Cola bottle for light. All was dead secret; you listened carefully, one ear cocked, fearful of discovery; you envisioned every sound a Betrayer, a Giant, a Walking Horror . . .

  1

  “Stop!” Niles cried, and the music stopped, stopped precisely and immediately, that twanging sound that rang in his ears and made him nervous. “Listen! Somebody’s up there. Do you hear? Listen!”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Holland—listen!” he insisted, his voice ecstatic with horror. He had hastily put out the candle, flatting his hand against the flame, knocking over the bottle the candle was stuck in; its empty clatter still echoed up and down the room.

  There was Somebody walking around up there, you bet. Somebody trying very hard not to be heard, Somebody being a sneak, Somebody out for trouble. Almost soundless they were, the footsteps, so soundless you had to make a face to hear them, but there they were all the same. Somebody crafty up there, crafty enough to be barefooted, or to be wearing sneakers.

  “You’re nuts. Jeeze. It’s nobody.” Niles was unable to see him, but Holland’s voice had that familiar, well-honed edge of ridicule. Unconsciously Niles rubbed the palm of his hand, greased by hot wax.

  “Somebody’s up there,” he rigidly insisted. “Somebody—” Somebody human, he had meant to say; at least he imagined it human.

  “Crazy as a bedbug.”

  “No sir!” Niles retorted, grimacing with suspense, eyes roving the floorboards above. There they went again, surreptitious, creepy, sneak-up-on-you steps. He waited for the grating protest of iron hinges he knew must follow.

  Silence.

  The footsteps neither progressed nor receded, they merely stopped. There followed a faint double thud on the trapdoor and he could picture Somebody kneeling on the floor overhead, hand cupped to ear, ear to floor, listening . . .