The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  I excused myself before we’d even had coffee, sick at my growing deceit, Flossie frowning after me as I ascended the stairs.

  An hour later, I was in the kitchen, scraping food into a bowl for the cats, feeling rattled still over the encounter, when I heard someone at the door. I started, turned to see the latch twist, the door open. I scarcely knew whom to expect.

  It was Flossie.

  She stood there in the front hall, staring coldly in at me. I stepped forward, repressing the urge to usher her back out. I glanced quickly toward my employer’s door. I hardly expected him to emerge, but even so.

  Flossie stood waiting, it seemed, to be invited inside. Gone was her sparkle. I thought at first she was only angry at my premature departure, but it seemed more than that. She stood as if holding herself in restraint. I noticed there was a plate in her hands. She looked around the apartment with obvious interest before settling her eyes back upon me, her gaze hard.

  I’ve brought cake, she said.

  I set the pot I was holding onto the counter.

  Why don’t we go down to your apartment, I suggested. It’s so much more pleasant.

  Flossie crossed the room, as if she hadn’t heard, her heels sharp on the linoleum, and set the cake heavily upon the table. I cast my eyes again to the hall behind her, the closed study door. She followed my gaze.

  Might I have a knife? she said, and seated herself firmly at the table.

  I confess I deliberated, given her murderous tone. She appeared to be wound, as they say, rather tight.

  What did you think of your admirer?

  She seemed very pleasant.

  She didn’t seem … crazy, to you?

  She seemed quite sensible. Why do you ask?

  No reason. She stabbed the knife into the cake so forcefully the plate slid dangerously toward the edge of the table. She yanked it back.

  We had an interesting conversation. After you left. Mary and I.

  Did you?

  Yes.

  She flipped a slice of cake onto a plate and smacked it down on the table.

  Aren’t you going to offer me coffee?

  I put the kettle on to boil, all the time glancing nervously out into the hall. Flossie watched me carefully.

  You seem … , I began.

  What?

  I cleared my throat. Angry?

  Just surprised, she said. She stabbed the knife into the cake again.

  Oh?

  Mary certainly seemed to know a good deal about you.

  Is that right.

  From some press club or something, some amateur something association. I can’t remember the name.

  Indeed?

  Yes. She told me quite a bit. She said, for instance, you live here. With your aunt. That’s how she found you here. From the amateur press whatever membership.

  Yes, I told you that.

  No, you said you were staying with her. Just for a while. Just to take care of things, until she is well.

  And that is true.

  Mary said you live here.

  I forced out a small laugh. Well, then, Mary must be right. Come now, Flossie, I don’t even know the woman.

  But she knows you. It seems you’re quite famous. In certain circles. Weird circles. Horror, I mean. Or, whatever you call it.

  I wouldn’t say that, I said, uneasily. I thought of my employer, possibly listening through the wall. I wished desperately that she would lower her voice.

  Oh, yes. Quite a bit is known about you. You have quite a following.

  Is that so.

  And anyway, what should I even call you?

  Call me Arthor, of course, as you always have.

  The kettle screamed and I plucked it off the range.

  And another thing, for instance, another thing Mary happened to mention, is that you are married. That’s another thing.

  I tipped the kettle, sloshing boiling water out over my shoes.

  You needn’t look so startled.

  I set the steaming kettle back carefully on the range.

  Is it true?

  Flossie—

  I thought you were different, she said, looking at me steadily.

  I wanted to say, We are, none of us, different.

  Coffee, she demanded, and swiped at her eyes, though they were dry.

  I poured the water and brought the coffee. Flossie reached out and sloshed it into her cup before it had even brewed. She lifted it scalding to her lips.

  So tell me about her, then.

  About?

  Your wife. This Sonia.

  I stared. Sonia?

  Oh, don’t be stupid. Tell me about your wife. Is it true you are married?

  I …

  Mary said you are married but not living together. She didn’t know why. Is that true?

  I don’t know what to say—

  Say the truth.

  What was the truth? I had no idea.

  Keep your voice down, I said instead.

  She looked astonished, then furious.

  And why should I keep my voice down? Who should hear me, your aunt?

  She’s not here. I told you that.

  Are you married?

  Flossie, please.

  Answer me.

  Yes, I said, in a low voice, casting my eyes down the hall. Yes. I’m married.

  It was out. I’d told her. And I might have told her all of it, everything, the truth and not a version of it, but all at once she was on her feet.

  My god, she said, she’s here. Your wife. Isn’t she. Has she been here the whole time? All this time?

  Before I could stop her, she was out in the hall, calling, Hello, I’d love to meet you, Mrs. Crandle, Sonia. I’ve brought a lovely damned lemon cake.

  I had the eerie, awful vision of a door opening, and Jane stepping darkly through. Who on earth was Sonia?

  I grabbed Flossie by the arm, feeling her skin pinch between my fingers, but she wrenched free and made for the door at the end of the hall.

  Ah, she cried. Is she here?

  She grasped the latch. With a cry, I stepped forward and pulled the door shut with a sharp smack.

  What are you hiding from me?

  I pulled her back down the hall toward the apartment door.

  She isn’t here, I said. She isn’t. I haven’t seen her. It’s been—

  Flossie lifted her hand, pressed her fingers to my mouth, fiercely. I flinched. I’d thought she was going to slap me.

  Don’t, she said angrily. Don’t. I know. All right? You don’t owe me anything. I know that. I know. It’s too old-fashioned, to think that way. And not free at all. Right?

  I’m sorry, I said. I was.

  It’s the lying, she said, that really bothers me. She turned from me then, angrily, her hand on the latch. You needn’t have lied, Arthor.

  I know that, I said.

  3

  I woke in the night from terrible dreams, shaking, as though I would retch. I rose and went to the window, feeling a chill the weather alone could not account for. It seemed all was crumbling. I had gone down twice to the foyer to rap at Flossie’s door, but she was either not home or she did not answer. The house seemed darker again, sadder, without the certain knowledge of Flossie’s brightness somewhere in it.

  Outside, a storm was dying. The rain had ceased, though the wind was still up. Across the hedge, the boarding house glowed warmly. I imagined the boy there, James, seated near a flickering hearth, staring into the flames with that pale, otherworldly gaze, a cat curled purring in his lap. I had not seen any of them in days, and I wondered if perhaps the man Baxter had found a job, if they had moved on.

  I was just about to turn away from the window when I saw her again, the girl.

  There, in the garden, in the moving grasses, she stood. In all that wild motion, she was herself unmoving, utterly still, in a pale nightdress, the hem dragging heavily in the wet, her face upturned in the broken moonlight, staring with cold intensity at my attic window. But it was not Flossie
; it was no woman.

  It was a child.

  I stepped unconsciously backwards in the force of its terrible, dead stare, my heart pounding. But just as soon as I’d glimpsed her, she was gone.

  I shivered where I stood at the window, and raised a cold hand to the glass. The print from my sweating palm remained a moment, ghostly, then evaporated, was gone.

  Four

  1

  We do not always meet life directly. We turn aside, let it strike us on the cheek. I thought of my other life sometimes with a kind of horror, as of something unstoppable, something unnatural, to which I was still hurtling, or which was still hurtling toward me, sideways, just out of the line of my vision.

  It was two years ago last December, in the week before Christmas. Molly was yet an infant, not quite three. All across Boston, candles glowed in small-paned windows, pine smoke cut the air, snow fell. There was a commitment I had at my workplace—all right, it was a party, as Jane insisted. A Christmas party. Molly was ill. Some minor ailment, congestion, fever, that sort of thing. Nothing serious, certainly. Jane had come down with the same. She had been ill with it a good while, I recall, and I had begun to wonder, I’m ashamed to admit it, if she was being willfully ill. Things were rocky, then. Jane was lonely. I worked long hours. Someone had to pay the bills, and even then it was already not easy, the economy in a downward slide. We argued, often. She infuriated me. I was weary.

  Then, this commitment, this … party. I was in the bedroom, fussing with a black silk tie, smoothing pomade through my hair, adjusting the tie again, too short, too long. But I had to go. I really could not get out of it. It was scarcely a matter of choice.

  Assuming what I judged a suitable air of reluctant obligation, I smoothed my jacket and stepped into the sitting room.

  Jane was on the sofa in the shabby dressing gown she favoured. Chenille, she called it. I thought it a bedspread. She had not washed her hair in some time and wore it pinned up untidily at the back of her neck. She did not bathe as much as she might; when I kissed her she smelled of onion peel, soured milk. Molly rolled feverishly in her lap.

  Jane looked up at me in shock. I was instantly annoyed.

  I really cannot get out of it, I said, adjusting my tie again. A work thing. You know how it is around there these days. Swinging axes. If you’re not looking, you’ll get it in the back of the neck.

  You’re going, she said, to that party?

  It’s hardly a party.

  Just then headlights pulled up in front. One of my coworkers—all right, it was the daughter of my boss—who’d offered to give me a ride, being aware Jane and I did not own an automobile.

  Who is that? Jane asked, peering out between the curtains.

  Well, don’t stare, will you.

  I said it rather sharply, I confess.

  She let the curtain fall into place. Molly sat up, glassy-eyed, whimpering, and Jane jiggled her knee ruthlessly. Molly began to cry.

  Jane stared at me, waiting, I realized, for an answer.

  It’s—to my credit I did not lie, certainly I might have, another man would have—Constance.

  Jane rose with Molly against her shoulder, bending her knees deeply, as if warming up for a race, and looked back at me blankly. Something in me was perversely irritated that she did not know who Constance was. Everyone knew Constance. Everyone in our circle, certainly. Possibly everyone in Boston.

  Morris’s daughter, I said, pulling on my galoshes. She helps out around the office sometimes. Helps out, you know what I’m saying. Morris’s make-work project. Wants to keep her busy, I suppose. If she lifts a finger, it’s only to check her nails. Been to one of those snooty girls’ schools, Radcliffe or something, I don’t really know. Home for the holidays. She offered a ride. I told her I could just hoof it, but she insisted, decent of her, after all, and I suppose it’s just easier. I’ll be home sooner this way, you see.

  I buttoned my overcoat in the alcove as I spoke. Jane stood in the sitting room. Molly cried.

  Well, I said briskly. Home soon. Try to get some rest.

  And I pulled the door shut behind me, hurrying, lest Constance, dressed as I knew she would be, scandalously, should, god forbid, come to the door.

  When I stepped into the snowy street, smoothing my hair, I made a point of not looking back. I did not need to. I remembered the expression on Jane’s face well.

  I suspect I will remember it always.

  The evening was a great success, as such parties in poor times must need be. Constance was clearly having a splendid time, into the gin punch and the men equally enthusiastically, and some of the women as well. I stood over by the window, sipping a ginger ale, watching her dance the Charleston on a table in such a manner as to make it look fashionable still, her bobbed hair damp against her cheeks, her silvery dress throwing hard sparks in the candlelight, like armour. I tried not to think of Jane and Molly, ill at home; tried not to think of them, out of a kind of misguided spite; but they were on my mind nonetheless and I had begun to regret my decision.

  On the table, Constance reached up and pulled down a silver garland with a gesture at once obviously calculated and yet so seemingly natural. The girl, I thought, was masterful.

  You know what I call a dame like that? said someone at my shoulder.

  No, I said, without turning. What.

  A Chicago overcoat.

  Chicago overcoat?

  I turned, then, to look at him. I did not recognize him from the office. He had a bright spot of cocktail sauce dribbled on his tie.

  I thought that was a coffin, I said.

  The man drained his highball before responding. The ice clacked against his teeth.

  Bingo.

  The band, winding down, launched into the syrupy “Stardust” and Constance slowed too, swaying there on the table, one hand outstretched, swinging the silver garland like a tail, the fine straps of her dress looped down over the tops of her white arms.

  Want my advice, the man said, chewing an ice cube, moving away into the crowd. Take a cab.

  When I turned back to Constance, Morris, absurdly furious in a velvet Santa hat, was pulling her down from the table. He steered her into a corner. She was easily as tall as her father, and she stood with her head thrown back, half-reclined against a table, her long legs stretched out like a man’s, while he spoke angrily into her ear.

  She caught my gaze then, across the room. I held it a moment too long. Morris glanced over, following her look, and I turned quickly away, toward the window. I lifted my glass of ginger ale but it was empty. I set it on the window ledge.

  The snow had begun to fall harder, spiralling in great flakes, drifting against the parked cars along the curb, the dead lawns, then swirling back up to stick against the steamed windowpane. The lights of the city were dying. One by one, guests drifted over to the window and rubbed the glass, peering out, frowning. The air stank of stale tobacco, soured wine. The band already packing away their instruments in great black cases with self-conscious ceremony, like magicians, the chatter of the crowd all at once shrill in the absence of music. A couple stood in the doorway, locked in intimate, groping conversation. An elderly man dozed in an armchair in the corner. Someone had removed his shoes and socks, and his feet against the dark carpet looked bloodless and sculpted. A fat woman wrapped a string of silver paper bells around his throat like a boa; another threw back her head and laughed. A pretty young woman I recognized from the office stood surrounded by a circle of girls, like horses, in the center of the dance floor, shaking her head and weeping.

  Constance, it seemed, had disappeared. I sat on the window ledge, folding and refolding a paper cocktail napkin, waiting. I imagined Jane and Molly would be asleep by then on the old sofa in a yellow pool of lamplight.

  Slowly, the room emptied, the guests trickling away with the weather and the hour, leaving cocktail glasses, and trampled party favours, and plates of oysters half-eaten. Soon it was just me and an old Negro who emptied ashtrays into a tin
bucket beneath the drooping garlands. I wanted to go home.

  I made my way to the abandoned coat check and found the last two in the back row, hers and mine, ominous as hanged bodies. The feel of her coat on my arm, some sort of inky fur, was as of a live thing, at once sensual and alarming. I wondered what sort of state I might find her in, and where.

  It did not take long. She leaned against the wall outside the ladies’ room, her cheek pressed up against the gilded paper, hair damp against her forehead, scarlet lipstick bleeding beautifully.

  She raised her head slowly at my approach.

  Ready? she said.

  2

  The image of the child in the garden haunted me. There was something about the pale wispiness of her hair, a certain sturdy set of the shoulders. Something achingly, impossibly familiar.

  But I could not think it. I pushed it from my mind. My head pounded. I worked sporadically, slept fitfully. During the night, I woke to the feel of a small hand against my cheek, cold, cold. I left the light in my room burning, and rose in the morning only to cross to the window and look at once down into the empty garden with a feeling of dread. I did not know what I feared to see, what sort of apparition—no, that was not right: I knew exactly what I feared to see. But there was nothing. Only glittering morning, only raindrops hung from bare branches like purses of pure light.

  I fumbled my feet into my shoes and went sockless down, through the foyer and around the outside of the house to the back garden, wanting proof. Something concrete, tangible, bare footprints in the turned soil, an unlatched door.

  I found only last summer’s weeds and long grasses, untrampled, beneath limbs so overgrown and diseased they’d been peeled smoothly of bark. I tried the latch of the garden door, which seemed to be, as I had thought, a sort of back entrance to Flossie’s suite, but the latch was padlocked and looked to have been so for some time, cobwebbed, the metal dripping rusty stains down the white clapboard siding. Mossy clay pots stood stacked in front of it, still filled with soil and dead plants from summers previous, mouldering leaves packed against them in drifts. No one had come that way, clearly.