In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “We had this girl go into insulin shock last year, and—”

  “She’s not diabetic, Philip. She has a very unusual condition.”

  With a flash of his old, mean-spirited self, Philip said, “Must be restricted to fictional characters, I guess.” Then, seeing Willy take the cup into her own hands and wash another mouthful down with the soft drink, he added, “Seems to be working, anyhow. Should we get her to the hospital?”

  “No hospital,” Willy said, a little thickly.

  “Tim. You know she belongs in an E.R. Please.”

  “I know she does not. Back off, Philip.”

  He did so, literally, holding up his hands in conspicuous surrender. A few seconds later, Willy stood up and, knowing what was required of her, did her best to look abashed. Gently, almost convincingly, she told Philip that her “condition” could not be treated in an emergency room and that she was grateful for his concern.

  “Well, if you say you’re okay . . .” Baffled, he looked back and forth between them, half-understanding that he had missed something important and explanatory.

  “We’re on our way,” Tim said. Philip did not acknowledge him. His gaze had settled on Willy, and he looked as though he was capable of standing there for the next couple of hours.

  Willy thanked him for the sugar.

  “I’ll see you at the reading,” Philip said, without taking his eyes from her.

  30

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  She told me what I wanted to hear and she wanted to believe, that the shock of seeing that house had pushed her deeper toward disappearance than she had ever been. She meant that what had happened to her was an exception and that she had her “condition” under control.

  Willy passed the next moment that might have tested her, our arrival at the Children’s Home, with perfect equanimity. It looked exactly as she remembered it: a hideous building with a dirty stone facade, narrow windows, and stone steps leading up to an arched doorway. It matched her memory because I had driven past the massive old building a thousand times in my youth.

  A couple of candy bars, no more; she was pleased by the harmony between the building and her memory of it.

  The interior was a test of another kind, for I had invented Willy’s memories out of a generic muddle of institutions I had seen largely in movies. She kept saying things were “in the wrong place” and giving me unhappy glances, as if I had neglected a hypothetical duty to create accurate representations of things that existed outside of fiction. The lounge where she’d dealt with Tee Tee Rowley was on the wrong floor; the Ping-Pong table we glimpsed on our way past the game room was on the wrong side of the room; the dormitory was all wrong, since it had individual rooms instead of being a big communal barrack.

  And the “real” Children’s Home in Willy’s mind had no matron, because I had neglected to supply it with an administrative staff. The Children’s Home on South Karadara Street, however, came splendidly equipped with the regal, kindly Mercedes Romola, who welcomed us into her spare little office, sat us down, and spoke the magical words “Mr. Underhill, it appears you are in luck.”

  The very sight of Mercedes Romola told Tim that Lily Kalendar’s life could have been very little like the one he had fashioned for Willy Patrick. The matron exuded warmth, practicality, and common sense; she had iron-gray hair, a comfortable skirt and jacket, and a level, intelligent gaze. She was like the perfect fourth-grade teacher, a woman whose natural authority did not inhibit a sense of humor that, in its sly appearances, hinted at the existence of a private life more raucous and freewheeling than could be revealed in the public one. The matron instantly conveyed a sense of solidity and specificity that transferred itself to Lily Kalendar. Her life had contained no missing transitions or amnesiac passages: it had been lived minute by minute, in a way that made a pantomime of fiction.

  “In fact,” she told him, “you are in luck in several ways. As you would expect, we do not release information concerning our present and former charges without obtaining permission beforehand. And in this case, the special circumstances surrounding the child’s transfer to the shelter, especially the notoriety of her father, make us wish to proceed with a great degree of caution.”

  “She was here, though,” Tim said. “Lily Kalendar.”

  “She had literally nowhere else to go. As I told you on the phone, she was taken into care at the age of nine. According to her father, the girl’s mother had run off two months earlier, and he could not cope with raising two children. The son was being trained as a carpenter, but the girl gave him problems he couldn’t solve. The caseworkers agreed, and she came to us. Later, we thought he’d sent her away to save her life. And maybe it was the only way he could stop abusing her.”

  “I knew he loved her,” Willy said.

  “What exactly is your role here?” asked the matron.

  “Willy is my assistant,” Tim told her. “She’s been very involved with this project.”

  “And you say the project is a book about Lily Kalendar. My first question is, will it be fiction or nonfiction?”

  “Probably some combination of the two.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Underhill, but what is the point of mixing genres? Doesn’t combining fiction with fact merely give you license to be sloppy with the facts?”

  “I think it’s the other way around,” Tim said. “Fiction lets me really get the facts right. It’s a way of reaching a kind of truth I wouldn’t otherwise be able to discover.”

  She smiled at him. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m a big fan of your work. I love those books you wrote with your collaborator.”

  He thanked her.

  “Let’s go back to the subject of your good fortune. As you will surely understand, I have to be very scrupulous. We make our records open to the public, which includes researchers like yourself, only if the person in or formerly in care, or the legal guardian, gives us permission to do so. Your first bit of luck was that one of your readers is the head of this institution. I made two phone calls on your behalf. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s worth two hundred dollars to our Big Brothers Big Sisters program.”

  Tim nodded, forcing himself to appear relaxed.

  “As a result of these calls, I can give you the following information.” She opened a folder on her desk. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses and peered down. “The Kalendar girl was first taken into care in 1974. The matron in those days was Georgia Lathem, and she made some unusual notations in the girl’s file. It seems Miss Lathem found the girl exceptionally closed off, emotionally numb, prone to acts of violence against the other children, liable to nightmares. She also observed that the girl was extraordinarily intelligent and strikingly beautiful.”

  She looked up. “Now, you see, Miss Lathem and all the rest of the staff would have been quite aware of the Kalendar girl’s background. I don’t mean murder, because in 1974 no one knew about that, but the site inspections had made it pretty clear that the child had been raised by a very disturbed man.

  “We are always looking for good foster parents for the children in our care, and Miss Lathem eventually came upon a couple that seemed perfect. Guy and Diane Huntress had successfully fostered three children some years before—they seemed to specialize in turning around some of our most damaged children. Miss Lathem arranged a meeting, the Huntresses agreed to take Lily into their home. Things went on, lots of ups and downs but mainly ups, until 1979, when Guy Huntress unexpectedly died.”

  Mercedes Romola looked directly at Tim. “And what else happened in 1979, Mr. Underhill?”

  “Joseph Kalendar was arrested for multiple homicides. The police found only a few fragments of the bodies, because he burned most of his victims in his furnace.”

  “The Kalendar scandal exploded. Mrs. Huntress feared what might happen to the child in school. It seemed to her that Lily would fare better back here in the shelter. But children can be so cruel—she went through two really lousy
years. It’s no fun being an outcast. She was humiliated over and over. Face in the toilet, things like that.”

  “What school did she go to?” Willy asked, with the air of one sticking an oar into a swiftly running river.

  “While she was with Diane Huntress, Grace and Favor Elementary School in Sundown, Slater Middle School, and Augment High. Why?”

  “I was under the impression she went to Lawrence Freeman.”

  “The elementary school down in what they used to call Pigtown? Why would you think she went there?”

  “Sorry, sorry, my mistake,” Willy said.

  The matron looked back at her papers, then glanced up with the suggestion of a smile on her face. “At this point, an unusual event took place. Diane Huntress came in for a talk with Miss Lathem and said she wanted Lily to come back to her as a foster child. In my considerable experience, this kind of thing is more or less impossible. Foster relationships are terminated for all kinds of reasons, some worse than others, but they are never resumed.”

  “But she went back,” Tim said.

  “She went back. And in her way, she flourished. And when I spoke to her an hour ago, she told me that although she would not assist you in any way during the writing of your book, she would not obstruct you in any way, either. She says she’d be willing to talk to you, on one condition, if you wish to speak to her. On the whole, she’d prefer not to, but the choice is up to you.”

  “What’s the condition?” Tim asked.

  “That first you meet with Diane Huntress, so that she can decide the next step. Mr. Underhill, do you know what this means?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It means that Lily Kalendar trusts Diane Huntress absolutely. In spite of the fact that Diane had returned her to us, and left her here for two awful years. Lily knew why she had done it, she understood. And when she went back to Diane, it was with the feeling of coming home to a mother who had been ill, but now was well again. People like Lily Kalendar, not that there are very many, seldom trust anyone at all. You realize, what happened to that child was immense. Immense.”

  Underhill felt the word sink into him, widening out as it did. The comprehension of that immensity seemed the point behind everything that had happened since his sister had thrust herself through the mirror to shout her silent command. Even getting close to understanding Lily Kalendar’s experience was the other half of fulfilling Kalendar’s demand: he would acknowledge the bizarre mercy Kalendar had shown his daughter, but he also had to wrap his imagination around the price Lily had paid for his mercy. For a moment, it felt like the task of his life. Then he looked at Willy, and his heart moved at the recognition of her plight. She was listening to a woman talk about the person she had been supposed to be. What could that be like?

  “It’s an immensity for me, too,” he said. “How can I arrange the meeting?”

  Mercedes Romola’s smile may have been small, but it illuminated her entire face. “I spoke to Mrs. Huntress right after calling Lily, and she is prepared to meet you anytime this afternoon. In fact, this will be your last chance to have her look you over for two or three months. She’s leaving for China with a tour group tomorrow, and after that she’s going to stay with some old friends in Australia. Do you see what I mean about luck, Mr. Underhill?” She wrote something on a white card and slid it toward him. “This is her address. It’s in an interesting part of town. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

  Tim yielded to the impulse to kiss her hand, and she said, “We don’t do much hand kissing in Millhaven, Mr. Underhill. But I’m glad to see you have some idea of what is at stake here. If you’re going to write about Lily Kalendar, you’d better make it the book of your life.”

  31

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  Willy cried steadily as I drove to the address the matron had given me. She also ate half a box of Valrhona chocolates, more for the comfort of it, I thought, than in response to her “condition.” She kept her head turned from me, and now and then held up her left hand as a shield to protect herself from my gaze.

  “It’s not the way you think it is,” I said. “You’re not nothing; you do exist. If I love you, you have to exist.”

  “You’re a liar. You love her, and you never even met her. But she’s real, and I’m not. You think she’s immense. She’s what I was supposed to be.” I got another angry peek. “You’re sick. You’re twisted. Other people’s pain makes you feel good. You must be in pig heaven right now.”

  “Willy, other people’s pain does not make me feel good. It’s that I don’t want to overlook it or pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to do it justice. That’s why you liked reading me when you were depressed, remember?”

  She made a dismissive mmph sound.

  “Do you want to know what I really do like?”

  “Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar.”

  “I like the space between,” I said. “The space between dreaming and wakefulness. Between imagination and reality. Between no and yes. Between is and is not. That’s where the interesting stuff is. That’s where you are. You are completely a product of the space between.”

  “Between is and is not?”

  “Where they both hold true, where they become one thing.”

  Evidently, this struck her. She faced forward and she kept her eyes on the windshield. She wasn’t going to look at me, but at least she had stopped looking away.

  “That’s so stupid it might actually mean something. Still, I thought I was a real person, and it turns out all along I was only a bad Xerox.”

  “That’s completely wrong,” I said. “You’re not even close to being a copy. You’re unique. Willy—”

  “Holy shit,” she said, looking ahead.

  I snapped my head forward again and, as we drifted through a turn, saw what Mercedes Romola had meant by “an interesting part of town.” The road we were on, and the houses that sprouted up on either side of it, went down into a huge, long, descending spiral that resembled the interior of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. The top of the spiral must have been about two hundred yards across, and down at its bottom lay a grocery store, a movie theater, a bar, a library, a Gap, and a Starbucks around the edges of a little square with a bandstand. It brought to mind a Hobbit world; it was also very pretty. At night, it would have looked extraordinary, with the lights shining around the great swooping curves of the spiral. From the top, the scene suggested a terraced landscape with houses instead of vineyards. That the name of this area was Sundown I had always attributed to its location in the city’s far western reaches. Now I thought that if you lived even a little bit down on the curve, the sun would vanish early every evening.

  The Huntress house, about a third of the way down, could have been in any older section of Millhaven. Three stories, dark wood, cement steps leading up to a small porch with a peaked roof: it was no more than a modestly upscale version of the houses on North Superior Street, but the setting gave it a slightly Brothers Grimm aspect.

  I parked in front of the house and walked around to Willy’s door. “Admit you’re interested.”

  Instead of responding, Willy rammed a Three Musketeers bar into her mouth. I hadn’t seen her pull it out of her pocket, which she must have filled when I was walking around the front of the car. A bright wrapper fluttered to the ground.

  “Oh, Willy,” I said, and picked it up. “That’s beneath you.”

  Around a mouthful of Three Musketeers, Willy said, “Do you think this lady is going to like you? This lady is not going to like you.”

  I hauled her up onto the porch and pushed the bell. A minute later, a stocky woman with a purple cloud of hair and sharp eyes in a big, foursquare face that gave full justice to the mingled pains and joys of seventy-odd years opened the door and released the ghosts of a thousand cigarettes. She reminded me of the Pigtown women of my childhood who had worked on the line in one factory or another, down in the Valley.

  We said hello to e
ach other and spoke our names, and I introduced Willy as my assistant. Diane Huntress said something nice about Mercedes Romola’s approval and invited us into her house. It was not what I had expected, nor was she. What that woman said—for the ninety minutes she spoke of Lily Kalendar, it felt like she stopped time. Like Joseph Kalendar, Diane Huntress froze the cars on the street and the kids playing ball and the mailman puttering along in his cart, and anybody else who was in the reach of that smoker’s voice and the things it said. She certainly froze me. Willy never moved, either.

  Tim Underhill walked amazed into a setting that declared its inhabitant a dedicated traveler of great taste and curiosity. Treasures adorned the walls and gleamed from the depths of cabinets: African masks and tribal figures; Chinese vases and Greek amphoras; Japanese scrolls; small, ornate rugs; a thousand little things that had been lovingly accumulated over decades. Part of the effect was the implied knowledge that, for all their worth, these objects had been obtained at the lowest possible price by travelers who’d never had a lot of money to draw out of their purse.

  On the way to the sofa where Mrs. Huntress wished them to sit, Willy set aside her unhappiness long enough to admire a small tapestry panel shining with silken threads.

  Tim wandered past a group of photographs depicting Diane Huntress and a large man with a genial face dominated by a slablike chin standing in jungles, in deserts, before great monuments, beside canals and rivers, at the feet of snowy mountains, in hookah cafés, in crowded bazaars.

  He turned to Mrs. Huntress. “Did you ever take Lily Kalendar with you on your trips?”

  “As often as possible,” she said. “Here. Take a look.” She brought him to the far end of the group and indicated a photograph that must have been taken by Guy Huntress, for he was not in it. His wife, perhaps thirty years younger than the woman beside Tim now, stood planted in a meadow rimmed with hills that might have been in Africa. A little blond girl of ten or eleven peeked out from behind her legs with an expression of mingled fear and pleasure on her intense, radiant face that flew straight to the center of Underhill’s heart. To him, the child looked like an exposed nerve—the sensitivity he saw in her dark gray-blue eyes, the planes of her face, the tilt of her head, in even her sunburned skin, moved him nearly to tears.