In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  I think Lily is remarkable. She’s the best person I know, and in some ways, she’s really and truly the worst. I love her. She became so beautiful, I think Helen of Troy was based on her.

  College? Oh yes, she got a wonderful scholarship to Northwestern. They paid for everything, textbooks, tuition, housing. Her grade point average was something like 3.98, because she got a B in something once, I forget what. Statistics, maybe. And when she got into Columbia medical school, a bunch of Northwestern alums, people who knew nothing about her background or her life story, pitched in and paid her tuition and all her other expenses. She got her M.D. in 1992, and specialized in pediatrics, and now she’s back in Millhaven, working as a pediatrician. That’s what she does. She takes care of other people’s children. She’s a great doctor, a brilliant doctor, and her patients adore her. So do their parents. You could have looked her up in the phone book, didn’t you realize that? Of course, you’d have to know her name. Lily Huntress, M.D.

  That is by no means everything Diane Huntress told Timothy Underhill and his beloved creature Willy Patrick as they sat entranced upon her sturdy sofa, but it covers most of the high points. When time unlocked and resumed its flow, and the cars once again spiraled up and down Sundown Road and mailmen again jolted forward in their carts, Tim felt as though, unlike the journey that had brought him to Mercedes Romola, Diane Huntress’s had concluded in a completely unexpected place.

  “Is she married?” he asked.

  “Married? Good Lord, no. She’ll never marry. She’ll never write a book, either.”

  “Is she happy?”

  “I don’t think Lily understands the concept of happiness—it’s like a foreign language to her. She suffered greatly, and now she helps children, that’s her life. I think she thought of it as the most beautiful thing she could do. That’s the way her mind works.”

  “Does she work with other doctors in a practice?”

  “She works alone. Her practice is in two rooms of her house. She still has days when everything overwhelms her and she has to cancel all her appointments and reschedule her patients. She locks herself in her private rooms and deals with it. She knows I’d come in a second, but she doesn’t call me. She doesn’t call anybody.”

  “What you did,” Tim said, “was like a miracle. It was a miracle. You rescued her.”

  “She let me rescue her. I’ll tell you what I did, and I’m very clear on this. I hung in there. That’s what I did. I hung in there.”

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  “Well, you got some things right,” Willy said.

  “I didn’t really get anything right,” I said. We were driving back toward the hotel, ringing with the emotions that had flowed through Mrs. Huntress’s living room. “Except you, I guess. I missed the boat with Lily, but with Willy I did just fine.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Light. Full of honeycomb spaces. It’s okay. I don’t mind. It doesn’t really hurt anymore.”

  “It used to hurt?”

  “Your whole body feels like one big funny bone, all over.”

  “You never complained,” I said.

  “I wish I were like her,” Willy said. “She sounds absolutely amazing.”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t want to be like her. It’s much too complicated.”

  “In contrast to the simple, sunny history you gave me.”

  “You had the same childhood, with the same father,” I said.

  “You should have made me a pediatrician. And you know what else you did? You made me pretty, but in a stupid way. You saw how she looked as a child. Imagine the way she looks now.”

  I thought of the face Lily had had at eleven, compact and alive with a complex, glowing density of feeling, and could not imagine what she must look like now.

  Willy unfolded the paper she had been holding since we’d gotten into the car. I didn’t have to look at it to know what was written there in Diane Huntress’s surprisingly calligraphic hand: 3516 N. Meeker Road, Lily Huntress’s address.

  “Do you want to go there? I guess I could stand it, if you thought you had to see her, at least. I’d have to stay in the car, though.”

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” I said.

  “Good. Then let’s go back to the hotel. You have to get ready for your reading.”

  “Oh,” I said. “My reading.”

  32

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  I don’t want to write anything here about my reading at the New Leaf bookstore; the memory is embarrassing enough without reliving it. I stumbled through the stuff I’d selected, the Q&A was all right, I signed a pile of books. China Beech turned up, and I liked her. She’s a small, nice-looking woman with a face in which underlying honesty is at war with its superficial prettiness. That’s the only way I know how to put it. She is younger than I had expected, about forty, and extremely nice looking, and it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t give a hang, and after a couple of seconds you’re so aware of her basic warmth and goodness that you don’t really notice how she looks. She wears a little lipstick, that’s all. When we were introduced, China took my arm and said, “Philip told me you believed him when he wrote you that I was an exotic dancer. Meaning a stripper. You must have had horrible visions of me!”

  “Well,” I said, “it did seem an unusual choice for Philip.”

  “It would have been. But the only man I intend to strip for is your brother.”

  For some reason, that remark left me in a state of mild shock. Then I went ahead and gave the worst reading of my life, unable to think about anything but Lily Kalendar, Lily Huntress.

  After the disaster had ended, Willy and I went out for drinks and dinner with Philip and China at an old hangout of mine called Ella Speed’s. The only memorable thing that happened during dinner was something Willy said after I told Philip that she was a writer: “In an alternate universe, I won the Newbery Medal.”

  Back in our hotel room, I thought Cyrax might have some last-minute instructions, so I plugged Mark’s computer into the hotel’s online service and discovered that although my gide had nothing new to say to me, my in-box was jammed with messages from the newly dead. I deleted them all without reading them. Willy pretended to read A Far Cry from Kensington, which she had picked up at the bookstore—literally picked up, I fear, because she had no money of her own and had not asked me for any—while keeping her eye on me. I paced from the living room into the bedroom, stopped off in the bathroom to see what I looked like in the mirror, and paced back into the living room, where I paced some more.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” I said. “I can’t stand it.”

  “I can’t stand watching you act this way,” Willy said. “What’s it?”

  “Do you still have that piece of paper?”

  Her face went soft and vulnerable. She knew exactly what piece of paper I meant. “I stuck it in this book.”

  “Do you think she might have deliberately given us the wrong address?”

  “Diane Huntress? Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know. To protect her? Is there a phone book in the desk drawer?”

  Willy uncoiled herself from the sofa, moved to the desk, and found a Millhaven directory in the drawer. “Do you want me to look it up for you?”

  I knew how little she wanted to do that, and I loved her for making the offer. I held out my hand for the book. “She’s probably not even in it.”

  She was, though, as I should have known. A pediatrician can’t have an unlisted number, not even if she’s like Lily Huntress. There she was, on page 342 of the Millhaven telephone directory, at 3516 N. Meeker Road, with a telephone number anyone could dial. It was staggering, like looking through a window of the house next door and seeing a unicorn.

  Willy dared to rest her hand on my shoulder. “You want to go there, don’t you? You want to talk to her.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” I sa
id, “but I have to go there, at least. I have to see her house, get some idea of how she lives.”

  “Why don’t you call her? It’s not that late.”

  “I can’t call her.” If I called Lily Kalendar, and she answered the phone, I thought, the sound of her voice would reduce me to a heap of smoking ashes. This was not something I could say to Willy. “I guess I’m too shy.”

  The untruth disturbed her, and she held the novel in her hands and seemed to look at the blank screen of the television. “Do you know where that street is?”

  “I can find out,” I said.

  “Were you going to invite me along? I don’t know if I’d be willing to come, though.”

  “Will you drive over there with me, Willy?” I asked.

  Gently, almost reluctantly, she slid the Muriel Spark novel onto the desk and, without raising her eyes to my face, moved slowly toward me. An inch away, she turned sideways and stepped into me like an uneasy cat in search of comfort, brushing her shoulder against my chest and leaning her head sideways on the base of my neck. I could feel the candy bars in her pocket.

  “I don’t want to be here alone,” she said. “But I want you to know, I don’t like any part of this, either.” She turned to face me and looked up, right into my eyes. “Why would you want to talk to her? You’re not going to write a book about her, that was just a story, a pretext. Do you think you can help her? You can’t, you can’t help Lily Kalendar. She doesn’t want your help. She doesn’t even want to see you, really, she just agreed so you’d leave her alone afterward.”

  “I might write that book,” I said, knowing I was fudging the truth again. “I don’t know what I’ll do until I get there.”

  Meeker Road turned out to be a short cul-de-sac tucked behind the Darnton Woods golf club on the city’s North Side. To get there, we got on the expressway that leads into Milwaukee and stayed on it, hurtling along in a cluster of other vehicles like a wolf in a wolf pack, headlights stabbing and shining out, for about twenty minutes. In the face of Willy’s silence, I turned on the radio and found the local jazz station. The sound of a very familiar alto saxophone playing “Like Someone in Love” in Copenhagen in the year 1958 soared from the speakers, filled with the hand-in-hand mixture of joy and sadness, happiness and grief, that great jazz music conveys.

  “We love Paul Desmond, don’t we?” Willy said, and for a few bars sang along with the solo.

  I turned off at Exit 17, and tried to remember the directions from the expressway. There are no streetlamps in that part of town, and dense clouds blanketed the night sky. More or less aimlessly, I swung the car past big houses set far back on perfect lawns. Eventually, I saw the sign for Darnton Woods and kept moving along beside the course on Midgette Road until I reached the extensive stand of oaks and poplars that marked the boundary at its back end. The road wandered farther north, and I thought I had somehow missed my turnoff in the darkness. I told Willy we were going to have to turn around, and she told me that it was too soon to give up. “Distances always seem longer in the dark,” she said.

  Five minutes later, I saw an old street sign half-submerged by a gigantic azalea bush and knew I’d found Meeker Road. An extraordinary tumult, caused by the most divided feelings I had ever experienced, erupted in the center of my body. I wanted to turn in, I needed to see where Lily Kalendar lived, and I wanted with equal force to keep on driving until I got back to the Pforzheimer, where I could make love to Willy Patrick. She peeked at me out of the side of one eye, and when at the last I turned in to Meeker Road, she braced herself by sitting up straighter in her seat and staring a bit glumly at the windshield.

  On Meeker Road, thick trees half-concealed the spacious houses that had grown up at wide intervals between them. Windows glowed yellow. TV sets, some of them wall-mounted plasma screens, glowed and flickered in empty-looking rooms. The basketball hoops above the garage doors wore nets that looked like off-center beards. The numbers on the mailboxes, some of them as big as Santa’s sack and painted with ducks in flight, windmills, sailboats, tennis rackets, went by: 3509, 3510.

  Down at the far end of the cul-de-sac, a Bauhaus-influenced house seemed to emerge from the giant trees behind it like a yacht cutting through thick fog. White, bare except for the nautical details, solid and functional, beautiful in its unforgiving way, this had to be Lily Huntress’s house. A plain metal mailbox stood at the end of the driveway, and when my headlights picked it out, we saw, unaccompanied by a name, the number 3516.

  I stopped the car and turned off the headlights. Light shone from an upper window on the left side of the house and in a ground-floor window on the right side of the front door. Dimmer light appeared in a round window like a porthole directly above the front door.

  “Look what she did,” I said. “Her back is protected by the wall at this part of the golf course, and facing forward, she can see anyone who comes down the street. It’s like taking the farthest seat in a restaurant and watching the door. I bet she has the best security system you can buy.”

  “So what?” Willy asked. “She’s scared?”

  “She’s dealing with it,” I said. “Like you. She has her whole life brilliantly controlled, so that she can feel safe without turning into a recluse. I know guys who bought houses in the middle of the woods in Michigan and rigged up perimeters of barbed wire and floodlights. Plus a couple of tormented dogs. They had terrible experiences, but Lily Kalendar’s were worse.”

  “Are you going to knock on the door, or ring the bell, or whatever?”

  “I’m going to sit here and think about it,” I said.

  “I hope she doesn’t walk past the window or anything.”

  I realized that what Willy dreaded was what I had driven to Meeker Road to see. It would be enough; it would be all I needed. I thought of Lily Kalendar watching out for her patients’ arrival, waiting for her receptionist to confirm what she already knew, then treating the children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her early childhood had never known. Diane Huntress had said, “Now she helps children, that’s her life. I think she thought of it as the most beautiful thing she could do. That’s the way her mind works.” That last sentence offered an implied touch of criticism, to be taken up or not, in the observation that Lily had aesthetic motives for her moral decisions. I saw it the other way around, that her choice of profession was beautiful in a moral sense.

  Then the world changed. A woman with bright blond hair that fell to within two inches of her shoulders walked past the window holding an open book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. She appeared to be slender; there was a slight stiffness in the way she slipped through the air. The tumult I had experienced when we came upon Lily Kalendar’s street reawakened, amplified to an internal earthquake. The woman’s face was turned from us, and all I could glimpse was the side and back of her head. She wore a dark green blouse, or maybe it was a light cashmere sweater. It was still warm, though not as warm as it had been during the day, and her air-conditioning was running. She liked cold rooms anyhow, I thought. A moment later, we were looking at an empty window.

  The thought came to me that I was the one man in the world who could restore what was missing, and make Lily Kalendar whole as she had never been. In the next second I realized that many, many men had known the same impulse, and that none of us could offer her anything commensurate with her beauty, her pain, or her history. To the extent that these had been overcome, it had been done by her own efforts: she had so thoroughly absorbed the cruelty and wickedness visited upon her that they had been rendered all but invisible, and she paid for what she had absorbed with a hundred daily acts of kindness and generosity. I could not rescue her. When devotion still had an effect, she’d had Diane Huntress; after that, she had simply rescued herself, and done it, with her magnificent intelligence, as thoroughly as she could.

  Then I remembered the slight stiffness in her gait, the way she had held herself, deliberately turned from the window, and even my bones went
cold. Like her father, she hid her face whenever she could; certainly, she wanted no one to look in and see that face. The cruelty and wickedness she had absorbed, and for which she paid with service to her patients, still lived in her—Diane Huntress knew it, she had always known it. That was why she had told us that Lily was the worst person she had ever known. Diane had not rescued Lily; by dint of tireless, selfless, unending devoted work she had half-tamed her. That Lily’s new name was Huntress sent icicles through my bloodstream. Her father, who had loved her, loved her still: it was only by a closely monitored borderline that she restrained herself from going out hunting exactly as he had.

  I thought I could hear Jasper Dan Kohle cackling and howling from beneath the trees at the end of the country club.

  “All right,” I said. My voice sounded breathy and battered, and I cleared my throat. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  On the way to the Pforzheimer, Tim stopped at the Fireside Lounge, a restaurant he had always liked for its old-fashioned red leather booths and low lighting. Willy said, “I was so preoccupied back there, I forgot how hungry I was.” When she ordered a tenderloin for herself, the waitress pointed out that it was intended for two people. “I’m eating for two,” Willy said. “What kind of potatoes come with that?”

  She devoured her enormous meal in no more time than Tim required to eat his hamburger and half of the French fries that came with it. The other half wound up on Willy’s plate. When the worst of her hunger had been satisfied, she asked, with the air of one entering extremely dangerous territory, “What do you think about what just happened, anyhow?”