“If you can’t take care of them, you don’t deserve to have them,” he was shouting. “You haven’t had them three days and they’re absolutely ruined.”
“I didn’t break them, Daddy,” the child sobbed. “I promise it wasn’t me. I didn’t break them!”
“Don’t lie to me, Melissa,” he roared. “Now stop that whining and go on in the house. I want you to go straight up to your room and think about little girls who tear up presents their parents work hard all year to give them.”
He slammed the lid on the garbage cans and took the child by the shoulder and pushed her through the back door. It shut with a glass-rattling bang and I could hear no more.
My stomach worked with anger and dislike. “Damned tyrant,” I muttered aloud and turned back to the work I was doing. I made a mental note to stay at the Greenes’ Twelfth Night party only as long as decency decreed.
We were late getting to their house on the night of the party, and it was in full swing when we walked into the living room. Norman Greene met us at the door. He wore the first and only burgundy velvet smoking jacket I have ever seen and had a sprig of holly in his lapel. His dark hair was even shorter, new-mown, and his scalp looked like polished ivory. His eyes glittered blankly, reflecting light, and his mouth was stretched into a caricature of good cheer.
“Welcome to our humble abode,” he said. “Come have some of your grandmother’s eggnog you were so kind to tell us about. I made it myself and it’s first-rate, if I do say so. Those old Southern aristocrats really knew how to live, didn’t they?”
Walter gave him an exaggerated leer and said, “Oh, to be sure. Col’s grandmother was known far and wide for her eighteen-inch waist and her family silver and her eggnog. She made a batch every day for forty years until they locked her in the attic for good. For medicinal purposes of course.”
Norman Greene looked at him closely, decided he was joking, and gave him a startling, conspiratorial wink. He led us into the living room, where Susan Greene, in a long velvet skirt and a white satin shirt, stood with her daughter. Melissa was enchanting, dressed in a long blue taffeta dress with a starched white pinafore over it. Her chestnut hair curled round her small pointed face, and her smile was quick and sweet, a carbon of her mother’s. She had clear, lambent green eyes sheltered under feathering lashes, so lovely and startling and unlike her father’s silver-gray ones or Susan’s dancing blue that I wondered how I had failed to notice them before. There were tender mauve shadows under them. I thought she looked like a Kate Greenaway miniature and said so to Susan.
“She does have a funny, old-fashioned look about her, doesn’t she?” Susan said. “She really likes dresses and ruffles and frills. I have a hard time getting her into blue jeans. Lissa, honey, show Mrs. Kennedy where to put her coat. Norm will take yours, Walter.”
I followed the child into the downstairs bedroom. I had not seen it since the night I had stood in its doorway stricken to stone, seeing Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott frozen like statues beside the bed and Matt Gladney on the floor. The bed had been piled with purses then too and light spring wraps. I forced myself to look long around the room, to superimpose normalcy over that awful remembered image.
An enormous white-and-gilt bed teeming with cherubs and rosebuds and swags and garlands dominated the room. Lavender taffeta shrouded the bed and made a canopy. Lavender taffeta hung in carved folds at the windows and covered the padded cornices. Lavender petit point covered the vanity bench, which was white and gilt too, and there were lavender velvet pillows on a chaise longue in a corner of the room. A white-and-gilt escritoire against one wall had a crystal inkwell and a quill with a curling white plume. A silver seal, with an elaborate G cut into it, stood on the escritoire beside a stick of red sealing wax. An open door showed wallpaper with pink and purple shepherdesses, purple bath carpet, pink and lavender and purple towels. I’ll bet it has gold fixtures, I thought, and peered around the door. It did.
Kim Dougherty’s house was astounding. There was hardly an inch of floor space that did not house a piece of carved, polished, satined, damasked and gilded French furniture. Mirrors and paintings covered the white walls. The long expanses of glass were draped and tied and swagged with satin. The polished wooden floor lay under thick, pale-blue carpeting. A great log roared in the fireplace, and flowers, mostly white, stood spikily, formally erect on tables and mantelpiece. White candles blazed everywhere. In the dining room dour faces in frames of heavy gilt glared down on the buffet table. A lovely, heavy cut-crystal punch bowl held my grandmother’s eggnog, and an ornate old silver ladle bobbed gently in the bowl. Ham glistened pinkly, and roast beef glistened redly, and enormous platters of sandwiches, crudités, canapés and cheeses covered the white lace tablecloth. It was a stunning array of food, enough to feed a battalion.
Claire stood at the table with Semmes and Eloise Jennings, looking down at it bemusedly. She held a cup of eggnog, and there was a creamy mustache on her upper lip. I moved up beside her and greeted her and the Jenningses.
“Quite a spread, isn’t it?” I said. Walter handed me a cup of eggnog and I tasted it. It was good, thick and pungent with cream and rum.
“Think of the starving Biafrans,” Claire said. “I’d sell my soul for a good stiff Scotch, but no dice there. Well, what do you think? Was I right or was I right?”
“You were right,” I said. “Buffet paintings and all.”
“Right about what?” demanded Eloise Jennings truculently. She was looking around the dining room and living room discontentedly, as though they were a personal affront to her.
“I told Colquitt it looked like a French whorehouse,” Claire said, and I could tell by her voice that she and Roger had had a fortifying snort of something before they came.
“Well, I think it’s sensational,” Eloise said. “I never did care for that stark stuff the Harralsons had in here. And I never saw what the Sheehans did with it. Funny people, weren’t they? I never did think she was all there in the head, and I hear I was right. That’s a pretty little girl of the Greenes’ too, but it’s so sad when people dress children up like little adults. I’ve always thought so. Children should be free to express themselves. I’d never dream of putting an outfit like that on any of mine. She’s showing the strain too. Look at her eyes. Peaky. She’s getting something, mark my words.”
“Not all children have that certain joie de vivre yours have, Eloise,” drawled Walter.
Eloise’s face reddened and puffed, but before she could reply, Susan Greene appeared at our sides with Norman and a short, squat, froggy man in heavy bifocals.
“I’d like you all to meet Dr. Holderbein,” she said. “You probably already know him, he’s president of City. Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, Dr. Holderbein, our next-door neighbors, and this is Claire Swanson, from up the street, and Eloise and Semmes Jennings.”
“Indeed I do know most of these people, Mrs. Greene,” said the little man in a piping treble. “Roger Swanson is a great friend of mine, and Mrs. Kennedy here did a superb job for City last year when we had our Centennial. Are you still with your firm, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“No, I’m on my own now,” I said. “I have an office at home, and I handle three or four small accounts. It’s good to see you again, sir.”
Norman Greene swelled visibly with pride. “Fine neighbors, aren’t they, sir?” he said. “Susan wasn’t at all sure about the house when I first showed it to her—she liked an old one over in Druidwater, but you could tell the neighborhood was going—but now she’s glad I talked her into this one. I think we’re going to be very happy on this street. Solid people, everybody here. Very like our friends at home.”
Dr. Holderbein smiled at Norman Greene and, charmingly, at Susan. “Fine neighbors indeed,” he said. “And you could not be more correct about the Druidwater section being in a state of, shall we say, genteel decay, Greene. I’ve lived there myself for many years, and it really isn’t what it used to be. May I trouble you for a cup of that sple
ndid eggnog, Mrs. Greene?”
There was a painful silence, in which Norman Greene looked at one of us, and then another, and then Susan said, “Claire, would you get Dr. Holderbein some eggnog? Norm, I need you to help me start another batch in the kitchen.” She drew her husband toward the kitchen door. At that moment the lights flickered, then swelled, then flickered again, and died slowly out. We stood in the candlelight.
“What the hell is the matter with those lights?” I heard Norman Greene hiss, and Susan Greene said, “I don’t know, Norm. Why don’t you go check the fuse box? It doesn’t matter, we have plenty of candlelight. Nothing needs to be heated. I’ll mix this next batch by hand.”
“No, it needs the blender,” he said sharply. “Christ, Susan, I told you when they were acting up the other day to get somebody out here to check that fuse box; it shouldn’t be doing this in a new house. Did you even think to call? I guess it’s too much to ask that you remembered…”
His voice trailed off down the basement stairs, and a flashlight bobbed briefly in the darkness before he shut the door. Claire and I went into the kitchen to help Susan.
She had taken a candle into the kitchen with her, and Claire picked up another from a side table. The kitchen leaped with shadows. Susan Greene was rummaging in her dark refrigerator for cream and eggs, setting them out on the counter. Her mobile face was fragile and miserable.
“I really meant to call,” she said. “It was that day Melissa was worse again, and I called and canceled our lunch so I could take her back to the doctor, remember, Claire? But I just forgot, and since it had only happened that once, I didn’t think anymore about it. Now he’s going to be furious with me again, and I really don’t have an excuse, except that Lissa—I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I used to be so damned efficient.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Claire said. “You’ve got plenty of light from the candles; they look pretty in the living room and dining room. Everybody can see. Nobody’s bothering about it. They’re eating and drinking and laughing up a storm. It’s probably an accident with a power pole somewhere around here. They’ll be back on in a minute.”
They began putting eggnog ingredients into the blender bowl, and I went to look out the back door. There were lights up and down the street; ours were still burning, and the street lights and other houses were lit.
Norman Greene came stamping back into the kitchen, cursing under his breath. “There’s nothing wrong with the circuit breakers that I can see,” he said. “Susan, go call the power company and see what’s going on.”
“Norm, I’m trying to get this eggnog done,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, we have plenty of candlelight. Go on out and mingle. I’ll bring this in a minute.”
“No, I’ll do it. You’ll just screw it up. Go on and call.”
“Honey—”
“Go on!”
She turned and went out of the kitchen, and Claire and I went back into the living room. With the firelight and the flickering candles in the dining and living rooms, the house was only slightly darker than it had been before. People were still laughing and talking in groups and clustering around the buffet table. We joined a group in front of the fireplace, where Walter and Roger and some of the City people were laughing at some piece of Chick Herren’s acid foolishness. He is the editor of our morning daily, and a great friend of Walter’s and mine. Walter reached out and draped his arm around my shoulders.
“What’s with the lights?” he said into my ear.
“I don’t know. Nothing that anybody can find. Susan’s calling the power company. It really doesn’t matter, we don’t need them. But he’s just having a fit. Blaming her for ruining his precious social triumph. I think he thinks she’s cut the main wires or something.”
“I hope she has,” he said. “Didn’t you love it when Holderbein said that about living in Druidwater? Herr Goering isn’t going to get over that little gaffe for a while. God, there’s a real case of being your own enemy.”
What happened next was distressing enough to all of us at the time, but terrifying, I think, only to me then. It was Norman Greene’s reaction to it that set people to murmuring after the party. The lights came surging back. They swelled and bloomed and brightened, shimmering into a superintensity of brightness. The stereo began to purr forth music again, and a clattering, banging whine came from the kitchen, followed by a hoarse cry from Norman Greene and a high, shrill cry, as from a child. Then the lights died again, and we stood once more in candlelight. In the living room and dining room people were still and silent, faces turned toward the kitchen. Walter and I snatched up candelabra from the dining room table, and Dr. Holderbein and Chick Herren got candles from tables in the living room. We burst into the kitchen. The bulk of the party crowded behind us.
Norman Greene stood in the middle of the kitchen, his hands held out before him, fingers stretched stiffly apart. He was covered with eggnog. It masked his contorted face, clotted his hair, dripped slowly down the front of the velvet jacket. He was blinded with it. The runaway blender, untended when the lights had come surging back on, had spread it all over the walls, the ceiling, the counters, the floor.
In a corner of the room, beside the refrigerator, Melissa Greene crouched. She was drawn into a fetal position, head on chest, arms crossed over her stomach. She was whimpering and grunting with spasms of pain, and her taffeta skirt was drawn up around her waist. Excrement smeared her clothing and pooled on the floor around her. While we stood in mute horror in the doorway, another spasm wracked her, and another loose flood of feces splattered onto the floor, and she fell over onto the white Italian tiles and lay there, full length, crying monotonously, as though she would never stop.
21
THE NEXT WEEKEND, on a Saturday afternoon, Walter went to Norman Greene and told him what we thought about the house.
He had not wanted to. Despite the fear that had gripped and shaken me like a demented terrier during the days after the party, despite the murmurings that swept the street, despite Norman Greene’s half-mad fury and humiliation and Susan’s bewildered anguish, I do not think he would have spoken if it had not been for the child. And, of course, for me. But when Claire called late the following week and said that they had had Melissa in the hospital for intensive tests and found that she was suffering from regional ileitis and was very ill, he had reluctantly agreed.
“All right, Colquitt,” he said when he had put the phone back in its cradle. He raised his hands, then dropped them helplessly in his lap. “All right. You win. They’re going to think we’re crazier than hell, but I’m going to talk to them. I still think you’re wrong, but maybe they shouldn’t stay there. Not if there’s the child involved. Maybe they should know about that other stuff.”
“You still think I’m wrong after that awful scene, after Melissa? You saw it, Walter, you saw every bit of it. Remember what I said about the house going after the precise things that you value most? Well, what do you think that poor, awful fool cares most about? His image, his social standing, his perfect, orderly house, his perfect little pseudo-Wasp parties, his perfect, competent wife and perfect, storybook child, his whole perfect, clockwork life.
“And her, what’s her best thing? Him, God help her—his good graces, his opinion of her to run his perfect, stupid house and his perfect, stupid life—and her child. God, that adorable, immaculate little girl, in her ruffled pinafore—So what happened? All at once, in one night, in front of the people he wanted most in the world to impress, standing there dripping eggnog and looking like an utter ass. And his child lying there emptying her bowels in front of all of us. And it wasn’t just an accident with her, a one-shot thing—she’s sick! She’ll be awfully, horribly, messily sick for a long, long time! She wasn’t sick before they came here. Don’t you see, the house isn’t even being subtle anymore! It’s not taking things one at a time, it’s moving too fast, it’s not going to give them the time it gave the Harralsons or the Sheehans, the child could die�
��” I was nearly incoherent with urgency.
“Colquitt, all I’m saying is, look at how it’s going to sound. An electrical malfunction, a child with a serious disease—there’s nothing unnatural about those, taken by themselves.”
“They can’t be taken by themselves,” I said tiredly, “because they didn’t happen that way. You said yourself there was something wrong over there, you agreed with me—you said we’d wait and see, and if anything else happened to anybody else over there, we’d do something about it.”
“I said I’d talk to them,” he snapped. “And no, you can’t go, because the state you’re in, they’d laugh you out of the house. Christ, I don’t even pretend to understand this thing anymore. I’ll go, and I’ll tell them everything that’s happened over there except about us, and Buck and Virginia, and I’ll tell them why you—why we think it’s dangerous for them to stay there. And they’re not going to believe a word of it. But at least we’ll have done something.”
We had not seen the Greenes since that night. Susan Greene had appeared in the kitchen immediately after we had all gotten to the kitchen door, and had cried out in distress and pain at the sight of her pitiful, soiled child. I don’t think she even saw her white-sodden husband. She had scooped Melissa up into her arms and run with her up the stairs, and Claire had followed, carrying a candelabrum. Most of the guests had crowded into the kitchen, exclaiming in helpless sympathy and embarrassment, and among us all we had soothed and reassured Norman Greene back into a cracked kind of mobility. Walter and Roger Swanson had taken him into the downstairs bathroom, and Gwen Parsons and I had gotten paper towels and tackled the worst of the eggnog. Dr. Holderbein, bless his dear, froggy heart, had rummaged in the kitchen cabinets and found bottles of Scotch and vodka and had set up a perfunctory bar in the living room, and Semmes Jennings had brought melting ice from the dead refrigerator, and Chick Herren had marshaled everyone back into the living room and handed out drinks. By the time Norman Greene had reappeared, washed and combed and clad in a lustrous ultrasuede jacket, the party was struggling lamely along in a ghastly parody of normalcy and niceness.
House Next Door Page 22