House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Norman Greene was white-faced and coldly furious, and when Chick put a drink in his hand, he tossed it down without seeming to know what he was doing. He set the glass down and faced us. The stilted chatting stopped and everyone looked at him in silence.

  “I apologize to you all for my wife,” he said in a loud, flattened voice. “She’ll apologize to you herself, I’m sure, when she’s seen to Melissa. I have asked her to have the wiring taken care of, but apparently she has forgotten. I wouldn’t have dreamed of subjecting any of you to this if I had known it had not been repaired.”

  I gasped, my face burning at the sheer treachery of it. A babel of voices rose around him assuring him that it was nothing, he mustn’t worry about it, things like that happened to everybody, the only important thing was the child. Several people began to tell rambling, disjointed stories of malfunctions and embarrassments in their own homes, and a grandly disheveled old doyenne bellowed, “My dear Professor Greene, I was at a pink tea in one of the city’s finest old homes, and the toilets backed up. This was nothing to that, believe me.”

  We all collapsed into the helpless laughter of release, and Norman Greene managed a slitted, wounded shark’s smile. But the evening was broken, of course, and guests began to glance at watches and murmur about the time and retrieve their coats from the downstairs bedroom. Norman Greene stood in the middle of his emptying living room saying helplessly, “No, it’s early, please wait for a minute. Susan will want to say goodnight,” but they murmured politely, “Please don’t trouble her, we’ll let ourselves out,” and “Please don’t worry, we had a marvelous time,” and “We’ll have to get together at our house in a week or two.” The living room emptied quickly of everyone but Walter and me and Roger Swanson.

  Claire and Susan Greene came down the stairs then. Susan had changed into an emerald silk caftan, and though her face was pale and her blue eyes large with strain and worry, managed to look self-possessed and nearly normal. Claire followed her, tight-mouthed.

  “I apologize,” Susan began on the landing. “I don’t know what on earth—” She looked into the empty living room and stopped. She looked at her husband. “Where is everybody?” she said.

  “They went home of course,” said Norman Greene loudly, his back to her. “What did you expect them to do? Stay and play in the eggnog and the—the manure? You haven’t been able to keep the clothes clean or the curtains hung since we moved in here, so I don’t know why I expected you to be able to give a simple party in relative peace. I guess you realize that this has probably ruined me at the college.”

  “Norm,” she said tentatively.

  He wheeled around, his face blind and silver-eyed and terrible. “I told you to call an electrician,” he roared. “I told you last week. I told you to take Melissa to a baby-sitter tonight, you knew she was having that…trouble…”

  “Norman, that’s why I didn’t want to take her out tonight,” cried Susan Greene. “I knew she didn’t feel well—I’m not going to farm her out when she’s sick. I didn’t realize it was this bad; it hasn’t been this bad; she’s been better lately. You know that. But we’re going to have to get her to a doctor tomorrow. I just wanted to let her tell people where to put their coats and then put her to bed. You know how she’s been looking forward to that. I’m sorry about the lights, but I didn’t think—”

  “That’s right!” It was a howl of rage, primal and out of control. “You didn’t think! You didn’t think nine years ago when you—You haven’t been thinking ever since we moved in here—”

  “Shut up, Norman,” Claire hissed. “Just shut up. You’re making an utter ass of yourself, and I’m not going to listen to you bully Susan anymore.”

  She stood, breathing heavily, for a moment, looking up into his face. He said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Susan,” Claire said. “I have an awful mouth. I’ll call you in the morning to check on Melissa. You ought to get back to her now. I think we should go home.”

  She went into the bedroom and returned with their coats. She and Roger walked to the door. Susan and Norman Greene looked after them.

  “See you folks later,” sweet Roger Swanson mumbled.

  “I’m sorry, Norman,” Claire said briefly, and they went out.

  “We’d better go too,” I said, looking desperately at Walter. His face was remote, and I knew that he had simply gone away to some private place inside his head, as he does when he is angry and upset and does not want to show it.

  We went home. We did not talk about it that night.

  At two o’clock the following Saturday afternoon Walter looked out to see if both the Greenes’ cars were there, and then shrugged on his sheepskin jacket and slogged reluctantly across the sodden driveway and up the rhododendron bank to their house. I looked after him, watching while he rang the doorbell, thinking how alone he looked with the house towering around him, and the wet, green-black winter trees. Dwarfed. I was suddenly and terribly, childishly frightened for him and wanted to call him back. Let the stupid, intrusive Greenes wrestle it out by themselves. I hadn’t wanted them there. Norman Greene was an impossible bully, a mean-spirited, rigid tyrant, a voracious climber. Susan Greene was a spineless jellyfish to take his abuse, and take it, and take it. I thought of the subterranean estrangement between Claire and me and flushed with anger. And then I saw again the embarrassed love, the hurting incomprehension in Susan’s plain, pleasant face, and I thought of the child. No. We were right. They had to know.

  I went into the kitchen and made a batch of red clam sauce for spaghetti, and riffled through the record albums and found the florid, familiar Chopin etudes that have soothed me through more than one crisis, and settled down on the den sofa with The New Yorker. Razz and Foster curled up in an elaborately ignoring heap at my feet on the afghan, and we all fell asleep. When Walter let himself back into the house it was close to five o’clock and dark was falling down through a rising wind.

  His face was burned red with wind and cold, but there were vertical white furrows on each side of his mouth. He passed through the den without a word and went to hang up his coat. I heard him back in the kitchen getting a glass out of the cupboard, and ice clinked and a cork thunked.

  “Bring me one,” I said in sleep-distorted dread. He came into the den carrying two Scotches.

  “Well? What happened?”

  “He showed me the door is what happened. Ordered me out of his house. Said never to darken his door again. Said he’d call the police if he ever caught me with so much as a foot on his property. Fini. End of song.”

  “Walter, oh, baby, not really!”

  “Oh, yes, really. I don’t know as I blame him, to tell you the truth. I mean, it was a bad overreaction, but I could hear my own voice going on and on for almost three damned hours, and I sounded…crazy. Just crazy. Worse than I thought I would. I knew how I sounded, I knew I was screwing it all up. There’s no way you can get across the—the horror of the stuff that’s happened over there unless you’ve lived in the middle of it from the beginning. I could hear how I sounded to them. I should have just apologized and cut it short and come home.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry! I should have gone; it’s me who really thinks all that stuff, not you! I wouldn’t have cared how I sounded.”

  “Yes, you would, because you’d have sounded just as flat-out insane, as I did. Those people had no idea what’s happened over there, and then somebody comes in out of nowhere and starts telling them about miscarriages, and strokes, and dead puppies, and fags, and dead kids in Vietnam, and television programs that weren’t on, and dead kids on telephones, and then says that there might be something unnatural in the house and they ought to move out immediately. You try saying that to people who don’t know anything about that house, who haven’t lived through some of this, and see what kind of reaction you get. Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, Colquitt, even Claire wouldn’t listen to you, and she knows about that stuff!”

  “Not about the last thing—not about
Buck and Virginia! Not about…us. She’d believe that.”

  “Tell her, then! Tell the Greenes if you want to. We probably should have told somebody about them in the very beginning. Do you think the Greenes would believe me if I went running back over there now and said, ‘Oh, by the way, the capper is that I caught my wife kissing the architect in your kitchen and almost killed them both with a knife, and my wife found the last guy who lived here screwing the lady next door, and it put his wife in the funny farm forever more’? Do you think that would change anything now?”

  “But they didn’t know Virginia, they didn’t know Buck, they couldn’t know how…impossible it would be for them to do that! They didn’t know Kim, and they don’t know us, not really.”

  “Claire did. Claire does. You want to tell Claire?”

  “No,” I moaned. “I can’t tell anybody, ever. You know we can’t do that.”

  “I know.” He slumped back against the sofa cushions and rubbed his eyes tiredly. My heart strained.

  “But, Walter, why did he get so mad? I mean, even if he thought you were a stark, raving lunatic, he must have seen that you were serious, that you were terribly concerned for their welfare. I mean, he could have just—thanked you, and not believed you—”

  “Colquitt, he chose to think that I came over and told him that because we couldn’t stand him and wanted to scare him out of the neighborhood. He got hysterical. Just went bananas. He was screaming stuff about anti-Semitism, and all of us thinking we were better than he was, and that he had, by God, worked all his life to live well, in a house like that, to get a teaching position at a college with some prestige, and no rich, effeminate Wasp was going to scare him off with lies and shit about haunting. He said he didn’t give a damn if the whole town wanted to ride him out on a rail, he wasn’t moving out. He said his little Wasp wife might toady up to all her Wasp buddies, but he was goddamned if he would. I’m surprised somebody didn’t call the police, he was making so much noise.”

  “Oh, God,” I whispered, “I never thought of that. Of course that’s just how he’d take it. Poor damned fool. He’ll never leave now. They’re just…doomed. They’re gone.”

  “Well, right now I couldn’t care less,” Walter said bitterly. “About him, anyway. I haven’t exactly been thrown out of many houses in my lifetime, whatever else I may have accomplished. It’s quite uniquely humiliating.”

  “What about her? Was she there?” I asked in dread and pain. “What about Melissa?”

  “Melissa is in the hospital, and will be for quite a while, I gather. But, oh, yes, she was there. For almost the first time since they took Melissa to the hospital, getting some rest. She was there, all right. I made a clean sweep of it. She was absolutely scared to death. I think she’d have snatched the kid out of the hospital and left that house and this town that minute when I finished telling them about it if he hadn’t turned it all around on her. He said it was all her fault, that she was such a slob nobody wanted to be around them, nobody could stand being in her house. He said she had herself to thank if his whole career went down the tube and her child grew up without any friends and none of us ever spoke to them again. He was very eloquent.”

  “Oh, my God, what have I done?” I cried. “I never meant to let such horrible, awful things loose.”

  “It’s not your fault, Col,” he said bleakly, pulling me close and spilling my Scotch. “I agreed with you. I may have blown it, but I guess we had to try. I think I’d do it again if I had to. Whatever his reaction, they deserved to know what’s happened over there.”

  “Maybe I could go talk to her…”

  “No. Let her alone. I’ve scared her to death, and he’s torn her practically to pieces. I started to defend her when he jumped on her, and that’s when he threw me out. They’re not going to want to see either one of us again. I’d almost hope whatever it is over there jerks a knot in his stupid Nazi neck, if she wasn’t there.”

  “But she is,” I said, beginning to sob with weariness and hopelessness. “She is.”

  Late that night Claire called. “Susan Greene has just left,” she said. “She told me what you’d sent Walter over there to say. I know it was your doing. I just called to say that you’ve succeeded in practically destroying her, if that’s what you set out to do. You couldn’t have picked a better way to do it. He’s been as brutal to her as it’s humanly possible to be, and Walter has scared her within an inch of her life, and her child is desperately ill, and you can chalk up a good day’s work. I don’t want to see you again, Colquitt, and I don’t care who knows what you’ve done this time. I’m going to tell everybody I know that you’re a jealous, vindictive, crazy woman. People ought to be warned about you.”

  Her voice broke and she hung up before I could answer. I felt nothing. For days after that I walked in a void of stillness and emptiness.

  She was as good as her word. The next weekend we went to the club for lunch. Walter made me go. He said it was still our world and we had to live in it. I knew he was right, but I shrank from entering the dining room. Claire and Roger often lunched there on Sundays. But they were not in the room. Martin Sawyer, Walter’s warm-weather tennis partner, was, though, with his wife and some people I did not know. They were at a table near the fireplace, and as we passed on our way to a vacant table for two by the wide, mullioned windows, Martin called out, “Hey, Walter! What’s this I hear about ghosties and ghoulies next door to you?”

  “You’d be surprised what we’ve got next door to us,” Walter called back cheerfully, and they laughed, and we sat down. I saw Martin talking to the strangers and gesturing in our direction, and they looked at us and smiled, but the smiles were constrained and uneasy. Martin saw me looking at them and raised his glass in an affable, silent toast. That was to be the tack, then. Amusement, constraint, and polite incredulity.

  A few days after that Walter came home later than usual and was silent and abstracted during dinner.

  “Okay, what?” I said finally, when the silence had spun on into the evening. The television set beat futilely against it.

  “Well, Charlie called me in just as I was leaving. He asked me what the hell was going on over here. He said he’d been hearing some pretty funny stuff about us thinking the house next door was…not quite right or something. I tried to gloss it over, but then he said old Winkler, he of the prison bed empire, had called him this afternoon and pulled his account. Said he didn’t want his firm’s impeccable old name connected with weirdo goings-on like that.”

  “Oh, Walter. Oh, dear God.”

  “Oh, it’s no great loss. Charlie was laughing about it. The guy’s been a royal pain in the ass ever since we got the account. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans as far as billing went, and the creative department is going to rejoice mightily. Charlie said we probably ought to lie low on talking about it, though—meaning you and me. He said the guy had heard about it from somebody he didn’t even know, at a Rotary meeting or something.”

  “Did you tell Charlie about it? About what we think, I mean?”

  “No. I’m going to have to, though. I made a date for drinks with him Friday after work. You want to come along?”

  “I guess I ought to. I’m the one that got you into all this.”

  “No need if you don’t want to. I guess it would be better if it was just me, at that. If anybody in the world will understand, Charlie will. I should have told him everything tonight, but I just didn’t feel like talking about it.”

  “No. Of course you didn’t.”

  Another card came from Kim Dougherty the next day. I read it up in my office, with Vivaldi splashing from the radio and my coffee pot bubbling, and Foster’s grating, sleepy purr making a cosy counterpoint to both. Outside the late January wind prowled and fingered the shutters and ticked the bare, wet twigs of the big water oak against my windows, but inside it was warm and rosy-lit, womblike. I was spending a lot of time up there during those weeks, the still weeks of waiting again.

  �
��Things are looking up,” wrote Kim in his sprawling, flyaway hand. “I’m on staff now in restorations, in strictly a lackey’s position. I have a room in the old section, in a funny, narrow old house that leans right out over the Arno. And I have met me one tough lady. I’ll write more later. I just wanted you to know I’m alive.”

  22

  FOR A TIME AFTER THAT Walter and I lived very quietly in a shell of routine and household ritual and ordinariness. We were both strangely tired and went to bed early most evenings and slept heavily and dreamlessly. A kind of peace settled over us, the sort of narrow peace that I imagined pioneer families lived in during the bitter black winters, when dark fell early and lingered late, and snow piled silently against doors and windows, and commerce with the outside world was suspended until spring. Our normal winter world of work and shopping and errands and dinners on trays before the fire in the den expanded to envelop us totally, to absorb and swallow us.

  We drew closer than ever to each other. It seemed then, for a space of time, that we were sufficient unto ourselves; we might have been strangers in a strange city, newly married, knowing no one and needing no one. There was about that time a timelessness. We dwelled little on the recent past, and not at all on the future, the spring and summer to come. Television and the radio, the newspapers and books became very important to us; we followed the local professional basketball and hockey teams with an attention that bordered on obsession, and watched programs on television that ordinarily would have left us limp with boredom or gasping with disbelieving laughter. We both read the papers from cover to cover as avidly as homesick exiles in a foreign country might devour the papers from home. I pulled out my cache of seldom-used cookbooks and experimented with exotic recipes for curries and Chinese dishes and elaborate, spiced stews and soups, spending long hours, after I had finished my day’s work, in my bright, shuttered kitchen. We ate the dishes judiciously, lingering over them and rating their relative merits with the absorbed seriousness of gastronomes. Walter painted the woodwork in the dining room and kitchen, and we repapered the downstairs bathroom. We went to few of the small, informal dinner parties that flourish on our street in the cold months. It was not that we were not invited. Few were given. With the Guthries away, and the cold silence between Claire and me, the street seemed to draw in upon itself, as Walter and I had done, and lights glowed most evenings only from the backs of houses, where kitchens and dens were.