The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Poof,” said Violette, frowning. “That is not enough, the slipping of an old man’s memory.”

  André smiled. “He never called Robert ‘Eddie’ and never made him such promises and never invited him to the shop, though he loves Robert also, and, in particular, that silly Gertrude who considers she speaks French better than I. And when he gave them a dollar, he would give me two dollars and an extra smile.”

  “That is encouraging,” Violette conceded. “He is dying, of course. We shall soon see. You are a most satisfying son, my dear.”

  A maid brought them hot chocolate with whipped cream, which they drank together by the fire, listening to the storm. “You will take me to Paris this time, Mama?” suggested André. “It is very tiresome here.”

  Violette had already given this some thought. She had come to the conclusion that André himself might be “tiresome” in Paris, a hindrance to the gay life his mother lived. Ralph hardly spoke of the child and was certainly never more than mildly interested in Maria’s dutiful accounts of his schooling and his health. Since the war it was very hard to obtain responsible women to care for children. Nanette would surely leave if André was imposed upon her, and not only was Nanette extremely discreet but she was an excellent cook and a frugal housekeeper. Violette said, “Paris is not the same as when I was a girl. You would not find it interesting, my dear.”

  André shrugged, without disappointment. He said in English, “Okay.” He was shrewd far beyond his years, and he was fond of his pretty, smart little mother and did not wish to interfere with her. She bent and kissed him, and he could smell the enticing and heady bouquet of her perfume. She said approvingly, “You are a most understanding son. If you were truly an American boy, you would kick and scream and pout, not because you had been crossed but because I had given you an occasion to be disagreeable and intemperate. You will be a civilized man. When you are twelve, then you shall come to Paris.”

  The house was absolutely silent, as if untenanted. Only the butler and one maid remained this evening, and they would soon leave for midnight Mass. Violette put André to bed, and she sang inappropriate songs to him as he lay under his blankets, and he laughed merrily. Later Violette, humming lightly, went in search of David. He was in the music room at the piano, but he was not playing. His elbow rested on the polished top of the great instrument, and his chin was in his palm, and he was apparently studying the beautiful Renoir hanging on the yellow damask wall. Violette paused on the threshold to admire her brother-in-law’s fine, aquiline profile. Ah, if he were not one of these puritanical Engers! A little dalliance, a little flirtation, was entirely innocent, but no Enger could understand that, not even Ralph after all those years in Paris.

  Violette was about to enter the room when David sighed and dropped his head on his arm. With admirable tact, she understood that he would not be pleased to see her. There was a desolation about him; the golden lights on the walls shone on the sleekness of his narrow head. Had he been unfortunate in an affair? Violette remembered that once he had loved Margaret, his brother’s wife, but that was long ago and love was a moon-moth thing that lived only for a day. Violette could believe in the grande passion; she had believed in it many times. But it was only in novels for shopgirls that love lasted forever. Perhaps it was the matter of money. Violette could understand that perfectly. David was no longer young, and money was extremely important to men whose youth was passing rapidly. The young Frenchwoman was sympathetic. David was proud; doubtless it was onerous for him to be Edward’s dependent. (She did not know that David no longer received money from his brother.) These Americans! In Europe it would be taken for granted that the man with money should show a proper solicitude for his less endowed relatives. The relatives, in turn, felt not the slightest obligation. But Americans were very peculiar about money. They believed that even though they had a relative who was rich they should actually work for their own living! How very uncivilized and gauche. She was happy that Ralph had no such foolish convictions.

  Violette withdrew noiselessly and went back to her rooms, passing up the white staircase and looking down, as she did so, at the baronial vista of hall and the dimly lit shadows of the great rooms on each side. It might be very dull in this house, but it was also reassuring. She went to bed, yawning contentedly, waiting for Ralph to return. As she dozed, she thought she heard the distant piano rolling in melancholy and muted thunder against the louder thunder of the storm. She also thought she heard a door open and close somewhere. Then she was fast asleep.

  David was playing a Brahms concerto, and he was playing as he had never played before, not only with technical brilliance and faultlessness but with passion and grandeur and humanity. He was absorbed in the music; he was expressing, for the first time, in classical music, his grief and despair and loneliness, his hopeless love for Margaret, his love for his brother and his impotence to help that brother. The music flowed from under his fingers and hovered in the air like sorrowful and mourning echoes. The big music room was filled with the lament of rebellious and imploring phantoms. Sometimes their voices sank to a subdued supplication; then they rose wildly like souls that could not be comforted. The storm added its drums of dolorous power.

  Now David, like one in a trance, passed from the personal anguish of a single man to a universal anguish, with majesty and tragic undertones filled with a prayerful resignation. It was as if an enlightened Job acknowledged not only the calamitous and unknowable fate of man, but the mighty dignity and mystery of God to Whom all was known. The conversation between man and the Divine seemed to fill not only this room but the thundering world outside, and to penetrate to the farthest star. It faded, at last, into reconciliation, into acceptance, into slow tender notes of mutual and confident love, into promise given and promise received, forever and forever.

  David’s hands lay exhausted on the keys; drops of water stood on his dark forehead. His face was peaceful and calm.

  “So you can play when you want to,” said a harsh voice from the doorway. David started and swung on the stool. Edward stood there, wrathful, his pale eyes violent. “You can play as you never play for an audience—if you want to.”

  He seemed very excited and stirred, under the wrath and violence. He came into the room, walking with a heavy tread on the parquet floor. His breath was audible. “I’ve never heard such music,” he went on in a low and savage voice. “And no one else ever has, either, from you. You can create as I knew you could. But you never wanted to, did you? It was too much to ask of you, too much for me to ask! I was only Old Garlic and Pickles, never a man who knew music. Why—” He choked, and a terrible grayness washed over his face, and he caught the edge of the grand piano.

  “Ed,” said David, getting up in deep alarm. But Edward waved him off, with greater savagery. “Shut up,” he said, and his voice was suddenly weak and gasping. His eyes remained violently on his brother. “God,” he whispered, “I could kill you!”

  He stood there, and his rasping breath filled all the room, while David stood in agony and listened. There was nothing he could do under the glare of those raging and hating eyes, those condemning eyes. He could not explain, for there was no explanation for him. And Edward, seeing his brother so still, so pale, and so obdurate, as he thought, and so defiant, as he thought, really was possessed with the urge to murder. He might have moved upon David then and there, but the tearing horror in his chest was like an animal.

  David shut his eyes suddenly. He could hear Edward’s ragged breath, the quick gasps. The storm rose in power and fury, and it seemed less to come from the chaotic world outside than in this room. What is wrong, what is wrong with him? David asked himself in terrified despair. He’s sick; he sounds as if he’s dying. If only I could reach him … David opened his eyes. Edward’s color was a little better, but his hand still clung to the piano. He was still staring fixedly at the older man as at an enemy both despised and repudiated.

  David clenched his slender hands at his sides. “Ed,”
he said, “you must listen to me. I don’t know how to say this. We never could talk. None of us could ever really talk to each other. I want to try now. I want to help you.”

  Incredulity and affront leapt like a blaze across Edward’s face in a frightening flow of red. “Help me! You!” His voice was stronger, charged with renewed wrath. “You parasite! You’ve taken all I could give you, and you’ve never returned anything, until now, and it wasn’t for me! You, help me?”

  “I think I can,” said David, and his voice broke. “If you’ll let me try. Do we have to be like this? Let’s sit down and talk—”

  He came closer to Edward, his concern growing for his brother. “You look sick,” he said pleadingly. “Let’s sit down. I’ve a lot to say to you—help—”

  Then Edward raised his hand and struck David furiously across the face, and David, overwhelmed both by the force of the blow and the dreadfulness of it, staggered back and fell against the piano. His hand reached for a hold and crashed on the keys and a discordant sound cried out. Then he stood there, his head bent, livid welts springing up on his assaulted cheek.

  It was as if Edward had struck involuntarily, for he said with the same unchanged violence and with no satisfaction, “All the days of my life—all the days of my life—” And he turned and walked out of the room, his step heavier than before, and slower, like a man who had come to the end of his endurance. He stopped in the doorway, to hold his side for a moment. It was as if he had forgotten David.

  Then David was alone again. He sat down on the piano stool, his head drooping. It was no use. There was nothing he could do. His cheek throbbed and he was only vaguely aware of it. There was a more torturous throbbing in his heart.

  When Margaret returned home, cold and strangely disheartened as she was so often these days, she went at once to Edward’s room. But the room was dark. The shaded light in the sitting room filtered into the bedroom, and she saw the long mound of Edward’s body, very still. She sighed with relief. He too often remained up half the night reading. It was not yet midnight yet he was asleep. Somewhat cheered, she herself prepared for bed.

  The bells of the churches sang faintly through the snow and the gale. And Edward lay in his bed and cried silently in himself, “Help. Help.” And did not know to Whom he cried.

  There was a big and glittering tree for the children in the large living room. The storm had withdrawn in the night, and the world shone as if polished into marble, white on the earth, bluish gray in the sky. The adults gathered with the children, to be pleased with their pleasure. The aunts and uncles, remembering early rigorous lives, lived vicariously in the excitement and delight of André, Robert, and Gertrude. Margaret thought the gifts too lavish and expensive and too numerous. It wasn’t a wholesome thing for children to be satiated this way, as satiated they would later be. She had given Gertrude two dozen fine, but plain, linen handkerchiefs, and a silver wrist watch to Robert, and a similar watch to André. Sylvia, when Margaret was momentarily distracted, pointed out these gifts to the others with disdain.

  But Gertrude, who was so understanding, and Robert, who was so good and amiable, gave their mother a sincere and loving kiss, and she was comforted. André, thanking his aunt with a politeness she thought excessive and a little mocking, put the watch aside, to rejoice in a gold watch from David, and other wonderful things. Edward had given each of the children a twenty-dollar gold piece. “All he can think of is money,” Sylvia whispered to her brothers. She had bought Robert a silver flute and Gertrude a small typewriter. André did not fare so well from her, however. She had given him a book of fairy tales, which highly diverted him. He showed it to his mother, who smothered a laugh.

  Maria, who thought much as Margaret thought, had knitted the children sweaters and gloves.

  “What is wrong with him—again?” Sylvia muttered to Gregory, as they knelt in a welter of gold and silver paper near the tree. Gregory, smirking contemptuously, glanced over his shoulder at Edward, who sat at the far end of the vast room reading his newspaper. “We’ve probably got a contagious and loathsome disease,” Gregory replied. “He looks like hell, though, doesn’t he? Ten years older than a year ago. Business bad or something?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Sylvia, indifferently. “He’s just opened four more stores. What does he think of when he isn’t thinking of money? What a life that must be, narrow and sterile, with no intellectual or artistic resources! He can’t tell an opera apart from a symphony, or a water color from an oil, and I suppose he’s never read two books in his life. How did we ever get such an anomaly in this family?”

  Gregory reached up to pat André as the child wandered by, his eyes inquisitive and his ears always awake to catch a morsel to be repeated to his mother. But Sylvia said coldly as André wandered on, “I don’t like that boy. He’s sly, and I don’t think he’s too bright.”

  Gregory gave her a shrewd look. “Don’t underestimate—” he said. “By the way, Old Garlic and Pickles is reading my book in manuscript. Insists on it, since The Sun Rises West. Waves the old money club, which is all he has, but it’s potent, unfortunately. Don’t underestimate him, Sylvia.”

  Sylvia shrugged. She smiled, however, when she saw her shy husband playing with Robert’s, toy railroad; Robert knelt beside him, laughing excitedly. Then Sylvia said, “And what’s wrong with Dave? His cheek is bruised; he said he slipped on the polished floor of the music room and hit his cheek against the piano. But he looks distracted today, and sick.”

  “We’re a very mysterious family,” said Gregory, in a light and jeering voice. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said to Gertrude, who was approaching them. “How’s the typewriter? Thinking of putting your old uncle in the shade, eh?”

  Ralph came up to them, frowning. “Just had a consultation with old Burns about Pa. He came in early on his daily call. He says Pa is definitely failing.”

  “Oh?” said Gregory, without interest.

  “He ought to be in the Clinic,” said Ralph. “But Ma insists he stay here.”

  “Masochists, that’s what we are,” said Gregory. “What’s your opinion? Think the old man will last out the winter?”

  Ralph said, grinning, “They have new methods at the Clinic. If Pa were there, they could do something challenging.”

  Sylvia shuddered. “Don’t use that damned word. I hate it. Everything’s ‘challenging’ these days; right out of the mouth of Jung. It’s even a ‘challenge’ to sell soap.”

  Gregory sat back on his heels, and his eyes, pale gray and penetrating, like Edward’s, fixed themselves on his brother and sister. “The old boy must have a pot,” he said thoughtfully. “And probably never spent a cent of it. Wonder who it goes to?”

  “Why, Ma, of course, probably about half, and the rest divided among us,” said Sylvia. “Ellis and I could use our share. There’s a Strad he wants.”

  Margaret went to Edward at the far and deserted end of the room. She saw at once that he was not really reading his newspaper; it was upside down. She bent and put her hand on his shoulder, for she had been overpoweringly shocked at his appearance that morning. “Dear,” she said, “why don’t you lie down before dinner? You look so tired.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, smiling at her. His hand rose and smoothed her white wrist and hand. “I like to listen to the children having a good time with their presents. Gertrude’s fascinated with her typewriter, and Robert with his flute.”

  Margaret’s face changed slightly. “It was awfully good of Sylvia,” she said, and straightened up.

  “Now, now,” said Edward. “Let’s not start one of our little spats about the children again. It’s Christmas. By the way, I haven’t thanked you yet for the gold pen-and-pencil set.” To her bafflement he looked aside, and the shadow she dreaded fell over his eyes.

  “Well, I hope you use them,” she said, trying for lightness. “I’m so tired of seeing you use that ancient set you have, with the chipped bakelite. And thank you again for the diamond bracelet. See? Isn
’t it pretty?” She pushed up the sleeve of her white velvet dressing gown, and the blazing light of the winter sun struck the bauble into colored fire. Then she bent and kissed Edward full on the mouth with a desperate yearning and with a silent prayer for him.

  That was one o’clock. Dinner was at three. The noise in the living room became more febrile as the children became more confused over the proliferation of gifts. “I really think that Gertrude and Robert should go to their rooms and rest,” said Margaret. “After all, they’ve just had an infection.”

  “Leave them alone,” said Edward, abruptly. He was thinking of his desolate Christmases when he had been young. But Margaret was hurt at his tone and went without speaking. She saw Maria beckoning her from the doorway, and hurried to the older woman. Maria said, with no emotion showing on her large face, “Father Enger is restless. I am disturbed. I have been sitting with him for the past hour. A moment ago he turned his head to me and said one word, ‘Eddie.’ Very clear. Will you ask Edward to come upstairs at once?”

  Margaret looked searchingly into Maria’s eyes and saw the withdrawn grief there in spite of Maria’s composure. “Of course,” she said and went back to Edward. His face was still shadowed and he glanced at her with some impatience. “Darling,” she said. “Please come. Your father is asking for you.”

  The pupils of his eyes distended until they seemed to blacken the iris. “Asking for me?” he said incredulously. “Why, he hasn’t been able to do anything but grunt since he had his stroke. Who says he wants to see me?” He rattled his newspaper.

  “Your mother. She’s just gone back upstairs.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Edward. He dropped the newspaper. “Why don’t they let the old man alone, to sleep?”

  “You’re not coming?” asked Margaret, disbelievingly.

  “Of course not. It wears me out just to look at him. He died when he had his stroke. He’s just a vegetable now.”