by Peter Straub
“Yes,” Davey said, “but it didn’t start until a month or two after the founding of the house. Before that, things were less formal.”
“We’ll think of something,” Paddi said. “Think—what did you forget?”
“The storage area in the basement,” Davey said. “I don’t think anybody knows what’s down there. My grandfather never threw anything out.”
“Okay. What would you like to do tonight?”
There were some new movies, how about a movie?
“Or we could go upstairs. Would you like that?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I would.”
23
AFTER THEY DRESSED and left the room, their arms around each other’s waists, Davey felt that his life had undergone a fundamental change. His days and nights had been reversed, and his daytime self, which did boring things at Chancel House, was merely the dream of the more adventurous night-self, which bloomed under the ministrations of Paddi Mann.
They unclasped at the staircase, too narrow to permit them to walk down side by side. Paddi went before him, and he placed his hands on her shoulders. His shirt rode up on his wrist, uncovering his square gold watch. It was a few minutes past six. He wondered what they would do when they reached the street—it was scarcely believable that an outer world existed.
Davey followed her down the last of the stairs, past the empty desk, and outside into a world far too bright. Noises clashed and jangled in the air. Taxis the color of brushfire charged along Second Avenue. A drunken teenage boy in jeans and a denim shirt three times his size lolled against a parking meter” poisonous fumes of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke came boiling through his skin and floated into Davey’s nostrils.
“Davey—”
“Yes?”
“Keep looking for that manuscript. Maybe it’s in the Westerholm house.”
A bus the size of an airplane whooshed up to the curb, displacing thousands of cubic feet of air and pulverizing a layer of rubble. Davey clapped his hands over his ears, and Paddi waved and glided away.
Alden must have looked into the unused office and seen him leafing through a stack of forgotten manuscripts, some so old they were carbons, because when Davey looked over his shoulder his father loomed behind him. Where the hell had he been the last two nights? His mother had been trying to get him out to Connecticut for the weekend, but the kid never answered his phone. What happened, had he found a new girlfriend or was he turning into a barfly?
Davey said he had been feeling antisocial. It had never occurred to him that it might be his parents who were calling. After all, he saw his father every day.
He was expected at the Poplars for the weekend, beginning Friday night. Alden turned and marched out of the little office, which had the dreariness of all empty spaces meant to be occupied by busy and productive people.
Paddi’s trophy did not appear among the papers in the empty office. Davey took the elevator to the basement.
At two twenty-five, he emerged from the storage enclosure with blackened hands and smears of dust on his suit and his face. He had found boxes of letters from deceased authors to deceased editors, group photos of unknown men in square double-breasted suits and Adolphe Menjou mustaches, a meerschaum pipe, a badly tarnished silver cocktail shaker with a silver swizzle stick, but he had not found his trophy.
Two hours before he was to meet Paddi at an address she had printed on a slip of paper now in his jacket pocket, he returned to the basement and again attacked the boxes. He unearthed a carton of Artie Shaw seventy-eights and a deerstalker hat once likely paired with the meerschaum. In a jumble of old catalogs he came across copies of his mother’s two early novels, which he set aside. A fabric envelope tied with a ribbon yielded a copy of the photograph he had described to Paddi, and this, too, he set aside. Night Journey’s precious manuscript declined to reveal itself. Paddi’s final words came back to him, and he promised himself to have a good look through the closets and attic of the Poplars before coming back to town on Sunday.
24
AN ELEMENT OF disaster, however muted, was built into all of Davey’s weekends at his parents’ house. Daisy might appear for dinner too drunk to sit upright, or a lesser degree of intoxication might bring on a bout of weeping before the end of the soup course. Accusations, some so veiled Davey could not understand exactly who was being accused of what, might fly across the table. Even the uneventful weekends were tainted with the air of oppression, of mysterious but essential things left unsaid. This weekend, however, was an outright calamity.
The Italian girl’s nephew, Jeffrey, had recently joined the Poplars household. At this point, his presence seemed an unnecessary affectation on Alden’s part. Until Davey arrived in Westerholm on Friday evening, he had expected a younger male version of Maria, a cheerful, smiling person with the stout physique of a tenor hurrying forward to snatch away his weekend bag. But once Davey and Alden came in through the front door, Jeffrey was revealed to be a tall, middle-aged man in a perfectly fitted gray suit who showed no signs of hurrying forward, snatching bags or doing anything but nodding at them and continuing to pass through the rear of the hall, presumably on his way to the kitchen. His face seemed to suggest a quantity of thoughts and judgments held in check, and his eyes were hooded. Davey thought he must have been some foreign publisher his father had enticed into his web. Then Alden had introduced them, and the two had exchanged a look, Davey imagined, of mutual suspicion.
Friday’s dinner had not been unusual. Alden had dominated the conversation, Daisy had agreed with everything he said, and Davey had been silent. When he mentioned the new edition of Driver’s book, his father changed the subject. After dinner, Alden said that he hoped Davey would get some rest, he wasn’t looking very good, to be frank. By ten, despite the coffee, he was asleep in his old bed.
To his surprise, Davey did not wake up until eleven on Saturday morning. By the time he left his room, it was eleven-thirty. The irregular tap of typewriter keys and the smell of cigarette smoke, along with the faint drone of a radio, came through the door of his mother’s studio. For a moment he considered going back for the books he had brought along from the Chancel House basement, but he decided to surprise his mother with them at brunch on Sunday, as he had originally planned.
Maria poured steaming coffee into a mug, uncovered golden toast in a silver rack, and asked if he would like a small omelette. Davey said that toast and jam would be fine and asked if she knew where Mr. Chancel was. Mr. Chancel had gone out shopping. Then, because she seemed to be preparing to leave, he asked her about Jeffrey.
Jeffrey was the son of her sister-in-law. Yes, he did enjoy very much to work for the Chancels. Before he come here? Well, before he come here, he do many things. College student. Soldier. Yes, officer in Vietnam.
Where college?
Maria struggled to remember. Harterford? Haverford? Davey supplied, aghast. In Massachusetts, said Maria, badly mangling the name. A terrible possibility occurred to Davey. Harvard? Maybe, could be, Maria offered. She untied her apron, and left him to wonder.
With at least an hour to squander before either parent appeared, Davey searched the basement without any luck. When he came back upstairs, he found his father removing groceries of various kinds, including scotch and vodka, from bags bearing the names of Waldbaum’s and Good Grape Harvest.
“Doesn’t Jeffrey do that sort of thing?” he asked.
“Jeffrey has the weekend off,” his father announced. “Like you. What were you up to down there, that you got so dirty?”
“Trying to find some old books,” Davey said.
During lunch, Alden abandoned the usual monologue to question his son about Frank Neary and Frank Tidball, their longtime crossword-puzzle makers. For decades Neary and Tidball had dealt with the company through Davey’s predecessor, an amiable old alcoholic named Charlie Westerberg. Soon after Charlie had staggered cheerfully off into retirement, Neary and Tidball hired an agent, with the result that they were now paid
a slightly higher fee for their puzzles. Most of the increase went in the agent’s commission, but Alden had never ceased to blame Davey for the insurrection. For half an hour, he was forced to defend the two old puzzle makers against his father’s implications that they were past their prime and should be replaced. Alden’s real but unadmitted objections lay in the discovery, made soon after Westerberg’s departure, that the two men shared an address in Rhinebeck. Neary and Tidball would be more difficult to replace than his father understood. There were only a few young crossword-puzzle makers, most of whom had adopted innovations undesirable to Chancel House customers, who did not long for clues about Moody Blues lyrics or the films of Cheech and Chong.
During this discussion, Daisy toyed with her food, at random intervals smiling to indicate that she was paying attention. As soon as Maria began clearing the plates, she excused herself in a little-girl voice and went back upstairs. Alden asked Davey a few questions about Leonard Gimmel and Teddy Brunhoven—he was always interested in the murderers—then wandered off to watch a baseball game on television. Within fifteen minutes, he would be dozing in his easy chair. Davey thanked Maria for the lunch and climbed the stairs to the attic.
The Poplars’ attic was divided into three unequal areas. The old maid’s rooms, the smallest of these, were a series of three chambers situated around a common bathroom and a narrow staircase at the north end of the house. These wretched rooms had been empty since early in the reign of Helen Day. (Davey’s parents had ordered the construction of two large apartments over the garage, one for the Cup Bearer, the other for any overflow guests, and these apartments now housed Maria and her nephew.) The second, central portion of the attic, roughly the size of a hotel ballroom, had been floored and finished but otherwise unchanged. It was here that Lincoln Chancel’s gifts to the first David Chancel had been preserved for the second, and for this reason the central section of the attic had always inflicted an oppressive, uncanny feeling of fraudulence upon Davey. The third section, reached by a door from the middle attic, had been floored but not otherwise finished.
Metaphorically holding his breath against the psychic atmosphere in the central portion of the attic, Davey walked through the jumble of old chairs, broken lamps, boxes upon boxes, and ratty couches to make sure that the old maid’s rooms were as empty as he remembered.
The three little rooms contained nothing but spiderwebs, white walls blossoming with mildew, and dust-gray floors. Then he made another quick pass through the center of the attic to inspect the unfinished section. At last he could no longer postpone moving into the main area of the attic, jammed with Victorian furniture.
The old oppression came back to him in various forms as he lifted padded cushions and bent down to see far back into wardrobe closets. Davey experienced resentment. Why should he waste his time like this? Who was Paddi, anyhow, to set him prowling thieflike through his parents’ house?
Davey’s thoughts had reached this unhappy point when he heard footsteps on the stairs leading to the maid’s quarters. He froze. His mind went empty, as though he were a burglar about to be discovered. He half-padded, half-ran to the light switch beside the main attic stairs, flicked it down, and crouched behind a Chinese screen in a heavy wooden frame.
The footsteps on the stairs reached the maid’s rooms a few seconds after Davey had found shelter. Footsteps rang on the wooden floor. Peering around the side of the screen, Davey saw a line of light appear beneath the door separating the maid’s quarters from the rest of the attic. He drew back. The footsteps advanced toward the door. He flattened his upper body over his knees and covered his head with his hands. The door swung open, and a shaft of light hurtled toward him. Then the entire room flared with light.
A voice he did not know called out, “Who’s here?”
Footsteps came toward him. Davey found himself on his feet, fists raised against the shadow whirling to meet him. The shadow grunted in shock and surprise and struck out. The blow drove Davey’s right hand into the bridge of his nose. Blood spurted out onto his clothes, and a bright, clear wave of pain made the world go dark. The side of his head crashed into the frame of the screen.
A hand caught his hair and pulled sharply, painfully, upward. “What the hell did you do that for?”
Puckered with consternation, Jeffrey’s face stared down at him.
“I thought you were someone else,” Davey said.
“You attacked me,” Jeffrey said. “You jumped up like a—”
“Wraith,” Davey said. “I’m sorry.”
“So’m I,” said Jeffrey.
Davey clutched the standard of a tall lamp and tilted back his head. Sluggish blood ran down his throat. He said, “I guess I got scared. How did you know someone was up here? I thought you had the weekends off.”
“I saw the lights go on from my windows.”
Davey groped in his pocket for his handkerchief and swabbed his face before holding it to his nose. “Say, Jeffrey.”
“Yes?”
“Did you go to Harvard?”
“If I did, I hope nobody finds out,” Jeffrey said.
Davey swallowed. His entire face hurt.
He spent half an hour cleaning bloodstains from the attic floor, then went to his bathroom, washed his face and hands, and fell asleep stretched out on his covers with a cold cloth on the bruised parts of his face. He woke up in time to shower and put on fresh clothes for dinner. His nose was swollen, and a purple lump had risen on his right temple. When he explained at dinner that he had hit himself in the face with the bedroom door, his father said, “Funny, when you have kids nobody ever tells you how many lies you’re going to have to listen to over the next thirty or forty years.”
Daisy murmured, “Oh, Alden.”
“If he hit himself in the face with his door, then he took a practice swing.”
“Did someone hit you in the head, darling?” asked his mother.
“Since you ask, yes. Jeffrey and I had a little misunderstanding.”
Alden laughed and said, “If Jeffrey ever hit you in the head, you’d be in the hospital for a week.”
At twelve-thirty the next day, Davey brought down to the dining room the rescued copies of his mother’s two novels and placed them under his chair. His father raised an eyebrow, but Daisy seemed not to notice. Unasked, Maria brought Bloody Marys to all three of them.
After the Bloody Marys came a bottle of Barolo and a soup in which streamers of egg, flecks of parsley, pesto sauce, and pasta circulated through a chicken broth. Davey took half a glass of the wine and nervously devoured the soup. A homemade mushroom and Gorgonzola ravioli followed the soup, and tender little filets of beef and potato croquettes followed the ravioli. Maria announced that in honor of Mr. Davey she had made a zabaglione, which would be served in a few minutes. Did they have these stupendous meals every weekend, did they eat this way every night? It was no wonder that Daisy was looking puffier than ever, although Alden seemed utterly unchanged. Davey said that he didn’t remember the Italian girl’s being such a great cook and Alden said, “Vin ordinaire, my boy.”
The brief silence that followed his father’s remark seemed the perfect time to produce his gift.
“Mom, I’ve got something for you.”
“Goody, goody.”
Unwilling to tell Alden that he had been prospecting in the Chancel House basement, Davey said that he had found two books in the Strand one day last week, and he hoped she would be pleased to see them again. He rose from his chair to bring the humble package down the table.
Daisy grasped the bag, tore out the books, smiled at their jackets, and opened them. Her eyes retreated into a band of red that appeared over her face like a mask. She set the books on the edge of the table and turned her face away. Still thinking that she was pleased by his gift, Davey said, “They’re in such good shape.” Daisy drew in a breath and let out a frightening sound that soon resolved into a wail. She shoved back her chair and ran from the room as the Italian girl entered wit
h cups of zabaglione on a silver tray. Baffled, Davey looked inside the first of the two books and saw written in a hand more confident and decisive than his mother’s, For my heart’s darling, Alden, from his dazzled Daisy.
25
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK on the previous Thursday night, a flat package clamped under his left arm, Davey had stood uncertainly in front of a restaurant called Dragon Seed on Elizabeth Street, looking back and forth from the restaurant’s front door to a slip of paper in his hand. A row of leathery ducks the color of molasses hung across the restaurant window. The black numerals beside the menu taped to the door matched the number, 67, Paddi had written on the piece of paper.
A delicious odor of roast duck and frying noodles met him when he opened the door. Davey stepped inside, stood at the end of the counter for a moment to look over the room, then went to the only empty table and sat down.
All the men in the room ignored him. Davey looked around for the door that would lead to a staircase and saw two set into opposite ends of the rear wall, one of them marked restrooms, the other private. Then he was on his feet.
Two waiters in black vests and white shirts watched him from across the room, and a third set a platter of noodles before four stolid men in suits and began cutting toward him through the tables.
Davey tried to wave him off, and said, “I know it says Private, but it’s all right.”
“Not all right.”
Davey put his hand on the knob, and the waiter’s hand came down on his before he could open the door. “You sit.”
The waiter pulled him away to his table and pushed him down. Davey placed his package on his lap and considered making a break for the door. He looked around and found that everybody in the restaurant was eyeing him.
The waiter came back through the tables carrying a tray with a teapot and a cup the size of a thimble. He set these before Davey and spun away, revealing a small man in a zippered jacket behind him who rotated a chair and straddled it, and gave Davey a horrible smile. “You funny,” the man said.