by Peter Straub
Nora seized on a desperate improvisation. “I think Alden wrote these books.”
“Oh, come on. I never heard anything more ridiculous.”
“Just consider the possibility. Alden knew he could make a whopping amount of money in a hurry if he brought out post-humous Driver novels. Because there weren’t any real ones, he had to provide them.” Nora continued improvising. “No one could know that they weren’t real, so he couldn’t farm them out. He couldn’t even trust Daisy. Haven’t you always thought these were different from the first one?”
“You know I have. They’re good, but not like Night Journey. A lot of writers never come up to their first successes.”
“The same person wrote these two, isn’t that right?”
“And the same person wrote Night Journey. Who sure as hell wasn’t my father.”
“What’s the name of that monster who cuts Pippin with his claws?”
“He doesn’t have a name. He’s a Nellad.”
“Nellad. Remind you of anything?”
“No.” He considered it for a moment. “It does sort of sound like Alden, if that’s what you mean.” He laughed. “You’re telling me he put his own name in the book?”
“Wouldn’t it be just like him to thumb his nose at everybody that way?”
“I have to give you credit for ingenuity. All these other people are trying to show that Driver didn’t write Night Journey, and you’re saying, yes, he did write that one, but not the other two. Which is almost possible, Nora. I’ll grant you that much. If you weren’t all wrong you could actually be right.”
“Some of this really does sound like Alden to me. Look at the last page.”
“All right.” He read in silence for a time. “Come on. You mean that cat?”
Nora said that she meant the entire page. “I think Alden wrote this. I didn’t even notice about the wet cat until you mentioned it.”
“Well, it sounds more like my mother than my father, because my father never wrote anything except business letters.”
“I don’t think it sounds like your mother’s writing,” Nora said.
“God damn, you haven’t been listening to me. I told you, someone’s as sad as a wet cat in a couple of those Blackbird Books, and she used that phrase all the time when I was a kid. She still does sometimes.”
“I had no idea.”
“It still can’t be true. My mother?”
“Alden used some of her favorite phrases. He wouldn’t trust her that much.”
“She’s about the only person he would trust. I have to look at more of this.” She heard him turning pages, breathing loudly, now and then taking a sip of his drink. “It can’t be, can it? There are a million different ways to explain . . .” He let out a noise halfway between a wail and a bellow. “NO!”
“What?”
“One of the villagers, right here, page one fifty-three, says, ‘You may ask me twenty-seven times, and the answer will never change.’ Twenty-seven times! My mother used to say that all the time. It was her expression for infinity. Holy shit.”
“Your mother wrote it?”
“Holy shit, I think she did,” Davey said. “Holy shit. She really did. Holy shit. It’s no wonder they were so freaked when you accused her of writing the horror novels. This could absolutely finish us off.”
“I don’t see why,” Nora said. “Doesn’t it put your mother in a good light? If she did write those books, that is.”
“God, you’re naive. If this gets out, my father gets accused of fraud, and Night Journey immediately becomes suspect. There’ll be lawyers all over the place.”
“If it gets out.”
“It better not. This has to stay secret, Nora.”
“I’m sure it does,” she said.
“At least we finally got to Miami. If the Cup Bearer knew my mother wrote those books, I guess I’m not surprised that they had to buy her off and get rid of her. Wow.”
“Hold on to your hat,” Nora said.
80
AS SHE TOLD Jeffrey early the next morning in the restaurant off the terrace, the rest of their long conversation had lasted half an hour, and in the course of it Nora had felt Davey’s universe spin and wobble. His past had been yanked inside out” Nora had questioned the central theme of his life. He ridiculed, protested, denied. He had hung up after ten minutes and picked up the telephone again only after it had rung a dozen times. “Think about what she wrote,” Nora had said, and listening to her account while spreading damson preserves on a croissant, Jeffrey shook his head. He, too, at first had been suspicious of the night’s discoveries. “Think about what your grandfather was like and what your father did to us, but first of all, think about what Daisy put in that book. That’s your story, Davey. It’s a message to you.” No, no, no. Helen Day had lied. Nora had brought him back again and again to the child abandoned in and rescued from the forest, to My mother is my mother. “If it’s true, I’m Pippin,” Davey had said, sounding the first note of the awe which follows all great revelations. Nora had told him, “You’ve always been Pippin,” and she had not added what she told herself: Me, too. “I feel like Leonard Gimmel or Teddy Brunhoven,” he had said. “There is a code, and I can read it.”
“Yes. There is a code, and it’s about you.”
“She wanted me to know. Even though she couldn’t tell me.”
“She wanted you to know.”
“Should I confront him? Should I go over there and tell him I know?”
For the first time in their marriage, Nora advised Davey not to confront his father. “You’d have to tell him how you found out, and I don’t want anybody to know where I am.”
“That’s right. I’ll wait until whenever. Until I can.”
This had left unspoken more than Nora liked. “You believe me, anyhow, don’t you?”
“It took me a while, but, yeah, I do. I guess I really ought to thank you. I know that sounds funny, but I am grateful, Nora.”
Fine, but gratitude isn’t enough is what she had said to herself when the conversation had limped to an inconclusive end.
She tore a flaky section off a croissant and put it in her mouth. Less than a quarter of the pastry, her second, now remained on her plate, and she was still hungry. Three tables away, a pair of heavyset men in windbreakers stoked in enormous breakfasts of scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. Nora felt as though she could have eaten both of their meals.
On the other side of the window wall to her right, a tall boy in a blue shirt was washing the terrace flagstones with a bucket, a long broom, and a hose. Rivulets sparkled and gleamed between the shining stones. Another boy was flapping pink tablecloths over the tables like sails and smoothing them out with his hands. It was as humble as the two men and their breakfasts, but to Nora this scene suddenly seemed to overflow with significance.
“To change the subject, you think Dart called Ev Tidy,” Jeffrey said.
She nodded and reached for another section of croissant, but she had eaten it all.
“Let me get you some more of those.” In a few seconds, Jeffrey returned carrying a plate heaped with sweet rolls, croissants, and thick slices of honeydew. Nora attacked the melon with her knife and fork.
“Do you think Ev is safe?”
“He said he was going to a house he owns in Vermont.” Nora finished the melon and began on the Danish. She felt as energetic as if she’d had a full night’s sleep, and she had an idea of how to fill the next few days.
“You can’t be as casual as you seem about Dart being in town,” said Jeffrey.
“I’m not casual about it at all. I want to leave Northampton this morning.”
“I was thinking about a nice little inn not far from Alford. If you
like, we could see my mother for a bit, and then I could run you over there. It’s charming, and the people who own the place were friends of my parents. Besides, the food is great.”
For a secular monk, Jeffrey placed a sybaritic degree of importance o
n meals. “I do want to see your mother, but I’d like to go somewhere else after that, if you don’t mind.”
“You want to stay with Ev in Vermont?”
“That’s not quite what I had in mind. Don’t they rent out the old cottages at Shorelands?”
He gave a doubtful nod. “You want to go to Shorelands?”
Nora groped for an explanation that would make sense to him. “I’ve spent days listening to people talk about that place, and I’d like to see what it looks like.”
Jeffrey folded his arms over his chest and waited.
She glanced outside at the boys, one of them sluicing away the last of the soapy water, the other arranging chairs around the tables, and moved a step nearer the truth. “I’m in a unique position. I’ve talked to Mark Foil and Ev Tidy, but they’ve never talked to each other. Foil knows what Creeley Monk wrote in his journal, and Tidy knows what his father wrote, but the only person who really knows what’s in both journals is me, and I have the feeling that there’s a missing piece. Nobody ever tried to put everything together. I’m not saying I can, but last night and this morning, when I was thinking about all these conversations I’ve been having, it seemed to me that I at least had to look at the place. Half of me has no idea what’s going on or what to do, but the other half is saying, Go to Shorelands, or you’ll miss everything.”
“ ‘Miss everything,’ ” Jeffrey said. “ ‘A missing piece.’ Is it just me, or are you talking about Katherine Mannheim?”
“She’s at the center of it. I don’t know why, but I almost feel responsible for her.” Jeffrey jerked up his head. “All these people had conflicting views of her. She was rude, she was impatient, she was a saint, she was a tease, she was truthful, evasive, dedicated, frivolous, completely crazy, completely sane. . . . She goes to Shorelands, she gets everybody worked up in a different way, and she never comes out. What comes out instead? What’s the only thing that really comes out of that summer? Night Journey.”
Jeffrey regarded her with what looked like mingled interest and doubt. “The way you put it, you make it sound like the book is a kind of substitute for her.” He thought for a second. “Or like she’s in it.”
“Not directly, nothing like that. But a phrase of hers is: the Cup Bearer.” Jeffrey opened his mouth, and Nora rushed to say, “I know we’ve talked about this before, but it still seems like an enormous coincidence. Davey saw that photograph of the sisters in your mother’s apartment at the Poplars, but Hugo Driver couldn’t have seen it. It’s part of the missing piece.”
“If you want to play detective, I’ll cooperate. It is possible to stay there. Five or six years ago, a French publisher, a great Driver admirer who wanted to stay there for a night, had some trouble getting accommodations. Alden asked me to take care of it for him. Which I did. The Shorelands Trust runs the estate, and some of the old staff is put up in Main House, but Pepper Pot and Rapunzel have rooms for people who want to stay the night. I got the French guy a room in Rapunzel, and he was delighted. So was Alden.”
“Will you call them?”
“While you pack, but first I want to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.” She braced herself, but Jeffrey’s question was milder than any she had expected.
“Why did you want to tell me the family secrets? I came to the Poplars so late that I didn’t even know Davey was supposed to have been adopted.”
“I didn’t want to be the only other person who knew.” She stopped short of adding, In case anything happened to me.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and signaled the waitress for their check.
81
WHEN THE TELEPHONE rang, she was in the bathroom, considering the question of makeup. On the fourth ring she picked it up and heard Jeffrey answer her question.
“I hope you don’t mind waiting about half an hour,” he said. “I called my mother to tell her we were coming over, and she’s in a high old state. Apparently I agreed to drive some of the girls over to a market this morning, and I’m already late. It’ll take forty minutes at the most, and I’ll swing by to pick you up as soon as we’re back.”
“Perfect,” she said. “I was just thinking that I’d be safer if I put my disguise back on.”
“Your . . . ? Oh, the war paint. Good idea. You’re checked out of the hotel, and I booked you into Pepper Pot as Mrs. Norma Desmond. I thought you were probably tired of being Dinah Shore.”
They agreed to meet in the lobby in forty minutes. Jeffrey would call up to her room if he returned before that. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Wait for me in the lobby, okay? I don’t want to be responsible for all the skeletons in the Chancel closets.”
Half an hour later the young woman at the desk glanced at Nora as she came out of the elevator and then returned to explaining the hotel’s charges to a flustered old couple complaining about their bill. A soft pinkish light suffused the otherwise empty lobby. Nora wheeled her case to an armchair next to a table stacked with brochures and sat down to read “The 100 Most Popular Tourist Sites in Our Lovely Area.” The white-haired couple were still wrangling over their room charges, but now it was the clerk who was flustered. The husband, a pipestem with a natty blazer, ascot, and shining wings of white hair, was loudly explaining that the telephone charges had to be mistaken because neither his wife nor himself ever used the telephones in hotel rooms. Why pay a surcharge when you could come down to the lobby and use the pay phone?
The clerk spoke a few words.
“Nonsense!” the old man bellowed. “I’ve just explained to you that my wife and I don’t use telephones in hotel rooms!”
His wife backed away from him, and the young woman behind the desk spoke again.
“But this is an error!” the man shouted. The clerk disappeared, and the old man whirled on his wife. “You’ve done it again, haven’t you? Too lazy to take the elevator, and what happens? Two dollars wasted, and here I am, making a scene, and it’s all your fault.”
His wife had begun to cry, but she was too frightened to raise her hands and wipe her eyes.
Nora saw an echo of Alden Chancel in the domineering little dandy and could not bear to be in the same room with him. She left the suitcase beside the chair and went down the hallway to the exit onto the terrace. Through the windows, she saw half a dozen cars, none of them Jeffrey’s, driving down King Street. Sunlight glittered on the washed flagstones, and yellow lilies nodded beside the steps down to the pavement. She pushed through the door into fresh, brilliant morning.
When she reached the top of the steps, she looked up King Street for the MG, wishing that she could have taken a run that morning. Her muscles yearned for exercise” her breakfast seemed to have vaporized into a need for work and motion. She looked back at the hotel and through the glass wall saw the elderly husband spitting invective as he put down his suitcase to open the door for his wife. He was a gentleman of the old school, complete with all the tyrannical courtesies, and he had parked on the street because he thought he might be charged for using the hotel lot. Gripping the strap of her handbag, Nora marched down and walked five or six feet up the block, looking for Jeffrey.
The MG did not appear. Nora glanced over her shoulder and saw the couple coming down the steps onto the sidewalk. The man’s face was pink with rage. She put them out of her mind and concentrated on the pleasures of walking briskly through the air of a beautiful August morning, still nicely cool and scented with lilies.
When she reached Main Street she looked left toward the row of shops extending toward the Smith campus and Helen Day’s house, by now expecting to see Jeffrey tooling along in the sparse traffic. Half the shops on both sides of Main had not yet opened, and none of the few cars was Jeffrey’s. With the blunt abruptness of a heart attack, a police car appeared from behind a bread truck and came rolling toward Nora. She forced herself to stand still. For a long moment the police car seemed aimed directly at her. She swallowed. Then it straightened out and came with no great urgency toward the
intersection. Nora pretended to search for something in her bag. The car drew up before her, rolled past, and turned into King Street. She watched it move, still in no apparent haste, in the direction of the hotel. She decided to forget about exercise and wait for Jeffrey in the lobby.
Down the block, the dandy was standing beside an antique touring car with sweeping curves, a running board, and a massive grille decorated with metal badges. He opened the passenger door and extended his hand to his wife. Quivering, she hoisted herself onto the running board. The police car slid past them. The old man strutted around to the driver’s side, giving the hood a pat. Down the street, the police car pulled up in front of the hotel, and two officers began moving up the steps.
King Street remained empty. When Nora turned back, the policemen were striding across the terrace toward the glass doors. Telling herself that they were probably after nothing more than coffee and apple turnovers in the café, she stepped into the street and began walking toward the shelter of a movie theater. The old man started up his extravagant car and pulled away from the curb. Standing near the middle of the street, Nora waited for him to go past. The car came to a halt before her, and the window cranked down. The old woman sat staring at her lap, and her husband leaned forward to speak. “The crosswalks are designed for use by pedestrians,” he said in a pleasant voice. “Are you too good for them, young lady?”
“I’ve been watching you, you brutal jerk,” she said, “and I hope your wife kills you in your sleep one night.”
His wife snapped up her head and stared at Nora. The old man jolted away with a grinding of gears. Either a laugh or a scream came through the open window. Nora hurried to the other side of the street and moved beneath the theater marquee to the concealment of an angled wall next to the ticket booth. She looked at the hotel without seeing the policemen, then back at the antique car, which sat waiting for the light to change at the top of the street. A red car, not Jeffrey’s but familiar all the same, swung around the antique vehicle onto King Street, followed by an inconspicuous blue sedan. It isn’t, it can’t be, Nora said to herself, but the Audi moved steadily toward her, and it was. She saw Davey’s dark hair and pale face as he hunched over the wheel to stare at the Northampton Hotel.