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Copyright © 2013 by Zoë Rosenfeld
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Owl in Darkness
On her third day at the manor, day three of pinprick rain and cold mist hanging in the air, Bert grows tired of mooning at the windows, waiting for the rain to stop, and decides to head out into the wet afternoon. She pulls on a sweater, yanks her gray woolen cape off its hook, then unfurls it around herself. She bends to lace up her brown boots, and finally, she puts on her hat with the earflaps she likes. As she stands in the kitchen on her way out, hand on the knob, she watches a rabbit at the far end of the scraggy lawn as it watches her. The rabbit looks skittish, poised for flight, and she can only hope that over the decades she’s gained more of a sense of bearing, of her right to occupy space, than this. She opens the door to step out of the house, and the rabbit flicks its tail and disappears.
The Littlejohns, who own the manor, are an elderly couple Bert has only corresponded with, never met. “Dear Roberta,” Mr. Littlejohn wrote in his austere script in his third and final letter to her, “Please enjoy your stay.” The Littlejohns live in the manor for part of the year, and the rest of the time they keep it as a writers’ retreat where they let established authors stay for months at a time. The manor is in a town nestled in a foggy valley not far from the winding Susquehanna, in a part of the world where Revolutionary battles were fought and musket shot still rises to the surface of the fields after a hard rain. The Littlejohns run a three-line ad in the back of a few literary publications, terse and modest but enough to catch Bert’s eye. And because of the arrangement and the way it was described in the ad, Bert assumed the Littlejohns were reverential about the authors they hosted, that the notion of helping writers gave them a sense of purpose. She imagined that they had reached a certain age and had sat down together to talk about giving something back to the world of letters that had given them so much. But none of this seemed to be the case; in her correspondence with Mr. Littlejohn, he was matter-of-fact and didn’t seem particularly interested in her as a person or even as a writer. Still, though he was remote, he was not unkind: in a letter, he told her she should feel free to ride the horse they kept at the manor, explaining its personality and a couple of local paths in some detail, and went on to tell her to prevail on the caretaker or the cook if there was anything at all she needed.
When Bert got to the manor in the beginning of February, laden with notebooks and novels for her six-week stay, she realized her head was full of all sorts of images she’d conjured from Mr. Littlejohn’s letters, very few of which turned out to correspond to reality. Though Mr. Littlejohn had never said a word about the grounds, for some reason, she’d been picturing a lush lawn and green, green trees. In reality, at that time of year the manor grounds were still quite brown and dead, the sky stern overhead, scraps of muddy snow daubed under the trees. It had been a harsh winter, and clearly it would still be a long time before much of anything sprouted.
Also, contrary to Bert’s image of the horse, which she later realized was really an image of a pony from a county fair, the horse turned out to be a big chestnut gelding that looked too majestic for the muddy little paddock. Mr. Littlejohn never mentioned the horse’s name in his letters, but Bert now knows from the caretaker that it’s Clover, which makes her feel sorry for the horse: all that power and beauty wrapped up in such a boring name. She wonders who named him — the Littlejohns? a granddaughter of theirs?—and hopes the horse doesn’t know how hopelessly ordinary its name is.
In the manor parlor, a taxidermied crow perches on a branch. He’s so expertly stuffed that it looks as if he’s about to let out a cry and fly off. Sometime soon after she arrived, Bert started talking to the crow out of sheer need, and now she talks to him all the time; she tells him everything. She tells him how she can’t seem to get started with her writing. She tells him about her strange, vivid dreams; about her thoughts on the far-off city life she’s left behind, how Berkeley looks from this vantage point, how she’s changed her mind about teaching a couple of the books on the reading list for one of her classes, and about how, however convenient it may be at the moment that Phoebe, her daughter, still lives at Bert’s apartment and can water the plants while she’s gone (if in fact she’s even bothering to do this), she wishes Phoebe would find her own apartment once and for all, and get her own car. And not mention her father’s new wife quite so often, though Bert knows that’s not even reasonable.
The house isn’t really a manor, at least not in the way Bert was picturing, which is actually a good thing in her opinion. It’s true that it’s perched on top of a hill and that the grounds sweep rather grandly down from it, the endless lawn stretching out from the building’s entrance to the winding, treelined road below. The house’s style is somewhere between Greek Revival and Federal, and it was built in 1820, as two different brass plaques in the house hasten to point out. But though it’s decorated like a true British manor, with the imposing paintings, leatherbound books, and camelback settees one would expect, it’s not actually all that big, and in back, on the side no one sees, the plain, utilitarian kitchen trails out to the woodpile, and from there to the stable and paddock, and, beyond, to a muddy stream, a little springhouse, a leaf-choked pond, and a couple of tilting sheds. However stately the house may seem from the road, its grandeur falls apart on the far side, and even inside it, the rooms are smaller and less numerous than one would think. Bert never uses the front entrance; she feels exposed opening the great heavy wooden door and walking down the manor’s marble steps, her dark cape framed against the manor’s unsparing whiteness. She only comes and goes through the back doors, setting out from the kitchen or coming in through the cracked solarium with its stacks of broken flowerpots. This seems to exasperate the cook, whose name is Allison, and who clearly wants her to behave more like a privileged guest and less like a maid. But for whatever reason, Bert can’t bring herself to inhabit the role the cook has set out for her. If nothing else, ruffling the feathers of someone as frowning and rigid as the cook feeds Bert’s vanity, because she gets to play the free spirit, though that’s nothing she’s proud of.
After over a week and a half of ceaseless gray skies, she decides to take the Littlejohns up on their offer to ride the horse. She’s craving a shift in her thinking, and she has a memory of flying along on a horse years ago in a state of wordless joy. She stands in the stable, inhaling its sweetness: wood, hay, leather, sweat, manure, urine, dust.
She hasn’t ridden since she was a girl, hasn’t touched a saddle since she finished grade school, over forty years ago. She’s not at all sure she remembers how to saddle up a horse, but she feels her way, waiting for it to come back to her. With the horse tied up and pawing the wooden floorboards, she lays a worn saddle pad over his withers and nestles the saddle into place. She reaches down and pulls the girth straps tight, her knee pressed into the sleek brown belly. She slips a thumb into the horse’s mouth to pry it open for the bit (it is coming back to her after all), and once she’s fastened the bridle, she gives the horse a triumphant slap, raising a puff of dust, then heaves herself up. She wipes a touch of sweat from her upper lip, her thumb rich with the musk of the horse’s mouth.
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nbsp; She guides the horse (whose name she’s privately changed from Clover to Xerxes) out of the paddock and toward the stream and the woods, and at first, she’s awkward riding after so many years. But once she’s circled the grounds and followed the edge of the forest for a half hour or so, she loosens up and starts to feel good—better than she has in the past week and a half—though the thought nags at her that she’s supposed to be getting this feeling from writing, not riding horses. Eventually this notion succeeds in leaching all the pleasure out of being up on the horse and trotting along watching crows pour out of the trees. Not long after she’s set out, she turns the horse back toward the manor stable, skirting the ancient moss-covered hammock slung between two trees just past the decrepit sheds, and in the stable she unbuckles his bridle, hoists his saddle up on the rack, and puts him back in his stall with a melancholy pat on his forehead.
As she’s closing the stable door, she notices an old cup on a ledge by a broken-down chair. She’s sure this must be one of the nips the caretaker, whose name is Mason, allows himself, and she pictures him sitting in the dark stable at night, enjoying this small pleasure. Mason is only a few years older than she is, a quiet man in a graying beard, glasses, and hiking boots. She doesn’t feel particularly womanly around him—mostly she just feels like a helpless creature of the city, more used to calling up landlords to complain than to taking a screwdriver to a problem. Lately, she’s found herself thinking of Mason not as the caretaker but as the night watchman, which feels more mysterious. She’s found his cups before, sometimes not quite empty. She takes up the cup and drinks the sip of scotch he’s left behind, and when she puts her face in it, the cup is full of the smell of his mustache.
Bert lifts the heavy kettle down off the hook and fills it at the tap in the fast-creeping dusk. The water falls musically into the dark interior, and though she can’t see it rising, she feels the water weigh against her hand, feels her tendons strain as the kettle fills. She strikes a match for the stove, cups the flame, touches it to the pilot, and the stove erupts in light, singeing the hairs of her forearm. When she puts the kettle on the metal trivet, steam migrates across its surface, a moving bank of clouds. She sits in one of the wobbly kitchen chairs and looks out at the dusk, at a couple of dark birds with pale undersides hopping on the pines. As the sky goes violet, the mourning doves call out sorrowfully, and she thinks of the suet bag for the birds but can’t remember where Mr. Littlejohn said it was. She pictures her room upstairs, the big windows, the white, white curtains, the white chenille bedspread with pastel tulips, the illusion of spring in the room. She tries to think of new flowers and multicolored kites in the air. Baby chicks and newborn bunnies. She tries to believe in spring but can’t seem to summon it. It feels like a book she read long ago as a girl.
She walks down the main street of the town in her big boots, the town sleepy, frozen, deserted in the rain. Under the canopy of an enormous umbrella—borrowed from the manor and smelling of mothballs—she makes her way to the one-room library. Just inside the entrance, out of the downpour, she collapses the umbrella and slips it into the empty stand by the door. There is no one in the library but the librarian and a young janitor laying down rubber mats by the side entrance. The doggy smell of rain mixes with the over-sweet scent of well-handled books, and she wanders past the fiction at the back of the room, past spine-cracked paperbacks with covers lettered in bulging gold, past library-bound classics in drab greens and blues. As she drifts along, touching books, she tells herself to take one down and open it and try to read. But instead she makes her way to the wall of windows facing east, lowers herself into a chair, and watches the rain slant against the enormous panes. A leak in a window casement far up above drips rain onto a handsome oak table.
In a flash, the street beyond the windows goes shock-white with lightning, and the little library shakes with thunder. It occurs to her that she could go to the bar down the street and get a pint of something dark, sit in the dim wooden interior listening to the bartender talk to a couple of locals over the drone of the TV, maybe order some soup or a bowl of chili. It seems like a good place to burrow into on a day of heavy rain. But she knows she would stand out too much, and whatever conversation they were having would stop when she came in and only start up again haltingly, out of politeness. They would pretend not to watch her and she would pretend not to know, and the whole thing would just end up making her feel peevish and lost.
In the morning, she watches fog rise out of the trees like pale hair pulled from a brush. The sky is sea-mammal gray overhead, and it hangs low over the forest; the trees look very black, the lichens on their trunks standing out brilliant white and ghostly.
Once again, Bert roams restlessly through the house, spooked by its dark corners, startled by its sudden mirrors. She talks to the crow; she twirls the globe and skims a finger over its surface, leaving trails in the dust like the map lines in old movies showing the trajectories of journeys. She runs a hand over the fancy fabric wallpapers. She can’t alight anywhere; she feels like a bird with no feet, like the early explorers’ image of the bird of paradise. She can’t read, she can’t write letters, she can’t even open her computer. She’s tried to open it once or twice and has gotten as far as letting it boot itself up with its granular, cogitating sound, but then she’s gently closed it again each time. She can hear the tin weathervane on the stable roof turning all the way from the parlor. She listens for the night watchman’s step outside, but hears only the wind in the branches. Eventually, she decides to put one of the Littlejohns’ records on the record player, and La Traviata comes pouring out. She wanders through the house with the opera surging through the rooms, and even though it’s not really her thing, for a short while it makes her feel less alone. But when the side runs out and the needle floats over the inner ring with its insistent “k-kk-k,” all of a sudden she can hear the grandfather clock on the landing ticking out the minutes, and the house closes in on her again.
She feeds the nameless cats at the back door with bits of cheese and tuna, but they never grow any sleeker or fill out at all—maybe there are too many different cats, she can’t be sure. She brings the dishes back inside, licked very clean, and runs water over them in the big double sink. They look forlorn in the enormous kitchen. Her attempt at befriending the cats seems pointless; she doesn’t even know how many there are or which one is which.
Bert tries to read one of the manor books in bed, an old coffee-table book of works from the permanent collection of the Met, which she brought upstairs hoping it might spark some idea or other. The pages fall open to Moreau’s painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx, an image she’s loved since she was a teenager. In the painting, the Sphinx, horrible monster of myth, clings to Oedipus’s cloak like a freaky housecat that’s clawed its way up the drapes. The look the Sphinx fixes on Oedipus is pleading, beseeching; she seems to be begging him not to guess her secret, not to send her dashing down onto the rocks. There’s so much weirdness and life in this painting that Bert pauses to soak it in. But when she leafs through the rest of the book, something about all the consensus masterpieces—entombed, wholly divorced from the process of their creation—puts her off. When a work of art is too famous, it starts to seem to her as if there’s no human hand behind it. It becomes an artifact, a meteorite that’s fallen to Earth from some distant realm, and this feeling makes her uneasy.
After a while she can’t focus on the book anymore, so she puts it aside, turns off the lamp, and lies in the dark. The tree branches sway in the wind, and a shutter bangs arrhythmically. The moon, swimming high in the night sky, looks very bright and cold over the wide, empty grounds. An owl lets out a cry at the edge of the woods. As the house cools, she can feel it settle; floorboards pop and the window frames creak. She nestles into the density of the pillows and curls up in a ball under the white comforter and bedspread. The sheets hold the faintest feeling of damp—a coolness, a weight. They seem to have been rarely slept on before she arrived.
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p; She asks the night watchman about the owls she hears in the trees at night, about what kind they are, how big, what they eat. He shrugs and gestures vaguely toward the woods. “I’d say a couple of different kinds, probably.” When she asks at the library, they give her a bird guide that lists several kinds of owls found in the area. She can’t figure out which one she keeps hearing at night, but she imagines it’s a barn owl, the one with the mask of white feathers arrayed around its eyes. She thinks of it seeing in the dark, flying through the night forest, dropping down on small animals in blackness, and the image thrills her. It is almost voluptuous, how she imagines the owl descending on its prey. The owl so beautiful, so mysterious—dark wings falling on furred body.
The mornings she wakes to are identically gray, even on days when the sun will burn through before noon, so to let in what light there is, she’s tied the curtains back with packing string. When she leaves for good, she knows there will be a pucker in the fabric, an imprint of her that will take weeks to fade. She likes the idea of this mark lingering on when she’s gone.
She untethers the horse, Xerxes, and lets him graze on the property during the day. She knows the cook will probably tell the Littlejohns about this, but she does it anyway. The horse noses at the windows of the house and startles her when she’s daydreaming, but then the look she and the horse share through the pane is so complicit it makes her feel less lonely. The horse eats the early forsythia buds off the bushes, and she’s dimly aware that this means there will be no forsythia this spring, which is a fairly terrible thing. But since she can’t believe in spring, she can’t believe she’s spoiling it, so the horse grazes and she dreams on the stone-colored velvet sofa.
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