by Frances
He was businesslike. He walked across the room, carrying the will, and put it down on a table in front of a window. He said, “Give us a little light. All right?”
“Not too much,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Her eyes.”
He pulled one curtain aside, so that a streak of light came through, falling on the papers. He folded the upper sheets back, so that only the last was in sight.
“Now,” he said. “Mrs. Williams. Tony. You have witnessed the signing of a last will and testament by Abigail Montfort. You now so attest by signing as witnesses, in her presence and in the presence of each other. Mrs. Williams.”
He pulled a chair out for her and took a fountain pen out of his pocket and gave it to her and pointed to a line. She put her name down. Graham said, “Tony,” and she got up and Tony Bourgelotti brushed the seat of his slacks and sat down, on the edge of his straight chair, and signed his name under Lois’s. Graham looked at both signatures and said, “Fine. Everything in order,” and picked the will up. He waved it briefly. He folded it in the stiff blue-paper backing and put it in his pocket.
“So,” he said, re-completing the completed.
Lois, however, was left with a marked feeling that things were not completed. Perhaps— She turned back toward the little woman in the deep chair. Mrs. Harbrook was again bending over her. Lois took a step toward them.
“I wonder,” she said, and spoke softly—spoke into yesterday’s dim hush. “I wonder, Mrs. Montfort, if—”
Mrs. Harbrook stood up and turned toward her and put a finger to unsmiling lips. Lois stopped speaking and Mrs. Harbrook, moving cautiously, came toward her. She stood close to her and whispered.
“Dropped off,” she said. “She does, you know. Bright as a button one moment and—”
She pushed Lois toward the door to the hall, and Lois went, -stepping softly. Tony and Graham went after them. Keating stood in the hall and waited for them. When they joined him he raised eyebrows above close-set eyes. Mrs. Harbrook nodded and he said, “That’s good, Aunt Ella,” in a low voice, and, again, with the accents of New York.
Mrs. Harbrook pulled shut the door to the living room. She still spoke softly—softly, Lois supposed, as the flatness of her voice allowed.
“She dozes,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “She’s very old, you know. But I’m sure the tour will be all right, Mrs. Williams. Only yesterday, she was speaking about it and saying there were things we had to do—have the hedge trimmed, you know. Things like that. Put our best foot forward—that’s what she said. So, you see.”
“The committee will be pleased,” Lois said, in a tone of duty.
“Just leave it to me,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Next Saturday, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lois said. “This coming Saturday.”
“I’m sure it will be all right,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “When she wakes up I’ll tell her I told you. Get her to write a little note to the committee. It was so good of you to come, Mrs. Williams.”
“Whew,” Howard Graham said, standing beside her on the long porch. “In a word, whew!”
He smiled down at her, welcoming them both back into summer warmth, into today.
“It,” he said, “sort of closes in on you, doesn’t it? Sweet old thing, from all I hear and what little I’ve seen. All the same—”
He paused. She nodded. She breathed deeply of the warm air—the freshness of the warm air.
“As for me,” Graham said, “I could do with a drink. Can’t I buy you a drink, Mrs. Williams?”
“I don’t—” she began and stopped and thought, Why not? And then, a little to her surprise, she heard herself laughing softly, deep in her throat. “So could I,” she said. “I’d like very much to have you buy me a drink, Mr. Graham.”
They had two cars. They met at the Inn. There were a dozen people in the old taproom of the Inn—the taproom low-ceilinged as the Montfort house and, with chilled air flowing from vents, as cool. And—as utterly different as one room could be from another.
Two of “the flock” were in the taproom with frozen daiquiris in front of them. (“The flock” was, to a considerable degree, daiquiri-minded.) They smiled at her when she came in with Howard Graham and, with her eye caught, nodded in vigorous approval. Her expression disclaimed, but her eyes smiled.
Was it possible, she wondered fleetingly, that the shadows had finally concentrated in the old Montfort house; that, coming out of it, she had made a first, tentative, but perhaps committing step toward a new brightness?
“A martini,” she told Howard Graham, when he raised eyebrows to ask.
“A girl after my own heart,” Graham said, and, to the waiter, “Two dry martinis.” Again his look enquired. “Very dry,” he said.
II
He said she lived—didn’t she?—in Long Meadow Manor? “And,” he said, “your husband’s one of the—” With that he stopped, as if he had stumbled. Then he said, “Damn. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Lois said. But her voice was dull. It had been absurd to think she had stepped out of dimness. “My husband was that Captain Williams.”
There had been enough about it in the Glenville Advertiser. (The “local angle” of catastrophe.) He looked at her and, again, she said, “It’s all right, Mr. Graham,” and then, with what might do for a smile, “Really it is.”
“I’m an idiot,” he said, and spoke low and shook his head. “A hopeless idiot.”
There was no use saying, over again, that it was all right. There was no use in saying anything. She sipped her drink and thought, There’s not much use in anything. Now, she thought, he won’t know what to say next, and she drank more quickly than she would normally have drunk, because that was a way to get it over with.
“The tour,” he said. “It’s shaping up all right?”
She roused herself. She said, “Oh yes. Quite well,” and, for his sake as much as anything, “I do hope Mrs. Montfort will agree.”
He snatched at that.
“I’m sure she will,” he said. “She seems a sweet old thing and she’s—well, she’s a hundred per cent Glenville. She and her father before her and his father before him, from all I hear. Back to the day the first Montfort bought the house from the last Brown. A gloomy place, isn’t it?”
“The way they built them then,” she said. “It is—gloomy. So dark and—everything.” She sought something else to say; sought to keep things going until the drink was finished and she could go herself. “But,” she said, “probably you’ve been there often. As her lawyer.”
“Not I,” he said. “Twice before. Once to talk about her will, once to show it to her and leave it for her to read. And then today. It’s because old Snoddy died, you know.”
“Snoddy,” she said. “Oh—Mr. Snodgrass. He was her lawyer before?”
“Since the memory of man,” he said. “Why she turned to the likes of me.” He smiled again, without assurance. “Not that she had much choice,” he said. “If she wanted a local. Me or Jimmy Parsons. Probably tossed a coin. All the same, she’s bright as a button. As Mrs. Harbrook says. Knows her own mind. Probably you gathered that.”
“I didn’t have much chance to gather anything,” Lois said, and heard the dullness in her own voice and saw, in his face, recognition of, depression because of, his failure. Obscurely, she felt that she was letting him down—that, by coming there for a drink, she had promised him something and now was withholding it.
“She certainly seemed alert,” Lois said, and forced the dullness out of her voice. “At first, anyway. She’s a very old lady, isn’t she? Old and—frail?”
“Eighty-four,” he said. “Eighty-four or eighty-five. Frail—yes. The other two times, though, she seemed—well, livelier than she did today. I suppose it was—what would you think? Reaction to getting done something she had been all steamed up about? And, with it done, just—well, dropping off to sleep?”
“Probably,” she said.
“There’s no question about her mind,” Graham said.
“I’m sure of that. Anybody would be who had a chance to talk to her. You could tell that, couldn’t you?”
“Oh yes,” Lois said. “That was—you mean there’s some question about it? Or—might be?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. After a time he nodded his head.
“Cases like this,” he said, “it’s something one has to—keep in mind. At her age, with the money she’s got.” He smiled more naturally then and said, “Whew! The money she’s got!”
“It’ll be nice for her grandson,” Lois said.
“What?” Graham said and then, “Oh—she did mention him, didn’t she? But I’m afraid—”
He stopped suddenly, the sentence unfinished. It was, Lois thought, as if again he had stumbled. The implication, however, remained hanging, undefined but nevertheless obvious.
“You must,” he said, “be running into some strange old-timers. Lining up the houses. Old Pruitt, I suppose?”
His tone invited her to be amused—invited a new start for this whole episode. Partly because he was so transparent in this sudden changing of the subject, partly because she had met Old Pruitt—third oldest house, but not by Old Pruitt’s reckoning—Lois smiled at Howard Graham. She said she had indeed. A character Old Pruitt was, and one with strong views on the. antiquity of houses. Old Pruitt did not count additions; Old Pruitt was of the opinion that, when you came down to it, a lot of the houses people were all the time talking about were nothing but additions. “Find two bricks still stuck together and call it a house”—that was Old Pruitt. As for the Pruitt house—now there—
“Don’t I know,” Graham said. “Did he tell you about—”
He did not stop, this time, of his own accord. He stopped because one of the dining room waiters came into the taproom, looked around and, finding what he wanted, said, “Telephone call, Mr. Graham.”
Graham said, “Damn,” and then, “Excuse me a minute, Mrs. Williams,” and went out after the waiter. Lois waited, there being nothing else to do. It hadn’t worked—not that there was any “work” promised. But she would have to sit, sipping what little remained of a martini no longer cold, until this pleasant—if bungling—man had the chance to return and offer her another drink, and she the chance to say she was afraid not, and that she had to be getting on. (Getting on to what, for the love of God?)
The two members of “the flock” had finished daiquiris and gone their way. There were only a few people remaining in the taproom. The episode dwindled.
Then, out of nowhere, a feeling of repetition came into her mind—the feeling, intangible and at the same time disturbing, that something which had just happened was happening again. She looked around her for a source of this, and listened for a source, and, with that, with her mind focused, she knew that she had merely heard a familiar voice.
Now, consciously, she heard it again—a voice, a woman’s voice, familiar but—illusively familiar. A voice she had heard—recently? weeks ago or even years ago?—and had not forgotten, yet could not place.
“I’m sure that will do very well,” the familiar—unfamiliar— voice said. “Probably only for a few days.”
The voice came from the lobby outside the taproom. The woman was accepting, presumably registering for, one of the Inn’s guest rooms. The voice was a carrying voice—rather high-pitched; Lois shook her memory for the voice. Not that it mattered—how could it matter? It was only that to know yet not to know—to be so close to remembering and yet to not remember—was a haunting exasperation in the mind.
“If someone will take my bag up,” the woman said. “I do need a cool drink and—I suppose the room itself isn’t air-conditioned?”
“Sorry, Mrs. Banks,” the room clerk said.
Banks? There was no Banks in Lois’s memory. Yet the voice —she was certain about the voice. Only—was she now certain about the voice? If she knew no Mrs. Banks—of course, it could be someone she had known but not as Mrs. Banks. Or—and this now seemed more probable—was it merely a voice which had the carrying quality of a voice she had heard before? Was it only that special quality which had made her think—
A small, slender woman, apparently in her thirties—a woman with short and rather unconvincing brown hair—came into the taproom and looked around and chose a table against the wall. The bar waiter came to the table and the woman said, “Could I have a gin and tonic, please?” and spoke in a low tone. But still the voice carried. And—still it was hauntingly familiar.
And I am quite sure, Lois Williams thought, that I never saw this woman in my life before.
Then Howard Graham came back into the room. He came grave-faced and shook his head a little as he approached—shook it as if in unhappy surprise. He sat down.
“She’s dead,” he said. “Like that—” he snapped his fingers— “like that she’s dead. While we were sitting here talking about her.”
“Mrs. Montfort?” Lois said. “You mean—just now? While we—
“Quarter of an hour after we left,” he said. “Dozed off, you know. And—that was it. Mrs. Harbrook took her in a cup of tea and—well, that was it.”
“Oh,” Lois said and then, more slowly, “I’m so sorry.” And found that she was sorry that an ancient woman, a woman met once only, had died peacefully in her sleep. Sorry and, because death came so close, was so immediate, obscurely a little frightened.
“Thank you,” the woman with improbable brown hair said, in the voice that carried.
And—in the voice of a woman who had just died. In the voice of Abigail Montfort!
Lois was in that instant, and for that instant, as sure of that as she had ever been of anything in her life. But then, since it clearly could not be true, she knew it was not true. The mind plays tricks.
“You’re all right?” Howard Graham said, and she realized, from the intentness with which he looked at her, that her face must have revealed the shock of certainty, the immediate rejection of the impossible. He looked at her with puzzled curiosity.
“Quite all right,” she said.
“I’m afraid I’d better go out there,” Graham said. “See if there’s anything—”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course you must.”
She pushed the table away and he, quickly, pushed it farther, went around the table’s end and pulled it out so that she could stand freely. The brown-haired woman looked up at them as they moved and Lois looked at her. But there was no sign of recognition in the woman’s face and Lois, looking at her again, was more than ever certain that she had never seen her before—never known her under any name. Only the voice—the voice of a dead woman. It was absurd, it was a fantasy. She realized that as she walked out of the taproom, ahead of Howard Graham. She was imagining things.
They walked out of the Inn’s coolness into the warm, humid evening, stood for a moment on the sidewalk.
“Could I buy you the other drink another—” he began, but she had thought of something—something which might readily explain, end a nagging in her mind, and did not hear him.
She said, “Mr. Graham. Did Mrs. Montfort have a daughter? You spoke of—”
“A daughter?” he said. “No—that is, not that I know. Never mentioned one. Only a son, who’s dead now, and this grandson of hers who seems to have married the wrong—” Again, he was preserving the privilege of communication with a client. “Why?” he said. “Why did you ask that?” And he looked at her curiously, thoughtfully.
There was no point in protracting it, in going into an explanation of mental quirks with a stranger—particularly with a stranger who had other things to do.
“No reason,” she said, and smiled at him—smiled with a measure of apology. “Curiosity. No reason.”
He continued to look at her for a moment, but then the friendly smile—the outgoing smile—returned to his pleasant face.
“Look,” he said, and was boyish—“Look, I don’t want to push in. But—we’d just got started, hadn’t we? I mean, the old saying —can’t fly on one wing. Yo
u’ve got another drink coming. A—rain check?”
It didn’t, she thought, matter one way or another. (What did?)
“That would be very nice,” Lois Williams said, in a tone which meant nothing, and then added, “Some time.” But then, to take the sting from that rejecting “some time,” because he did mean so well, so evidently meant so well, “Thank you for the drink,” and tacked a smile to it. She moved then toward her car, and he stood for a second or two watching her before he went toward his own, parked a few yards up Main Street.
So—so the young woman with the carrying voice, the familiar, exasperatingly unplaceable voice, was not Mrs. Montfort’s daughter. Of course she wasn’t. Why would Mrs. Montfort’s daughter be registering at the Inn? Even if Mrs. Montfort had a daughter, and she hadn’t. So—the voice was not a family voice, not an inherited voice. Probably, if she could have heard the two voices together—as now she most obviously could not—they would not have proved alike at all, or alike only in a certain pitch, a certain (not very agreeable) quality. Forget it, Lois told herself, driving toward home.
As always, now, she drove more slowly as she neared the house—the bright small house of glass and redwood siding. She drove slowly so as to postpone the moment when she walked to a door which now only she opened, and turned a key to unlock it and then, setting herself, drawing a quick deep breath to brace herself, walked into a house forever lifeless. But the black road rolled backward under wheels, all the same, and the gravel of the driveway, and the key made, all the same, the small metallic sound in the keyhole and the bolt clicked back, and she walked into bright emptiness.
She made herself a drink—a long drink this time—and turned the television on. It was old movie time, and a man in a flying suit was climbing into an airplane on the deck of a carrier and then the plastic canopy closed over him and—Lois Williams, whose husband had flown planes like that off decks like that, got up and turned the television off and went back and sat, looking at nothing, now and then sipping from the long drink.