Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Lying in bed listening to the wind buffeting about the eaves, he tried to recall the content of the dream. The substance of it remained shadowy and elusive, but shreds and tatters of it still clung about him. The dream, he knew, involved a box. It was a plain, unpainted wooden box three feet square and three feet deep with a hinged lid. He knew nothing about the box, only that it contained something living and that whatever it was smashed and flailed about inside trying desperately to get out. Sharp cracks and fearful rending noises issued from within it. The wood shrieked and groaned, and at one point so violent was the energy thrashing about inside that the box scraped horribly over the floor and the hinges of the lid stretched to the point where the hasps holding it seemed on the verge of being ripped away.

  Quintius had no idea what was in the box. At one point in the dream he threw himself across the top of the lid, using the weight of his own body to bear down upon it. The struggle continued for hours, but despite all his efforts he knew he was losing. Slowly, inexorably, the lid rose. It was at that point that he awoke.

  Slightly breathless, as if from his struggles, he stared down at Isobel. There was something unspeakably sad about her there. Like a doll in a child’s crib, she appeared to have been sleeping for thousands of years, just waiting there for someone to come and wake her from a spell that had been cast upon her.

  The breeze had turned round into the west, causing the slats of the vertical blinds to tremble at the sill. They clicked against each other with a light hollow sound.

  Outside beyond the windows, the large gardens sloping down to the water lay swathed in curling mists. The night was almost preternaturally still, an anticipatory stillness as if all life for that moment-all time and even the earth’s ancient rotation—were held in some breathless abeyance.

  Quintius felt a sense of suffocating weight on his chest. There was within him a sense of dread, combined with a strange exaltation. Something was about to happen, he knew. Something within him was bursting to get out.

  An owl hooted in the trees outside. The foghorns boomed and the long slat blinds clicked hollowly against each other. The sense of suffocation and unspecified rage swelled once again in Quintius’s chest. In the next moment he was up, moving about in the chill damp of the room, slipping into a robe and slippers, then stepping out into the cold corridor. Once up and going, Quintius moved with remarkable purpose, like a man governed by strong inner directives which under no circumstances were to be denied.

  On the bar in his library one of the magnums of unfinished champagne sat in a bucket of melting cubes. Standing there in the close-muffled dark, a tremor rippled up the length of his right leg as he poured a glass for himself by the light of the moon. It was a full moon—white as rime and ringed with a ghostly halation. A hunter’s moon, Quintius thought, lapping tentatively at the wine which had grown tepid and flat.

  In those gray, slowly shifting shadows, he gave the impression of a thirsty dog refreshing itself at a pool of brackish water. Then, refilling his flute with the dregs of the bottle, he maundered through the wide French doors of the library and out onto the flagged terrace. Old rattan chairs and chaises stood about in the shadows beneath a pergola thatched with the dry lacy stalks of unbloomed clematis.

  Turning his robe collar up against the mizzling predawn chill of the hour, he sipped the flat, sourish wine, and stared down over the expanse of sprawling gardens toward the Sound. Though the water was not visible through the fog, he could hear its sound lapping at the pylons of the dock several hundred feet away. Farther out, a buoy bell tolled somewhere out on the dark water.

  Quintius tipped his flute back and drained the warm, sour fluid. Grimacing slightly, he set the glass down on a marble table and stepped down off the patio flags onto the cold damp grass.

  His tread, stiff and unhurried, cut a slurred trail through the misted grass. The path he was carving at the moment led unswervingly to the low, sprawling greenhouse up ahead where an image of the moon hung trapped in huge plates of skylight glass.

  Once inside Quintius felt better. The sweet, dizzy fragrance of lush growth, the earthy smell of peat moss and manure all had a salutary effect upon him. They had the power to subdue the querulous, bickering voices that had beset him all day. Suddenly his expression appeared more relaxed, more reconciled. Moving through the orangery to the area where his huge collection of succulents were housed, there was no longer the unrelenting gnaw, that vexing sense of doubt and incompletion.

  Here in the moon-dappled shadows of the greenhouse, his huge collection of cactus grew, virtually every species known to man. Over the years Quintius had collected and cataloged them all—the large Euphorbia candelabras, the Opuntias, some twenty-five species of Noto Cactus from South America, the gnarled Lithops from southwest Africa, almost forty-four species of Kleinia tomentosa, Echinocactus, and a grandly awesome Cereus peruuianus monstrosus thrusting upward thirty feet so that it brushed the greenhouse ceiling. Then Aloes, some three hundred species, and Agaves, and finally, above all, his beloved climbing, throbbing, pulsing nightbloomers. ‘

  Cryptocereus anthonyanus, Anthony’s rick-rack; Hylocereus undatus, the Honolulu queen; Selenicereus werklei, moon goddess—it would bloom in another night or so, he judged. Then Selenicereus urbanus, moon cereus—it would burst its calyx late in the month— Then his own special favorite, now fully bloomed, quivering, radiant, dominating all others by its sheer extravagance, but its life already half over—queen of the night, Selenicereus grandiflorus, nightblooming cereus.

  Standing before it, Quintius closed his eyes and inhaled deeply the sweet, slightly citrine breath. He gulped it, ingesting the essence of the plant as if he were partaking of special magical properties. Shortly his eyes closed and he rocked slowly back and forth as if in prayer.

  78

  All was not well between the Quintiuses. In the nearly five months since the snowy evening of Mooney’s visit, they had quarreled incessantly. The crux of contention was the charge the detective had leveled at Quintius. Mrs. Quintius was unable to grasp why her husband had failed to answer the charge or even to seek advice from his attorneys. Quintius maintained that he was reluctant now to reopen something which appeared to have quietly closed of its own accord. Quite reasonably, he had an absolute horror of dragging the gallery and the family name through the mud.

  At first Mrs. Quintius was puzzled; later she was angry and thereafter, a little frightened. When the situation between them had become intolerable, they agreed that she would go to London for a few weeks in May with her son Frederick on a buying trip. It would give them both a breather—time to think. Later, when she returned, they would decide on a course of action.

  Before leaving she made Quintius promise that he would see their lawyers the moment she got back.

  The morning of her departure he drove her out to the airport. When they kissed good-bye, she seemed worried and preoccupied. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him how sad it made her to see him look so distraught. She knew he had not slept well for weeks and that he no longer enjoyed food. She knew that he dwelled morbidly on the senseless death of their elder son, Billy, blaming himself for everything that had happened, and then this wildly outrageous charge. And that awful man Watford and the detective.

  Alone back at the house (he’d given the elderly German caretaker and his wife two weeks’ paid vacation), he sat down to wrestle with the problem himself.

  Isobel would be home in a fortnight. As far as seeing their attorneys, he knew, she could not be put off much longer. The fact that he had already delayed so long only served to arouse greater suspicion.

  Somewhat more ominous was the fact that several times during the past month or so, as the weather had steadily warmed, he had seen the detective. Twice in the area of the gallery as he’d gone out to lunch; twice on the rush-hour platform as he boarded the Huntington express, and then once again while returning to the gallery from an estate auction on the Upper East Side. Taking no special pains to be furtive
, the detective was there, presumably shadowing him, watching and waiting, dogging his steps, flaunting his presence as if he could bluff Quintius into making some ultimately incriminating move.

  “The dominant suit is Pentacles.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s masculine.”

  “Thank heavens for that.”

  “It’s the money suit. High finance. Industry. Enterprise. Progress. That sort of thing.”

  “Not artistic?”

  “Not remotely.”

  Laughter and chatter. The clink of glasses. The quiet orderly hum of dinner being served. The young couple seated at the table across from Quintius appeared to be lovers. Though the restaurant was Japanese, the fortune-teller was not. She was not even Oriental. More probably Middle-European.

  Glancing at her incuriously, Quintius judged she might be on the sunny side of forty. He frowned at the kerchief and bangles, the multiple rings on her fingers, the absurd little panatela tossed in for effect as she shuffled the tarot deck around the tabletop.

  “Shall I continue?” she asked.

  The young man laughed. “By all means.” Quintius plucked up a sea urchin with his chopsticks, dipped it into a mixture of soy and wasabi and ate, washing it down with hot sake. All the while his anger mounted.

  “Your significator is the King of Pentacles,” the irritating singsong of the tarot reader drifted back upon him. She held up the card for the young man to see. It had a picture of an aged patriarch, a crown on his head and a scepter in his lap. He was seated on a pig, and in his right hand he held aloft a pinwheel or pentacle. “His number is sixty-four in the deck,” the reader trilled. “He’s what is called a ‘dark man,’ meaning mysterious.”

  “Oh, is he?” the young woman laughed.

  “But it’s not mystery in the ordinary sense,” the reader shook her head, causing her silver loop earrings to tinkle lightly. “It’s mystery in the sense of ambiguity. For instance, the ‘dark man’ is associated with courage and success, but also passions of a dangerous and ungovernable sort.”

  The slightly mocking smile on the young man’s face appeared to droop. He had gradually begun to fall under the reader’s spell. So had Quintius, who, all the while he plucked with his chopsticks at the slivers of raw fish, had fastened almost hungrily on her voice.

  “Your suit cards,” the reader continued, “are the Six of Swords, Four of Cups, Knight of Scepters, Five of Pentacles.”

  The reader squinted through a whorl of thick smoke from her panatela and shuffled cards once more about the table. “Ah, now you see your trumps— Il Bagatto, the juggler, and … Il Motto, the fool.” The girl began to laugh, caught something in the reader’s eye and then thought better of it.

  The reader flashed her quick, mirthless smile. “The Four of Cups, reversed here, stands for new acquaintance. Not necessarily desirable, I would judge from this suit. The Knight of Scepters is a sad card. It means disunion, rupture, discord. Conceivably tragedy.”

  Quintius’s ears pricked. His jaw slowed. He sipped more sake, feeling the hot astringent fluid at the back of his throat as he strained forward to hear the reader.

  “Your Five of Pentacles suggests a deep sense of loss, of grieving, some center of sorrow you have as yet been unable to resolve. Something you deeply regret? The Knight of Scepters here indicates some dark, unhappy destiny.”

  The young couple stared back at the reader, baffled and a bit surprised.

  “What do the picture cards mean?” the young man asked.

  The reader seemed reluctant to discuss them, but then sighed and resumed. “They represent dominant personality traits. Il Bagatto, the juggler, symbolizes will, often of an immoral sort. Il Motto, the fool, impulsiveness. The total picture is that of a highly successful man, in the temporal sense, of course, but one whose feelings, whose deepest emotions are blocked, thereby transforming themselves into something destructive. In this man are violent tides of passion. Ungovernable rages. Dark, unfathomable depths which he himself is unwilling to plumb.”

  The reading concluded simultaneously with Quintius’s dinner. His red lacquer box of raw fish and rice was empty, his sake flask drained. He sat back now as the waiter poured steaming green tea into his cup.

  After the young couple had paid her, the reader rose and left them. She started toward the opposite side of the room, then paused and stared hard at Quintius as if taking his measure. Even before she’d made a move in his direction, he knew she would come. Beneath the table, his hands clenched.

  “Is there anything I can do for you this evening, sir?”

  Quintius stared fixedly down into his empty red lacquer box. When at last he looked up, he found himself gazing into the smiling, hooded eyes of the fortune-teller, the panatela poised between her jeweled fingers. “A card reading? Perhaps a palm?” From across the narrow table he caught a blast of her smokey breath.

  Quintius shook his head from side to side. “No—I think not.” He tossed a wad of bills on the table and stalked out.

  It was too late to go back to Cold Spring Harbor. He decided instead to stay overnight at Sixty-second Street. He felt poorly. The pain above his eyes he took to be the result of too much sake. Also, he was now troubled with a faintly oppressive sense of fullness in his chest. A walk, he felt, would have a salutary effect.

  It was a balmy spring evening and the air along the river had a thick, scorched feeling, the result of incinerators and fog. The hour was roughly 10:00 P.M., the hour of panhandlers and dog walkers. People strolled with their pets up and down the avenue, pausing to chat with neighbors around hydrants and sewer openings.

  Quintius walked fast, a man with a mission, bound for some special destination.

  At one point he turned to look over his shoulder as though he were certain he was being followed. When he reached the fashionable brownstone at East Sixty-second Street, he didn’t go directly up. Instead, he continued to walk at a brisk clip along the river, attempting to exorcise through physical exertion his sense of vague, unspecified dread. On the river promenade he stood by the dilapidated railing and watched the barges slip noiselessly over the inky black water. Their green-red running lights had the look of something phantasmagoric. Attempting to focus his vision on those fleeting, wraithlike lights, they ceased to be fixed points of illumination, changing instead into huge daubs and splashes of paint in the process of chaotic application.

  He turned quickly from the railing and hurried off the promenade, away from the barge lights and the lambent flicker of streetlights dancing on the inky water.

  Back again at East Sixty-second Street, he bounded up the front steps, then stood outside the door rummaging in his pockets for a key. At that hour lights still streamed warmly out onto the street from nearby apartments and town houses. But his house, its full three stories plunged in darkness, reeked of something ominous and vaguely inhospitable.

  Opening the front door he peered into the thick shadows of the small foyer as if listening for something. For a moment he hovered on the threshold, uncertain whether or not to go in. Something made him turn to see if he were being observed. It was at that moment that he saw in the light of a streetlamp across the way the big, rumpled silhouette of Francis Mooney.

  He stood there in a wide circle of illumination, brazenly regarding Quintius. For a time, Quintius stared back, half-inclined to go out and confront him. But instead, with a shrug, he stepped into the stale hush of the old town house and locked the door behind him.

  Once inside, he undressed quickly and got into bed. But he was too rattled to sleep. Instead he lay in the dark, staring at the strange play of lights on the ceiling.

  Ghosts and chimeras swarmed through his fevered brain. Fantastic speculations he played out to their most catastrophic extremes. Then, unaccountably, there in the mottled pattern of light and shadow on the ceiling, the face of his dead son materialized slowly like a photographic image wavering in a bath of developing fluid. It was he unmistakably, not as a gro
wn man, but as he looked as a boy—glowing, vibrant, full of mischief and goodwill, all the world before him.

  Quintius turned and buried his fevered face in the pillow. Alone in the vacant, airless shadows of the old town house that had been in the Quintius family for well over eighty years, he could hear Billy’s laughter ring out and the ghostly, plangent sound of a Scarlatti sonata played on a harpsichord by his grandaunt Mathilde. Now Mathilde was gone and Billy was gone and the harpsichord, unplayed for decades, gathered dust in the library.

  79

  The building he’d selected was 356 West Forty-eighth, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. It was a vintage twenties, seven-story walkup, built out of grimy brown brick with rows of rusty fire escapes facing out onto the street. Though its occupants were mainly welfare recipients, there was still a hard core of blue-collar Italian-Polish tenants whose families had been in residence there for decades. The building clung doggedly to some notion of clean, albeit shabby, respectability. Geranium pots flourished on the windowsills, and refuse cans, lined up neatly on the curb out front, awaited the trash collector.

  There was an Italian bake shop at the corner. Just in from there was an electrical contractor whose storefront windows were decorated austerely with no more than a parched and badly wilted leopard plant. Cheek by jowl to a storefront palmist and fortuneteller was a junk consignment shop with a dilapidated Morris chair squatting forlornly out front.

  In the middle of the block the street boasted four small restaurants known to theatergoers for good, moderately priced food and fast service. One was French, one was Greek, one was Cuban and the other was a landmark New York City steakhouse. On any night of the week the lights burned late in the vicinity of 356 West Forty-eighth, and one could depend upon there being people in the streets well up until 2:00 A.M.

  The roof of 356 was a typical tar-topped affair with glass transoms, sooty chimneys and a cluttered maze of wash lines and TV antennas. Several of the lines sagged beneath the burden of drying wash. Stepping out on the roof he smelled at once the combination of starch and strong soap wafting across at him from the gently billowing sheets.