The Moonflower

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Once he had greeted Laurie, Jerome seemed hardly to notice the child. He said evenly that he was indeed surprised, and waited for Marcia to speak. Somehow she managed to go to him quietly and lift her face for his kiss. He hesitated just a moment before brushing her cheek lightly with his lips. His restraint cut her further and it took all her will to suppress the tremor in her voice as she spoke.

  “Hello, Jerome,” she said.

  The winged black brows she had once loved to trace with her fingers lifted sardonically, and his lips, straight, yet faintly sensual, curved in a mirthless smile. “Didn’t you get my letter?”

  She glanced at Laurie and shook her head in warning. Laurie knew nothing of the contents of that letter.

  “I got it,” she said. “And that’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.” He withdrew his arm from Laurie’s fervent clasp. “If you’ll excuse me now—I’ve had a long trip. I’d like a bath, and then I’ve some work waiting for me.”

  Quickly Marcia turned, glad of something to do for him. “I’ll tell Sumie-san. Would you like something hot to drink? Have you had lunch—” She broke off because she had begun to sound like Laurie.

  He shook his head. “Sumie-san knows what I want. It’s not necessary for you to trouble yourself being wifely. If you’ll excuse me.”

  “But, Daddy!” Laurie wailed.

  “Hush, darling,” Marcia said. “Not now. Your father is tired.”

  He crossed the hall to his bedroom and the door closed behind him. All the bubbling ferment subsided in Laurie and she looked completely bereft. Yet she tried to hide her hurt behind a grave young dignity.

  “I guess he’s tired. He’ll feel better after a while, won’t he? Is it all right if I go outside and play again?”

  “Why don’t you build yourself a snowman?” Marcia suggested. “That’s something you could never do in California.”

  Laurie agreed that this was a good idea, and went outside rather meekly. Watching her go, a quiet anger began to stir in Marcia. She went into the bedroom she shared with Laurie and sat before the fire Sumie-san had lighted, staring into the red curlings of flame.

  So this was the way he intended to be—withdrawn and cold and strange. But why? What had she done? The last time he had gone to Japan, he had parted from her lovingly enough. In the years she had known him she had glimpsed this cold side at times, though never before had it been directed toward her and Laurie. But as the stirring of indignation died, she began to feel shocked and sore and bewildered.

  For more than an hour she sat before the fire, tense with listening. She heard him when he went down the hall to the bath. Heard him as he returned to his room. There was a long silence. Then he opened the door again, and she went out into the hall to find him putting on his coat.

  “You’re going out?” she asked evenly. “I hoped we might talk a little, get acquainted again.”

  He regarded her remotely. “I believe I said everything I wanted to say in my letter. You’ve made a foolish move in coming out here, Marcia. The only sensible thing you can do is turn around and go home.”

  “That’s what Nan Horner said,” she told him. “But it’s not something I mean to do. I can’t give everything up so easily without even understanding why.”

  Something flickered in his eyes and was gone before she could read it. “So you’ve met Nan?” he said.

  “Sumie-san went for her last night when we got here,” Marcia explained. “She came down and cleared things up. Then she invited us over for lunch today.”

  “I see.” He moved toward the door uneasily, as though he was increasingly eager to escape. “I must go out now. Don’t expect me for dinner.”

  He went into the entry hall to put on his shoes, and she watched him go out through the garden. Somehow she had not expected this—that he would leave the house so quickly, still cold and remote, with no word of kindness to her, or even of explanation. Never in the years she had known him had he been deliberately unkind, and this new attitude shocked and dismayed her to a frightening degree. For the first time she could almost believe in the words of his letter; words she had rejected so fiercely until now.

  She was close to tears and despair and she fought back the weakness. She had not come all this distance to give up at Jerome’s first unkind look. If she meant to fight for their marriage she would have to find more courage and endurance in herself than this.

  Doggedly she put on her coat and galoshes and went into the side garden to join Laurie, who greeted her with pleasure. Together they rolled a huge snowball to make the base of a snowman. But she knew they were both pretending. Pretending there was, for the moment, no Jerome Talbot in their lives to wound and torment them.

  Already the sun melted the surface and they had to dig into shaded corners for snow that was still firm. The physical effort of working with her hands, with her body, was a release for Marcia.

  Once, as they worked at their lopsided snowman, she glanced up at the big Japanese villa behind them. Toward the rear of the upper gallery in the adjoining apartment, a section of wooden doors had slid open. A man stood in the aperture, staring down at them. It was the Japanese man she had seen upon her arrival the night before, Ichiro Minato. He did not blink or turn his eyes away when she caught his look upon her, but continued to stare at her stolidly. His expression was neither one of interest nor indifference. He stared as a stone image might have stared and there was no telling what thought went on behind his unwavering gaze.

  “The inscrutable Oriental,” Marcia thought dryly, and wondered if the cliché were really true.

  Since she couldn’t bring herself to stare as he did, she turned back to her play with Laurie. Later, when she glanced at the gallery again, the shutter was closed and only the house watched her.

  Dinner that evening was a lonely affair. Sumie-san served it in a big gloomy dining room, heavy with mahogany furniture out of the past. There was a huge sideboard and a Victorian chandelier, a long table and stiff, high-backed chairs. Marcia wondered if the Japanese family which had once occupied this house had ever used this dining room, or if it had been kept as a foreign curiosity, more for show than for use. Certainly the rich, wine-red carpet revealed little sign of wear, though time had faded it. There was no fireplace here, and with only an electric heater burning, it was a chilly room. They ate hurriedly, grateful for the hot noodle soup Yasuko-san had made for them.

  Afterwards the evening seemed endless. Unlike Laurie, Marcia could not settle down to look at pictures in a magazine. Her immediate problem was too urgent. When Laurie was in bed, she went into the drawing room, to sit huddled before the fire, wondering where Jerome had gone and when he would be back. In the dark, chilly room anguish lay heavily upon her spirit. Who were his friends in Kyoto? To whom had he turned so quickly upon coming back from his trip? Was it only his work at the laboratory that had drawn him away? She knew so little about him that she had no way of knowing.

  The ringing telephone startled her. She listened while Sumie-san went to answer it, not expecting it to be for her. But the maid came to call her and when she picked up the receiver she heard Alan Cobb’s voice. She had hardly thought of him since they had parted at the station the previous day. It was as if, since then, she had been projected into another world which had little relation to any other life she had ever known.

  “Did you have any trouble finding your address?” he asked.

  It was difficult to put aside her aching concern and dissemble casually.

  “No, not really,” she managed. “The driver took me to the wrong entrance first, but it was the right house.” She sensed a lameness in her words and added an explanation, lest he suspect that something was wrong. “My husband was away and hadn’t received my cable. But he came home today.”

  “Fine,” Alan said. “I was sorry to leave you on your own yesterday. You looked a bit scared. But I had an idea you’d land on your feet. How is Laurie?”

  His voice was relaxed, his words un
hurried and he began to seem like a link with the ordinary everyday world outside the depressing atmosphere of this house. To keep him there on the wire and stave off the wave of anxiety that would return when she hung up, she told him about Laurie playing in her first snow, and a little about this picturesque house, although she did not give him its more gloomy details.

  “You won’t forget that I want to meet your husband?” he reminded her.

  She had forgotten and she was sure Jerome would be indifferent to the idea, but she did not confess these things. She would try to arrange a meeting before long, she promised and let it go at that.

  “How do you like the college?” she asked him, still wanting to hold to this thread of sound that stood between her and the dark thoughts that waited to engulf her.

  “It’s too soon to tell, but at least it’s going to be interesting,” he said. “I have my first class tomorrow. And they fixed me up in western-style living quarters. Everyone has been anxious to make me comfortable. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

  They talked for a little while longer. He reminded her that he wanted to take Laurie on a sight-seeing trip one of these days when the weather improved, and then they hung up. She stood for a moment in the hallway near the foot of the stairs, aware of the brooding silence of the house, of the empty rooms above and the locked door cutting off the gallery upstairs. With silence, the house came into its own again. How muted and secret it seemed, how strangely hostile to her presence. Shivering, she hurried back to the fire in the drawing room and sat upon the hearthrug as Laurie liked to do, getting as close to the blaze as she could to warm the chilled core of her.

  It was while she sat there that the strange music began—if it could be called music. Someone was playing melancholy minor notes on an Oriental stringed instrument, with an accompanying drumbeat and chanting in the background. She rose and walked around the room, trying to tell where the music came from. It was not drifting in from the street, but seemed to come from the rooms beyond the partition. There was a wailing monotony to it that wore upon her nerves and made her restless. It was not music which permitted escape and there was no shutting out the strange rhythm. When a woman’s voice began to sing plaintively in Japanese, the sense of sadness, of mournful despair, was deepened. Then song and music stopped abruptly, and the ensuing silence seemed to ring with the sound, as if the rhythm of that strange drum were going on and on inside Marcia’s head.

  It was late when she gave up her vigil before the fire and went across the hall to the room where Laurie slept. Just as she was about to turn the doorknob softly so as not to waken her daughter, Jerome came into the house. She did not want to face him now, when her courage had long since ebbed, but she was not quick enough to escape before he saw her standing there.

  “Wait a moment, Marcia,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle.

  She paused, alert to the change in his tone and manner. He took off his coat, unwound the wool scarf from about his neck and then went to look in the drawing room.

  “There are still some embers,” he said. “If I poke them up, will you join me here for a few minutes?”

  She followed him into the room, still uncertain, and stood beside the grate while he stirred up the fire and added coal from the bucket. Once he looked at her with the old, bright smile she remembered.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” he said. “Though I can’t say I’d blame you. That wasn’t much of a welcome, was it? But you took me by surprise and I didn’t know how to deal with the situation when I found you here.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry,” and longed to go to him easily in the old way and be held and comforted.

  He tossed the poker aside with a clatter and stood up, tall and lean before her. Lightly he put his two hands on her shoulders and bent to kiss her cheek. The faint odor of his pipe tobacco reached her, familiar and unsettling. She held very still beneath the touch of his lips, knowing that this was not the time to turn to him in response.

  “I don’t know how to manage this gracefully any more than I did before,” he said. “But I’ve had time to think a little.”

  Near the hearth there was an old leather chair, shabby and cracked, and he pulled it up for her, lowering her into it. She drew up her feet beneath her body and curled back in the depths of the chair, while Jerome stood beside the marble mantel, his face in shadow as he studied her. Behind him a tall mirror reflected the dark saturnine shape of his head.

  “I’ve never wanted to hurt you, Marcia,” he said at length. “Or to hurt Laurie either.”

  She was silent, waiting.

  “I don’t think you should have come out here,” he went on. “But since you are here, why not make the best of it for a few weeks? See a bit of Japan, and help Laurie to get something from the experience. This house is your home, of course. Do anything you like to make yourself comfortable in it.”

  The implication was clear. She was to entertain herself for a vacation period and then go home and forget about Jerome Talbot. Forget that she had ever had a husband or a marriage! She looked up at him mutely and knew her eyes had brimmed with tears.

  With a visible effort he suppressed the return of impatience. “You’ve always thought life a lot simpler than it is, Marcia. Sometimes it’s necessary to accept the fact that there can be a—a sea change. It’s something that can happen to anyone. My road took another direction from yours.”

  “I would have come with you,” she said.

  Again there was a stiffening in him, a withdrawal. “Will you accept the terms and stay for a while?” he asked.

  She blinked her eyes against the bright flames in the grate, blinded by the shimmer of tears. If she accepted, or appeared to accept, she could at least remain in Japan. For the moment that was all she asked—to remain, to be near him.

  “I’d like to stay,” she said softly.

  He bent to take her hands in his. “I will like having you here. Will you believe that, my dear? I think no one has laughed in this house for a very long while. Once I liked to hear you laugh, Marcia.”

  She smiled at him tremulously and hope stirred in her again. This was all she asked for the moment—that he not be indifferent to her, that she be granted time to win him back. Once he began to remember, then perhaps—

  “That’s better,” he said and touched one corner of her mouth with his forefinger. “I want you to have fun while you’re here. You’ve met Nan Horner and you’ll meet other people through her. I don’t go in much for Kyoto’s social life. But you might have a party some night, if you like, invite some people in for dinner.”

  She nodded brightly. If this was the role he wanted her to play, then she would play it with all her heart.

  When he had walked beside her to her door and said good night, he turned out the hall light and went into his own room. For a long moment she stood there in the thick darkness, remembering times when he would not have left her alone like this. In a trembling wave the longing for him swept through her, engulfed her. She wanted him with a hunger that startled her and left her shaken. This was worse than being across an ocean from him, to have him here in the next room and to be unable to go to him.

  All about her the house was alien, cold and dark. Somewhere in its depths sounded the single quick spat of a Japanese drum, as if someone had struck it accidentally in putting it away.

  6.

  In the next few days February gave way to March. Snow still lay upon the mountain tops, but it was gone from the roofs and streets of Kyoto, and the first stirrings of spring were moving upward from the islands to the south.

  Within the Japanese villa nothing had changed and Jerome remained courteous, but remote. The pattern of his days was uncertain, Marcia discovered. Sometimes he worked at the laboratory—or so she supposed—but there was something strange about that.

  When he had first come to Japan, he had invested a portion of his private capital in collaboration with two or three Japanese scientists working actively in the
study of nuclear energy. He had written to Marcia’s father about this work with excitement and elation. She had supposed that it was a continuation of the research and experiments he had been conducting in the States before the war, work in which her father had inspired his initial interest. Papers began to appear in scientific journals, written by Jerome Talbot in Japan. There had been some newspaper publicity about this “experiment in Kyoto,” but the news had gradually died out, there were no more papers, and Jerome had ceased to mention his work in his letters home. Now he seemed to have lost all that early purpose and drive, and he blocked any effort on her part to inquire into his work.

  All this troubled her. She remembered him as a man dedicated to science, indifferent to all else so long as no one interfered with his working pattern. Now there seemed to be no pattern in the sense that she remembered, and she discerned in him a suffering she could not reach or understand. There were days when he shut himself in his room and came out only for meals. There were evenings when he left the house altogether, without indicating his plans, so that she did not know where he went.

  Yet in spite of her deep concern, she was not wholly unhappy in this new life. He was not completely indifferent to her and more than once she had caught that flicker in his eyes that she could not read. All she asked for the moment was to stay, to be near him, to be given enough time to work out her own purpose in coming here. The conviction was strong in her that if only she could stay long enough she could reach him again. He could not help but remember the sweetness of the past, just as she remembered.

  In the meantime, there was the enchantment of Japan outside her door and she turned to it eagerly.

  Jerome was kind to Laurie in a somewhat absent-minded manner, and once he brought home a pretty flowered kimono for her, so that she could dress up like a Japanese girl. When Laurie put it on, she provoked smiling consternation in Sumie-san. No Japanese lady would fold her kimono with the right side over the left in the western manner. A kimono was worn that way, Sumie-san pointed out, only in death. So Laurie and Marcia learned the elementary rule of closing a kimono with the left side over the right.