The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  The snow was deep and smooth in the driveway. The wind raked off the road, across the immense lawn, and only the vaguest outline in the drifts against the shrubbery indicated the path of the driveway. I chanced it with the new snow tires and slowly but firmly the Lincoln settled into the snow and worked its way forward.

  In a while I saw the house, the elms and oaks which shaded the lawn in summer, the veranda which seemed long as a football field, the six squared white columns rising all three stories to the roof with its own tier of cupolas, chimneys rising out of the roof in faint shadows.

  The house was dark. There would have been a light for me if Cyril had arrived. He wouldn’t have gone to bed, not with me on my way. He wasn’t here yet. The snow had held him up. No one was here. I left the car running and plodded calf-deep through the virgin snow. I had decided to spend the night in the cottage down by the little private lake on which we’d sailed and ice skated as children: it had always been my favorite spot. But first, hopelessly cold and tired as I was, I wanted to step inside the great house itself. Five years. … I had been away five years and all that time the key to the front door remained on my ring. Turning my back against the wind churning along the veranda, I fitted key to lock and stepped into the front hall.

  My footsteps echoed in the parquet-floored entry. Reflexively I reached for a switch, snapped it, saw a dim yellowish light come on against the wall. The yellow shaded bulbs had been fitted into the old gas fixtures. Although the house was no longer lived in, arrangements had been made for Emil Blocker, who had been the caretaker for forty years, to come by once a week with his wife and keep it dusted, clean. I stood looking the length of the foyer as it widened to take in the huge, gently sloping staircase. On either side there were sliding doors, opened, giving on shadowy expanses of drawing rooms. I had grown up running wildly through these rooms, playing tag and hide-and-seek with Cyril, making far too much noise and being hushed by our nanny or grandfather’s secretary. Now I couldn’t even summon up a ghost. I had never felt more alone in the stillness, listening to the wind and snow outside, the inevitable banging of something that had come loose at the back of the house.

  I went through one drawing room, turned on another light, and walked into the library. It had been my refuge in the house from early on, even before I could read the books. My grandfather would let me sit in a huge leather chair, cracked and split and incredibly ancient, while I turned the pages of encyclopedias and historical atlases and obscure magazines which have long since passed out of existence.

  Now the room looked as warm and comforting as ever, as if my grandfather had just gone up the stairs to retire for the evening. Logs had been laid in the cold grate opposite his desk with its brass student lamps. Books lining the walls had been dusted. The World War II position map was still punctuated with colored pins. I stepped closer to it and realized that my grandfather had been refighting the German breakthrough in the Ardennes during the winter of 1944–45, called the Battle of the Bulge ever after, when he had died.

  Another series of pins, all white, marked the corridor which was to have been used for Hitler’s escape at war’s end. A realist at all times, my grandfather had always labeled those who thought the escape route might actually have been used as “romantic idlers.” Hitler was dead, and in my grandfather’s view Hitler’s fate had been earned by his own gross excesses and perversity, was richly deserved for having squandered his chances.

  But there was still a good deal of wallspace given over to framed and frequently autographed photographs of my grandfather in the company of world leaders. There was even one of him puffing a token cigar with Winston Churchill when Churchill was alone in the wilderness of the 1930s. My grandfather was, of course, at political swords’ points with Churchill but admired him enormously. Most of the black-and-white photographs were, however, efforts to capture forever moments with the Nazi leaders: sitting in slatted lawn chairs in slanting late afternoon sunlight with Hitler in some flower garden, chatting with Hitler and Eva Braun at a table laden with the remains of a casual luncheon while a pair of German shepherds drowsed at their feet, peering intently at a bottle of wine being exhibited by von Ribbentrop, who bears an expression of such vacuous arrogance as to be laughable, standing by an immense Mercedes-Benz touring car with a vague smile on his face as if trying to ascertain the reason for Goering’s obvious mirth.

  There were also a great many family pictures, one of which showed me holding a baseball bat, wearing a Chicago Cubs cap, smiling at my grandfather, who wears a characteristic suit and tie. There were pictures of my father, young and quietly concerned, and my mother laughing, holding my little sister Lee, who died. …

  The house was moaning in the wind and there was no point in standing in the library getting sentimental. I was very tired. I took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from a cart against the wall by the large, functional globe, and went back outside, turning off the lights and closing the front door.

  I let the Lincoln roll back into the whiteness, eating it up, down around behind the house, following the railing barely visible over the snow drifts. Inside the car it was still ice cold. But I was all right. I parked beneath the blackened branches of an oak tree which in summer shaded the cottage.

  I got the bags out of the trunk, hauled my gear into the cottage. The screened porch was deep with snow and in the light I could see that the cottage was not kept up as carefully as the main house. It had a mildly stale quality and as I stood in the faintly musty room I realized what was missing, what I’d noticed in the library, in the foyer: cigar smoke. The house still retained the aroma.

  The furnishings were wicker, flowered cushions of green and summer yellow against white painted wicker. It was very cold in the cottage and I stacked wood in the fireplace in the living room, checked the flue for snow and birds’ nests, and lit it, listened to the dry birch and oak crackle in the flame. Then I went to the bedroom, saw that the bed was made, and laid another smaller fire in the bedroom fireplace, lit it.

  While the house was warming up I went around opening all the windows a crack to get rid of the stale smell. Then I went to the kitchen, found that it was stocked with certain necessities, and made coffee in a glass percolator on a gas burner. I lit my pipe of Balkan Sobranie and the two smells, coffee and tobacco, began to fill the house, along with the dry burning wood, getting rid of the closed-up dead smell. I poured a cheese glass of brandy and toasted my homecoming.

  It was something past midnight when I took a cup of coffee into the bedroom. I brought with me Blandings Castle by Wodehouse, a dog-eared copy which had probably been in the wicker bookcase for forty years, my brandy, and my pipe. I bunched the pillows up behind me and pulled the covers up to my chin. There was a dim bedside lamp and the shadows from the fireplace crackled, danced on the walls and ceiling. I listened to the wind as I read and sipped my coffee and brandy and smoked my pipe and I felt safe and secure, the way I’d felt as a child in the cottage.

  I wasn’t wondering where Cyril was and I wasn’t thinking about the man in the sheepskin coat. It would all be all right and in the morning I’d get it all straightened out.

  Then, exhausted, I turned off the lamp and slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Seven

  THE MORNING WAS GOOD. I felt cold and clean and rested. My head ached only slightly as I stood in front of the glowing embers in the grate. I put my underwear and socks in a bureau drawer, put on corduroy trousers, high-strapped cavalry boots, and another pullover with no bloodstains on it.

  The air outside was crisp, triggering an avalanche of memories as I stepped onto the porch. The sky was the same eerie white as the landscape, divided by a ridge of firs in the distance like a piece of abstract art. There was no sound but the wind, no movement but wisps of snow skidding across the crust. The thermometer by the door told me it was exactly zero where I was standing and after a moment I went back inside and put on my sheepskin coat and heavy, fleece-lined gloves.

  The Linc
oln sat quietly in the snow, graceful, dignified, wounded. Its tracks and my own from the night before were completely filled in by the new snow. It cracked and squeaked as I walked, following the driveway as best I could, circling around the lawn away from the house, past the gazebo and the trout pond toward the other set of stone gates closer to the town.

  Standing in the shelter of a grove of firs, I stared back at the house. For a moment I thought I saw a wisp of smoke curl up from the chimney. But no, it had to be snow swirling off the slate roof. When I looked again it was gone, a curtain of blowing snow separating me from the house.

  It was nine o’clock and I was going to walk to town. It was dry and cold walking along the road, protected by the thick trees on either side of me forming a natural corridor. Above me snow circled, lashed into the trees. At ground level, it was quiet and the walk of a mile went quickly until I was standing by the great square park at the edge of town. I hadn’t seen a car or another human being.

  Holidays in summer had been spent at the park. Cyril and I had grown up saluting our fallen war dead and the nation’s loftier principles in the park, sweating in the summer sun and drinking frosty bottles of beer from ice-filled washtubs and listening to the town band in the tiny, exquisite shell. Behind the band shell I had made love to a girl from the high school, my first time, tugging at her clothes, full of urgency. In the center of the park stood a bronzed doughboy of the Great War, gesturing countless invisible comrades onward with an arm raised, clutching his rifle. On the base of the statue there were tablets with names of the boys from Cooper’s Falls who had died over there, over there. …

  Walking on, I came to the corner of the park nearest the business district, which lay oddly quiet in the snow. There were perhaps a dozen cars parked along the curbs and finally one passed me stealthily, quietly in the snow. Standing in the corner of the park was a tall nineteenth-century figure, lean and stem and bearded, holding a book in one hand: the first Cooper of Cooper’s Falls—one of my ancestors frozen forever, doomed to spend his own eternity watching the sleepy world of Cooper’s Falls from the grassy corner of the park.

  Not really conscious of what I was doing, I walked past Brill’s Drugstore, the Cooper’s Falls Cafe, past the imposingly somber Cooper’s Falls Hotel, which looked exactly the same as it had in my youth: rich, opulent, more like a club, reflecting the money which hallmarked the town. And there was the tiny frame library, trimmed in gingerbread, a miniature example of the curlicued sort of wooden structure which was so big in Mother Goose’s day. The Cooper’s Falls library was her “A material,” as we used to say when I was in the network television business. I had never been able to resist it.

  Almost reflexively I went up the steps and into the library. A gas heater in the middle of the room was working much too hard: the room was stifling. There was no one behind the rolltop desk, but after I’d slipped out of my coat and draped it across a chair I heard sounds from the back of the building, from behind the racks of Cooper’s Falls Leaders, which I knew dated back to the very first issue, midway through the nineteenth century.

  “Well, John Cooper, how are you?”

  I turned around, the voice vaguely familiar, and saw Paula Smithies, a very pretty girl who had one summer gone to bed a great deal with my brother Cyril.

  “Why, Paula, for God’s sake,” I heard myself saying, knowing I was smiling at the sight of her. I hadn’t seen Paula in nearly fifteen years and she was not only recognizable but far prettier as a woman than she’d been as a teen-ager. And she’d been pretty then. “How are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m fine, John, just fine.” Her face was pale, hair very dark and long and straight. She wore black framed glasses which were squared off and looked fine. “Would you believe I’m the librarian here now? I’ve come back to Cooper’s Falls in my old age.” She grinned openly, looking into my eyes.

  “I thought you went off to California, was it California? Married a newspaperman. …” I was searching. She picked up a stack of antique National Geographics.

  “That’s right. And he went off to Vietnam for the L.A. Times and stepped on a land mine in Laos when he was supposed to be back in Saigon resting and I was a widow all of a sudden.” She set the magazines down on a packing crate, pushed her glasses back with a forefinger. “That was three years ago and I stayed in L.A. for a while, working in a branch library but, God, have you ever lived in California, John? It’s some sort of updated Dantean inferno—highways, overpasses, underpasses, cars, cars, cars, sunshine, smog, the Dodgers and the Rams, and the Lakers, drugs, and just unbelievable isolation.” She reflected for a moment and flashed a nervous little smile. “Unbelievable. People do very peculiar things because they’re so insanely lonely. Things you’re ashamed of afterward, things that eat away at your sanity when you think about them. …”

  She asked me what I’d been doing and I told her that I’d been up to my ass in all the normal things: marriage, infidelity, writing books, working for the network, occupational alcoholism, divorce, too many pills, a long struggle back. Just the normal things. She laughed, shaking her head.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee? Can you stand the heat in here? This damned thing has no idea of the meaning of restraint.” She glared at the heater. “I was trying to open the windows in back when you came in.”

  I picked my way among the cartons of books and opened the windows overlooking the deep drifts between the library and a low stone wall.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Both,” I said. It was nice, comfortable. We sat by her desk with a carton propped against the door holding it open. She lit a cigarette, gestured at the cartons, the stacks of file cards. “I’ve been back since last fall, living at home with Mother. It’s very quiet here, boring, but so far I’m pleased by it—it gives me a chance to forget some things which are best forgotten. This job came from the state historical society. A friend of Mother’s knew I was coming back and I think they set out to find me a useful, non-traumatic, worthwhile job and there hadn’t been a librarian here for years, not since old Mrs. Darrow, you remember her, died. So, here I am, up to my ass in books and dust, cataloguing the whole thing.” She blew smoke at the stacks. “It hasn’t been catalogued since 1925! Christ.” She laughed. “I get the feeling it’s my life’s work, penance for my sins, of which there are far too many.” She grinned again, a tense little flicker at the corners of her wide pale mouth.

  She was wearing a blackwatch skirt, a kilt actually, with a big gold safety pin, and a blue button-down oxford-cloth shirt, polished penny loafers, blue knee-socks. It was a Wellesley outfit from the late fifties, when she’d gone to college. Somehow, in the Cooper’s Falls library, it didn’t seem out of date: time had a tendency to stand still in Cooper’s Falls. That thought surfaced as I watched her and I realized it had been in my mind ever since I arrived at the great house the night before. Time was standing still and as we chatted the morning away I also realized that Paula Smithies was a very attractive woman. I could see what it had been that had drawn Cyril to her: I hadn’t even been mildly attracted to a woman in a long time and it was nice to feel it happening, however gently. There was something very pleasant about the fact that she was wearing a Peck and Peck outfit from another decade.

  After I’d finished a pipe and the coffeepot was empty, I said that I’d come back to see Cyril. I told her about the telegram.

  “I know why you’ve come back.” She had turned serious. I didn’t quite understand at first.

  “You knew I was coming back?”

  “Yes, actually I knew before you did. Cyril told me he was going to contact you, that he wanted you to come back and meet him here.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but the hints of nervousness had flowered. She stood up, lit a cigarette, and threw the matches back onto her cluttered desk top.

  “You’ve been in touch with Cyril?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve always been in touch with Cyril, even when I was married. And after my husband’s d
eath, Cyril was … very good to me, visited me in Los Angeles.” She stood with her back to me as if she were studying the titles on the shelves. “And last week I came across some material here at the library, stuff that had been delivered to the library in boxes when your grandfather died. Books, old things that might fill gaps in our collection of town records, Cooper memorabilia, harmless old stuff that no one had even unpacked until I got into it last week.” Finally she turned to look at me.

  “I went through those papers very carefully, not at first, but once I realized there was something … peculiar about them, something I couldn’t quite figure out.” She paced past me, around behind her desk.

  There was a vague queasiness in my stomach. I scraped ash out of the pipe’s bowl with a pipe nail, packed it again from my leather pouch. “What did you find, Paula?”

  “Well, there were some diaries your grandfather had kept, and you can imagine what they were like. Full of day-by-day comments as he traveled through Europe hobnobbing with a lot of men who have passed into history. There were comments on the Nazis, some Italians—Count Ciano, who apparently amused your grandfather, some Englishmen. There were also some letters written in German.” She looked back at me: “I don’t read German. Do you?”

  “No,” I said lighting my pipe. “I never had the proper motivation to devote much time to a study of the Germans.”

  “Well, there were what seemed to be documents, bureaucratic directives, with broken seals, and so far as I could tell they had originated in Berlin. And there was a small metal strongbox, nothing pretentious … but it was locked and I left it alone.” She stopped and looked at me quizzically.

  “Go on, Paula. How did Cyril get into it?”