Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said Caroline.

  I said nothing, just sat and felt my sweat bloom. With the wipers now dead, the rain totally obscured the view through the windshield.

  When I started the car again and the wipers revived I could see that my front bumper was less than a foot from the shiny black figure. It was a man, clothed in a black rubber rain slicker and cowl.

  “Oh my God, it’s Nat,” said Caroline. “You almost hit Nat.”

  The man in black stepped around the car to the driver’s side. I unrolled the window and he bent his body so that his dripping cowl and face loomed shadowy through the frame until Caroline reached up and turned on the roof light. Nat’s face was long and gaunt, creased with deep weather lines. His eyelids sagged to cover half his bright blue eyes. Circling his left eye was a crimson stigma, swollen and irregularly shaped. There was no fear on his face and I realized there was no fear in the way he had held his body as my car headed right for him, just a curious interest, as if he had been waving his arms not to ward me off but to increase the visibility of my target.

  “You need to pump those brakes, young man,” said Nat in a dry friendly cackle.

  “I wanted to turn into the skid but I couldn’t figure what that meant,” I admitted.

  “Can’t say as I’m sure myself, but that’s what they say, all right. How are you, Miss Caroline?”

  “Fine, thank you, Nat. This is a friend of mine, Victor Carl.”

  “Welcome to Veritas, Mr. Carl.”

  “Isn’t this a marvelous rain, Nat?” she said.

  “From where you’re sitting, maybe. Stream’s rising.”

  “Can we make it up?”

  “For a little while, still. But you won’t make it down again, not tonight. Not without a boat.”

  “Maybe we should turn around,” I said.

  “Your mother’s been expecting your visit, Miss Caroline,” said Nat.

  “What about her cats?” asked Caroline.

  “They’re in the cage in the garden room for the evening.”

  “Vicious little things, her cats. And they pee everywhere. She knows I hate them, why can’t they just stay in Europe?”

  “Your mother’s quite attached to them,” said Nat. “It’s good to see her attached to something. I left the front gate open for you.”

  “Well, I suppose it will be all right once the rain lightens,” said Caroline. “And we could always stay over.”

  “Plenty of room,” he said. “But if you’re going up you should be going before the stream rises any further. Already there’s a puddle where the bridge should be. Master Franklin was going to be late so I told him not to bother.”

  “I need to go to a funeral tomorrow,” I said.

  “Rain’s supposed to stop tonight,” said Nat. “There won’t be any trouble leaving in the morning.”

  “Let’s go, Victor,” she said.

  I smiled at Nat and did as I was told. In my rearview mirror I could see him watching us leave, glowing red, dimming as he fell farther away from my rear lights into the misty depths of the rain.

  I followed the road onward, leaning forward so I could see more clearly through the wet darkness. After a turn left and a bend right we came in sight of two towering black gates, opened enough to let a single car through. Studding both gates were gnarled, spidery vines sprouting great iron cucumbers. On the left gate, wrought massively in iron, were the words MAGNA EST, and on the right the word VERITAS. Before the gate was a black puddle that spread ten yards across the road, its surface pocked by rain, its depth impossible to determine. I stopped the car.

  “It’s just the stream,” she said. “It’s not too deep yet.”

  “Are you sure? This isn’t four-wheel drive. My drive’s only about a wheel and a half.”

  “Go ahead, Victor.”

  Slowly I drove forward, the road sloping down, sending my car deeper and deeper into the water. I kept looking down at the floor, wondering when the water would start seeping through, kept listening to the engine, waiting for the sputter and choke as the motor drowned. The water looked impossibly deep outside my window, the car so low I felt I was in a rowboat, but then the front tilted up and the car pulled higher and soon we were out of the overflowed stream, through the gates, past two huge sycamores, driving up the long driveway to the house.

  The trees and overgrowth had given way to a wide flat hillside that seemed to spread forever in the darkness. The drive pulled higher and the hillside lengthened and I realized I was driving through what must have been a vast piece of property, stunning, I was sure, in its size and depth even though I could see only the narrow strip illuminated by my headlights. And then a crack of lightning confirmed my suspicions and my eyes couldn’t take in its entire breadth before darkness once again clasped shut its jaws and the sky growled and my vision was reduced to the thin strip lighted by my car. Atop the hillside was a glow, yellow and dim, a glow that strangely grew no brighter as we approached. The driveway curved away from the light and then back again and suddenly Veritas came into view. I drove around the drive as it circled tightly across the top of a wide stone portico, whose steps led down the hill which our car had just climbed, and parked in front of the house

  “Charming,” I said.

  “We call it home.”

  What they called home was a massive Gothic revival stone structure with dark eaves and predatory buttresses and strangely shaped bay windows with intricate stained glass. Wings and dark additions had been slapped on with abandon. Dull yellow lamps lit the great front door, giving the carved wood a sickly look, and thin strips of light leaked weakly out some of the windows on the first floor, though a whole huge wing of windows to the right was dark as if in blackout. The second floor appeared deserted except for a window under one of the eaves at the far left end, where I saw a light stream for a moment before heavy curtains were dropped to block its exit. I gaped with amazement at the monstrosity before me, and that’s what it was, truly. Misshapen and cold, I could imagine it as one of those demented boarding schools for the blood spawn of the insanely rich. I had always wanted my fine home on a hill in the Main Line, sure, but not that home.

  “Come on in,” she said, as she opened the car door.

  “Is it haunted?” I asked.

  “Of course it is.” She jumped out of the car, dashing through the rain, until she was protected by an archway over the front door. I joined her. Before she could reach the knob that worked the buzzer the heavy wooden door opened with a long creak. A tiny maid with a tightly wrinkled face stared at us both for a moment, as if we were intruders, before guiding us into the center hall.

  It was a poorly lit space, cavernous, two stories high, leading to a dark hanging stairwell at the rear. There were huge arched beams overhead, like ribs, and dark maroon wallpaper on the walls, the seams peeling back. A piece of furniture sat squat in front of the stairs, round like a tumor, its four seats facing hostilely away from one another. A chandelier lit the space with an uneven, dingy light; three of the bulbs were out. I felt, with those arched ribs above and the tumor of a circular couch, that I was in the belly of a some huge malignant beast.

  “Hola, Consuelo. Como estas?” asked Caroline.

  The maid, without smiling, said in a lightly accented voice, “Fine, thank you, Miss Shaw.”

  Caroline gave Consuelo her raincoat and I did the same. I hadn’t noticed before, but underneath Caroline’s raincoat had been a tight black cocktail dress that was obviously not thrift-shop quality. She was wearing stockings with black lines down the back and her black heels were high and glossy and sharp and the stud in her nose held a diamond. Caroline had dressed for the family; her spirit of rebellion only went so far.

  “Donde está ma familia?” she asked.

  “They’re all in the great room,” said Consuelo. “With the guests. They held dinner for you.” She let her impassive gaze take me in and added, “I’ll set another place.”

  “Road’s out, so
expect some overnights this evening.”

  “I’ve already taken care of it. I’ll set up another room for your friend.”

  “Gracias, Consuelo,” said Caroline as she grabbed my arm and led me deeper into the beast’s belly.

  “Pretty good Spanish,” I said.

  “That’s all I know. Hola and Como estás and Gracias. The fruits of four years of high school Spanish. Pathetic.” She gripped my arm ever more tightly as we approached a double doorway at the end of the hall. “Are you ready?” she asked gravely, as if I were about to enter a wax museum of horror.

  “I guess so,” and before I had even finished saying it she had swept me through the doors.

  It was a huge formal room, ornate plaster ceiling, walls covered with wood and studded with portraits of the wealthy dead, furniture with thin legs, a huge pale blue oriental rug. I could tell right off it was a fancy room because the fabrics on the differing pieces of furniture didn’t match one another and there wasn’t a plastic slipcover in the place. From the ornamental facing of the fireplace a gloomy plaster head stared out with blank eyes and above the mantelshelf was a portrait of an angry man in a bright red coat, a hunting coat. He had a brisk white beard and great goggling eyes and a familiar face and it didn’t take me long to recognize him. Claudius Reddman. A clot of people held drinks in the center of the room, leaning back and chatting. Others were standing by a huge blue vase from some ancient Chinese dynasty that had prospered for thousands of years for the sole purpose of providing the great houses on the Main Line with huge blue vases. Before I could take it all in Caroline, still clutching my arm, said in a voice loud enough to silence their conversations:

  “Sorry we’re late everybody. This is Victor Carl. He was a dear friend of Jacqueline’s. He’s a painter.”

  All eyes turned to gaze at me in my very painterly black wing tips and blue suit and green tie. And just as they were all giving me the up and down Caroline pulled me close and leaned her head against my shoulder and added:

  “And in case you’re interested, yes, we’re lovers.”

  17

  Serenata Notturna in D minor

  1. Adagio

  I WAS LYING IN BED in a dark cell of a room on the third floor of Veritas, lying in my tee shirt and boxers, staring up. The ceiling, illuminated by a dim lamp beside my bed, was made of thick beams, painted with fragile flowers, arrayed in a complicated warren of water-stained squares, all imported, I’d been told, from a famous Italian villa outside of Florence. It had once been a pretty fancy room, that room, with that ceiling. Once. As I lay staring at the ceiling and thinking of the strange evening I had just spent in the Reddman house, an uneven patter of water dropped from that wondrous imported ceiling into a porcelain chamber pot by the foot of my bed. Splat. Splat splat. Splat. And then, behind the patter of those drops, I heard a faint knock at my door.

  I bolted to a sitting position and wondered if I had imagined the sound, but then it came again, just a light tap tapping, soft, hesitant. I rose from the bed and grappled on my pants and slowly, carefully, walked barefooted across the mildewed threadbare oriental rug to the door.

  “Yes?” I said through the wood, hoping for some reason it was Caroline. Well that’s not really true, I was hoping for very specific reasons that it was Caroline, hoping because of that dress, the shape of her legs in those sharp glossy heels, because of the way she looked feral and dangerous in her cocktail wear. I was hoping it was she because I could still feel the warmth of her and smell the scent of her from when she leaned into me and surprised the assembled throng with her announcement of our sexual engagement. The whole horrid evening I had been watching her out of the corner of my eye, watching her move, watching her laugh, watching the butterfly on her pale neck flutter as she drank her Manhattans, one after the other after the other, a veritable stream of vermouth and whiskey and bitters, and as I watched her I found myself wishing that what she had announced with great ceremony and mirth was actually true. So I said, “Yes,” through the door, and I hoped it was she, but when I opened it whom I saw instead was her brother Bobby.

  “Mr. C-C-C-Carl?” said Bobby. “D-d-d-do you have a moment?”

  “Sure,” I said, “so long as you don’t mind my informal dress.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, and his gaze dropped from my face, down past my tee shirt, to my pants and lingered there long enough for me to assume I was unzipped.

  “Come on in, then,” I said, “and call me Victor.” When he was past me in the room I quickly checked my zipper. It was closed.

  He sat on the edge of my bed. There was an overstuffed reading chair in the corner and I switched on the lamp beside it before sitting. I could feel each spring distinctly beneath me and the cloth underneath my forearms was damp. The light coming through the faded lampshade cast a jaundiced yellow upon the walls and Bobby’s face. He was a tall thin man, shy and stuttering, who slouched his chin into the shoulder of his gray suit as if he were a boxer hiding a glass jaw. His hair was red and unruly and his lips were pursed in an astonished aristocratic sort of way. He kept mashing his hands together as if he were kneading dough. We had talked some at the cocktail gathering before dinner, each of us with a bitter glass of champagne in one hand and a stick of some sort of roasted gristly meat in the other. He had asked me about my art and I had described for him my imaginary oeuvre.

  “I wanted to t-t-t-talk to you about Jackie,” Bobby said as he sat on the edge of my bed. He avoided looking at me as he spoke, his gaze resting over my shoulder, then to the side, then again quickly on my crotch before moving up to the ceiling. “Caroline said you knew her.”

  “That’s right,” I lied. “I met her at the Haven, where we used to meditate together.”

  “Poor Jackie was always searching for some m-m-m-measure of meaning. I expect that place wasn’t any better than the others. She tried to get me to go with her once.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, of c-c-c-course not. Jackie was always looking outward, away, certain wherever she would find the answers was someplace she had never been. I think it’s really sad that she was looking so d-d-d-desperately for something, when all along the answer was right under her nose.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. In this house, in our history. I think m-m-m-meaning is in devoting yourself to something larger than yourself, don’t you? That’s what our Grammy taught us.”

  “And what do you devote yourself to, Bobby?”

  “To our investments, our money. I go downt-t-t-town and watch the family positions on the monitors at the stock exchange building every day. And I have a hookup here, also. While most of the family money, of course, is in the company stock, we have other investments that I watch and trade.”

  “That must be exciting.”

  “Oh, it is, really,” he said as he looked me straight in the eye. As he spoke of money and finance an assurance rose in his voice and his gestures grew animated. “But it’s more than just exciting. See the thing, Mr. Carl, is that we’re all going to die, we’re all so small. But the money, it just goes on and on and on. It’s immortal, as long as we care for it and tend to it. It’s the only thing in the world that’s immortal. Governments will fall, buildings will crumble, but the money will always be there. My role in life is caring for it, keeping it alive. Every moment as I watch it percolate on the screen, watch the net value go up and down by millions at a stroke, I feel a flush of fulfillment. That’s what was so sad about Jackie, she was looking for something else when she should have been looking right here.” He paused, his eyes dropped to my chest and then my crotch, and then he began to clutch his hands once more. “But w-w-w-what I wondered, Mr. Carl…”

  “Victor.”

  “All right, V-V-V-V-V…” His face closed in on itself as he tried to get the word out and I struggled with him. I was about to spurt out my name again, to get him through it, when he stopped, breathed deep, and smiled unselfconsciously. “Some letters are harder than others.”


  “That’s fine, Bobby,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “W-w-w-what I wondered was why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself, if you have any idea. She almost seemed happy for the first time. She was engaged to be married, she said the meditation was helping her. Why do you think she k-k-k-killed herself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought she was doing well too. So well, in fact, that I’m not certain that she did kill herself.”

  “N-n-n-no?”

  I looked at him carefully as I spoke, looking for anything that would clue me that he knew something he shouldn’t have known. “No,” I said. “There are some things that seem suspicious about her death, little things, like even the way she died. In a group meeting at the Haven she once admitted to having a cache of pills in her apartment. They were there, in her bathroom, at the end. I don’t see why she hung herself if she had the drugs.”

  “That is strange. But Jackie was always m-m-m-most dramatic in her despondency, m-m-m-m-maybe she wanted to m-m-m-make a statement.”

  I shrugged, noticing that he had seemed more nervous as he talked about her death. “I don’t know. It’s sort of comforting to think that maybe she was happy and was murdered rather than her being so depressed at the end as to hang herself.”

  “That w-w-w-would be nice, yes, but who w-w-w-w-w-w…”

  “Would want to kill her? You tell me.”

  He shook his head. “No, Jackie was always unhappy. Even as a b-b-b-baby she was c-c-c-colicky. If she was going to die she would do it herself. Grammy used to say the c-c-c-curse got hold of her from the start.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.