Donia chattered incessantly while we ate, and sometimes her talk carried small barbs directed at me, sometimes at Laura. I sensed that Irene served her reluctantly and would have been pleased to have her out of the house. Miles roused himself to make some effort toward conversation, but he was not a talkative man and there was something brooding about his presence. I wished him free of that dark mustache, so that I could see the shape of his mouth and judge his emotions accordingly.
Our talk dealt with Bergen and Norway, with customs and living conditions, with the interest in outdoor sports. Donia was eager to learn to ski. Miles was not, though apparently Laura still did some skiing when she was able. Unlike the sport in America, it was mostly cross-country skiing in Norway. Nothing anyone said touched upon the past, or upon Laura’s career. Once or twice when I tried to turn the conversation in a direction that might aid me in my writing, Miles switched quickly to other matters.
I was glad enough when the meal was over. Without asking anyone’s permission, or lingering long enough to be stopped, I ran upstairs to Laura’s room and tapped on the dark wood paneling of her door.
Her voice, not altogether recovered in strength, called to me to come in. Outside, the evening was still bright, but Laura had lighted a handsome lamp made from a tall blue vase of Royal Copenhagen china that stood beside her easy chair. Her Burgundy gown had been replaced by a sand-colored caftan robe, embroidered in brown and gold. On her feet were jeweled slippers from India. When I admired the robe, she said with pleasure that Miles had given it to her.
She had been reading, and the tray Irene had served her sat upon a nearby table, the food hardly touched.
“I’ve brought you an invitation from Gunnar Thoresen,” I said. “He’d like to take us both to lunch up on the mountain tomorrow.”
For an instant her eyes brightened. Then she shook her head. “Go with him and enjoy yourself. It’s a holiday and Miles may have plans. I don’t want to spoil them.”
Again there was indication of her fondness for Miles, and a more sincere consideration for him than he seemed to show her, for all his apparent watchfulness of her health. I was relieved that she chose not to go, and I didn’t urge her.
“We’ll be able to talk tomorrow morning before Gunnar comes?” I asked.
“I hope so.” She did not sound eager.
“I must try to do what I’ve come for,” I reminded her. “I’d like to write a really good piece about you. But there’s so much talking we must do first. Have you the strength for it?”
She roused herself and stared me down. This was a woman who wanted no sympathy, who asked for no quarter. Against my will I had to respect her.
“Of course I have the strength. I don’t often have such attacks as I had this afternoon. I was unprepared to see that dress again. For a moment it was too much for me.”
“Then it was the gown from The Whisperer that upset you? Mrs. Jaffe told your husband that it was the candlestick.”
Her pallor seemed more intense, but this time she showed no faintness. “What candlestick?” she asked, and there was that arrogance in her manner which challenged me.
I turned to leave. She was playacting again, and I wanted none of it. I was beginning to see that my difficulty with her was always to be that I would never know what was real, what was a performance. I wondered if she knew herself. Was there a real Laura Fletcher? Or were there only the many masks of the roles she played as Laura Worth? Had she any real inner being?
“I’ll say good night,” I told her. “I’m looking forward to spending some time with your room downstairs.”
If that made her uneasy, she said nothing, and I went out, closing the door behind me. Irene hovered in the hall as if she watched for me, and I tried to reassure her.
“She’s very tired,” I said. “I won’t trouble her any further tonight.”
The woman nodded solemn approval and went to Laura’s door. I descended the stairs to the empty hall below. A shaft of light fell through the living room door, and I gathered that Donia and Miles were in there, spending a quiet evening. I didn’t think they would concern themselves if I disappeared for the night.
Laura’s room waited for me. The windows and doors were still open and the choking odors were hardly noticeable. I switched on the Tiffany lamp and stood in the center of its glow. I had a rendezvous with this room, and it had been postponed long enough.
Chapter 6
At first I didn’t know where to begin. In random fashion I chose the section to the right of the hall door. A dress form stood in the corner with an evening gown from Maggie Thornton dripping bugle bead fringe. Behind it, both walls that formed the corner were hung solidly with framed photographs. They had been arranged with some care, so that they followed a sequence from Laura Worth’s earliest picture to the next one before the last. There were, I noted, no scenes from The Whisperer portrayed.
I took my time studying the photographs, watching Laura grow in stature as an actress and a star. Some of these films I had seen in New York, but not all of them had been revived. Carefully typed strips had been pasted at the lower right corner of each picture, giving the name of the film and the year in which it had been made. Here was invaluable factual information, some of which I could use.
Around the corner a section of wall had been given to photographs of famous male stars with whom Laura Worth had played. There were many familiar faces, and I recognized Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Spencer Tracy, Herbert Marshall, Brian Aherne. There was a young Cary Grant, a boyish Robert Taylor. So many of the male stars of that day were gone. Often these pictures were signed with such effusive lines as “With dearest love,” “Always yours,” “To the divine Laura …” and so on. I grimaced at the face of one of my favorite actors. “Did you really mean that?” I asked him.
But of course neither he nor the others had meant anything very deep. Or they had meant it only temporarily as a part of that tinsel world they lived in, where reality was no more than a picture flashing on a silver screen.
Yet there had been a deeper reality for Laura. Not because she had been loved. Being loved by men must have come easily to her. But she had borne a child. Whether she liked it or not, that experience had been real. She might look at me with that distant gaze of hers, that unbearable arrogance—but I was real, and she must still deal with me. She could not escape wholly into make-believe.
I moved on about the room, taking my time, relishing each discovery as though I relived the period that had created it, still cradled in that curious ambivalence that had been mine since I was a child. It was possible—almost—to shut out the corroding resentments, the jealousy of what she had been that I was not, the deep, tearing hurt that went back to the first days when I had known about her and begun to understand. I could, instead, glow with the delight of an inveterate movie buff who is given a chance to step into the world of a long-admired idol. It no longer seemed strange to me that these two opposite passions should exist in me at the same time, yet with neither entirely destroying the other. I simply accepted and postponed the time of war between them.
I found a pair of blue shoes Laura had worn in Sands of Fortune. They were made with T-straps and Cuban heels, entirely unsuited for walking in the sand. I remembered the scene in which she had kicked them off and stumbled on through the desert in her stocking feet, while the camera panned in to focus on bright blue slippers resting against the tawny sand. In the picture it had been sad to see them there, left abandoned to the desert heat—as the woman in the story must surely be abandoned, if rescue did not come.
Of course it had come. It always came in the movies of that day. Perhaps that was what made them satisfying. It was good to feel that matters would be neatly tied and brought to a happy conclusion—when in real life that was not the way at all. In real life the woman who had worn these shoes sat alone and weak and frightened in a room upstairs.
The train of my thoughts startled me. Alone? weak? frightened? Why did I think of her
in that way? She was anything but alone. She quickly summoned arrogance to overcome any physical weakness, and she was the least frightened person I had ever known—most of the time. And yet—somehow—these things had impressed themselves upon me and left me questioning. There had been moments when she was afraid.
I picked up one blue shoe and slipped my hand into the toe. Unbelievably, there were grains of sand still clinging to the inner sole. She must never have put them on again. And now they brought a hot western American desert into this Norwegian room. I set the shoe down carefully so as not to jar out the crumbs of sand. They were part of memory.
On I moved about the room. I was nearing the doors to the outside now, and against a shadowy wall where light bypassed it, there hung another picture. This was much larger than any of the others, and as I stepped close to make it out I saw that it hung with its face to the wall. My curiosity demanded at once that I turn it about. The frame was heavy in my hands as I lifted it from its hook and carried it to the bright evening light that fell through the door.
Someone had done an excellent painting of Laura Worth at the peak of her success. It was a three-quarters portrait of her seated figure. She wore a red gown that I thought for a moment was the dress from The Whisperer. Then I saw that it was not. Red was always her color, but this style was different, with a V neck that showed the beautiful line of her throat, the familiar tilt of her chin. The artist had caught the luminous look of her dark eyes, and her thick dark hair fell about her face, giving her a gypsy look. Her reddened lips were slightly parted, as though her breath came quickly. Her hands lay open in her lap, palms up, unlike the carefully posed hands of the usual portrait. It was somehow a sultry picture. She looked like a woman awakening and eager for love—eager to give love. She, who had never been able to give it at all!
I carried the portrait back to its place, wondering why it had been turned with its face to the fall. Surely it was a picture Laura Worth would be proud of, would treasure. Had it been she, then, who had turned it from view? Here was a puzzle easily solved. Tomorrow I would ask about it. In the meantime, I would leave that lovely painted face turned toward the room, so that I, at least, could enjoy this younger glimpse of Laura, the actress.
I had, however, lost my interest in exploring the rest of the room. The turned-to-the-wall portrait had left me uneasy. Miles Fletcher had said that all paths of exploration must lead to disaster. Perhaps no one here dared explore the past. There had been a murderer who was never apprehended, and he belonged to a time Laura would not touch or talk about. A time she kept locked in a trunk with that gown she had worn in The Whisperer. Was I the one who would explore—the one who might bring about disaster, or free her from some long-ago threat which still haunted her?
I began to busy myself with everyday things because I needed a sense of reality to steady me. Irene had opened the sofa bed and its Norwegian eiderdown awaited me. Quickly I unpacked a few more things and slipped into my terry robe. Open windows and doors had made the room chill, but I did not want to close them. I would take a hot bath and go to bed, no matter how bright the day light might be. Weariness was once more engulfing me and I did not want to think about Laura Worth or anything to do with the past. Not even my own meager past. Only the thought of meeting my father’s friend, Gunnar Thoresen, tomorrow could buoy me up. I would go to sleep quickly and let tomorrow come.
A light burned dimly in the square hall outside my room. A radio was playing and the sound of music came from the living room—a BBC broadcast from London, as I could tell by the announcer’s voice.
The small downstairs bathroom opened off an alcove beneath the stairs. As I went toward it I saw that here again were many pictures hung close together. These were all rather small photographs in oval black frames, and they were clearly family pictures. I paused to look at them with interest. If I could identify them, these were undoubtedly my grandmother’s family. There were uncles and aunts and great-grandparents. There were children of all ages—perhaps some of them were my cousins. Strangely, I found myself wondering which was the face of my grandmother. I wanted to know what she had looked like. I must ask Laura to tell me. I must not go home without taking some knowledge of my Norwegian ancestors with me.
I went through the bathroom door and closed it behind me. The tub was a lovely old-fashioned one—enormous and deep enough to float in. I turned on the faucets and sprinkled in my favorite bath salts.
When I had luxuriated sufficiently in an aura of rose geranium, and was warmed to my very toes, I returned to my room. Laura’s room. I had left the Tiffany lamp burning, but someone had opened the door and frugally turned it off. I turned it on again and saw that the garden doors and the windows had been closed. Already the odors of camphor and dust were creeping back.
I flew across to open each window, and set the doors ajar. I did not think that anything would intrude upon me from outside during the night. This was safe Norway. This was quiet Bergen.
Against the wall near the doors hung Laura’s portrait. Someone had already turned it back to face the wall. I let it stay that way. It was less likely to disturb my dreams. All this was Irene’s doing, of course. Tomorrow perhaps I would ask her about the picture.
The eiderdown welcomed me. This was no puff of an English comforter. It was slipped into a big cloth cover which was tied with blue ribbons along the side. It was the exact size of the bed and was not intended to be tucked under the mattress, but only under the sleeper. The sides and bottom were folded under on top of the bed, and I learned to slip into this sleeping bag effect carefully and let it enfold me in lovely warmth. I closed my eyes against the light evening, and in spite of everything went soundly to sleep.
When I woke up suddenly the room was dark and my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what I had been dreaming, but something had disturbed me. Awake in the dark, I could feel the room pressing in around me. The shadowy figures of the dress forms seemed about to move—invaders of my privacy. The staring eyes of the photographs watched me from the walls, and I was intensely aware of the Venetian red gown hidden from me by the closed lid of the trunk, glowing in its enclosed world of darkness.
The night seemed very still, though there were distant sounds of traffic. No board creaked within the house. The other members of the household were undoubtedly asleep upstairs, and I felt alone on this lower floor, with no one nearby in a strange house.
The whisper came so softly that at first I thought it my own imagining. And then I knew it was real.
“Listen …” it said. And while I listened with my entire being, it came again from farther away. “Listen …”
The sound was utterly eerie and utterly devastating because my mind, my emotions, were ready for it in this room. I could not tell what direction it had come from. A whisper can seem disembodied, directionless, neither male nor female. When I’d lain very still for another moment or two and the sound had not come again, I got out of bed into the cold air and thrust my feet into slippers. I fumbled for my robe and pulled it on, stood in the center of the room, waiting, listening. I was half afraid that the whisperer stood in the room with me, alert and watching the darkness. If I dared to turn on the light, some dreadful truth might be revealed to me.
I did not dare, and I heard nothing more. There was no one in the room. Had the voice come from my open windows? From the garden doors? I went to the inner door that led to the hall and found it barely ajar, though I had closed it when I’d gone to bed. When I pulled it open and listened intently to the house it was as still as though it too held its breath. I closed the door again securely and wished I could lock it.
Grazing Laura’s trunk with my knee, I crossed the room in the dark and stepped through the open doors to the garden. Overhead the sky was a night sky, but not altogether dark, and the stars were barely visible. How brightly they must gleam in the black sky of winter. Beneath my slippers the dead grass of the lawn was rough and stubbly as I walked around the side of the house and into the wid
e front garden. There was no one about. No shadowy figure fled my coming.
It must not be very late because many of the lights of Bergen still burned in a carpet of shining jewels at my feet. Around Lille Lungegårdsvann, the little lake in the park, the walks were lighted. Streets made wandering paths of light interlaced with dark, and the waters of the larger lake were a deep blue under the sky, with the bridge a row of jewels from point to point. All around, dark mountains encircled the city in guardian arms, and a light glowed from the communications tower atop Ulriken. The snow peaks lay sleeping, waiting for spring. Out of doors the traffic sounds were louder, but no voice whispered eerily, commanding me to “listen.”
Had the sound been part of my dreaming? Was it possible that Laura’s imaginings had so haunted my dreams that they seemed momentarily real? I couldn’t tell.
Down the hill in Kalfaret a party was going on in a private home, and strains of music reached me. Strange music for Norway, I thought, for this was like the sound of a bagpipe playing as it should be played, in the open—as though the player stood on a balcony. I listened for a little while longer, but it was cold outside and I pulled my terry collar up to my ears and scuffed my way back to my room.
The moment I stepped through the double doors, I sensed the change. I knew someone was there in the room, waiting for me. The door to the hall was open again, and a shaft of light cut through, touching a shadowy figure which stood before Laura’s picture. There was something ghostly about the stillness of that figure, about the long white gown which clothed it. The electric switch was far across the room from where I stood, and I waited, frozen, not daring to speak or move, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. By going outdoors, I had given over the room to this presence.
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