The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  I waited my twenty minutes, then thirty, picking at my thoughts with growing temper as I waited, and at the point where I felt I could bear it no longer I heard, not the footsteps I had been expecting to hear, but the sound of horse’s hoofs. Hoofs thudding, sliding, scraping a little on the path that led through the trees. So I turned in surprise to see what it was, and I saw Mia. But it was not any Mia that I had ever known.

  She was riding the slim chestnut gelding that had been her father’s gift to her when she finished school, that much was familiar. But she was not wearing the faded Levis and old shirt and worn boots that had always been her riding costume. She wore the full formal habiliments of the society lady whose hobby is fox-hunting or the show ring. Everything was there on display. The long, pleated coat, pinched at the waist. The sweep of skirt draped over the pommel of the saddle and falling to the tip of her black riding boot. The white silk scarf knotted at her throat. The tall silk hat and the veil that shaded her eyes as she reined up and looked down at me. And she rode sidesaddle, that antique and incongruous position for riding which tells the world that whatever is between a woman’s legs is too precious to be risked astride a horse. She rode like that, the queen of the Gennaros, an image that Sargent would have responded to at sight, beautiful, ridiculous, terrifying, her right leg hung over the pommel, her left boot braced in the stirrup, the reins taut between her gloved fingers, her back straight, and when I approached her, marveling at what I saw, she said, “Don’t come too close. This is all new to him,” the horse shying a little at the sound of the voice.

  I stopped where I was. “It’s new to me, too.”

  “I know. You’re the first one to see it. I’ve been working with him where nobody could see me and make stupid jokes about it, but the clothes were just finished today. How do you like them?”

  “They’re very interesting,” I said. “What are they for, hunting rabbits with the Maartenskill pack?”

  The horse sidestepped nervously away from me, two or three little steps, as delicately as a dancer. Mia patted his shoulder comfortingly, the way she had patted my cheek. “That’s one of the jokes I was hoping not to hear,” she said.

  “Is it? Maybe I’m not joking.” Looking at her, the Sargent portrait of her in the Inness setting, I had a dreadful sense of revelation. A cruel understanding of what her mother and brother had been trying so hard not to tell me. I stood there dying a little, feeling the way I sometimes did in a dream when I knew that I must move and could not.

  Mia said, “Well, if you’re angry, don’t be. I couldn’t help keeping you waiting. I had to dress in the stable, because Mama wouldn’t like me to be out of mourning yet. Poor Mama. If it were up to her we’d all be wearing black the rest of our lives.” She held out a hand. “Give me a lift down. I can’t sit here talking like this. He’s too edgy.”

  He was not the only one of that pair who was edgy. When I helped Mia down she quickly released my hand. She undid the veil and lifted off the silk hat, and I saw that her face was shining moist and the hair at her temples damp with perspiration. “This stuff is hot,” she complained. “One thing is sure, it wasn’t made for the summer.”

  “What was it made for?” I had to ask her that. There was one chance in infinity that the answer would surprise me, and I wanted that chance.

  “Not for rabbit hunting, dear. And what are you looking deadly about? Don’t tell me I’m so unattractive this way that you can hardly stand it.”

  I thought, you’re beautiful this way, but you are someone else. I said, “Mia, the one person in the world we know who has anything to do with fancy hunt clubs and riding to the hounds and all that nonsense is Noel Claiborne.”

  “I suppose he is.”

  “You don’t suppose anything. You know he is. Is he what you’re in training for now?” I said, and when her face whitened and her mouth started to shape the words that would put me in my place I refused to listen. For the first time in my life I refused to let her turn my love for her against me. I would not be cozened or charmed or beaten down. “It is Claiborne, isn’t it?” I said. “And the Eastern Shore Hunt and the old plantation down in Talbot County? Jesus, you ought to know better than that. What have you got to do with Claiborne’s kind of people? What are they to you—dried-up, inbred bunch of bastards that they are? They’ve been dead for a hundred years and don’t know it. But you should!”

  Her eyes blazed. “Shut up! Don’t talk to me like that. I don’t want anyone to talk to me like that. Not even you. You don’t own me.”

  “No,” I said. “You own me.”

  “Well, I don’t want to. Can you understand that? I don’t want to own anyone.”

  “Not even Claiborne?”

  “Just because I think Noel happens to be—”

  “Yes, and he thinks you happen to be, too. I saw him working on that project the night of the party. What did he do after he drove you and Mama and Papa up here—keep working on it overtime? Move in and turn on the southern charm until you fell for it?”

  She said with brutal intent, “No, he did something you didn’t do. He came to Ben’s funeral.”

  “Ben would have appreciated that.”

  “I think he would. Anyhow, the family did. And I did. I might have appreciated it if you showed up, too, but I wasn’t given the chance.”

  “Don’t you think I had my reasons for not coming?”

  For some reason that seemed to jolt her. She suddenly put her hand to her breast, her fingers pressing into it. “Yes, I think you had reasons. Good ones. Very good ones.”

  The violence of her gesture, the intensity of her voice, everything about her warned me of meanings under meanings that I couldn’t grasp. I said, “As it happened, they were good ones. Maybe they were cowardly, but they made sense to me at the time. It’s easy enough to say that I should have faced the world once and for all and gotten it over with, but I couldn’t. Not the way I felt.”

  Her eyes never left my face. “I know,” she whispered. “Oh, I know so well.”

  “What do you know? What are you getting at?”

  “I know, and you do, and Noel does. Did you think you were the only one?”

  “I don’t know what to think any more. I wish to hell you’d tell it to me straight out.”

  “All right, I will. Noel heard you that night. He was on the stairs after you and Ben went to your room, and he heard you shouting at each other.” She must have seen from my expression what I felt, but she took no pity on me. “He couldn’t make out what you were saying, but he told me it sounded as if there was going to be a murder done. It worried him, because nothing like that had ever happened between you and Ben before, and he was going to go to your room, but then it stopped.” Her voice rose. “And there was a murder done. When you left Ben in that room you killed him. You killed him the way you’d like to kill anybody who gets you angry. I’ve seen you like that, and I know. And Noel had a good chance to see you like that. When he found out Ben was dead and told you what he thought of you, you tried to beat him to death and didn’t even give a damn! That’s the thanks he got for not telling the whole world what he knew about you!”

  “Yes,” I managed to say, “I can see you’re a lot more worried for him than for me. But you could have broken the news to me some other way. You didn’t have to put on a costume and act it out for me.”

  She shook her head. “All I ever worried about was telling you we were through. I should have done it a long time ago. But I was afraid to do it. I’ve always been afraid of what would happen when I did it. I could see you getting drunk and trying to drown yourself all over again. But I don’t care now. Do what you want. Do anything you want. Go out and get drunk and be a bum the way Margaret says you’d love to do.” She frantically worked at her glove until she stripped it off. The ring on her finger—the ring I had given her with the circlet of seed pearls around the Iobacchoi seal—was tight, and she strained to pull it off. She thrust the ring into my hand. “Here, take it. It’s not m
ine, it’s yours.”

  I looked at the ring in my hand, not really seeing it. And I looked at Mia, really seeing her. “You’ll be wearing another one just like it in a little while, won’t you?” I said. “Right after the hunt season in Talbot County, I’d say.”

  “I might.”

  “You’ll like it there. I was there once, and I’m sure you’ll like it.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. Just that I’m sure you’ll like it there. It’s real antebellum stuff, Georgian house, old colored retainers, the works. And not one loud-mouthed wop in sight no matter where you look. Can you imagine that? Not one. It’s the kind of place you’d appreciate.”

  Mia’s nostrils flared. “You’ve got a pretty vile mouth, haven’t you?”

  “Why not? I’m going straight to hell anyway. What difference does it make what I say along the way?”

  “It makes a difference to me.”

  “All right, then I’ll try to be a little gentleman. The kind you prefer. Not the kind you got mixed up with in a hayloft once, or in Mama’s kitchen when Mama wasn’t there.”

  “You don’t have to remind me of that. I was a kid then. How did I know what I was doing?”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “But you learned fast. And you forgot fast, too. When did you decide that I was the dispensable man? Don’t tell me it was because of what happened to Ben. It wasn’t. You can believe I deliberately left him there to die, all right, but your mind was made up about me long before that. When was it? And were you going with me all this time just because Ben wanted you to? Isn’t it strange that as soon as Ben is dead you let me know I might as well be dead, too? What was there about Ben that made you so loyal to him, little sister?”

  She was beautiful even with her face drawn into a mask of horror. “You perverted son of a bitch,” she said in a choked voice. “You think that kind of talk changes anything?”

  She moved swiftly to the horse, and, cumbered as she was by the silk hat and the glove in her hand she mounted it in one fluid motion, supporting herself with a foot in the stirrup as she swung the other leg around the pommel. In that revealing moment I saw that there was nothing to be revealed; she wore under her skirt riding breeches, tough, durable, the ultimate defense. Then she clapped the hat on her head, her shoulders squaring as she did so, her back straightening into the classic riding posture, and she—Marian Gennaro who had been Mia—went her way. And I went mine, the ring that might have restrained me flung to the indifferent river.

  I was careful not to meet anyone on my way to the car, so there was no need to say good-bye. But on the other side of Maartenskill, where the irregular ranks of gravestones, of crosses, of marble Madonnas marked the Catholic cemetery, I left the car and went seeking Ben Gennaro’s resting place. It was a small cemetery; it was not difficult to find the freshly sodded rectangle among the stones marked Gennaro. I went up to it, concerned only with my own thoughts and emotions while I stood there, and what I could make of them was as ominous as the thunderclouds riding toward me over the mountains.

  There was no headstone marking the grave as yet, so I knew that my presence there might be felt but could not be exorcised. The local tombstone cutter was slow and thorough; it would take time for him to finish his work. Meanwhile there were small American flags planted at the head and foot of the mound, and wreaths of flowers piled high on it. But nothing was there which should have been inscribed, as the stone and marble and wood of ancient Greece were so often inscribed, with the thunder of the great warning:

  The conqueror, the son of Zeus, dwells here—

  Herakles! Let no evil thing come near.

  ELEVEN

  The other side of the moon, my uncle Charles had called it, but, in actuality, it was the other side of the elevated highway which carried automobile traffic around the fringe of the city. I passed under the highway, the traffic whirring faintly over my head, and entered a street where on either side of me barrooms alternated with pizzerias, quick-lunch stands, and small machine shops, the barrooms outnumbering all the others put together. The street ended in a cul-de-sac before the gate of the Voorhees Shipbuilding Company, a sort of large unpaved courtyard, the dirt underfoot hardened into a series of tracks cut by automobile tires. Cars were parked thickly around the courtyard, but there was one which caught the eye immediately. It was an old Rolls-Royce, a vintage Rolls-Royce limousine, black and stately, its side panels covered with wickerwork such as was used a generation ago, its chauffeur, in shirt sleeves but with cap on head, sound asleep at the wheel. It stood apart from all the other cars near the gate and was, I surmised, the property of Jacob Voorhees himself. It was very much the Voorhees, whereas the cars around it were clearly the Company.

  I gave the guard at the gate the note Jacob Voorhees had addressed to me—thinking, as I watched him read it, that this slip of paper was, in truth, my own choice of weapons against the doubting world—and the guard handed me over to the personnel office, which had me fill out innumerable forms and, in its turn, handed me over to the medical office. The buildings I traversed stood like squat and decaying fortresses against the shattering noise that filled the air around them. They were made of brick—Egan brick, my father had remarked—which had been weathered by time and grime to a neutral color, and even the patches of tired ivy on their walls had taken on this color. Not a color so much as an absence of color. Behind the closed doors of the fortresses the chatter and clatter and thud of noise beat at me from far away, and I found myself speaking over sudden bursts of it in a louder voice than usual, so that when there were abrupt and unexpected silences I had the foolish feeling of hearing my own voice dinning out answers to questions as if I were shouting out confidences.

  There was no doctor in charge of the medical office, there was a nurse. Ben’s nurse. Even if there had not been a nameplate on her desk with Miss Auchincloss imprinted on it—a name Ben had found funny—I would have recognized her at once from his description. There had been something about that red hair and baby-face and all that meat packed into a starched white uniform that had given him a charge, he had said, and when I watched Miss Auchincloss move between her desk and her filing cabinet I could see what he meant. She was on the borderline of thirty, plump and heavy-legged, her breasts and buttocks straining at her uniform as she moved, and underneath the flaming red hair and the ridiculous white cap perched on it was a round and childlike and much be-freckled face. But, as I happened to know, she was not quite as childlike as she looked. It had taken Ben half a summer to convince her that the examination table could serve a much more pleasant function than it was built for, and after that, to use his own unimaginative phrase, it was all gravy. She had what it took and she knew how to use it. During lunch hours, of course, when the room could be locked and no laborer in the Voorhees’ vineyard was likely to intrude. A sane laborer reserves his medical calls for the boss’s time; he does not waste his own on it.

  From the way Miss Auchincloss darted an occasional speculative and frowning glance at me as she filled out my medical history, I had the feeling that I knew what was coming. She finally said, her pen poised over my card, “Haven’t you been here before?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? It’s the funniest thing, I could swear I know you from someplace.”

  “Not me,” I said. “Ben Gennaro.”

  The freckles stood out starkly against the sudden pallor of her face, her teeth caught at her lower lip. “Oh,” she said, and I knew that she wanted to say, as my sister had said it, Did he tell you that we—? Poor woman who unlike some could not purge her soul at a church in Kingston, but had to have strangers walk in and remind her it was unpurged. And, perhaps, blackmail her on that otherwise antiseptic table behind her, if they were so minded. But I was not so minded. I said with becoming gravity, “I was Ben’s roommate at college. You probably saw my picture in the papers.”

  The col
or returned to her face. A heightened color now. “Oh,” she said again, “I knew I recognized you. You were the one—”

  “That’s right.”

  She said in some confusion, “How awful. He was such a grand person, wasn’t he? I just couldn’t believe it when I heard about it. I was listening to the radio that Sunday when they announced it, and I couldn’t believe it at first. He was such a terribly alive person. Of course, I didn’t know him very well, but I did see him around, and when it’s such a famous person you sort of take notice. Now why am I going on like this? I mean, the way you must feel about it and all. I’m sure I’m not making it any better.”

  I looked at her and thought how painful it must be to have been touched by greatness, to have been fondled and penetrated by it, and yet have to keep that a secret. How barren such a secret was, how much better to have delivered the bastard child of greatness, a suitable facsimile of Ben Gennaro, and proclaim it to the world. But we all had our barren secrets to bear, and it was a kindness to let them gnaw at us undisturbed, like a fox beneath the cloak. I was rather pleased with that thought. It seemed to me that I was becoming quite a philosopher this side of the moon.

  So I said like a good philosopher, “You’re not to blame for the way I feel. Anyhow, I’ll get over it. We always do, don’t we?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with great relief but scant originality. “Time is the great healer, isn’t it?”