“Oh, as a professional he most likely felt a certain sense of satisfaction; it’s the pro’s job, once he takes it on, to carry out the client’s wishes, not his own, and there couldn’t’ve been any question but that he’d done that, in spades. Because there’s no mistaking what it is, or what it was meant to be: a three-story, mauve stucco villa, with claret trim around the windows and doors, and a maroon terra-cotta-tiled mansard roof—which is, not so incidentally, a hellishly-expensive bauble to maintain and repair, all those little hooks and wires holding everything in place like the guts of a Swiss chronometer, until the weather inevitably does to the whole arrangement exactly what New England weather would do to a Swiss watch if you left the guts of it exposed outdoors for a year or so. The first one or two hooks and wires let go so the whole thing starts to slide off and go crashing down piecemeal into the shrubbery.
“It’s perfect, you see,” Dennison said. “It just isn’t perfect for here. What it would be absolutely perfect for would be a choice site on the lower slope of a Côte d’Azur corniche with southeastern exposure to the ocean. An exact copy, in other words, of the mansion-house where the designer’s client had spent his halcyon, wealthy boyhood, the eldest child and only son of an international merchant who’d made himself princely-rich by means of his shrewdness in the selection of rugs, woven in the Land of the Peacock Throne. Rugs that he purchased by the bale, cheap, for resale in units, at retail-expensive, to people with far more cash’n brains back home in America.
“No, the trouble with the house wasn’t then and isn’t now with what it is; the trouble’s all with where it is. Adriatic, Mediterranean: either one of those would’ve been the ideal place for it. Wouldn’t’ve mattered in the slightest. But smack-dab in the middle of a Bristol County, Massachusetts meadow—slightly rolling, very pretty, very pleasant, very Fairfield Porter, or maybe Fairfield County—especially in springtime when the wildflowers’re in bloom—well, even though it’s in Westport and you can smell—and sense—Buzzards Bay to the south, it’s a good mile and a half from the harbor. So much for any hope of seeing open water. Which’s fatal, for a house like this one. It has to overlook the water. No option. Mandatory. You can’t have a house as tight-assholed as this on any site where the surroundings—the terrain and vegetation, no matter how spacious and open they might look to some Bronx tenement refugee, someone who’d grown up in a city—’re going to give even the slightest hint that something may be closing in on you. But that didn’t matter. That fact didn’t matter and neither did the architect’s opinion, which I can state with assurance even though I never met the chap and don’t even know who he was. The architect knew, one this good would’ve known this, had to’ve known this, that if you build a house like that, in a place like that, where you cannot see the ocean from a minimum of one major window in every important room, every room where anyone’s going to spend any amount of time, and then you go and live in it long enough, sooner or later you will find that you’ve begun to lose your mind. But that’s the location that our architect’s customer owned, and the one he’d picked, and where he wanted his dream house to be built, which carried a certain amount of weight in the decision: he was, after all, the fellow who was going to be paying for the fucking thing. The first time it got paid for, at least. So it didn’t matter to him that everyone who lived in it after he got through with it would begin to lose their marbles fairly soon after they moved in.”
“Communications with the spirit world, all that sort of thing?” Dell’Appa had said.
“Well, sure,” Dennison had said, “but in the old lady’s case, that was nothing especially new. She’d started having regular conversations with dead people right after Tory’s father died. Only well-known dead people, though. Virginia was very picky. About everything.”
“Well, that’s not uncommon,” Dell’Appa had said. “Lots of widows that my mother knows, friends of hers that’ve lost their husbands, they have those kinds of conversations. She brought it up one night when Gayle and I were over for dinner, my father was griping about some trivial thing or other—she’d left the porch-light on all night or something, and he was saying he’d have to give some more thought to getting a divorce if it happened again, part of their standard routine—and she said she supposed he’d gotten so he liked nagging her so much he’d come back and do it after he was dead. Like his old friend Mike was doing to Rose now. And my father didn’t like that at all.”
“Death’s never been his favorite subject,” Dennison had said.
“Uh-uh,” Dell’Appa had said, “not by any means. He just clams up when it’s mentioned. I think making a good living, doing something he thought he might like to do, and being good at it; I think all of that was probably only part of the reason he went to law school. The other part was that he figured there must be a loophole somewhere in the rule that says we’re all gonna die. Death and taxes, right? The two inevitables. The inescapables. But taxes aren’t, inescapable, at least not all taxes, when you come right down to it. They’re not all inevitable, I mean. A good many of them can be avoided, if you’re careful and determined. Lots of loopholes in tax laws. So then, if it’s possible that a good lawyer can show you a way to skate around the tax law, maybe a good lawyer could also find an escape hatch in the death law, and help you duck around that. Of course you’d probably then find out that for tax-purposes it’d still be better if you died, say, by the end of your current fiscal year. ‘If all else fails, you might even consider hiring that batty doctor out in the Midwest who helps people kill themselves. Not that I’m suggesting you’re incurably ill, or anything that disagreeable, not at all. In your case, it would be purely for tax-purposes.’
“Not that my father’d do that. He’s ’way too conceited. That’s what I think really ticks him off about death: the possibility that the world could ever get along without him, now that he’s been in it. He’s the type that wouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that no other lawyer’s ever managed to find a way to get around death. He’d most likely figure that’s just because until now there hasn’t been a lawyer who’s been as smart as he is. So, if there is a way out of death, and anyone’s going to find it, he of course would be the boy who would do it. Hasn’t yet, as far as I know, but I’m sure he’s still working on it, there, boy. But anyway, if your mother-in-law and your father-in-law were close …” Dell’Appa had said.
“Uh-uh,” Dennison had said. “Well, no closer’n any other couple that’s been married over thirty years, I mean. And besides, the conversations she started having—or started admitting she was having, after he died; could be they weren’t something new. Just something she’d thought she’d better keep to herself until he died; didn’t want him to have her put away. But her people on the Other Side, in the Great Beyond? After he died, and they had their meetings with her, they didn’t have him along with them. He wasn’t one of her callers. Far’s she ever let on to us, at least. If he did attend, he apparently didn’t have much to say. Or if he did, it didn’t seem to have made a real lasting impression on her. She didn’t allow him any more air-time after he was dead’n she had when he was still alive. Not that there was anything new in that. She never had been all that interested in what Stan had to say, anyway, even back when he was alive, right in the same room with her.
“So: no,” Dennison had said, “it wasn’t the house, when she got the house, that the dead people’d started talking to her. That’d been going on for a long time. I dunno as you could properly classify what she had with them as conversations, though, come to think of it—so far’s I ever heard, they only talked to her; she didn’t talk to them. At least not in the beginning, and I don’t think after that, either. If they ever did let her have a two-way hook-up, send as well as receive. I don’t believe so. If they did, she never let on. When she told us about something she’d learned, say, from Douglas MacArthur or somebody, it was always what this particular famous dead person’d had on his mind to say to her. ‘Mister Poe,’ for example.”
“As in ‘Edgar Allen’?” Dell’Appa said.
“The very fellow,” Dennison said. “ ‘Mister Poe told me that he served in Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence on Castle Island under the name of Edgar A. Perry, and rose to the rank of lieutenant,’ she told us. ‘This would’ve been in Eighteen-and-twenty-seven, he was there, when he was eighteen years old. Mister Poe said that while he was in Boston some of the other soldiers told him about how another young lieutenant by the name of Robert Massie had been killed in a duel on Christmas Day ten years before, and his friends had become so angry that they got the other man drunk and took him down to the dungeon in the fort and chained him to the floor and then bricked up the wall and went away, left him in there to die by himself. And Mister Poe said he wrote a story about that, he did change it somewhat, but he didn’t say what it was. So I wouldn’t know about that.’ ”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Dell’Appa said. “ ‘The Cask of Amontillado’?”
“Hey,” Dennison said. “For the love of God, Montresor, I am not shitting you, man. The late Virginia may be shitting you, posthumously using me as her helpless cat’s paw, but I am not shitting you.” He smirked. “Besides, it checks out, some of it. That’s how old Poe was, when she said it happened, and he did enlist here, under an alias. And they did find a skeleton, chained to the floor of the fort, in a four-brick-walled room with no entryway, back in Nineteen-oh-five. It was dressed in a full uniform. Tory went to the library one day and looked it up. After Virginia, told us.”
“Would your mother-in-law have done something like that,” Dell’Appa said.
“Looked up stuff like that, just to goose us?” Dennison said. “Or maybe remembered it from something she maybe heard when she was a little girl, about the body being found? Put it this way: if she’d thought of it, and she was bored, yeah, she might’ve gone to the trouble. But she didn’t need to, she didn’t need that stuff; she kept us hopping with no effort at all.
“But anyway, that was the sort of encounter that she seemed to have with the dead people. What Mister Poe or another one of them’d had on his mind to say to her. Not what she might’ve had on her mind, to’ve said to him. Which would’ve gone to show, I guess, that they were just as smart as she always claimed they were. Her consultants, I mean, as she referred to them. On the Other Side—that was the only address she ever gave us, where they could be reached. Where she could reach them, at least.”
He had paused. “And that’s another funny thing, I just thought of now: all of her consultants, least all the ones I ever heard about, all of them were dead, famous, American men. White American men: no minority-group representation at all. No affirmative action on the Other Side, I guess. No dead famous foreigners either. And, come to think of it, no dead famous women in her little circle. Huh. Have to mention that to Tory tonight, give her chain a little tug, here. Wonder if she’s ever noticed that, no dead women’ve amounted to enough to interest Virginia, not while they were alive.”
“Won’t get you anywhere,” Dell’Appa had said. “She’ll just come right back at you and say the reason was her mother’s generation’d been brainwashed, growing up, to ignore what women did.”
“Yeah, probably,” Dennison had said. “Anyway, though, Virginia had a lot of faith in them, her invisible pals. She told us how badly Mister Parker felt, Mister Harvey Parker, that he had no way of knowing, when John Wilkes Booth checked into his hotel back in April, ’Sixty-five, why he was practicing his pistol shooting nearly every day at the shooting gallery down the street, and what it was he planned to do when he got to Washington only ten days later. She said that Mister Parker always felt that if he’d only known, Mister Lincoln might’ve lived.
“And they also gave practical advice, her visitors did,” Dennison said. “She said in fact they were the ones who told her how to get the house, so at least we know who’s to blame. They told her how to bet. What numbers to play in Megabucks. When Tory found out she was doing that, writing down the numbers her consultants recommended to her during their visits, or seances, whatever they were, and then having Lucy buy the tickets for her twice a week, when she went to the store to do the grocery-shopping, well, at first Tory thought—and I thought, too—all this nonsense was some of Lucy’s doing. That Lucy’d been filling the old lady up with a big daily ration of some of that old Creole black magic, bayou-ragtime-voodoo she’d most likely brought up north with her all the way from old Metairie. Maybe had the old lady usin’ dream-books to choose numbers, same’s she did herself. Next thing, we figured, old Mama-Doc Lucy’d have Virginia sacrificin’ goats or something, hoodoo-voodoo on the back porch, every moonless night. So that was the first thing that came to our attention: this nice little old lady, looked like she was living out the string of a perfectly-ordinary, commonplace life in her nice peaceful little white house on a nice, quiet, tree-lined street in Taunton, well, it began to look as though she might not only’ve gone ’round the bend at a pretty good clip but then’d kept right on going, and’d traveled a good distance down the track beyond it, in fact, before we’d begun to catch on. Kind of frightening, it was. We had some thinking to do.
“See,” Dennison had said, “Tory got Lucy in to help her mother out. It was just temporary, after she had the hip replacement operation. Someone to fetch and carry for her while she couldn’t get around. Found her through an employment outfit, an agency that the doctor’s office recommended. Specialized in that kind of thing. Just ’til she got back on her feet.
“Wasn’t ’til a good deal later,” Dennison had said, “we commenced to find out Lucy hadn’t been wholly in agreement with those terms. What she’d had was what they call one of them-there ‘mental reservations whatsoever’ that the fellow with the Bible always asks you if you’re hiding, when you take an oath to serve, so help you God, and you’re not supposed to be. Holding something back, something you’re not telling him. As though you’d admit it to him if you did have one, and it wasn’t broad enough to cover keeping it a secret itself. Lucy’s mental reservation would’ve been broad enough for that. She sure hadn’t seen any reason to mention it to us when she first came. Course at the time we didn’t even have a Bible with us, not that we would’ve thought to ask. She didn’t surface it until after the business with the lotteries came to light, when we started paying a bit more attention to what was going on between the two of them those happy days, in that little house. Then it sort of dawned on us, what’d really been going on. Lucy hadn’t been gettin’ any younger herself, when Virginia’d been discharged from the hospital to convalesce at home. Hadn’t been for some time, in fact, certainly not by the time she showed up to work for us. And full well did she know it, too, did old Lucy know this.”
Dennison had gentled his voice, introducing a mourning tone and elegiac cadence. “Yes sir, Lucy’d been a mite footsore herself, right from the very beginning of her stay with us. That was how it’d started to look. Kind of tired, you know? ‘Tarred,’ that’s what she called it. ‘Ah’m tarred. Go an’ lay day-own a wahl here, an’ ray-ust.’ Way you’d be bound to get, you’d been like her, just bummin’ around all your whole, entire life. No security to speak of, not a bit. Sure couldn’t live on what the government was gonna give her when the day come, she couldn’t work no more. Knew that much. Had friends, tryin’ do that, goin’ hungry half the time, put out their homes, them’s had ’em, not that many of ’em did, they worked so hard to get. Spent their whole lives, just like her, gypsyin’ from place to place, this job to that one, then thuh othuh one, never settlin’ down. Now they’d gone and gotten old, and jus’ look the fix they’re in.
“And that was another thing we two dopes hadn’t noticed until then,” Dennison had said, in his normal tone of voice. “Lucy was no fool. She maybe hadn’t brought a degree from Tulane up from Loozyanna with her, but she was smart enough to know a good thing when she stumbled into it, and smart enough after that to do her level best not to stumble out of it. So in the nat
ural course of things Lucy’d already seen to it she and the old lady’d become pretty attached to each other. When Tory first tried to suggest to her mother, maybe Lucy should be getting in touch with the agency, thinking generally about where she might be going next—Lucy’s services not being free, gratis and for nothing, by any stretch of the imagination, and the old lady’s means being very far from sufficient to support a live-in maid, cook, or whatever the hell it was Lucy’d managed to become by then, in addition to covering her own expenses of living by herself, well, ’Ginia—which was what Lucy called her—raised a fearful stink.
“Didn’t make the slightest bit of difference at all to Virginia that Lucy’d been getting paid, when she first came, out of medical insurance limited to reimbursement of the cost of her convalescent care. Or that now that she was up and about, on her feet again, the insurance people were going to say she’d finished convalescing, and so those payments’d run out. Which meant: therefore so should Lucy.
“No sirree Bob, ’Ginia wouldn’t hear of it. She and Lucy’d gotten by all right, and they’d continue to get by. They might have to economize some, she realized that—cut down on the number of pay-per-view movies they ordered up from the cable-TV people, most likely, that sort of thing. But they’d be perfectly all right, just the same, and if what Tory was concerned about was her inheritance, that her mother might be going through that, if that was what was really on her mind, well, Tory and I—somehow I’d become a party to this discussion, in her mother’s estimation, despite the fact I wasn’t anywhere near the place that day, I was fifty-sixty miles away and had no idea it was even going to take place—well, we could just face up to the fact that Tory’s father’d left that money to her, his poor dear widow, first and foremost, so if there was anything she needed, or anything she wanted, after he was dead and gone, well, she was to have it, without a second thought. And it was only if—’Capital If,’ she said to Tory—there was something left after she died, that Tory was to get anything, anything at all. So we, Tory and I, ‘the two of you,’ was what she said, we could ‘just stop worrying about that, and mind your own damn business for a change.’ ”
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