Domino

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “That’s Sundance,” Gail said indignantly. “I might have known Mrs. Morgan would do this!”

  As Hillary and I dismounted and tethered our horses, a man came out the door and stood on the narrow porch, looking down at us, thumbs hooked in his worn leather belt, his battered hat set jauntily on black curls. It was Jon Maddocks, and with no volition on my part my spirits lifted at the sight of him.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I suppose I’m the welcoming committee. Mrs. Morgan thought you might be riding over this way today.”

  Standing above us, he looked brown and fit, taller than Hillary, and obviously at ease, belonging to this place.

  Gail barely acknowledged his greeting, and spoke to me. “Mrs. Morgan always hates to have anyone set foot in all this dead history. Though I can’t understand why. If you want to go inside, I’ll stay out here and smoke a cigarette. I don’t care much for dust and mice and heaven knows what.”

  Hillary shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said to me.

  I stood looking up at the house, caught by its forlorn and lonely dignity. “Perhaps there are only ghosts in there.” I spoke softly, knowing very well that I must go inside. I climbed the four wooden steps to the porch, finding the boards firm under my feet and in good repair.

  “Wait for me, Hillary,” I said, wanting to explore alone.

  Jon gestured me in. “It’s open. I’ve already unlocked the door.”

  “What skeletons is she hiding?” Gail asked lightly, “If someone wanted to break in, it would be easy enough.”

  Whoever had set the front door in place had carved its outer panel lovingly in an effort to decorate. What seemed to be primroses grew in relief around each panel. My great-grandfather’s handiwork? A memory of England? The doorknob was of cracked china, and it turned easily in my fingers. I pushed the door open upon a small dim entryway, with other doors opening off it. I chose one and stepped into what must have been the parlor. A small room compared to the one in Jasper, but with a bay window to let in light as long as it might last, deep in this slot in the mountains.

  There was no furniture, and here the bare boards of the floor showed traces of the years. There were none of the fine hardwoods of Persis’ house, no moldings or plaster cornices. Yet the loving touches of a builder who meant to live in his house were evident here and there. Where stairs went up at the side of the hall, the newel post also bore hand carving and the banister had a graceful curve. The ceilings were not high as they were in Jasper, but in this small place a young couple had made an effort to beautify in their own personal ways, and the result seemed less austere than their later, far grander house. I liked the young couple who had first lived here better than I did the affluent citizens they became. Here they had tried to please themselves rather than choosing an imposing frame for the sake of others.

  I walked over to put my hand on the carved post at the foot of the stairs.

  “Don’t go up there,” Jon said from the parlor door. “Some of the floors have started to rot through upstairs. Mrs. Morgan said you could look in the door—if you felt you had to—but that was all. I come over sometimes to take care of things—keep the house swept out and the roof from leaking. But she hasn’t wanted to put in new floors.”

  “Why was she so bent on keeping me out of this house?” I asked. “Are there skeletons, as Gail says?”

  “I’ve never found any.” He sounded laconic again. “Though sometimes I’ve wondered if they might exist. Maybe she just felt you hadn’t earned the right to come here and poke around.”

  I bristled a little. “She can’t keep that right from me. I’ve had it since the day I was born her granddaughter. So I think I’ll go to the top of the stairs, at least.”

  He made no effort to stop me as I went up.

  How curious it seemed to put my feet on these steps, my hand on the worn banister, knowing that the feet of Sissy and Malcolm had climbed these very stairs, that their hands had touched this same rail.

  Jon left the other two on the porch and came up behind me. At the top was a short hallway, with three open doors leading off it, the light dim because of shuttered windows in the bedrooms. The flooring at the top of the stairs seemed solid enough, and I crossed the tiny hall to a bedroom and stood in the doorway.

  “You don’t listen, do you?” Jon said behind me.

  “Not right now,” I told him.

  In this room, too, the floors seemed intact and had been recently swept. Through the broken slats of a shutter a little more light filtered in and showed me the empty room. On the walls were traces of peeling wallpaper. Wallpaper in Domino! I went to touch the gold and lavender daisies with curious fingers. Mountain daisies, so faded now that only a hint of color remained. I seemed to remember—something—perhaps staying in this room on a visit?

  “How old is this house?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother was born here,” Jon said. “So it must be well past eighty years. I don’t know how long the Tremaynes lived here. This was her room when she was a little girl.”

  I looked around at him directly, into eyes of smoky gray. “How do you know?”

  “Because she used to bring me here. I rode over with her a good many times when I was a young boy. And later too. She liked to keep in touch with Domino.”

  “Were you making that up—about the broken floors? Just to scare me off?”

  “No. They’re bad at the back of the hall and in one of the rooms. I have to get to work on them.”

  “Why didn’t she want me to come up here?” I repeated.

  “She didn’t want you to come into the house at all, but she saw she couldn’t stop you. So she told me last night to come over before you got here this morning. She told me to get you out as quickly as possible.”

  “But what difference can it make to her now if I visit Domino?”

  “I expect that’s for her to say.”

  Once more I wished there were some way to get past the prickly guard he wore against me.

  Through shutter slats I could look down on the street, where Hillary and Gail were walking about. Hillary, curious as always, had stopped to look through a broken doorway across the road. I should be down there, exploring with him. Perversely, I liked it better here.

  “Last night I was reading a book about the Morgan mines,” I told Jon. “It mentioned an old man they called Dominoes. Did he really exist?”

  “I suppose so, though legends have a habit of growing. The story is that the old fellow you read about started a tunneling operation on his own around the side of Old Desolate before Tremayne struck the main lode. He put up the first cabin here and turned the place into a mining camp. The hint of gold or silver was always like flypaper to flies, so people came in. And it took his name. They say that’s what he liked to play—dominoes. I suppose he stood out among all the poker players. Let’s go down now. There’s nothing to see up here.”

  “There’s this,” I said, and touched the wallpaper again. “A child lived in this room and grew up to be my grandmother. I didn’t ever expect to have any feeling about that, but I do.” A patch of faded daisies hung from the wall near my hand and I tore off a strip. For a moment I stood staring at it. Jon was watching, and I smiled at him absently. “You have to allow me a sentimental souvenir.”

  “There’s no time to be sentimental about wallpaper when a life is involved. She’s not just a grandmother you’ve happened to inherit. She’s a woman.”

  “But she never let me know her the way she used to be. So now her life doesn’t involve me. This is all I can take home with me from Colorado—this bit of paper. Persis Morgan is dying, and there’s no possible way for her to recover a time that’s gone.”

  His gray eyes could be cold as a mountain stream. “She doesn’t have to die yet. She’s giving up—and that’s something she’s never done before. Not ever in her life. Why don’t you stop her?”

  “That’s foolish! There’s nothing I can do against Mark Ingram.”

  “She thinks
there is.”

  I turned on him angrily. “Then tell me what it is—tell me!”

  “I wish I could. But you’ll never find out if you turn and run. That way the vultures move in.”

  “I thought you’d decided I was one of the vultures.”

  “Maybe you are. Maybe not. But you’re the one she’s asked to come here. You’re the one she wants to trust. So you need to get back into the real world. It’s okay to remember, but sometimes I think you want to live back there, making up stories about times and people that are gone. Just to comfort yourself. You don’t deal with what’s now.”

  His words came too close to the truth, and they made me angry. But they weren’t altogether fair. I could tell him about reality if I wanted to.

  “You talk so much about helping her,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  The challenge didn’t embarrass him. “I’m trying. I have an idea or two, and I’ve been searching. There are missing pieces. You may be able to pick them up.”

  I didn’t answer him, but stuffed the bit of paper into my jacket pocket and returned to the dimness of the hall. At the top of the stairs I paused.

  “Today, just a little while ago, I went into the rear parlor at Grandmother Persis’ house. Apparently that room has been shut up for years. As though something that happened there must have been so awful that she could never risk going into it again.”

  Jon Maddocks looked away from me out the window and said nothing. He knew, I thought. But I had to go on.

  “There was a box on a rosewood table, and when I touched it I was so frightened that I had to run out of the room. Do you know what’s in that box?”

  “Why don’t you open it and see?”

  “Because I have a feeling that if I do something dreadful will happen.”

  “When you’re ready you’ll open it,” he said, and I remembered his telling me that perhaps I had to earn the right to know. His assurance made me angry. How could he possibly understand that I was trying to be my own woman, trying to fight for my life?

  “I’ll tell you something else,” I went on. “Gail Cullen left that door unlocked for me deliberately. She knew I’d go in there. For some reason she wants to frighten and upset me. But I’m not going to open that box. Because if I do … Oh, what’s the use! No one understands. I know what my husband would say if he were alive. He would tell me I can never be free until I open whatever needs to be opened. Hillary thinks that too. He thinks I should open all the boxes. But if I do, perhaps I really will go out of my mind!” I could hear my voice rising, and I hated its pitch.

  “Whoa now,” Jon said as though he gentled Sundance. “I think there’s more of Persis Morgan in you than you know. You’ll find that out when you stop fighting it.”

  I backed down feebly. “I didn’t mean to explode like that. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be. Explode if you like. Maybe you hold in too many things. If you like, I’ll go into that room with you. I’m pretty good at fighting ghosts, when I have to.”

  “Yes.” Memory took me back. “You helped me fight them once before, didn’t you? All those years since then I’ve had a dream of riding a pony up the valley toward Old Desolate. Everyone has always said it was only a dream, but I’ve known it was real. I could hear hooves pounding after me because someone was following, and a terrible fear comes through in the dream. Why did you follow me? Why was I running away, and why did I feel so desperately that I had to ride toward the mountain?”

  He hesitated for a moment before he answered. “You were frightened. Terrified. You might have been hurt if you went on alone. There was no one else to ride after you just then, so I did. Though I didn’t know myself what was happening at the time.”

  I put my hand on the post at the top of the stairs to steady myself and closed my eyes. Now I could remember being thrown. I could remember arms about me and a young boy, frightened himself but holding me, trying to comfort me—the sort of comfort that I had yearned for ever since and never found again. But that child was gone, lost in the past, and so was the boy who had held her. I opened my eyes and looked into Jon Maddocks’ face—the face of a stranger. I wanted to thank that boy for what he had done, but I couldn’t speak such words to this man who seemed to be waiting for something more that must come from me, and that I didn’t know how to give, no matter what the need of my grandmother.

  “I’m going home soon,” I told him woodenly.

  “That’s a good way to escape what’s real and present.”

  I marched down the stairs and out of the house, not waiting to hear anything more Jon Maddocks might say to me, not daring to listen.

  Hillary and Gail were coming back along the street and Hillary was gesticulating dramatically, using Domino as his stage. I was struck by the contrast between him and Jon. The one always exuberant, excited, always onstage; the other quiet, indrawn, giving little away, yet always watchful, perhaps a little arrogant—thinking what? It disturbed me that I should find myself caring, wanting to know.

  As Hillary danced about, light on his feet as he would be in a stage duel, Gail followed him, entranced, the way women always did. I knew all about Hillary’s fascination as an actor, though sometimes I had the curious feeling that I didn’t know what he was like as a man. A new objectivity was stirring in me that I couldn’t altogether welcome.

  He saw me on the porch and stopped waving his arms. “What a marvelous place, Laurie! Come down here—I want to show you something. Look—this was a saloon in here. There’s what’s left of a sign lying there that says, Open All Night.”

  I went to him quickly, putting new uncertainties behind me. When I bent to look through a broken doorframe, I could see sagging ceiling beams and a splintered bar with shelves behind it—all fallen in upon themselves. A small pine tree thrust upward where there had once been a roof.

  “Can’t you see the boys from Shoot-’em-up Corral coming in here, Laurie? I’ll bet they really did. I’m beginning to get a feeling for all this. For the Opera House in Jasper, and for this little ghost of a town. It might be fun to put on Girl of the Golden West again. Put it on right there in Jasper—when people start coming in. Or perhaps I might even write a western play of my own.”

  “We’re leaving very soon,” I reminded him.

  “But why should you?” Gail put in. “You’re not through yet, Laurie. You must stay a few more days—a week, at least.”

  I knew what she meant. Enough time to open that box. Enough time to bring everything down like a pack of cards. Why should she want that? Why should she want Mark Ingram to be home free? And why should she say this if she had put the wreath on my door to frighten me away?

  “I suppose we could stay a little while longer,” Hillary said. “It’s not going to make all that much difference, is it, Laurie?”

  I recognized his excitement over this place. It wasn’t fair to bring him out here and then turn off this new eagerness that kindled him.

  “All right. But, please—not for long.”

  “Did you find anything interesting in the house?” he asked.

  I pulled out the strip of wallpaper to show him. “Just this.”

  His imagination caught fire as he held up the bit of paper. “Daisies—those mountain daisies! Years and years old!”

  “From a room my grandmother lived in when she was a little girl.”

  He gave the paper back to me. “Keep it, Laurie. It will help you to remember your coming here.”

  Companionably he linked his arm through mine, and as we walked along the street together I felt comforted. A little. Of course Hillary and Gail would like each other. He liked everyone—exactly the way Red did. But it didn’t mean anything. I’d seen women turn calf’s eyes at him before, and he still came back to me. Because I fired his imagination. He’d told me so once. Because I was a Pandora’s box full of undisclosed secrets, he’d said. Sometimes I’d wondered uneasily whether I would still interest him once he knew everything there was to know. But at leas
t he had understood how I felt about the wallpaper, where Jon Maddocks, the pragmatist, had not. I closed my mind against the thought of Jon. I mustn’t let him in at all. In that direction lay danger. The connection with the past was too strong, and I must be careful.

  We picked our way past stunted pine trees that grew here and there in a street made narrow because of mountain walls on either side. Grass waved in the wind wherever it had seeded in, and clumps of columbine, lavender and white, grew in rotting debris. In one corner flaming-red Indian paintbrush made an orangey slash of color.

  I tried to let all confusion and inner conflict flow away so that I could accept this place, know all of it that remained. Already I loved these lonely remnants of what had once been a thriving mining camp. I wanted to carry them back with me in memory, just as I would carry away that tangible bit of wallpaper tucked into my pocket. All this was Domino, and somehow Domino was part of my flesh and blood and bones, as I had never expected that it would be.

  If it hadn’t been for Domino, I wouldn’t be walking this street now. Perhaps I wouldn’t even be alive. Persis had said I looked like Sissy Tremayne. There was kinship for me here with my own people, with my very roots. Hillary might use Domino as a springboard for his imagination, but for me it was reality—a past to which I still belonged, yearned to belong.

  I walked on to the end of what had been a street, lost in a feeling for the past that had never touched me before. My eyes misted with grief for something I had never known, and I was closer here to Persis Morgan than I had felt standing beside her bed. If I were to stay a few days more to please Hillary, perhaps there was something I could do. Some way in which I could help her. A new resolve began rising in me that I had never felt before.

  The town had ended, running off into high grass that climbed the gulch, and we turned back toward our horses. Jon waited for us, astride Sundance. He looked right in a saddle, as a man should. He would never bother with fancy gaits in a horse, or proper posting with no saddle horn. A saddle horn was for roping, and Jon grew in his saddle, belonging to these western mountains as we did not. Even though Gail rode well, she looked a little like a dude, while Hillary and I were plainly easterners. Jon was real—a man who lived and worked in an environment he had loved and returned to. Perhaps he had never felt real in New York.