The Winter People

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  As we sat at the table drinking coffee afterward, Glen surprised me. I was still bride enough to want to be with him every minute that I could, but he made it clear that this was not what he would always wish.

  “I’m going for a walk through the woods to think about my work,” he told me. “So I can’t take along a distraction like you, Dina. If you want to explore the house, or walk about outdoors, go ahead. The sun is coming out and it’s warming up to a pleasant day.”

  I was eager to agree to whatever he suggested, eager to play the role of handmaiden to his art. I would tread softly and do as he asked. But when he left us at the table, Nomi looked after him with a slight shake of her head.

  “They’re loners, both of them—the twins. Except when they have each other. You’ll have to get used to that. But you puzzle me a little. Last night I glimpsed something a bit independent in you, yet ever since you came downstairs this morning, you’ve been acting like an echo, a shadow.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be an echoing shadow if it gives Glen what he wants?” I asked lightly. “I only mean to help him.”

  Nomi had a rather sharp little nose that she rubbed when something troubled her. She was rubbing it now, and her brown eyes appraised me, much as they had last night.

  “Elizabeth was like that too,” she said. “She was Colton’s shadow, Colton’s serving maid. He thought for her, spoke for her, molded her into exactly what he wanted. And he was horribly bored with her at times. A flavoring of the unexpected doesn’t hurt, you know. That’s why Colton can bear to have me around. I’m no Chandler, and I’m no Chandler shadow, either. I’m devoted to Glen, who has been like a son to me. Once, I suppose, I was even a little in love with his father. But I won’t be a doormat for Chandler feet, or a sounding board for Chandler voices.”

  I hardly listened, because I already knew Glen as a wife would know him, and as no one else could. The vision in my mind was as bright and clear as Glen’s vision of the head he would do of me. No one else could know what he needed as I knew, and this was what I would give him. If it developed that he wanted me to surprise him, entertain him, then I would try to do that too. But for now I must be still and undisturbing.

  “Do you think Glynis will come home soon?” I asked.

  “I suspect she’ll take the first plane she can catch,” said Nomi sharply. “We haven’t many free days left. Let me give you more coffee, Dina.”

  I pushed my cup toward her. “Will it matter to her that her brother is married?”

  “Without her permission?” Nomi snapped. “Without having her look the girl over carefully first? She’ll make mincemeat of you—if you let her.”

  I tilted my chin. “Then I won’t let her. I’ve married Glen, not Glynis.”

  Nomi thrust a hairpin briskly back into one of her braids. “That’s what you think.”

  “But why should she want to keep Glen from marrying?”

  “Because she’s frightened.” Nomi set her cup down with a thump. “She has to hold onto everything around her with all her might so that her own ghosts won’t catch up with her and destroy her completely. So she holds to High Towers. She even holds to the lake, though there are times when she’s afraid of that too. She would hold onto Colton if he didn’t slip through her fingers whenever he chooses. Me she’s never held to because she’s afraid of me most of all. I’m the one she least trusts. With good reason. But Glen is hers. He’s part of her own flesh and blood, as a twin can be. So she holds onto him most of all. He has tried to break away—oh, many times. But he’s always failed before. Now he has broken away by marrying you. That’s what it is, you know—his bid for freedom. Now it remains to be seen how quickly Glynis will smash up your marriage. If you let her.”

  “I won’t let her,” I repeated stubbornly. “I’m not a sponge, and I’m nobody’s bid for freedom. I’m not in the least limp and helpless. I don’t believe Glen is either. It’s just that he needed to meet the right person to be whole. He’s not a half now. He’s not a twin—he’s my husband. I want everything to be right for him, because if it’s right for him, it will be right for me.”

  “Humph!” said Nomi, unimpressed.

  “Why should Glynis be afraid of you?” I asked.

  With small, quick hands she began to fold her napkin neatly along its creases. “Because she knows how much I despise her.” Nomi’s voice was light, calm, with no intensity of feeling. It was as though she had said it was a lovely day, but later it might rain. I knew that this was not the time to ask why she despised Glynis. Perhaps she would trust me enough to tell me sometime, but not on my first day at High Towers.

  “This morning I saw a picture Glynis painted,” I went on, still pressing for clues to the puzzle of the twins. “It was a frightening picture of the lake—with the inn on fire, and a woman trapped at the window of a room.”

  Nomi nodded, her expression wry. “I’ve seen it. Therapy, Glen calls it. I’d call it something else. But then, I’m old-fashioned and can’t boast having been to a psychiatrist. I know what I am. That’s something I have to live with. Sometimes I don’t care for it much, but I’m willing to accept myself.” She rose from the table, putting an end to our talk. “Come along, Dina, and I’ll show you about the house. I can’t say you’ll be mistress of it, because I mean to go right on being that. As Colton will be its master, as long as he lives. He’s the only one who can handle Glynis, and I hope he will come home before she does.”

  I found that I liked Nomi more and more. She was forth right and there was no pretense about her. If she finally decided to accept me, I would have a friend I could trust. But she had not decided yet. Naomi Holmes would never be one to make flip, impulsive judgments.

  She let me look into her downstairs sitting room—not a “decorated” room, but comfortable, with the old-fashioned cast-off furniture of a house that had stood for many years. There were sewing things about, a small loom for weaving, and a big yellow tiger cat curled upon a worn sofa. I had not seen the cat before and I crossed the room to make its acquaintance.

  “That’s Jezebel,” Nomi said. “She’s not a Chandler either. Glynis hates cats, so this one stays in my rooms when she’s not roaming about outside living up to her name.”

  The cat looked at me from eye only a little more amber than her fur, and after consideration let me touch her.

  Under Nomi’s guidance, and with the cat following us, soft-footed and slightly supercilious, I was shown Glen’s old room, and, finally, the large bedroom overlooking the front of the house—the room which belonged to Glynis.

  In its doorway I paused to look about with lively interest. Everything I could learn about Glen’s twin, I must know. Jezebel would not cross the sill. She gave the room a haughty glance that dismissed it as beneath her attention, and left us to go downstairs, her tail aloft and curling slightly at the tip, perhaps in irritation at the very scent of Glynis’s room.

  Here Glen’s sister had used fern-printed wallpaper in pale green. The columns of a fourposter bed were carved and reeded, its quilted spread a snowflake design in rose and green. The hangings of the tester were a solid color—the same fern-green as the wallpaper, softening the bed’s outlines. But I had scant interest in the general furnishings because something at the front window caught my eye. It was the room’s one modern touch. On a pedestal of dark teak-wood stood the black marble head of a woman. I was drawn toward it irresistibly.

  Nomi thought I was looking at the view, and she came to raise the sash, letting in the bright, warm air of an Indian summer afternoon.

  “Colton had some of the trees on both sides of the house cut away so the view would be clear,!” she said. “But the man who built High Towers created it for a woman who wanted to be shut in. His wife was city folk—Philadelphia—and she didn’t like the sight and smells of the country. All that land at the foot of the hill used to be a farm. You can still see the barns and outbuildings. But she wanted it out of sight, and she liked the trees closing in on all sides. Her
husband was the son of a wealthy farmer, but he was a bit eccentric himself, so he approved what she wished and put up this Victorian creation on the hilltop. Sensible people built in the valleys in those days.”

  I eyed the black marble sculpture in fascination. The view over rolling lowlands toward hills and the distant Kittatinny ridge was beautiful, but it was the black sculpture that held my attention. I remembered that Glen had told me of his one successful effort in marble. This was surely it. I put my hand upon the head and could almost feel the springy locks beneath my fingers—like Glen’s thick, crisp hair. I had only touched Trent McIntyre’s hair once, and it had been like heavy silk and straight. But I would not think of Trent—never again, except as he came into my life as a stranger.

  “Glen carved this, didn’t he?” I asked Nomi.

  “Yes. It’s really good, I think. Even Colton feels that it’s a fine piece of work. And it’s appeared on loan in several museums. Wait, I’ll light it for you.”

  A spotlight had been arranged on the wall, above and a little to one side of the window. When Nomi touched the switch it cast a golden patina over gleaming black marble so that the face of the woman came to life. It was the face of Glen’s twin—Glen’s face with a feminine cast. Yet it was something else as well. Something rather awesome in the anguish it revealed—a face distorted by naked suffering.

  I turned to Nomi in astonishment. “If that is Glynis, how can she bear to have the head here in her room? I should think—”

  “Glen understands her as he understands himself,” Nomi said. “He knows that she’s afraid and he knows why. He hasn’t carved her—he has carved her grief and fear and she can bear that. Nevertheless, he has romanticized, as he does about himself. You can see that, can’t you?”

  I bent toward the head, studying the marvelous detail that had gone into it. When a mouth turns downward in suffering, it affects every muscle of the face. Beneath the marble surface there was more than flesh.

  I shook my head over Nomi’s word. “Romanticized? When he has made the face so raw with emotion?”

  “Exactly! Because, while she’s capable of ugliness and fear, she’s not capable of such tragic suffering as this. He’s left out the real things, left out what she’s really like.”

  I heard the depth of feeling in Naomi’s voice, saw her usual calm ruffled by some inner disquiet.

  “Why do you hate her so much?” I asked softly.

  This time she answered me, her voice quickly under control. “Because she killed my sister Elizabeth. She destroyed her own mother willfully—Glen’s mother.”

  I stared in astonishment. “But she was only five, wasn’t she, when their mother died? A baby. What could she have done?”

  Without a word, Nomi turned and left me. She walked out of the room with her back straight, her head with its white braids held high. I heard the stairs creak as she went down. For all that she was slight and small she walked heavily.

  I had been given a sudden dismaying glimpse of what Naomi Holmes was really like. Implacable hatred because of what a child had done seemed a shocking thing. I studied the marble face again and felt sudden, unexpected sympathy for Glynis. What horror had she lived with as a child that made her now a haunted woman? Perhaps, after all, I could be her friend—if only she would let me. I must be her friend. I must know everything about her so I would have something to offer her when she came.

  I switched off the light, feeling suddenly restricted by the house, stifled by these old, desperate emotions. My own family life had been happy and bright, filled with sunlight as I remembered it. This was a house made of winter things. Harsh and bleak and bitterly cold. Winter emotions, winter people.

  Outdoors winter had not yet come and there was sunlight and the lake waiting for me. I turned my back on black marble and fled down the stairs. I needed no coat on this gift of a warm afternoon, and I let myself out the front door, walked around the house to the lake side. I could see the water, placid at the foot of the steep hill, blue and quiet, in a windless afternoon. I started down through dry autumn grass, down among bare walnut trees, hickories, and slim birches, then cut to my left at a diagonal over the spongy carpet of needles that lay beneath the pine grove.

  In a few moments I was down and in the open at the water’s edge. It was my first complete view of the lake and I could see, far to my right, the steep gray rocks, rugged and pinnacled, that gave the lake its name. The rest of this shore, and the opposite shore as well, wore no outcroppings of rock, though it was rimmed in by hills all around. Directly across was the stone house from the eighteenth century—the house where the McIntyres lived. White ruffled curtains trimmed its upstairs windows and neat shrubbery landscaped it. Belonging to an earlier time than High Towers, it seemed a more decorous house—well-mannered, as one who has learned wisdom and courtesy with age. The pricked ears of High Towers always seemed to be listening, rudely eavesdropping.

  No one was in sight across the lake, and my sometimes wayward heart did not quicken at the thought of Trent walking into view. This afternoon I was safely and wholeheartedly Mrs. Glen Chandler, and I wanted nothing else.

  For the first time I thought of the boy, Keith, whom I had met briefly in the auto shop last night when Glen was bringing me home. It seemed a long while ago that he had spoken to me of Glynis. I knew more about her now. I knew who she was, but I still did not know enough, and I wondered at the boy’s intense interest.

  As I turned to my left in the direction away from those tall gray rocks and began to follow a rough path along the bank, I saw the redwood inn at the end of the lake. Glen had been furious when he had shown it to me last night, but now, by daylight, it did not seem to me that it defaced the lake. In fact, it had clearly been built with an eye to suiting its wild surroundings, so that it was not wholly out of place.

  Still, wilderness was better. Once the Lenape Indians had roamed this area and Glen said that arrowheads were still to be found in turned-up earth. I was on the side of those who wanted to keep all this a wilderness.

  Walking more briskly as the path straightened, I was strong with purpose again. I must know. I must find out. Anything and everything. I moved in the direction of Gray Rocks Inn, wanting to see it more closely. Perhaps I wanted to see how true to reality Glynis had been in her painting of the inn afire. Perhaps I needed to reassure myself that no flames leaped behind its windows, that no woman in white stood with her arms upflung in desperation.

  As I followed the curve of the shore, a sharp crack exploded somewhere on the hill above. Up there in the woods a gun had been fired. It had nothing to do with me, but the sound was disquieting in this lonely place, and I began to hurry on my way to the inn.

  4

  No sound of gunfire came again, but the strange feeling that I was somehow involved with the inn at the end of the lake began to build in me.

  It was a wide building with a shallow roof that sloped toward the water, and two strong stone chimneys at either end. The main floor had been built well above the ground and glass picture windows framed the entire front, so that diners could sit at their tables and look out over the water. But in Glynis’s painting the window behind which the woman stood visible against red flames, had been narrow—the window of a small room.

  I followed the glass and redwood front with my eyes, searching—and found what I was looking for. The smaller window was half hidden by a shaggy spruce, its narrow space empty now, shining serenely in the afternoon sun. Yet the queer urge was still upon me, the sense of misgiving. I wanted to know what that room was like—from inside. I wanted to look out its very window. Now who was being haunted? I wondered wryly, and went right ahead to satisfy the urge.

  In the summer the sloping bank that ran from the inn down to the water would be a pleasant lawn. Now it was stubby brown grass which crunched beneath my feet as I walked across it. I rounded the far end of the building to reach the driveway and parking space, where Glen and I had drawn up in the car last night. Broad stone st
eps led to a generous veranda and a wide redwood door. The door stood open and I hesitated before it. No one seemed to be about. No one had stirred outside, or looked down upon me from the windows of the inn. I climbed the steps and paused just outside the door.

  “Is anyone here?” I called. “May I come in?”

  There was no answer and I stepped into a rustic, pine-paneled anteroom which boasted a pine desk on one side, and a small cloakroom on the other. A summer painting of the lake as viewed from this end hung directly opposite the door—a watercolor, pleasant, but without any particular distinction. The shores of the lake, green as I had not seen them, though the pinnacled rise of high rock part way down its length looked as dull and gray as it had to me this morning. No warmth of sunlight, no blue waters or green shores would ever change the cold, craggy look of that pile of rock. The very contrast it made gave the picture interest, as it gave the lake interest and emphasis. Out on the painted lake a woman sat at the oars of a small boat, and a man fished placidly. I did not need to look to know there would be no Chandler initials on this picture.

  To my left, a door opened into a bar which occupied one end of the inn. The other led directly into a timbered dining room, alight with the warmth that natural, golden woods cast upon a room. Again there were paintings hung all around the paneled walls. Apparently Mrs. McIntyre encouraged the artists of the county to show their work here. Several were rather good, but I did not stop to study them now.

  I wound my way among the tables, noting the view down the lake, framed in each picture window. I found swinging doors that gave upon the kitchen area, passed them by and saw the door I was looking for. A narrow hallway led from the dining room, and off this opened the door of a small office. This was the room of Glynis’s painting.