The Winter People

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Ahead of me, as I neared the inn, something startling caught my eye. All the windows were not dark as they had been. From one narrow opening a streamer of scarlet licked the length of the frame and burst into fiery tongues. That was the room—the room in Glynis’s picture! And this time it was truly aflame.

  I was close to the inn and as I began to run smoke poured out the open window and the fiery tongues grew brighter, more eager and hungry. Once when I stopped to catch my breath, I tried to shout to those about the bonfire, to get their attention. But my feeble voice must have been lost in the sounds of singing and laughter. I ran on. The fire itself would summon them eventually.

  When I reached the lawn I glanced up again and saw the lacing of flame inside the room, the thick smoke billowing. I fled across the lawn and around the end of the inn, stumbled up the steps—almost into Keith’s arms as he came out through the main door.

  I fastened onto him like a leech, and though he tried he could not shake me loose. I fastened both my hands onto his arms and shook him with all my might.

  “Where is the water?” I shouted. “Where is the fire hose?”

  He tried to peel me off, and when I saw he did not intend to help me, I let him go and rushed for the door. At once he came after me, and this time he was the stronger and held me back.

  “You can’t go in there! It’s on fire. The inn’s going to burn down. You can’t go in!”

  I stopped struggling and faced him. “So this is what you’ve done! You’ve set fire to your grandmother’s property! You’ve done it because Glynis wanted you to. Oh, how could you be so stupid and blind?”

  “It’s none of your business!” he shouted at me. “You’ve done nothing but meddle ever since you came here.”

  “How could you be so wicked and so stupid?” I ran on. “Don’t you see how she has used you from the start to get what she wants—leaving you to take the blame? You set up that alabaster head as Glynis told you to do—so I’d be sure and knock it over. Yet she would never be blamed because she didn’t touch it herself. You’ve spoiled my marriage and turned my husband against me! Because I had to take the blame instead of your mother. It was all set up that way. But you aren’t going to be so stupid a second time. This time we’re going to stop what she has started. Come and show me where the hose is.”

  He had grown very still in the face of my rage. His grasp had dropped away from me. I could hear the flames crackling inside the inn. He turned abruptly and went back through the door and I went with him, right on his heels. He ran through the foyer, through the big dining room to the place were a hose was coiled on its wall rack.

  “Turn it on!” he shouted to me as he snaked the hose from its holder.

  Frantically, I turned the wheel of the faucet as he pulled the hose through the dining room and turned the nozzle upon billowing smoke and flame in the office. The fire hissed and spat, and steam rose furiously as he worked with unexpected enthusiasm, as though he were enjoying this phase of opposing the flames as much as he might have enjoyed setting them.

  I could see now that the fire had been started in a plastic wastebasket, and had then run up the draperies beside the open window. One curtain still billowed flame into the outdoors, until Keith turned the hose on it with vigor and the remnants fell back into the room, a dripping black ruin.

  There was nothing I could do except lose my temper further. “There—over by your grandmother’s desk!” I cried. “Don’t let it burn her records. What made you do such a wicked thing? Haven’t you any will of your own? Haven’t you any courage? Are you too much of a worm to tell Glen the truth about what happened and set me right with him?”

  “The fire’s just about out,” he said quietly. “It didn’t get so far. I don’t think it has spread any. So hush what you’re saying now, or I’ll turn the hose on you.”

  I sputtered into silence, my fury dying as the fire died. Trent found us so, watching the wet, stinking mess in the office, almost shoulder to shoulder in our common misery.

  11

  “What’s going on here?” Trent asked. “I saw the smoke, and—” He pushed past us and picked up the wastebasket, dripping with water and greasy ash, and dropped the whole thing out the window. Then he turned back to us. “What happened?”

  Keith was turning off the water at the hose nozzle, and his look was sullen. His eyes avoided his father’s.

  I stumbled into words. For some reason I had to protect the boy. “Keith and I saw the smoke. We—we got here at about the same time, and he used the hose to put it out. Something in the wastebasket caught fire.”

  The relief in Trent’s eyes made me feel utterly guilty. He laughed and clapped Keith on the shoulder.

  “For a minute there I thought you might have started it.”

  “Why would he?” I rushed into words again. Keith had put the fire out—Keith could be reached. Unless his father spoiled everything with his anger now. “What a silly thing to say!” I ran on. “Blaming your own son for what was obviously an accident.”

  Keith threw me a look of scorn. “I did set it,” he told his father, and then clamped his mouth shut and would not say another word.

  The boy had no use for my defense, but I gave it anyway. “Glynis put him up to it, but at least he stopped the fire from spreading. So perhaps no serious damage was done.”

  The scorn Trent turned on me was as great as his son’s. He was no longer the tender, kindly man who had kissed me only a little while ago. “I think you’d better go home, Dina. You’ve had enough for one night. I’ll take you back to High Towers.”

  “No,” I said. “Stay with Keith. I’ll find my way.”

  “You can’t stumble through the woods after dark,” he said. “Wait a moment and—”

  “I’ll go home with Colton,” I told him, and turned away before he could stop me.

  The blaze had been seen from down the lake and as I went outside I met Pandora hurrying toward the inn.

  “The fire is out,” I told her. “There’s some damage, but not a great deal. Don’t go in there now. Let Trent have some time with his son. And keep the others away.”

  Pandora was always quick and intuitive. She promptly took her stand on the steps, asking no questions, and I found the path back along the bank. On the way I informed any I met that the accidental fire was out. When I reached the dying bonfire, I noted that Glen and Glynis were still there, not in the least eager to visit the inn to find out what was happening.

  We drove back to High Towers in Colton’s car and the twins were keyed up and excited. Excited because of the gay evening, excited because Colton had said he would sell the land. Excited for other reasons that I knew about and Colton and Nomi didn’t. Colton would allow no arguments on the subject of the land, and when the twins grew importunate, he simply told them to be quiet—and quiet they were. Now that Keith had failed in what he had attempted, I wondered what they would try next.

  Back at the house I was glad that I had the bedroom to myself. To my surprise Jezebel was waiting for me. I picked her up in my arms and went to stand at the window where I could look out across the lake toward the stone house. Once more the light was on in Trent’s room. I could see him through the window. The sharp staccato of typewriter keys came to me across the frozen plain of ice, and it seemed a companionable sound on this Christmas Eve. I was glad that his book was going well. My father had trusted him completely, and so did I.

  I thought about Keith as well as I stood there, wondering whether I had reached him at all tonight. Wondering how Trent had handled him after I left. The boy had done a shocking thing, yet it seemed as though he had responded to me for a little while—as though I had, for a few minutes at least, got through to him. But was it enough to cause him to tell Glen the truth? This I doubted. What could be expected of him with a mother like Glynis, when she chose to influence him with her own particular wiles? Glynis was good at bewitching.

  After I was in bed, Glen came into our room for the first time since
he had moved to the room he’d had as a boy. He picked Jezebel up quite gently and put her out in the hall, where she whisked downstairs to a safer part of the house. Glen had no dislike for the cat, oddly enough, or she for him. Apparently he had this difference at least from Glynis.

  I turned on my side and closed my eyes. I did not know why he had come and I had nothing to say to him. But he had something to say to me. Not an apology. There was no mention of the slap he had given me, or the blow he had taken from Trent, but it was about Trent that he wanted to talk.

  “I never liked him,” he told me, “even when he was married to my sister. I can imagine that he’d like to make trouble for us now, if he can. I’m willing to overlook that tender little scene on the bank of the lake tonight and give you the benefit of the doubt, Dina. But you must not see Trent alone again.”

  I was too angry to answer. I lay on my side with my back to him and said nothing until he came to sit on the bed beside me and bent over to tweak my braid with one finger. Then, rather methodically, he began to unbraid my hair, spread it out on my pillow as though it was something that interested him apart from me.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” he said. “Let’s forget what has happened as far as we can and start over again.”

  I wanted to tug my hair away from his touch, but I lay still. “There’s never any starting over. Everything that has happened adds up and gets in the way.”

  “I never thought you’d be like this,” he said, still gentle. “I used to think you were exciting when you were angry, but I didn’t expect to find this unforgiving quality in you.”

  I rolled over abruptly and he let the strand of hair go. “Does that mean that you are forgiving me? Forgiving me for what happened to the alabaster head? Is that what you mean?”

  He drew a little away from me as if he found my sudden vehemence distasteful. “It’s not a matter of forgiveness. I want to go on to other things and put the past behind us. That alabaster head meant everything to me—everything!” There seemed a low, burning quality in his voice that was frightening to hear. “You owe me this, Dina. With your own hand you destroyed my work. Now you must give it back to me.”

  So that was it. He wanted something else of me now and he hadn’t changed at all in his thinking about what Glynis had convinced him had happened to the head. I could only scowl at him.

  He forced himself to relax a little, and reached out with one finger to smooth away the frown between my eyes. I tried to lie still beneath his touch and not resist him. Where had all my longing for his love gone that I should lie here in this stubborn, unresponsive state?

  Once more he touched my hair. “Colton said I must get back to work—and he’s right. I know what I’m going to do now. I’m going to use Glynis in the wood because she suits it—as you suited the alabaster. I’m going to use her face and being. It will work, I think. But I’ll use your hair. Not golden in dark wood, of course, but the lightness, the fine, spunsilk quality. I can catch them in wood.”

  I sat straight up in bed and jerked my hair from his touch. “You’ll do nothing of the kind! I won’t pose for you again Never, never!”

  I burst disgracefully into tears, jumped out of bed and went to lock myself in the bathroom. There in the dark I sat down on the chenille rug and wept into my fingers, into my tangled hair. Which was, of course, a ridiculous state of affairs. I could not spend the night weeping in the bathroom. Yet I knew that something had outraged me far more than I had ever been outraged before. How could he ask me to be a part of such a plan? How could he imagine that I would allow him to use any part of me in a carving he was doing of Glynis?

  After a time I got up, washed my face, rebraided my hair and went back to the bedroom. To my relief, Glen was gone. I lay down on the bed and stayed awake for a long time. I could hear, far away, belonging to another world, another life, typewriter keys chattering in the night.

  Morning, once more, was that brighter, braver time. I was tired enough to sleep late, and when I got up I dressed in gray-blue wool and bound my hair in braids over each ear in the style that had suited my mother so well. It did not particularly suit me because it made me top-heavy, but at least there would be no strands afloat to remind Glen of last night’s notions.

  Nomi was up early and outdoing herself with a hearty Christmas morning breakfast. Glynis looked a sylph in pale yellow trousers and a psychedelic blouse, and she was playing the daughter of the house to the best of her histrionic ability. She knelt before the lighted Christmas tree, poked at her gifts delightedly, read names aloud, rattled each one of her packages, and was altogether entertaining and little girlish for Colton’s and Glen’s amusement. I found that I was growing hourly older and more sour—as Nomi had said one might easily do in this house.

  I think Nomi saw how it was with me because after breakfast when we gathered before the lighted tree for the ritual of gift-giving, she drew me aside.

  “Don’t mind the way Glynis reverts,” she said. “It always happens on Christmas morning and we all know why. She still tries to go back to the day one week before her mother died and her world crashed in.”

  I could see then that this was what she was doing. She had become like the child she could never be again, happy and carefree, with no dreadful deed on her conscience. I could pity her a little, now that I understood, yet the result of her childish action had never seemed more dreadful.

  Though Keith had not yet come, we did not wait for him, and took turns opening our presents. Colton was pleased with the book of Spanish castles I had bought for him—with Nomi’s help. Nomi liked her sweater set. Even Glynis seemed to like the crepe blouse I had bought her—in a deep brandy shade that would accent her coloring. Glen exclaimed over the silk turtleneck I’d brought him from New York, and he put it on at once.

  The most expensive gifts came from Colton to the twins. He gave them each duplicate jackets—soft brown suede on one side that could be reversed with leopard skin on the other. Each put on a jacket with the leopard fur out, and I had the uneasy feeling that there were two, only partially tamed, wild creatures in our midst that morning.

  For me there was exotic perfume from Glynis—which I detested at the first sniff, and from Glen a large, cool aquamarine embedded in antique gold. The ring on my finger felt heavy, echoing the heaviness of my heart. Nomi’s present was best. She had made a marvelous scarf for me on her loom—finely woven of soft brown wool, with zigzags of pink lightning striking through it. It was almost a serape length, meant to be worn like either a stole or a long scarf. I flung it about my shoulders, liking its dove-soft yet heavy warmth, and went to kiss her cheek—a gesture she tolerated without enthusiasm.

  Colton’s gift to me was a book called A Year in the Country, which told about season changes in northern New Jersey, and related the habits of the birds and animals who lived about the lake. I knew I would study it with pleasure and was grateful for his thought.

  But the drama of our gift-opening lay in the final presents Glen and Glynis had given each other. They were almost duplicate gifts, and Nomi told me that this had happened before. The twins thought alike, they had similar tastes, and probably a bit of extrasensory perception between them as well. This often resulted in similar choices in what they gave each other.

  Glen opened his package first and found that Glynis had chosen a chain of gold links for him—its medallion a Greek profile that resembled Colton. In delight he shed his leopard skin and put the chain on over the turtleneck, urging Glynis to open her package. Hers, too, was a chain of gold links—more finely wrought than the male version, and also with a large medallion. Glynis laughed as she studied it, then held it up for us to see. The head on her medallion was one of a handsome, snarling leopard. She dropped the chain over her neck so that the leopard’s head shone against the glitter of her blouse—and the gift could not have been more appropriate. They were too close, these two. There was no place for anyone else in their lives. Each might have made gestures of escape, but always
they came together again—belonging to each other as no one else could ever belong. But how was I to accept this—live with it?

  Keith arrived late, looking a bit sullen, almost defiant as he brought his gifts into a tissue-and-ribbon-strewn drawing room. He dumped them unceremoniously onto Glynis’s yellow-clad knees, and stood back to await her verdict. Perhaps he expected blame because he had not succeeded in whatever she had set him to do last night—and had been caught at it besides. But Glynis seemed to have forgiven him readily, and I wondered if that was only because she wanted to use him again. It seemed likely.

  Keith’s gifts were surprisingly original, though all of a kind. He had whittled for each of us a small animal of wood, and when Colton held up his lion he gave the boy a look of approval.

  “You’re a Chandler after all,” he said. “This is good work.”

  For Glynis there was the obvious leopard, crawling flat on its belly as it stalked its prey. For Glen he had carved a unicorn. When I saw it I had to smile. The boy had more imagination than I’d have expected. A mythological creature was right for Glen, who was rather mythical himself. For Nomi there was a comfortable house cat, curled up and obviously purring, and for me a young doe, delicate and graceful, its ears pricked as if in alarm—which made me wonder.

  When Keith had opened his own gifts of sweaters and skis, a new encyclopedia from Colton, and books from Nomi and me, I managed to find a moment alone with him. So far he had not met my eyes, and I knew he would avoid me if he could. But I came near him on the pretext of picking up wrappings strewn about his feet and asked him my question softly.