“Where do you go?” said Peter, striving for the same light tone.
“Everywhere,” said Nikos, beaming and opening his arms. “I go everywhere.” Then he added, “But mostly, my house. Over there,” he said, pointing vaguely to the west of the main house. “You will see it. If not, I will show you. Later. Now, go on,” he said, shooing them away. “While there is so much sun.” He turned and sidled off across the drive, his boots scraping small bare patches in the loose gravel. As if he knew they were watching him still, he waved one hand behind him. “Go on. Go look around.”
Peter smiled and turned to Meg. “What a character,” he said in a low voice. “What do you suppose happened to him to make him walk that way?”
Meg looped her hair back behind her ears. “I don't know—maybe polio? An accident?”
“But how about those rubber boots? On a day like this?”
Meg shrugged, as if uncurious; in fact, she was. But Nikos had already made such a profound, and troubling, impression on her, that all she wanted was to put him out of her mind again, before the day was altogether ruined for her. Pushing her hands down into the back pockets of her jeans, she turned in a slow, full, wondering circle. “Isn't it amazing,” she announced, having taken in a 360-degree view, “to think that you can actually own things like this? Trees and rocks and land . . . that everything you're looking at actually belongs to you, just like something you'd buy in a store.”
“Are you implying there's something wrong in ‘owning’ a part of what God has given to all mankind?” said Peter, facetiously.
“Three weeks ago, if you'd asked me that question, I'd have said no. But now,” she debated, squirming as if in mild discomfort, “I guess I'd really have to say—no.” She laughed, and when Peter did, too, she said, “A fine pair of bleeding-heart liberals we make.”
“Après nous, le déluge.”
“Would you care to show me around the place, Louis?” She took him gently by the arm. “Which way would you recommend?”
“What difference does it make? Like Nikos,” Peter declared, “I go everywhere.” He laughed again.
Skirting the house, which loomed above them like a great gray cliff—Peter couldn't resist reciting the appropriate lines from Wordsworth's The Prelude—they discovered they were at the top of a long and gentle rise, at the foot of which, hundreds of yards below them, they saw a long wooden pier extending out into the bay and a ramshackle boathouse painted green and white. Halfway down the incline, off to the left, was a small, vine-covered gazebo with a cupola top.
“Oh, look at that,” exclaimed Meg, bounding off across the vast, unkempt lawn. Taking hold of one of the wooden posts, she swung herself up into the little round enclosure and plopped down on the rough-hewn bench inside. Peter joined her, and together they gazed up between the posts to the house above them. From the rear, it presented an equally sullen and uninviting view, the central block dominated by what appeared to be a single long chamber. Between the two short wings which extended down the hill, there was an ornamental stone fountain with a statue that shot a sporadic, feeble jet of water a few feet up into the air. What the statue was, they couldn't make out from such a distance.
“That poor girl,” said Meg.
“What girl?”
“Leah, or whatever her name is—the one who's in there trying to clean that monster all by herself.”
A gentle breeze rustled the new leaves overhead. Meg leaned her head back against one of the posts and closed her eyes; Peter absentmindedly rubbed his arm and rested his elbows on his knees. A cloud passed in front of the sun, leaving the house suddenly an even more somber gray. Peter thought of his grandfather, the fat man with the bushy white hair, wearing the black overcoat, standing at the foot of the grammar school steps. The only other thing he could really remember of him was the feel of his hand as it held his own on the brief walk home; it was bigger and thicker than any hand Peter had ever held until that time. It was strong and all-encompassing, but at the same time warm and slightly damp. Peter had thought it felt like the inside of his Batman puppet, wet and tight, but also slightly grainy.
And from that, he thought, comes this. From that one short encounter, this estate. This fortune, assuming Kennedy was right and the IRS left something. This day. He glanced at Meg, her eyes still closed, her breathing as soft and regular as a child's. He suddenly felt for her an overwhelming sense of pity, tenderness . . . and fear. He was afraid for her, afraid that by binding her life to his own she'd committed a terrible mistake that someday she'd be sure to discover. Afraid that when she did discover it, she'd leave him. Afraid that his work, his career—the presumption of the word made him uncomfortable—would never amount to anything and that she would be there to witness his failure.
Afraid, too, that she wouldn't be there.
Her hands lay on top of each other in her lap. Her fingers, surprisingly thick and strongly boned, were also uncustomarily white; they had lost the redness and the rough patches that they'd always had when she was busy with her pottery and sculpture. He hoped the pottery co-op would find another wheel for her soon. He hoped she could go back to that carefree happiness that had first so attracted him, before, he believed, his own malign star had begun to exert its influence. With one finger, he hooked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, just as she always did. She smiled, her eyes still closed.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she murmured.
“They weren't worth it.”
“Want to know mine?”
“Sure.”
“I'm starved.”
On their way back to the car to get the sandwiches, they took a short ramble through the woods. Here and there, they found narrow pathways that as often as not ended abruptly in tiny glades, or simply stopped altogether for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes Peter forged through the brambles to make a new path of their own; sometimes they just turned around and doubled back. It was like a maze, he thought, with its twistings and turnings and sudden dead-ends. But it differed from any traditional maze he'd been in—come to think of it, the only one he'd ever really tried was at Hampton Court—in that there seemed to be no formal design to it, and certainly no single points of entry or escape. The confusion seemed entirely random and, at the same time, somehow premeditated. When they finally broke out into the open again, they found themselves covered with burrs and standing at the far end of the drive, across from the house. The car glinted in the afternoon sun.
“I just had a terrible thought,” said Meg. “I think I left the sandwiches broiling on the back seat.”
The roast beef, they discovered, still passed muster; the ham and Swiss they decided not to risk. The Coke in the plastic thermos was tepid.
“Why don't we take what's edible around back,” suggested Meg, “and eat it by that fountain?”
As they went around the wing of the house, Peter thought he caught a glimpse of someone inside—the girl, no doubt—passing through one of the rooms. Nothing else was really visible—it appeared to be dim, and probably rather cool, Peter guessed.
From the back, the statue in the center of the fountain looked like a goat, or some other wild, furry animal, rearing up on its hind legs. But from the front, to both Peter and Meg's amazement, it presented the face and torso of a bearded man holding exultantly, with both hands, a wildly disproportionate and thoroughly erect penis; the water jetted sporadically from that. Peter put the thermos and sandwich down on the cement lip of the pool and motioned for Meg to sit down beside him there.
“I don't know,” she said, observing the statue with dismay. “I think I may have lost my appetite.”
Peter looked back over his shoulder at it. “Think of it as art,” he said. “Ancient and disgusting art.”
“Do you think it is ancient?”
“Who knows—but I do remember Kennedy saying Gramps was quite the collector.” He unwrapped the one good sandwich and offered half to Meg. She took it gingerly, still studying the sculpture.
“Your mother may be right.” Peter looked quizzical. “Maybe you shouldn't have been exposed to your grandfather.”
With their backs to the statue that played on unashamedly behind them, they ate their belated lunch and looked down the hillside to the dock. It suddenly occurred to Peter, just as he was peeling one of the oranges they'd brought for dessert, that the dock may have been where his grandfather had suffered the fatal heart attack, or whatever it was, that had plunged him into the bay. This, he realized, was the scene of the crime—accident, he corrected himself—perhaps the last place on earth his grandfather had ever been alive. In his mind's eye, he pictured him there, incongruously dressed in the black winter overcoat, poised at the end of the pier. Then spinning, clutching at his chest, dropping soundlessly into the lapping water. Peter waited for some feeling to blossom in his chest, some corresponding emotion of sadness, horror, loss. But nothing came; nothing could come. His grandfather was simply that single blurred shadow for him, and even his death was only a distant, if resonant, event, like the recorded fall of some historic figure.
Meg passed him the red cup from the top of the thermos. “It's starting to get late,” she said. “Do you think we could check out the interior of Castle Constantine now?”
The image of his grandfather disappeared from his mind in the time it took to raise the cup to his lips. He finished the Coke, then helped Meg gather up the orange peels and Saran Wrap and stuff them into the paper sack. Rather than attempt prying open the vaultlike doors in front, they probed the back of the house until they found a pair of unlocked French doors leading into the left-hand wing. Stepping across the threshold, they found themselves at one end of a long, nearly empty room, the floor of which was composed of a highly polished, flawlessly smooth black stone. Meg knelt down and placed her palm flat against it.
“I wonder what it is,” she said. “It's as cool as the top of an air conditioner.”
“It looks like onyx,” he said, noting also the iron tripod lamps, equipped with short, thick candles, at each corner of the room. “But it would have to be just about all the onyx in the world.”
“I guess it's black marble,” Meg speculated, still running her hands across the smooth, dully shining surface. “It's beautiful, whatever it is.”
Peter couldn't tell whether it was the note of appreciation in her voice or simply the kind of delayed reaction he had always been prone to, but for the first time he experienced a sudden jolt of something like pride, or at least of proprietorial interest, in his inheritance. This spacious room, in this enormous house, on this prime tract of land, was really his—and Meg's. The mysterious black floor, the iron lamps, the simple but elegantly geometrical moldings that bordered the ceiling all around the room were theirs. Theirs to hold, theirs to dispose of. He had provided for his wife, after all—in however circuitous or inadvertent a fashion. And maybe that wasn't so bad; maybe that was just as legitimate, just as justifiable, a manner as any other. Maybe he had nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to deny or negate. Maybe he could begin to take joy in his good fortune, even if it had come to him by way of a virtual apparition.
“Do you think we ought to find Leah first, before snooping around?” Meg asked.
“Leah!” Peter called, his hands cupped around his mouth as if he were hollering down a canyon. Despite the size and emptiness of the room, the sound of his voice didn't echo off the walls, as he had half-expected, but seemed instead to be deadened, or absorbed, by them. There was a dim rectangular archway in the center of the room and a normally proportioned door that swung on a hinge just behind them. But there was no reply.
“My guess is that way,” said Meg, motioning toward the smaller door. “I smell cooking.”
They passed through a dark servant's passageway and into a well-lighted, well-equipped kitchen. There were broad counters, racks of copper pots and utensils, a huge refrigerator, and an equally huge freezer unit squatting beside it. Something was simmering on the stove, and something else—not discernible through the little glass window—was cooking in the oven. A yellow timer was ticking on the windowsill above the sink.
“Nobody minding the store,” Peter said.
“I wonder what's cooking.”
“It's called pastitsio,” and they both suddenly turned, to see a tall, very thin girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, holding open another swinging door, no doubt the one that led to the dining room. She was dressed in a white blouse, knotted above her waist, and a loose wrap skirt.
“I'm Leah,” she said, letting the door swing shut behind her. “You must be Meg and Peter. I hope you like what you're smelling—it's your dinner.”
Peter started to say that they hadn't expected to be staying for dinner, just as Meg was apologizing for having to put her to so much trouble. Leah looked from one to the other with an expression both friendly and grave; her complexion, Peter noticed, was olive, like her father's, though not quite so dark. Her features were delicate but sharply chiseled, and her eyebrows, black as the hair she wore in one long braid down her back, almost met in a single straight ribbon across her brow. She wasn't what you'd call beautiful, not by any contemporary American standards, Peter thought, but there was something exotic and exceptionally striking about her.
“Oh, I'm sorry. I was told you would be staying.” She left it at that; Peter wondered if they would be now. “You must have come in the back way. Would you like me to show you the rest of the house?” She padded across the diamond-patterned linoleum floor, her feet bare, and lifted the lid off the pot on the stove; she stirred whatever was inside with a long-handled spoon, and an unfamiliar but fragrant aroma wafted through the room. “Egg-and-lemon soup,” she said and then turned to Peter. “Oh, forgive me—your grandfather, we're all very sorry. He was very good to us. He was an unusual man, with many interests. We're sorry about . . . what happened.” Something in her voice reminded Peter of a Saturday afternoon when he was twelve, and he had had to explain to a friend's mother how her son had broken his finger in their touch football game; there was that same odd combination of apology, explanation, and unspoken complicity.
“Thank you,” Peter replied. “It's nice of you to say so.” He avoided meeting Meg's eyes.
“Let's go this way,” Leah said, gliding across to the door at which she'd first appeared. “The dining room is in here.”
With its austere furnishings and strange air of vacancy, it reminded Peter of the black-floored room they'd already seen. There was a long rectangular glass-topped table on iron-gray legs, with perhaps a dozen straight-backed chairs drawn up around it. Along one wall stood a cumbersome wooden sideboard. Attached to one of its legs Peter saw a red paper tag. Leah immediately answered his unspoken question.
“The tax people were here a couple of days ago—Mr. Kennedy said they had to check the inventory in the will. A lot of things in the house have those tags now.”
“So they beat us to it, after all.”
“At least they left it long enough for us to see it,” Meg observed. “Be thankful for small favors.”
From the dining room, Leah led them into a wide, high-ceilinged hallway punctuated by abbreviated white columns modeled like those outside, then past a couple of smaller rooms which seemed to contain only the odd armchair or old-fashioned sofa. In the last of these rooms, however, Meg and Peter peered in at an ornately crafted billiards table, surrounded by walls of polished oak; at the far end of the room, as if for seating spectators, there was a raised, red leather banquette.
“Your grandfather liked to play this game,” Leah said.
Who with? Peter wondered. He sure as hell couldn't see Nikos squeaking around in here in his black rubber boots.
Leah had already moved on, into the main foyer of the house—a rounded atriumlike space with a grand, sweeping staircase on one side and a cavernous fireplace on the other. Carved into the mantelpiece, two slender nymphs, fully three feet high, their hair and dresses flowing as if caught by violent currents, stretched their a
rms out longingly to each other. From the heel of each dangled a tiny red tag.
“Oh, look at them,” said Meg, brushing the tag back from one figure to see it unsullied. But Peter was looking down and wondering what to think of the ornate circular mosaic on which he found himself standing. He could feel the rough pebbles it was made of through the soles of his sneakers. He quickly stepped back, as if he'd found himself atop a tombstone, and surveyed the design in its entirety.
On the left of the medallion, a young man wearing only a cloak restrained three bounding dogs with a leash tightly wound around his wrist; to the right, a naked woman, attended by two crouching maidens—who appeared to be alarmed at the sight of the man and his dogs—held one arm across her bosom and with the other reached for a two-handled urn. Peter assumed it was some scene from an ancient Greek myth, but which one he had no idea. The pebbles were all light brown, gray, or white, and certain portions of the figures—the naked woman, in particular—were outlined by very fine strips of what might have been bronze or copper. As he looked at it, the colors suddenly, though almost imperceptibly, altered, the tans becoming browner, the whites losing their luster, and the metal bands their sheen.
“It does that,” said Leah, once more anticipating his thought. “It's the light from overhead,” and she indicated the squared-off open space above them. “There's a balcony up there, and when the sunlight changes, it sometimes seems, I think, that the picture does, too.”
“Do you know what it's a picture of?”
“A story,” she said uninterestedly, “an old story, I suppose.” She gestured up the staircase. “Would you like to see the upstairs now?”
They dutifully followed her up the broad, curving stairs, lighted by one of the narrow windows they had observed from the front, and at the top found themselves looking down again at the foyer mosaic. Behind them, along a wide, white hallway adorned with only an occasional vase or antique sculpture, were five or six doors, all of them closed. Leah briefly opened each one, to reveal a bed with no blankets or linens, a chest of drawers, a rolled-up Persian carpet; at the last, in the center of the hall, she stopped and announced, before opening it, “This is where your grandfather slept.” Her solemnity reminded Peter of his visit, many years before, to Washington's Mount Vernon home.
The Spirit Wood Page 5