The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  Peter sat as if paralyzed.

  “Or perhaps I must explain everything to you . . . even now.” He sighed, surprised, it seemed, at Peter's ignorance or faulty intuition. “Let me just light my cigar again,” he said, before beginning in earnest.

  Thirty-eight

  MRS. CONSTANTINE AWOKE to the sound of heavy tires crunching across the gravel driveway. It seemed only minutes ago that, finally, she'd closed her eyes and fallen asleep. Most of the night she'd been beset by memory, by all the things she'd spent a lifetime trying to forget. And by visions, too, of her mother, ironing a pile of clothes in a dismal kitchen, minding a pot on the stove, humming, sadly, a snatch of a popular Greek song. She remembered so little of her girlhood, and her mother, that the memories she did have had become, over the years, as static and predictable as snapshots in an old photograph album; she could flip through them just as easily, knowing every frame, every nuance, which one came next. The last was always the same: her mother, a woman lost in life, looking in death equally lost, laid out on blood-red satin, white flowers strewn around her, an expression of composure on her face as unlike her as the elegant dress she was buried in. Ellen, as she'd grown older, had gone from missing her to hating her to pitying her; what this simple country woman must have suffered, married to a mystery like Alexander Constantine.

  The rest of the mystery—the questions about what Ellen had always referred to in her own mind as “Peter's heritage"—she was staying on at Arcadia to suppress. If Nikos could just be kept quiet until the estate was sold, if Peter could just be returned to Mercer and his previous life, then the last danger might be successfully passed, and forgotten. Once this auction was done, there was nothing essential, according to Meg, to keep her from packing up her own things, and Peter's, and heading straight back to their college apartment.

  From the voices she now heard outside the house, the preparations were already underway.

  “The tent's going up on the back lawn,” one man was saying. “Bring around the stakes and rigging first.” She heard a corrugated door being lifted; the squeak of a dolly's wheels. When she went to the window and looked outside, she saw Meg at the bottom of the front steps in a pair of jeans and sneakers. Her hair was gathered together in a long blond pony-tail.

  That, too, sometimes gave her a pang. She'd never been so young, like that. Never known those years. Her life had been brutally truncated, so early on.

  “If you go around to the left, it'll be shorter,” Meg was saying. “The tent's supposed to go right in front of the gazebo.”

  The men, three of them, loaded up the dolly with huge canvas sacks and followed Meg around the east wing of the house. Mrs. Constantine turned from the window and, in the restored silence of her room, went about choosing the proper dress for a summer auction.

  Even on the balcony, far away from the gazebo, Peter heard the unloading going on. When Meg and the workmen had moved sufficiently far down the back lawn, he swung his legs, gingerly, off the chaise and, still clutching the sheet around him, shuffled inside. Tossing the sheet onto the bed, he went into the bathroom and, only when he had locked the door behind him, looked himself over.

  There was more red in his beard than there'd been the day before. Or at least it seemed so. It was getting so he could never tell exactly what was different anymore, whether something had actually changed or if, in his fear and consternation, he was imagining it. The pain was what he could put his trust in: if something hurt, that was usually where the certain and demonstrable changes would next appear. Today his mouth hurt the most. Turning on the light over the medicine chest, he opened his mouth and with blunt fingers pried his lips away from his gums. Yes, the gums looked raw, and slightly discolored. Chafed perhaps. And his teeth . . . could they have moved farther apart from each other? Were they always so separated as this?

  In the soap dish on the sink was Meg's dental floss. He unwound a length of it, wrapped it hurriedly around his fingers, and wedged it between his teeth. Always, in the past, the floss had caught and become shredded. That's why he'd always hated flossing. It was impossible to get the stuff out from between his teeth. But today, the unwaxed string plunged in and out without obstruction, catching on nothing. His gums began to bleed; at least that had always happened. But this much? He spat into the sink, rinsed out his mouth with cold water. Then had to spit again.

  He finished in the bathroom quickly, splashing some water onto his face, lifting off his hat and scratching his scalp; the front of his skull he instinctively avoided. He slapped the hat firmly back in place, flicked out the light, and, still wearing the clothes he'd slept in, hobbled into the bedroom.

  He'd have liked to go outside—he always wanted to be outside now—but too much was going on out there. Before the day was over, there'd be a whole lot more. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he tried to raise his foot to tie the leather lace of his Topsider. But his knee was too stiff; it felt locked in place. He was about to try the other foot when he heard his mother's door open across the hall; his own bedroom door—damn—wasn't locked.

  “Peter?” Accompanied by a light rapping. “Peter?”

  He slipped off the bed, crept toward the door. Crouching down, took hold of the lock. Turned it, just as the knob of the door itself turned. There was a click as the lock caught; had she heard it? Did she know he was there?

  “. . . Peter?”

  He held his breath. Waited. He heard her footsteps going toward the staircase. Without taking his eyes from the door, he moved backwards into the study and breathed again only when he had closed and locked that door behind him.

  How could she face him, he thought. How had she ever been able to? If what Kesseogolou had said was true—and so much of it added up, so much made sense—how had she managed to pull it off, every day, for nearly thirty years? The maiden name story ("It seemed simpler, after your father died, to revert to the name I'd always known"), the mysterious “heart ailment” his father had supposedly suffered from, the total absence of relatives in Peter's life, the determination to keep him, always, from any contact with Alexander Constantine. It was all horrendous, all crazy, but only in Kesseogolou's account, all of a piece . . .

  . . . though even he had to be exaggerating, lying, about some of it. It couldn't be so irrevocable, so unnatural, so . . . It just couldn't be.

  A shooting pain, like a heated dagger, stabbed at the base of his spine as if to say yes, in fact it could.

  He bent forward in his chair to relieve the pressure, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. When the spasm abated and he opened them again, he almost laughed. Right in front of him, on the cluttered desk, was a stack of pages from his dissertation. He read from the page on top.

  The idea of true modernity, as Wilde understands it, is inextricably bound up with Matthew Arnold's notion of culture, defined in his essay “Sweetness and Light” as a kind of mental activity or process rather than a passive body of assimilated information.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought, did anyone give a damn about Matthew Arnold's notion of culture? Or Wilde's idea of true modernity? Did Dunlop, the department head? Did he, Peter? He'd written this only a week or so before; already it seemed as if it had been done in another lifetime, and by someone with whom he was only barely acquainted. Mechanically and without hesitation, he crumpled the page into a loose ball and let it fall between his legs to the floor.

  He read from the next.

  Arnold based his humanitarian vision of the future on a vanguard of cultured men who, he argued, would lead the proletariat toward enlightenment and, ultimately, socialism; he sincerely believed that man would be inexorably drawn toward the Immutably beautiful and the good.

  He was sincerely wrong; Peter crumpled this page, too. Man isn't drawn toward the immutably beautiful or good; he's drawn backwards. He's drawn whichever the hell way he was born to be drawn, whichever way his blood has already determined he'll be. That much Peter did know; that much he'd learned from Kesseogolou. And Nikos. And the
bathroom mirror. Everything that he had been doing until now—studying, reading, writing—none of it mattered one damn bit when chalked up against the inevitable, against the crime that had engendered him and the corrupt blood that was now percolating in his veins. He crumpled the next page, and the one below that. Kesseogolou had said, flatly stated, that there was no going back, no undoing it.

  “You've drunk the wine, you've run with us, you've played the sacred pipes . . .”

  The pages fell, one by one, between his twisted knees.

  “. . . you've joined in the sacrifice—Nikos tells me you drank quite deeply . . .”

  The taste of his own bleeding gums came back to him.

  “. . . and now with this Leah—Demetria, too, if you like—you can finish what your father only started. You can become what you've always been, something ancient, and proud, and real—real, Peter,” he'd repeated with fierce insistence, “and complete the circle that's been broken too long.”

  Thirty-nine

  THE FIRST CARS showed up at the main gates around 4:10, almost an hour before the auction was scheduled to start. Meg had at first been surprised it had been set for so late in the day, but Anita Simon explained to her that in August, people liked most of a Saturday to themselves.

  “And if it's one of those dog days, we're better off not having it at noon, anyway,” she'd added.

  Andy Simon and the Nashes’ boy, Buddy, had been put in charge of parking. They collected the twelve-dollar gate fee and directed the incoming cars into orderly rows, first on the gravel driveway in front of the house, then on the oval lawn in the middle. By 4:40 or so, they were asking the drivers simply to pull over along the sides of the long driveway leading in from Huntington Road. Anita had been right about one thing, Meg thought; Arcadia was indeed a draw.

  Dressed in a light yellow summer dress and a matching pair of open-toed espadrilles, Meg watched from an upstairs window as the prospective bidders gawked at the house itself, some taking a quick snapshot, before moseying around one of the wings to the back lawn. Some of these people she recognized from the party at the Simons’, others she had seen, at one time or another, in town. All of them, she could tell, just from the way they turned while walking or pointed at something of interest, had been terribly curious about what lay behind the wire fences and elaborately filigreed gates of the estate. The auction had given them a chance, after years of speculation, to find out. Meg wondered what they made of the wildness of the place, the rough-and-tumble look of the grounds. Or, once they got around back, the priapic satyr in the fountain. Thinking about that made her smile.

  It was time for her to go down, she realized, much as she'd have liked to hide out until the whole thing was over and done with. In the “skating rink,” she found Mrs. Constantine observing the crowd slowly assemble under the huge striped tent.

  “They've got quite a turnout,” Mrs. Constantine commented without enthusiasm. “I hope the weather holds.” The sky was clear now, but there had been forecasts all day for thunderstorms.

  “One thing's for sure,” Meg said. “Nobody's getting a raincheck.”

  Anita Simon could be seen bustling about in a pair of tight navy-blue slacks and a white blouse, directing people into the rows of foldup chairs, checking over the items heaped on the auction tables, testing the microphone.

  “One, two, three, testing . . .” A loud squeak. “Testing, testing . . . Hi, Al. Betty. Here's some seats up front. Don't be shy.” The Plettners sat down in front.

  “Where's Peter?” Mrs. Constantine asked. Everyone seemed to be asking that question a lot lately.

  “Who knows? I thought he might already be down there.”

  “I haven't seen him. All day.”

  “I'm sure he'll turn up in time.” He hadn't been in the bedroom when she'd gotten dressed. “I've got to go down to the boathouse and pick up my contribution to the auction. Would you care to join me?”

  “I'd love to. I was wondering how I'd find the courage to go out there alone.”

  The air outside, even this late in the day, was still very warm; earlier, it had hit ninety degrees. There must have been a hundred and fifty or two hundred people under the tent now, chatting, socializing, sipping lemonade that was being served at seventy-five cents a glass, from an urn set up on a card table. As Meg and Mrs. Constantine tried to skirt around the back of the crowd, Anita spotted them and said over the microphone, “Where are you two going?”

  Meg waved to her, crooked one finger in the direction of the boathouse, and mouthed, “Right back.”

  “We're officially part of the proceedings now,” Meg said.

  Three or four people were standing on the dock watching as Meg fitted the key into the padlock on the boathouse door. She turned it before realizing that the lock was already open.

  “Did I forget to fasten this again?” she asked herself out loud.

  Inside, everything seemed in place, the chemical bottles still in order above the sink, the lids to the clay containers clamped down, the kiln safely off and its own lid raised. On the center of the worktable, still under its protective cheesecloth, stood the statue of Dodger she'd made for the auction.

  “You know,” Meg said, “sometimes I get the oddest feeling coming in here.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Constantine asked, remaining in the open doorway.

  “I can't really put my finger on anything, but I feel as if someone's been in here while I was gone. Sometimes it feels, especially at night, as if I've almost caught them at it. That's probably why,” she said with a nervous laugh, “I've stopped coming down at night.”

  She pushed the stool away from the table and took hold of the edge of the cheesecloth. Something bulged—or did it?—under the cloth. For a split second, Meg remembered that terrible dream she'd had on her first night in Arcadia, when she'd imagined a sculpted satyr, a miniature of the one in the fountain, springing to violent life in her hands.

  “Well?” Mrs. Constantine said, coming closer. “Time for the unveiling.”

  “Yes,” Meg said, still hesitating. Forget it, she told herself; put it out of your mind. She raised the cloth from the bottom and flipped it back on the table.

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Constantine said. “How could this have happened?”

  Meg had no idea. The head of the sculpture, wrenched out of place, dangled at the end of the armature. The tail had already fallen—or been torn—off, and lay, broken in two, on the stone work surface.

  Meg felt chilled to the bone; this was how Dodger had, in actuality, been mutilated.

  “How could this have happened?” Mrs. Constantine repeated. “Did the clay contract somehow? Or expand? What could do such a thing?”

  Nothing Meg could think of; not since she was an apprentice, years before, had a piece turned out so badly. And even then, she'd understood why. She'd wedged the clay insufficiently; she'd fired it too soon; she'd built the armature wrong. None of that had happened this time; the day before, when she'd covered it, it was fine, finished, and ready to go.

  “I don't suppose there's any way, with a glue of some sort or whatever . . .”

  The look on Meg's face must have told her no. She slipped her arm supportively through Meg's. “I'm so sorry, after all the work you put into it, this had to happen.”

  Meg still couldn't believe it; there was no logical explanation. Aside from the obvious. But who? Ni- kos? For interfering with Fifi and Fritz? Angelos? Just for fun?

  . .. Peter?

  “Is there anything else you could bring to the auction instead?” Mrs. Constantine asked hopefully. “Not that I think you have to anyway, but if you wanted, I'm sure that any of your vases would do very well—didn't you say that Anita and that Caswell woman had been down here once and greatly admired them?”

  It seemed an eternity ago. But yes, that in fact had been the day Anita had requested she make a special piece for the auction—after she'd admired the two sculptures of Leah and her nude look-alike. Why not give her one of those? W
hy not get rid of that nude, maenadlike figure; she'd never enjoyed having it around anyway. It was only collecting dust on the bottom shelf near the door.

  “That's a good idea,” Meg said, covering up the ruined model of Dodger. “I've still got a statue here that she liked.”

  She crossed the room and knelt in front of the two covered figures. Lifting a corner, she saw one leg of the naked dancer; she slipped the statue out, checked quickly to see that there was no damage to this one, and said, “Our new donation to the Passet Bay Nature Preserve.”

  Mrs. Constantine appeared to be at a loss.

  “Not like my usual work,” Meg admitted with a laugh, “but what the hell, Anita liked it.”

  Leaving, Meg carefully secured the padlock, shook it to make sure it would hold. No, Peter could never have done such a thing.

  But would Byron have been so convinced?

  At the tent, things were running behind schedule. Several last-minute donations, like Meg's, had yet to be numbered and put on display; Anita was scribbling descriptions of them on colored notecards. “But that's the statue I saw months ago,” she exclaimed when Meg presented the maenad. “I thought you were doing something new for us?”

  Meg explained there'd been a problem, and this was all she could offer at the moment.

  “Oh, well, that's fine,” Anita said, recovering. “I'm sure we'll get a very good price for it. The way I've got it planned, since this is your place and all, we'll save your donation till last, sort of as the place of honor. How's that with you?”

  Meg said anything was fine with her. Anita's blouse, she noticed, was patterned with a geometrical Greek motif—in keeping with the theme of the auction. The gazebo was garlanded with vines, like a temple to Diana.