The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  ***

  Certainly nothing seemed deader than the iron window. Tony, who for all his vulgarisms was a gentleman at heart, had allowed her to choose its site in the gallery, but she knew that he would correct her if she tried to hide it. She had placed it finally, framed in dark polished mahogany, upright, in a glass case, in front of the Wollaston portrait of Valerian Ludlow, the owner of the house from which it had come. Certainly it was conspicuous enough there, in the very center of the gallery. Peering through it, on his first inspection, Tony was pleased.

  “It makes it look as if old Ludlow were behind bars,” he pointed out with a chuckle. “Very likely he deserved to be.”

  Aileen at first tried not to see the window when she passed through the gallery. She would keep her eyes averted and quicken her pace as she approached the hated object. But she found that this made it worse. What good was it to banish it from her vision if she only succeeded in summoning it to fill her mind? Somehow she would have to make her peace with it, before it became an obsession.

  She then adopted the practice, each time that she had to pass it, of making herself pause to look at it, or really to look through it, for there was nothing to see but its rusted blackness. She observed that one side was slightly more rugged than the other and had probably been the external side, facing on Barclay Street. Gazing through it, as if from inside the Ludlow house, she tried to imagine that thoroughfare as it must have appeared to an incarcerated patriot. Then she would walk around the grille and peer in, as if from the street, to visualize, with a shudder, the dark, fetid hole where the prisoners might have been penned. Sometimes visitors in the gallery would stop to watch her, and, when she had finished, take her place to stare through the window to see what she had been noting. Aileen, amused, became almost reconciled to her new “artifact.”

  One morning, however, when she was alone in the gallery and looking through the grille from the “prison cell” side, she had a curious and rather frightening experience. Ordinarily, she had not looked through the bars at anything in particular, but rather at her imagined reconstruction of an eighteenth-century street. That day when she happened to glance at the portrait of Valerian Ludlow, it struck her that he would have often passed that barred cellar window, in his own house, on the way to his own front door, and she attempted to picture him as he might have appeared striding by, viewed at knee height. The portrait helped her by showing him fall length, standing by an open window, looking out to a sea on which floated two little vessels, presumably his own, with wind-puffed sails. The expression on his round face (the cheeks seemed to repeat the puffed sails) was one of mercantile complacency. Mr. Ludlow had obviously been one of the blessed of earth.

  But now Aileen seemed to see something in his countenance that she had not noticed before. The eyes, instead of being merely opaque, either because of the artist’s inadequacy or the subject’s lack of expression, had a hard, black glitter. They changed the whole aspect of the portrait from one of seemingly harmless self-satisfaction to one of almost sinister acquisitiveness. At the same time the quality of the paint seemed to have lost its richness and glow. Mr. Ludlow’s red velvet coat now had a shabby look, and the sea on which his vessels bobbed was brown rather than a lustrous green. Yet these changes, instead of making the whole picture more trenchant, more interesting, as they might have, seemed instead to push it back into an earlier era of clumsy primitives. Ludlow was now not only disagreeable; he was badly painted. Was his new degradation of character simply the artist’s error? Had he come out mean, in the way of a clown drawn by a child? Or was Aileen seeing the real Ludlow for the first time?

  Walking now quickly around the grilled window, with a conscious effort of will—for she was distinctly frightened—she turned suddenly and looked through it from the other side. She gave a little cry and then stopped her own mouth, for the sensation that had abruptly appalled her had as abruptly ceased. She had, for two seconds, stared into an absolute blackness, and at the same time her nostrils had been filled with a suffocating stench. Now she smelled nothing, and she was looking once more through the window toward the great glass case that housed the tankard collection.

  Badly shaken, she returned to her office to go back to work on her article for the museum magazine on Dutch silver. But she was clear now that she would have to deal strongly with this preoccupation. In future she would walk by the window, not with consciously averted eye, not with undue attention, but simply taking it in casually, as she might take in any other exhibit. She would not flatter it with her fear or with her disdain. She would treat it, if its emanations compelled her to pause, with an icy disapproval, as she might treat a snoopy guard, set there by a jealous director to catch her out in something wrong.

  By staying away from the window, she avoided any repetition of the shock of the sinister Ludlow and the black pit (figments, she assured herself, of her overcharged imagination), but she was not sure that she had eliminated all of the window’s influence. She still had a sense, whenever she passed it, of some small, crouching, indistinguishable creature, some huge insect or tiny rodent, humped there by its base. And whenever she had to work near it, in the center of the gallery, she was conscious of something in the air, an aroma or maybe just a thickening of the atmosphere, that at once depressed her. If she looked about at the treasures of the gallery from any spot in the immediate circumference of the window, they appeared unaccountably drab. The silver seemed to thicken and tarnish and to lose the special elegance of its century. Bowls, plates, urns suddenly resembled the kind of ugly testimonials given to railroad presidents in the era following the Civil War. The beautiful carved wooden lady of victory that had once adorned the prow of a clipper ship might have been a widening, middle-aging nursemaid in Central Park. And the portraits, all the portraits, not only Valerian Ludlow’s, seemed to have hardened into so many dusty merchants and merchants’ wives as might have choked the wall of the Chamber of Commerce.

  Sometimes she would watch visitors furtively from the door of her office to see, when they were standing near the prison window, if they noticed what she had noticed, but if they did, they showed no sign of it. Yet how could she be sure, if the things actually had changed, that they would notice it? Perhaps what she saw, under the malign influence of whatever the squatting creature was, was simply their vision of beautiful things. Perhaps that was the mystic significance of the window: that, peering through it, one saw art as it appeared to the Philistine! Aileen’s mind had become a sea of hateful speculations.

  One afternoon, at her desk, she looked up and gave a start to see an old lady standing before her. She had not heard anyone come in. It took her two or three seconds before she realized that she knew who it was. It was Mrs. Ada Ludlow Sherry, one of those “old New Yorkers” who made life for the curators both difficult and possible. She gave money and she gave things, but her gifts were hardly a quid pro quo for her almost daily interference. She was small and bent but very strong, and her skin, enamel-like, and her hair, falsely red, gave the impression of having been preserved by a dipping in some hardening unguent. Her agate eyes snapped at Aileen.

  “Are you aware, Miss Post, that an atrocious act of vandalism has been committed in your gallery?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Some villain has poked a hole in my great-great-grandfather! Don’t you ever check up on your portraits? There’s a ghastly, gaping rip where his left eye was!”

  “In Valerian Ludlow!” Aileen jumped up and ran into the gallery to the Wollaston painting. Sure enough, old Ludlow blinked at her with one black eye and one blue, the latter being the color of the wall on which he was hung. Aileen gave a little scream of panic.

  “This was done within the hour!” she cried. “He had both eyes when I last went by!”

  Tony Side was summoned, the alarm was rung and all guards were questioned. Nothing was discovered, and after an hour of futile excitement Aileen was back again at her desk, depleted and scared, with the irate Mrs. Sherry, who re
fused now to depart. Aileen felt nothing but antipathy as she listened to the old lady’s animadversions. Obviously, Mrs. Sherry cared far more for the grudge than for the grievance. She had none of Aileen’s nausea at the damage to a beautiful object or her despair for the soul of the perpetrator.

  “Some black boy, of course,” Mrs. Sherry was grumbling. “Unless it was a Puerto Rican. They’re always prating about the hard times they’ve had, always griping about how they’ve been deprived of education and opportunities. Is this what they want opportunities for? I’d like to see the cat-o’-nine-tails brought back. I’d like to see these boys lashed before the public in Times Square! What do they exist for but to tear our world apart? They don’t care that they have nothing to put in its place! It’s revenge, pure and simple.”

  “Revenge,” Aileen murmured thoughtfully, glancing apprehensively through the doorway toward the iron grille. Could it be the revenge of a Yankee prisoner of war? But why? Revenge against whom?

  “Everybody’s too soft and sentimental with them,” Mrs. Sherry continued. “If it is softness. If it isn’t just cowardice, as I suspect it is. Where have our guts gone to, Miss Post? Where are our men, that we are exposed to all this? I tell you one thing, young lady. Nobody would have poked an eye out of Valerian Ludlow’s portrait in his day!”

  “What would he have done?”

  “Don’t you know what he would have done? Haven’t you read his journal? He knew how to handle insubordinates!”

  As Aileen watched the terrible old woman, she had just for a second the same eerie sense of blackness that she had experienced in peering through the iron grille. Then, as it passed, she felt a sudden, odd detachment from the immediate scene. She found herself observing Mrs. Sherry as if the latter had been a monologist performing at a private party. She noted the protuberance of the front molars and the drops of saliva at the corners of the thin lips. She marked how the almost transparent, onion-skin eyelids snapped up and down and how hatefully dark were the merciless eyes. Except for the teeth, Mrs. Sherry might have been a bird, a big, dark bird of rich, subdued colors whose feathers only made more horrible its dark face and beak, a condor tearing at a carcass. Both of Aileen’s hands went to her lips in horror as she saw her world in a sudden new light. The feathers, the feathers alone, were art. The head, the beak, the glazed eyes, the talons were—man!

  “Oh, be quiet! Be quiet, please!”

  Mrs. Sherry stared down at Aileen incredulously. “I beg your pardon?”

  When Aileen, stunned, gathered that she must have actually uttered her reproach aloud, she desperately summoned up the courage to go on. “You’re saying the most dreadful things, and you have no business to. You don’t know who damaged that portrait. You have no idea. It might have been a guard. It might have been me. It might have been you, yourself!” Aileen rose as if propelled by two strong hands clutching her elbows, and she spoke with a passionate urgency, a wondering, bemused prisoner of her own new flow of eloquence. “How do I know that you’re not just trying to get someone in trouble? Or a whole race of people in trouble? How do I know what mad, twisted motives you may have? Look at your umbrella. You might have done it with that! But, my God, there’s something sticking to it!” She seized the umbrella and rushed out into the gallery crying, “Guard! Guard!” When the bewildered man hurried up to her she shouted, “I’ve got her! The vandal! She did it with this! Look!”

  Here she held the umbrella up to the portrait, the tip toward the hole. Then she lowered it slowly, dumbly, apologetically, looking shamefaced at the shamefaced guard. For the round tip of the umbrella had a thick rubber cover. Mrs. Sherry must have made it do double duty as a walking stick. Pushed into a canvas, it would have made a much bigger hole than the one in Valerian Ludlow’s left eye.

  “And now, Miss Post, will you be so good as to return my property? And let me ask this gentleman to conduct me to the director of this institution that I may complain of your insane behavior.”

  Mrs. Sherry was so carried away that, turning from the stricken Aileen after she had snatched back her umbrella, she made the mistake of taking the guard’s arm. Her exit was comic rather than magnificent. But nothing could console Aileen.

  Tony, when he came, was very kind. He said that the vandalism had obviously unnerved her. He regretted that so important a member of the museum as Mrs. Sherry should have been insulted, but he hoped that she could be placated. He suggested that Aileen would do well to take a few days off and get a good rest.

  “No, I’m all right, I really am,” she insisted in a stony voice. “I promise, you won’t have to worry about me.”

  When Tony had left, obviously much concerned about her, Aileen sat for ten minutes, absolutely still. Then she rose and strode with a new resolution to the middle of the gallery. As she leaned slowly down and stared into the hated window, she whispered hoarsely:

  “Who are you, in there? Why have you come back to haunt us? Are you the spirit of some poor boy who died in that black chamber?” As she listened, she felt her first impulse of sympathy for whatever might be behind those bars. She had a vision of a thin, undernourished face, that of some nineteen-year-old Yankee boy, with long light hair and eyes liquid with homesickness, pressed up against the bars. “Were you left behind in General Washington’s retreat? Was that how the British caught you? But why do you hate the Ludlows? Wasn’t their house requisitioned by the governor? Was that their fault?” In the silence, as she listened intently, she had again that eerie sense of a close malevolence. “Or do you know something about them that we don’t know? Was Valerian Ludlow a secret Tory? Was he a traitor?”

  The blackness that she imagined behind the bars seemed now to lift, and her eyes fell upon the great portrait in the corner of the gallery of General Cornwallis, his hand on a globe on which the eastern shoreline of the thirteen colonies was clearly visible. Aileen straightened up and returned to her office. There would be no further revelations that day.

  The following morning she was greeted by the doorman with the news: “There’s been another of them vandals in your gallery, Miss Post.” When she arrived at her floor, breathless, after running up two flights, she found Tony and three guards standing before the glass case of the silver tankards. He silently pointed to something as she hurried to his side. On the top tray one of the tankards lay toppled over. Its cover had been wrenched off the hinges and had fallen to the bottom of the case. The coat of arms had been gashed several times by a heavy instrument, possibly a stone. She did not have to look twice to recognize the Ludlow crest.

  “Nobody’s to touch it until the detective from the police department comes,” Tony explained. “This is a weird one. The glass, you see, has not been removed.” He put his arm around Aileen’s shoulders and led her out of earshot of the guards. “It had to be an inside job,” he told her.

  “Whoever did it must have got the key to the case from your office. But we’ve checked, and your key case is locked. He may have slipped into your office one day when it was open, taken the key, had it duplicated and put it back. It might have been the same guy who used your umbrella to poke the hole in the Ludlow portrait while you were out to lunch.”

  “My umbrella!”

  “Well, I didn’t want to upset you, but we found a smitch of canvas by the rack in your office where you keep your pink umbrella. It has to be some nut, of course, with some fantastic grudge against the Ludlow family.”

  “Oh, you’ve put that together, have you?” she murmured. “You’ve recognized the Ludlow tankard?”

  “My dear Aileen. Even though I’m a museum director, I’m not a complete nincompoop.”

  Aileen was seized with a fit of violent trembling. She felt the same fierce prosecuting excitement that she had experienced when she had denounced Mrs. Sherry to the guard. Pulling Tony further away down the gallery, she whispered desperately, “Maybe I did it! Maybe I poked the hole in the portrait and then tried to throw the blame on Mrs. Sherry! Maybe I came here last night and let my
self into the gallery and scraped the tankard!”

  Tony’s little smile never failed him, but she could tell by the way it seemed just to flicker that he did not wholly dismiss the theory. “But assuming all this, my dear, what on earth would be your motive?”

  “I had no motive.”

  “Then why would you do it?”

  “Because I’m the instrument of a fiend! The fiend that you brought in when you made me take that!”

  Tony took in the little barred window, and at last even his smile ceased. “I said before that you needed rest,” he replied in his kindest tone. “This time I insist upon it. I want you to take three weeks off, and I want you to see a doctor.”

  ***

  Aileen was surprised and heartened by her own reaction to this disaster. Instead of crumpling before circumstance, she discovered that her spirit was strong and her emotional state serene. When Tony told her that the police detective had said that the force used in rubbing the stone or other substance against the crest of the Ludlow tankard had been greater than that of a woman, she had merely nodded and taken her dignified leave of him. She had recovered faith in her own sanity and did not need the confirmation of a cop. She had promised that she would consult a psychiatrist, but she was already resolved that she would not. There was no use in a confrontation between the world of medicine and the occult. It could result only in her commitment to a lunatic asylum.

  She was grateful for the solitude of her enforced vacation and of the time that it afforded her to deal with her ghostly opponent. For she knew now that she had one. No human being could help her. It was her grim and lonely task to track down and outwit the sinister spirit that was seeking to destroy her gallery.

  She spent her days in the library of the New-York Historical Society, reading everything that there was to be read on the history of the Ludlow family. The material was rich. She found considerable evidence of a curious effeminate streak in the Ludlow males of the eighteenth century. The first Ludlow in New York, a royal governor, had insisted on wearing women’s robes while presiding at the council, on the theory that he thus more appropriately represented his sovereign, Queen Anne. A generation later, his son had been criticized for making his more muscular African slaves wait on table half-naked, and this son’s son, in turn, incurred the resentment of society by keeping exotic birds, expensively imported from Rio, loose in the house where they pecked his guests. The wives of all these gentlemen, on the other hand, had been big, blocky, plainly dressed women, such as one might expect in a community that was still, after all, almost the frontier.