“Hit own, hit own.”
It was clear enough he meant for us to “sit down,” so we pulled out the white-painted chairs, but hadn’t actually sat before Ulub was pulling at each of us, at our arms, plucking at sleeves and rearranging us. We all wondered about this—I know I did—why Ulub thought one or the other of us was more one or the other of them; but we let him have his way. Me he sat at the table’s head, and I wondered which tormentor he had me down as, and whether she was worse or better than the other two. Ubub and Mr. Root sat solemnly, their hands folded before them, awaiting further developments. Ulub smiled a rare smile and continued, clapping his two hands against his chest and pointing into the parlor. “Ah on in air.” Here he made little waves with his hands, patting the air before him. He was going to play the piano, I guessed correctly. Ubub applauded me. It was like charades.
Ulub pointed to each of us. “U cuh nin nen ah caw”—and here he gave a short yell.
No one knew immediately what he meant, so it was up to Mr. Root and his concentrated efforts. He made Ulub repeat the phrase twice. Both of them looked equally pained until finally Mr. Root, slapping his thigh again, said, “You going to call to us. We got to wait here until you call us in, right?”
Ulub beamed and nodded and left.
“Hell,” said Mr. Root, “he ain’t hard to understand. Don’t see the problem, myself.”
In another moment, an awful raucous noise filled the air as Ulub pounded on the keyboard. Ubub (I could see) was about to rise and protest when a silence as full as the sounds had been came over the room. This was followed by muffled movements and then a cry or call which we took to be his signal. We rose and went through the door to see Ulub, not at the piano, but on the other side of the wall, standing there as if glued to the wall directly beside the kitchen door. I was first in the room, and he pulled himself away and ran back to the piano, where he started crashing around on the keys again. I doubted Mary-Evelyn had played that way.
He beckoned us over and, by means of more gestures and grunts, got us to stand in a semicircle around the piano and stare at him. When Mr. Root started to say something, Ulub furiously put his finger to his mouth. We were apparently not to speak; we were to look at the shamed Ulub—or Mary-Evelyn, sitting there with bent head and laced fingers staring at her shoes, or the floor.
I remembered what the Woods had said about the Devereau aunts not talking to Mary-Evelyn. What she must have been doing was merely listening outside the kitchen door, listening to conversation just to hear others speak. I remembered too my mother’s saying what a “silent little girl” she was, carrying glass plates of tiny canapes around at parties, never saying anything. She had run back to the piano when she’d been discovered.
Ulub was saying something to Mr. Root that sounded like “autumn, summer.”
“Aw noo un-ner.”
Mr. Root looked really perplexed, and Ulub repeated it two or three more times, all the while pointing at the piano keys and rippling his fingers up and down the air above them.
“All through dinner!” said Mr. Root, brightening. “All through dinner! That’s it, ain’t it?”
Now everyone nodded as if all of our fears had been confirmed. I said, “Mary-Evelyn was to play for them all through dinner, and if the music stopped, they’d go check on her.”
Almost ferociously, Ulub nodded.
I bowed my head. I found it truly hard to believe—not Ulub’s story, but that such a thing could happen.
I wondered if it had been a ritual thing, Mary-Evelyn playing the piano while they ate their dinner; if it was her penance that she must entertain them (though I doubted they took much by the way of “entertainment” from it) all through dinner.
Ulub spoke again: “Ee ride.”
Ubub and I looked at each other, and Mr. Root listed forward a little, as if this could help him in his deciphering.
Ulub said again, “Ee ride, ee ride.” Seeing then that no one was getting it, he screwed up his face and started to shake with dry sobs.
Mr. Root exclaimed, “She cried! That’s it, ain’t it, Ulub?”
Having made us understand, Ulub stopped heaving and nodded.
I said, “And her aunts, they just stood around and watched her?”
Again he nodded. Ulub looked truly unhappy.
No one said anything then. I guessed, looking around at our faces, no one wanted to. Gathered around the piano this way with our heads slightly bent, and looking down at our shoes, it was like a prayer meeting.
I could think of no yes-or-no question to ask and finally resorted to: “Then what happened?”
Ulub’s knitted cap was in his hands and he kept kneading it and pulling at it. He said, “Ah ot n-n-aared.” He looked down, sad or shamefaced, or both. On a small breath, he brought out what sounded like “raft” or “heft.” And then a short barrage of words uttered so quickly no one, not even Mr. Root, could make them out. “Ah end ome.”
I thought about the “raft” word. It had been the last word entered in the journal. “Raft.” Could it be “left”? And then, Ulub said, he “went home.”
Mr. Root, warming his hands under his armpits and chewing away at his tobacco, said, “Ulub was scared.”
“He left and went on,” I added. I was sure Ulub, seeing as much as he did, must have seen more. Must have seen the awful end of it. How disappointed I felt! And I realized that Ulub must have felt my disappointment, too. I also remembered, then, that this happened forty years ago and that Ulub was probably a teen-ager or less—my age. If it had been me—well, there was no use thinking about that, for if it had been me, I wouldn’t have had the nerve even to come here in the first place, much less hang around watching what the Devereaus were up to. Maybe what Ulub had spurted out at the end had to do with someone seeing him. Maybe one of the Devereaus had seen or heard something out here and come to investigate. And Ulub had run home. I’d surely have run; you wouldn’t have seen me for dust. I thought Ulub would feel better if I told him that. I put my hand on his arm. “You were really brave, Ulub. You were only a kid, anyway. If it’d been me, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.”
He surprised us then by saying, as he pointed in the direction of the lake, “Ah ame mack, ah naw um awken roo toods.”
Ulub had gone back to the lake! So there was more! More even than he’d been able to get across to Dr. McComb—another chapter that I had been hoping for. I listened to his broken words so intensely I think I must have stopped breathing. We all leaned slightly toward him. I said, “Ulub, did you see more?”
He nodded vigorously and said, “Ah uz ovr nere.” And he pointed again.
“You mean the other side of the lake?”
Mr. Root was just a little miffed at my appearing to take over as translator. He dragged up on his belt and said, “You mean it was after you run away home and come back again you seen something?”
Pretty much what I had said, but I kept my mouth shut.
Ulub said, “Ey gum ith amps, awken.”
Mr. Root was stumped on that one and so was I, so it’s a good thing there were props sitting around. Ulub took Mr. Root’s oil lamp and held it high; then he took one of the candlesticks and shoved it in his brother’s hands and said something that Ubub seemed to understand, but we didn’t. Ulub led and Ubub followed as they walked slowly about the parlor, holding their lights high.
I was open-mouthed at this little bit of dumb play. When I got my wits back, I said, “You mean that the Devereau sisters went out and walked through the woods with something like oil lamps?”
Ulub nodded. “An nanduls.”
“Lamps and candles,” said Mr. Root quickly, like he was a contestant on one of those TV quiz shows, making sure he answered first. He pulled up his belt again and repeated, “Lamps and candles, that’s it, ain’t it, Alonzo?”
Ulub nodded and waved his arms. He seemed almost happy, maybe because he’d finally got something off his chest.
I slowly shook my head in aston
ishment. Then I asked him, “Ulub—what about Mary-Evelyn?” I knew the answer before he told me.
“Ee uz tast un.” Here he picked up the lamp again, handed Ubub his candle, and then pulled at my arm. “Et nine, et inine!” As if I were a stuffed doll, he positioned me behind Ubub.
Having regained his control over the Ulub-language, Mr. Root said with authority: “ ‘Get in line,” that’s what he’s tellin’ you!”
I did; I followed them slowly around the parlor. After circling it once, Ulub grabbed up another candlestick from a side table and shoved it at Mr. Root. “Et nine!” He pushed Mr. Root between his brother and me, then looked us over to see if we’d do. I never realized how bossy Ulub could be, but I felt it to be a good thing. We circled the room at a slow and creepy pace, the three Devereau sisters and me, Mary-Evelyn.
In my mind’s eye I saw them out there, dressed in black (though they probably weren’t), and little Mary-Evelyn, in her fussy white dress, following. I could barely hold this image in my mind, it seemed so desolate.
Mr. Root asked, “Now, where was them three old witches goin’? Was they takin that poor child around to the boathouse?”
Yes, I thought, that’s where they were taking her. It was just too awful to be believed. I hung my head as if I had had some part in this punishment of Mary-Evelyn, as if I shared the blame.
So Mr. Root became official questioner. “So where was you, Alonzo? Near that boathouse?”
Ulub shook his head. “Uh ring. Uh ring.”
Mr. Root said to us, “Says he was at the spring.”
The spring was only a short distance from the old boathouse. I took a step toward Ulub and asked, “What happened then?”
Ulub had picked up his cap from the piano top and was wringing it in his hands. He kept his eyes on the floor, unwilling to tell us more. He said again, “Ah not narr-ared, narr-ared.” Ubub moved over to him and put a big hand on his shoulder.
This time I knew what he’d said—that he got scared. Who could blame him, watching that black procession with its sinister, flickering lights? But he did not say he ran from the spring, so I asked him what he saw then. I was upsetting him, and I certainly didn’t want to. His tongue would move to try again; I could feel the words wedged like cement between his tongue and his teeth, and his throat must have locked up over telling the rest of that night. He was too discouraged, or probably too shamed. Here he had finally got people who would listen to him, who honestly wanted to listen to him, and he must have been feeling he had let us down.
I myself felt ashamed and moved to put my hand on his shoulder, as Ubub had done, in comradely sympathy, and said, “It’s okay, Alonzo. It really is. It’s as it should be.”
Now, where on earth had I come up with that? “It’s as it should be”? That was not the way I talked; that was not the way anyone talked except maybe Father Freeman trying to convince some poor farmer whose crops had all withered away that there was a place for that withering in God’s plan. I fooled around with this idea of God for a moment. Then I had what I later would call a “moment of clarity.” It told me: yes, it really was as it should be. The silence forced on Ulub by the awful collision of throat and tongue, that was “as it should be.” It was almost as if Mary-Evelyn had come back to say to the Woods: “I’ll tell you what happened; I’ll tell you because you won’t tell anyone. But it will make me feel better for telling it, and you for hearing it.” They were in a way alike, Ulub and Ubub and Mary-Evelyn, for they were all three bedeviled by silence. Silence had been Mary-Evelyn’s lot in life; it was her punishment, not for things she’d done, but for just being her. I could guess at half a dozen reasons for them hating her. It’s very easy to find reasons to hate someone; all you needed was the will to do it.
I gazed up at the ceiling and said, “Let’s go upstairs; let’s each take a different room.”
We trooped up the staircase, whose banister was listing and rotted. We looked in each of the rooms until I decided the small one must have been Mary-Evelyn’s. It looked like a child’s room, with its blue-painted furniture. The other three went into the larger rooms and all of us poked around.
The small one was at the front and was the room I had seen from the other side of the lake, the one with the dormer windows that overlooked it. This must have provided the very best view in the entire house, and I could only guess that Mary-Evelyn had been given it because it was the tiniest room. Also, there were people who probably thought a view over Spirit Lake wasn’t exactly a prize.
The single bed sat between the two windows, covered with a spread. It was an iron bed, painted white. A narrow chest of drawers was blue, the wooden knobs painted along with the rest of it, as if someone couldn’t be bothered removing them. A little table beside the bed was also blue. An old rocker sat in the corner, with a faded flowered cushion, and there was a big dark wardrobe, the kind we had at the hotel, for only modern houses had actual built-in closets, which were boring. Wardrobes were much more interesting, because they came in all shapes and sizes and different woods, some with beautiful mirrored doors, and the coat hangers rattled and clinked when the doors were opened. Better for hiding in, too.
I opened this one and was surprised to see clothes hanging there. Dresses. There must have been eight or nine; all of them probably had been sewn by the Devereau aunt. They were fine material and beautiful. There was a deep-blue taffeta one with a full skirt. I touched its folds and thought of the Waitresses who once worked at the hotel.
Except for opening drawers there was nowhere to look. I struggled to open one of the windows and succeeded and crawled out on the narrow balcony, realizing only after I stood there that what I had done was foolhardy, for the balcony could be rotted like the banister, could be dangerous like the one outside of Aurora’s rooms. But nothing gave. It seemed very secure. Still, I sat on the windowsill with my rear pushed more than halfway into the room, just in case there was a sudden wrench and lurch.
It was dark now. In the time between the parlor and the bedroom, the sky had changed from that beautiful plumy dark to ink. The moon was up and looking like one of the china plates my mother serves dinners on. It was cold and hard and white like that. It hung there right over the lake, which looked as sheerly smooth as a black ice rink. Rivulets of moonlight moved across its surface. It was interesting, being here and looking over there, for I had never seen my side—meaning, the now-other side—of the lake before. It was interesting looking at all of the objects that I was so used to seeing from a different angle.
Ulub’s tale certainly said a lot about what Mary-Evelyn’s state of mind must have been; it was information any policeman would want to know. I sat there balanced on the windowsill, in the dark, and half-hearing (but paying no attention to) the calls of Mr. Root and the Woods, coming from below. I think I was searching the opposite shore for the Girl. My eyes roved, mistaking any sudden movement to be her: moonlight playing on the sculpture of rocks by the dam; the sudden illumination of a plank in the house; the birch tree bending in the wind. These objects in another moment revealed themselves to be normal and ordinary. I thought of the faded brown photograph on the wall, the young blond girl there in front of the much-younger sisters. Then I thought of my one picture of Mary-Evelyn, my mother’s snapshot, with the Devereau aunts standing behind her.
It was not my father’s lake any longer. She haunted it.
TWENTY
To look at me, or even to listen to me, you wouldn’t think that my life is a succession of terrors. “Blue devils” is what Mr. Root calls it. I try hard not to let this show in my face or my voice; I try to keep calm. Oh, I don’t mean the sort of terrors that include being led away in early morning to be lynched, or stumbling in the dark and sliding down a sheer rock face without finger- or toeholds, or waking to see the smoke fingering my doorsill. Not those kinds of terrors. I’m talking about things like this: the face behind the steamed-up window of the Greyhound bus and a hand waving when the bus pulls away, both face and hand disapp
earing in the steam and the distance; or being out in the woods or the field calling and calling for a dog or a cat you haven’t seen for two days; or Lola Davidow in one of her snits. Things like that. I don’t, of course, always feel this way; I can bury the fear or push it back if, say, I’m eating buckwheat cakes or ham pinwheels or even the Rainbow’s chili, or if I’m down in the Pink Elephant scribbling, or eating popcorn in the dark of the Orion, or doing meter checks with the Sheriff, or sitting in the Rainbow talking to Maud. So there are many things that toss a veil over such terrors. But the blue devils are always there, I think, underneath the surface, ready to jump out.
In this state of mind, everything stands out sharply. I can sit in the Rainbow, in my booth, and look at the row of faces seated at the counter and see each one surrounded by a fine line, each head scalped by light; or see the trees beyond the window out there looking cut away from the sky, each separate and severe; or when someone plugs money in the jukebox and Patsy Cline sings “I Fall to Pieces,” well, Patsy does, piece by piece. It’s like hearing prisms shiver in a chandelier, shards of glass on glass.
The blue devils. I’m glad Mr. Root gave me the words for it.
My mother told me that once my father got run over by a train. I do not know if this story is God’s truth, and I’m inclined to doubt it, but what my mother says happened is that my father got his foot caught in the middle of the track and the train was coming. According to her, he had so much presence of mind that he managed to lie down between the rails, longways, and hold himself perfectly straight and pressed against the ties, and the train just passed over him. I don’t think it was a whole train, or a passenger train. It might only have been a slow-moving caboose (though you’d think if that were the case, the engineer would have seen a person lying there). I find it hard to believe that anyone would have that kind of courage or command over his feelings that he could stop struggling to pull his foot out and just lie down. But that’s what my mother says. A lot of mornings I wake up and feel that I have my foot stuck in the railroad ties while another day is bearing down.
Hotel Paradise Page 17