The Golden Unicorn

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Behind her words lay old, angry resentment, and perhaps pain as well—perhaps the remembered pain of a child who had been neglected. Unexpected pity for her stirred in me.

  “I’m glad you’ve had a friend in your uncle,” I said. “I like him too. By the way, I don’t really know what he does. His work, I mean.”

  She flashed me a smile that hinted at amusement rather than malice. “Perhaps he’s mainly a parasite—like me. In his own way, I suppose he has a touch of genius—but he doesn’t work at it hard enough. Of course I was born too late to know, but I understand that Grandfather Lawrence was enormously proud of that boat Uncle John designed— the Anabel. It’s still in the marina over in Sag Harbor and I’ve gone sailing in it a few times. Grandfather was even ready to build a small shipyard, to try to revive ship-building here on Long Island—and let Uncle John design and build boats. But most of those plans are unfinished. Though he still promises to build a boat that he’ll name for me.”

  “Who was Anabel?” I asked.

  Stacia sat up on the bed and crossed her long legs in their green slacks. “It’s a Kemble family name. I gather that the boat was already built, and Aunt Alice had named it before little Anabel was born. The poor little thing wasn’t around very long anyway. Have you heard about the baby who died?”

  I sat very still, hardly daring to breathe, all too aware of the sudden thumping of my heart. “No,” I said, “I haven’t heard. Whose baby was it?”

  Restlessly, she left her perch on the bed and went to a window to part draperies that had been drawn against sky and ocean. When she spoke it was over her shoulder.

  “I’m talking out of turn. I keep forgetting you’re a reporter. Ask Judith. Ask Judith to tell you—she knows everything about this family. And she was the one who found Aunt Alice when she died. But this isn’t for me to talk about. Ask her.”

  I didn’t believe that Stacia was given to reticence when it served her purpose. Some other motive moved her now.

  “You sound like someone who is trying to stir up trouble,” I said frankly.

  “Perhaps I am!” She whirled to face me and I saw again the purplish bruise on her cheek and sensed the anger that drove her. There was nothing childlike about her now. She was a woman and furious. “They’ve got it coming to them! All except Uncle John. He’s outside of it. He and I are safe.”

  “Safe?”

  Her smile dazzled and mocked at the same time. “From you, perhaps? You’re not going to write about us, are you? Only about Judith. And if you want to do an honest piece about my mother, perhaps you’d better learn some of the right questions to ask. Everything’s going to be pulled down about their heads before long anyway, so a little more upheaval won’t matter. We’ll be leaving this house soon, and that will destroy Judith. I don’t think she can work anywhere else.”

  “Why must she leave the house?”

  “Because it will be sold. Whether they like it or not, it will be sold!”

  “Who will sell it? I shouldn’t think your father—?”

  “That’s another question you can ask her.” Stacia left her place at the window and moved about the room, once more as lithe in her movements as a young leopard, and perhaps almost as dangerous. My feeling toward her was still mixed. It was possible that she had a right to her anger. Perhaps injury had been done to her long ago that she’d had no defense against—yet I was beginning to suspect that she asked for punishment, willfully pushing out at everyone in order to antagonize.

  Finished with her prowling about the room, she threw herself on the bed and pressed an arm across her eyes. When she spoke she had lapsed back into her pose of youthfulness. “If it wasn’t for Nan and John, I might have run away years ago. Nan listens to me. She’s never tried to order me around, and she never scolds me.”

  I wondered if that was a mistake on Nan’s part, but I didn’t say so.

  “I liked Nan Kemble when I met her this afternoon,” I said. But it wasn’t Nan I wanted to talk about. “I don’t suppose you remember your grandfather—Lawrence Rhodes?”

  “No. He died before I was born. Yet sometimes I think he’s closer to me than those of my family who are living. Maybe I’m like him. I’d have made a good lady pirate.”

  “I thought Lawrence’s field was the law.”

  “It was. Dry stuff—trusts and wills and estates. Not much room for pirating there. But he was a pirate, just the same. Captain Yellowbeard, whose word was law. He ruled them all with absolute power, and he would cut down anyone who disobeyed him.”

  “Aren’t you making up some of this?”

  “Maybe. I’ve built him up in my own mind, I know, and even though we may be a little alike, I’m afraid he would never approve of me. Family—that’s what mattered to him. The Rhodes name and what he thought it stood for. That was make-believe too—but he fooled himself first of all. I don’t think old Ethan was like that. All the family pride began with Brian, who was Lawrence’s father. It got so the good name of the family and its importance in the community mattered more than anything else. Everyone had to be measured by what Lawrence considered infallible Rhodes’ standards. And when a Rhodes turned up who didn’t meet the measure, he was banished—or destroyed. I think old Lawrence destroyed my mother and father for all those false principles. Maybe he even destroyed himself. I’m not going to let him get at me, even though in some ways I admire him.”

  “When did Lawrence die? What happened?”

  “He died only two or three months after Alice and the baby. But prosaically enough. A heart attack. Judith was with him. Isn’t that a strange thing about my mother? She was always there when someone died—Alice, the baby, Lawrence. Oh, not that she had anything to do with causing anyone to die. The Rhodes name wouldn’t stand for that. Close the ranks, protect, shut out the press, save the family! And I guess it was done very cleverly. So now Judith paints melancholy pictures of sea and sand, and floats severed heads across her scenes.”

  “I don’t think I like what you’re telling me, and I don’t think I believe it,” I said quietly.

  “Why not? What do you care about the Rhodes?”

  The question came so suddenly, so pointedly, that I froze for a moment, and then realized that she couldn’t possibly know the main reason why I was here.

  “I suppose I feel doubtful about accusations that seem to be made out of anger and resentment.”

  Abruptly, disconcertingly, Stacia dissolved into tears. She turned on her stomach and wept long, heaving sobs like a child, so that her cheeks turned pink and the bruise grew even puffier. Alarmed, I went to sit on the edge of the bed beside her, and put a quieting hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no right to harsh judgments concerning things I know nothing about. But even if you dislike your mother, you mustn’t try to prejudice me against her.”

  “I don’t dislike her!” she wailed. “I love her. I’ve always wished I could be beautiful and talented and have people love me so much they would give up their lives for me.”

  The outburst seemed utterly childish and forlorn, yet even as I tried to soothe her I wondered if there was a woman’s calculation behind it. What did she want of me—and why?

  I went into the bathroom and dampened a washcloth with cool water, brought it back to her. “Let me wipe your face. You mustn’t cry like that.” As I touched her a curious feeling came over me. An emotion I had never experienced before—as though I touched someone dear to me who was of my own blood. A sister, perhaps? But the feeling was only fleeting. Stacia herself took care of that.

  As she reached up to hold the cold cloth against her puffy cheek, the heaving sobs stopped abruptly and her weeping ended.

  “Go look in the top drawer of that dressing table,” she said. “I left something there for you. I thought it might give you a shock to find it, but you’ve been more decent than I deserve, so y
ou’d better look now, while I’m here. Perhaps you don’t enjoy severed heads.”

  Uneasily, I went to the lowboy and opened the drawer. This was where I had placed my golden unicorn, and I looked for it first, still wrapped in its tissue. Only a few other things were visible—brush and comb and my cosmetics case, and I glanced toward the bed, questioning.

  “Feel back in the drawer. Way back,” Stacia directed.

  My fingers slid into the shallow space, searching the far corner at the rear until they touched something small and cold and round—something faintly human. I drew out the bisque head of an old-fashioned doll and stared at it with repugnance. Round cheeks had been tinted rosy, and the eyes clicked open as I held it up, staring at me, roundly blue and soulless. The hair had been removed and the head was hollow at the top, so that one could look into it and see the glued-in eyes, the joint that thrust up at the neck to enable the head to move on the body. But there was no body—only this small “severed” head.

  I didn’t like the feel of it in my fingers, and I didn’t like the impulse that had placed it here in my room. I set it down and turned back to the girl on the bed. She was watching me, her tears forgotten and that air of amusement about her again.

  “I spooked you, didn’t I? But it’s a kindness, really. It will help prepare you when you walk into Mother’s studio tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.” Stacia pushed herself up from the bed, and once more I had the impression of a body limber as a cat’s—a characteristic which mixed strangely with the child who had cried, and the woman who could be malevolent. My feeling of blood relationship had vanished, taking with it the momentary warmth I had felt toward her. Cousin? Sister? What might she be to me—if anything? And which of all these masquerades was she? Perhaps a mixture of all of them? For the first time I felt a twinge of sympathy for Evan Faulkner. It was possible to imagine being taunted into a rage by Stacia—but I still didn’t care for a man who would strike a woman. I didn’t care for human beings of either sex who showed violence toward each other.

  She paused beside me on the way to the door, taking her leave. “You look terribly confused. But I think I rather like you. And I don’t want to see you do a bad piece about Judith—but only an honest one. Will you try to do that—write honestly?”

  “I always do try,” I said stiffly.

  She gave me an elusive smile and slipped past me out the door. When it closed behind her, I turned back to see the staring eyes of the doll’s head fixed blankly upon me. Hastily I thrust it into another drawer, away from the unicorn, wishing she had taken it with her. My feeling was one of odd disorientation. So much had been hurled at me, yet all of it had amounted to nothing more substantial than fog—all wisps and patches, implied hints, nothing concrete, nothing sure and certain. I felt as though I’d been doing battle with a mist maiden—a creature without substance or reality—something out of one of Judith’s paintings.

  From my encounter with Stacia Faulkner, only one truth had emerged. There had been a baby. A baby named Anabel. And that was the name, complete with question mark, which had been written on the note so recently delivered to Herndon Rhodes. What was going on? Why had this name been thrown into a quiet ant heap, causing consternation and a scurrying for cover? Was it really possible that I had been that baby who was supposed to have died? Had I been named Anabel by my true parents? And who were those parents? Judith and Herndon? Alice and John?

  I didn’t know. Except for that brief moment with Stacia, I had experienced no sense of relationship to anyone, and I dared not even try to guess. I wasn’t sure whether I had been armed by Stacia with questions I could ask Judith tomorrow, or whether I would do better to erase from my mind every word she had spoken in this room. When I had time, I might visit Nan Kemble again. I wanted to know a great deal more about Stacia herself, to know what her malice—if that’s what it was—added up to, and Nan seemed to have befriended her.

  But for now I’d had enough of The Shingles and this rather terrifying family who lived here. Severed heads, indeed! What a pretty choice of words!

  When I’d undressed and turned off the lights, I opened the draperies at the window and looked out at a trillion stars, seldom to be seen by city eyes. A few flecks of cloud drifted across the spangled sky, over a moon that was not yet full. There were no unicorns. Beneath that vast spangling the dark ocean rolled in endless disquiet, waves breaking upon the beach below my window with a muffled roar. What would it be like out there when there was a storm? Probably pretty frightening. Along this south shore there were few inlets or bays, and no good harbors. Farther west, toward the city, the barrier of Fire Island sheltered the land, but here the shore was fully exposed to the elements and to any storms that might come pounding up the coastline from the hurricane belt.

  I drew the draperies across and switched on the bed lamp, got into bed with a mystery novel, and read until my eyes tired. Then I fell soundly asleep, and if I dreamed I couldn’t remember what about when I opened my eyes the next morning—and that was always best.

  At least my spirits had risen and I was looking forward to a day that could hardly be less than interesting in this house. The dark feeling of stepping toward the brink of some dangerous quicksand had lifted, and I no longer had a sense of becoming too closely involved. No one knew who I was, and I remained a free agent. I could reject this family any time I chose and go back to New York with nothing changed for Courtney Marsh. Even if some certain evidence were given me that I was a Rhodes, I could take it or leave it as I chose.

  Thus, feeling light-hearted and reassured, I dressed in white slacks and a turquoise shirt, and brushed my hair till it shone. The morning was beautiful, and when I went downstairs to breakfast I found bright sunlight pouring in at the tall dining-room windows. Stacia, John, and Herndon—this morning his vest was green—were already at the table, and someone said Evan had eaten early and gone to his work in the library.

  Stacia wore jeans and a pink pullover this morning, and her cheek had lost some of its puffiness, but she appeared subdued, greeting me briefly and returning to her own thoughts that seemed to shut out conversation. John ate with a hearty appetite, and I suspected that he of them all was the one who most savored the creature comforts. I wondered what he would do when The Shingles was sold.

  “Judith will be ready for you around ten,” Herndon told me. “Her studio is on the top floor in the attic. And, Courtney—don’t worry if she doesn’t talk to you easily at first. She’s rather shy with visitors and it may take a while to get her to relax.”

  “That’s my job,” I said. “Most people are apt to be self-conscious at the beginning of an interview. It’s like having a camera poked at you. Which reminds me—will she mind having a few pictures taken? I’ve brought my camera along.”

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Herndon said. “She’s very photogenic, but I’m not sure she recognizes the fact.”

  “She recognizes it,” John said, and I sensed a moment of tension between the two men. Then John folded his napkin, gave me a smile and a nod, and left the table.

  Herndon looked after him with an expression in his eyes that I could not read. Was it sadness, resentment? It was hardly fondness for his brother.

  “I’m calling on several of our bank branches in the area this morning,” he said to me, “but if you need to reach me, ring up the number in East Hampton. They’ll know where I am. I don’t expect there will be any need.”

  “I’m sure there won’t be,” I agreed.

  From her corner of the table, Stacia looked up. “Did you hear the weather report on the radio this morning, Dad? There’s a hurricane starting up the coast from the Caribbean. I hope it comes this way!”

  I stared at her. “Why on earth do you hope that?”

  “Because I love storms.” She flashed me her look of challenge. “And in this house we don’t have to
worry about them. Think of all the storms The Shingles has weathered. Old Ethan built for high seas and wild winds.”

  She gave her father a sly smile, excused herself, and left the table to disappear in the direction of the living room. In a few moments stormy music from the piano broke out, filling the house. The Valkyries were apparently going all out at this early hour, though I didn’t recognize the music.

  “She’s very good. What is that composition?”

  “It’s her own. And she is good. This is the thing she does best. She could have taken it up professionally if she had wanted to—both playing and composing. She chose to get married instead.”

  “Would her husband object if she wanted a career?”

  “No, I don’t think so. In fact, if she wanted to, no one would be able to stop her.” He smiled wryly. “It’s her choice not to. Discipline has never been something she has welcomed—not even from herself.”

  Herndon, as I had begun to realize, was a rather private person, in spite of those touches of dress that invited attention. He was a quiet man, capable in his business work, undoubtedly, but willing to sit back and let other people do as they chose. Thus it was surprising that he had opened up to me about his daughter. He was no easier to understand than anyone else in this house of complexities.

  He waited at the table until I had finished my toast and coffee, and then went off to one of his banks. I thanked Asher for serving me and wandered down the long rear hall toward the far end of the house. The library door stood open, and I paused to look in.

  Evan Faulkner sat at the refectory table, pencil in hand and a ledger before him in which he was making an entry. He did not look up as I stood in the doorway and I could study him for a moment. Something about that dark, bent head, something about his strongly carved profile aroused once more a curious ambivalence in me. I disliked him because of what he had done to Stacia, and because of our previous encounters as well. Yet he held my interest, made me want to fathom the mystery of a sort of man I had never known before.