“Let’s start upstairs and go through the whole house,” Jean Dorlean said. “Might as well not have to worry. Okay?”
Kasimir shouted from the kitchen, “La vapeur! La vapeur!” They found him in his white smock and chef’s hat, with a candle. Steam and a jeering note like a blue jay’s ricocheted from the sink, and the faucet screamed. She ran outside and again turned off the gas at the tanks. Though steam kept hurtling into the sink, soon there was a slight tonal fall to the blue-jay scream.
“La vapeur!” Kasimir said.
“Pas de I’eau,” Dory said. “Pas de l’électricité.”
“Je n’aime pas cela!” Kasimir stated, took his candle and went up the back stairs like the little boy in the ad.
“My God, I forgot,” she said. “The pump’s off. I can’t remember everything. And there won’t be any water. They’ll flush the toilets. They’re helpless. I’ve got to tell them how to turn their lamps out when they go to bed.” She heard her complaining voice from the hollow of her head.
He put his arm around her, gently. “Come on, let’s go find the kids,” he said. She let him lead her upstairs.
Debbie was in none of the dark, low-ceilinged little rooms on the third floor, where the rain drummed. She wasn’t in the empty room on the second floor, where Dory let Jean Dorlean put his arms around her. He put the hissing lantern on a table next to the unmade bed. She was sick of looking for Debbie, and also anxious about her, and tired. The anxiety was such that its relief would only be unhappy. Debbie would resent being found.
“There, now,” he said, holding her. His hands knew her back, where their warmth felt needed, or welcome, or familiar. She put her face up, and it was kissed, the strange fibers parting for his lips. How gently he wanted her, but how actual was the hardness of him. It was the gentle wanting that appealed.
“I love you,” he said, as if he knew every smallest meaning of the word, every large and small meaning of it, and meant each one.
Time passed, standing there. He said, “Let’s disappear ourselves.”
She said nothing, which could mean anything.
“He left you. What do you care for him anymore? You know it didn’t mean much to him or he wouldn’t have just gone off…” His words were not so much an argument as a lullaby, a nuzzling murmur, voice and breath against her skin. “Let’s turn out the lantern,” he said, and reached over and turned it off, so that its light and hiss began to fade. He pulled up her sweater and blouse and knelt down a little to kiss her breasts.
This was going to happen if she wanted it to. It was real, though it couldn’t be real. No, it would not be. It was not her real, her best self standing here, the one she knew each day. John Hearne had nothing to do with it. To hell with John Hearne. “No,” she said. “Don’t. I’m sorry…” God, she was all wet, even so, even considering it, even thinking about it.
“I need you,” he said, not stopping anything. “I love you, Dory. Please let me make love to you…” That went on, and soon she knew that he wasn’t going to let her go, that she was a prisoner, that he would take whatever he wanted no matter what she did or said. She felt in him a new temper, a cruelty.
“Let me go!” she said.
“Oh, Dory, Dory, please,” he said.
“Stop! Let me go!” But he was not going to.
In the light of the Coleman lantern appeared Dibley’s ice-pale face, and then Jean Dorlean jerked and slumped down and away from her.
“Oh, God,” he sighed hopelessly. Dibley stepped forward and kicked him hard in the stomach, and a thin liquid gushed out of his mouth. She heard it. She thought: I’ll have to clean that up.
She left the lantern there. Dibley had his Boy Scout flashlight, and she followed him, her bodyguard, but it was all unrepairable and horrible now. Everything was, and she had caused it.
Dibley took her to her room just as the lights came back on. He looked at her like a judge, disapproving and even angry. “Don’t you know him?” he said. “Don’t you know anything?”
He meant: Don’t you know who really loves you?
“I guess I don’t,” she said.
Kaethe Muller appeared in the doorway. “Hah, ” she said, looking speculatively at Dibley, but that thought was unimportant. To Dory she said with an official lack of emotion, “It is best you find your sister. Unless she has gone home? She is with Werner Ganz-Lengen? That is the question. A boy who has been through much, and can be…eccentric. Not meaning to frighten you, but best we look for them. This we all agree.”
“Eccentric?”
“Sometimes, ja. Meaning like condition red? Shell shock? In New York he is in the care of a doctor.”
“You mean he’s dangerous?”
“More…unpredictable.”
“Unpredictable,” Dory said, cool before the shock of its implications.
“Dory!” Cynthia called as she came down the hall. “They think we ought to look for Debbie!” Yvonne was there too, standing quietly.
They all went along the hall, Dibley leading. They met Jean Dorlean coming out of the bathroom. He stood against the wall, impersonal as a stranger in a public building, to let them go by. Kaethe Muller said,
“Jean, have you found Werner?”
“Der Tod sei unser Kampfgenosse,” he answered, and she made a hissing, dismissive sound with her lips.
Dory left them and went downstairs, Dibley at her side, her mute champion, her fingenailless protector, rigid as stilts. His allegiance seemed his pain, but what could she do about his queer love? She could say that it was her right.
Dibley took his olive-colored Boy Scout flashlight from his belt and tried it; it seemed brighter after its rest. Dibley said, “Boathouse?” The rain had stopped, so they left Cascom Manor behind them and went toward the lake.
The wind had gone down but the lake was still unruly, like a basin that had been tipped and righted. One of the sailboats was not at its mooring, so was probably ashore down along the pines somewhere. The boathouse was empty of all but its usual nautical tack—oars, paddles, lifesavers, paint and tools. They looked on the loft, up the plank ladder. Cobwebs and sawdust, no one.
“Where could they be?” she asked, hearing and feeling the taint of plaintiveness.
They went down the shore and came upon the loose sailboat. Dibley tipped most of the water out of it, pulled it up on the sand and tied its painter to a bush. They could get it tomorrow.
They went back to the house; no one had found Debbie or Werner. She and Dibley checked the station wagon, the cellar, the library. It was still so wet outside she couldn’t see how they would want to be outside. Everything was soaked.
They turned on the water heater and went around turning off kerosene lamps and blowing out candles. It would be so good when this anxiety had passed, when Debbie came back from wherever she was.
Dibley was hurt when she said he ought to go to bed. He was her right hand and protector, wasn’t he? But he was beginning to make her even more nervous with his intense, mute connection to her, as if she had something deformed on the end of a leash and couldn’t let go. She felt unfair and ungrateful, but she couldn’t help it.
Dibley scowled, turned and went toward his room. Her legs were trembling and she had to sit down somewhere alone, where she couldn’t be seen trembling so. She locked her door and lay down on her bed.
Time had passed awake, then not-awake time had passed; which went slowest? The stunned time of half-sleep. Maybe Debbie had come back by now, one in the morning. She would go to her room and find out.
As she passed Werner’s room his door was open upon darkness, that other element, but something caught her eye, a shape wide where a woman would be wide, and she first thought: Well, I’m hallucinating again, imagining Betty Salmon in every dark place. She looked again. Something was there, in the very center of the room, but it wasn’t standing; it floated, turning.
If it was real it couldn’t be Betty Salmon, unless her mind had crossed over into another dimension
. It had to be some tangible thing, unless she was mad. Things could bite the mind as well as the hand and arm to the elbow—what she would have to risk to find the light switch inside the door. If she turned on the light she might see what could hurt by being seen. It masqueraded as a choice—Betty Salmon, or whatever that bulk there really was, accusing her of some terrible omission of pity. As if she were placing her hand in a mouth she reached inside for the wall switch and pushed in its lower barrel.
It was Werner, his face black as a prank, his toes just off the floor. The rigid line of the rope angled his head quizzical. Not a squiggle of movement in him, just the slow turn as the rope pulled to a new tension and length. A straight chair lay on its side and the light fixture had been pulled down from the ceiling, but the old solid-copper wires had held enough. She yelled for help and tried to hold him up against his weight, but he was too flexible, so she held just legs that bent perversely, together or one at a time, the upper weight remorselessly beyond her strength. His clothes were dripping wet and cool. She went to the door and yelled for help, complaining and crying like an outraged child.
Dibley was there first. He opened his jackknife and cut the rope, part of a sailboat painter, and the body came down into their arms in an awkward bunch, half held, and thumped its several parts to the floor. For a moment they looked at the cyanotic face of the first dead person either had ever touched. The noose Werner had fashioned for himself came loose easily; it was actually a hangman’s knot, a strange skill to have.
“Artificial respiration!” Dibley said, and turned Werner over on his stomach, but their frantic looks at each other confirmed the toylike uselessness of that old rhythm they had learned as children on sunny beaches. Dory cleared the dark lump of tongue and Dibley sat on the legs. “Out goes the bad air, in comes the good air,” he sang as he pressed forward and sat back, but he might as well have been sitting on a side of beef. There was no pulse, no breath. The half-open blue eyes were as coolly inert as marbles.
“Has somebody called a doctor? An ambulance?” she cried to the others at the door, complaining of their helplessness. They all stared with the dead expression of horror, keeping their distance. Kaethe Muller shouted angrily in German, and then, to someone, “I told you so! Stupid to bring him here!” Yvonne came forward, her hands out as if to hold something, but couldn’t make herself come all the way.
Dory pushed through them to the door, moving them aside as if they floated in water, and went downstairs to the telephone. Mr. King was the part-time chief of police and the only policeman in Cascom. She had the normal thought that he would be asleep and it would be an imposition to wake him just because Werner was dead. When the operator asked her what number she wanted her voice failed for a moment at the prospect of explaining what had happened, of introducing that subject into the normal world in the middle of the night. Her child voice would have to say death, suicide. But maybe Werner wasn’t really dead. She said the number and heard the ring. Soon Mr. King, sounding grumpy, answered. She said, hearing tears in her voice, that she was Doris Perkins at Cascom Manor and a guest had hung—hanged—himself and he might be dead or not. A doctor. Artificial respiration.
“All right, now, Doris. Keep calm. Dr. Winston’s on call for the Cottage Hospital in Leah. I’ll call him and come right over.” His fatherly voice almost made her whimper, because now she could resign. He would be strong, with authority and age, and would come here from the real world.
When she returned to Werner’s room, Dibley was sweating as he mouthed the old phrases. “Out goes the bad air, in comes the good air.” But no air moved at all, and it became clearer and clearer that Werner was dead. They gasped when Dibley stopped and got up. “He’s dead. There’s nothing,” he said.
The rule was that no matter the lack of response you continued artificial respiration until the doctor arrived, but that was after a swimming accident. Maybe this was different. She knelt and tried for a pulse at Werner’s neck, but there was no motion, no new warmth. He might have been made of rubber.
A note was on Werner’s bed, in foreign-looking handwriting, with strange r’s and s’s, but as regular and legible as an exercise: We were playing and she said and tolerated lewd remarks that enticed me to believe she would submit to my advances, but when I acted upon this assumption she became insolent and abusive. Being grossly unattractive she had no right to put on airs, so it was necessary to teach her a lesson.
She read this, its stunning logic excluding for a few seconds the knowledge that it referred to Debbie.
Mr. King had arrived before Cynthia and Yvonne, unaware, found Debbie on the couch in Ernst Zwanzig’s studio. Cynthia became so hysterical and inconsolable she seemed in her continued screaming perverse. Dory didn’t believe in such hysteria. For herself, she acknowledged fact, no matter what it was; her own weaknesses came and then went away as she assumed control over herself. Dr. Winston came from Leah and eventually calmed Cynthia.
The State Police came—two troopers in their creased, hard-cloth uniforms, near-identical giants with large pistols angled from black holsters. In their presence the guests became quiet and attentive.
Her mother and father came, seeming smaller than she remembered them to be, as if compressed by their summons and its cause. They were both rational; her mother shuddered with grief and sucked in her breath, but wouldn’t make another sound. Her father, in his black mailman’s boots, stubbed his toe on a throw rug and had a small limp thereafter. Neither held her responsible because they felt that she, like they, had come among powerful strangers. She saw that she would have to take care of them, and that she couldn’t resign just yet. She could not stop moving. And as for Cascom Manor, it was against her nature to leave loose ends and she couldn’t think about what had happened, or make sense of it, with all kinds of tasks undone, with messy incompletions here and there and under her feet. She went to the Princess’s room and found her attended by Yvonne and Mrs. Patrick.
“Dory!” the Princess cried, “I am so terribly sorry!”
Dory could only nod her head. The Princess’s skin, rarely in the sun, was smooth and yet as old as a primitive religious painting, ivory on canvas, the grain visible. Her eyes were out of control, jumping from one part of Dory’s face to another, as if she might find an answer in her brow, or chin.
“Werner was a sick boy,” she said, a plea. “We thought he was better, but he was a ghost.”
Mrs. Patrick shuddered so that her teeth clicked together several times.
“Marie,” Yvonne said to calm her, and for a while they were all silent. The Princess, still in her nightgown, leaned back in the bunched sheets and pillows, the other two sitting on the bed.
“Princess, perhaps you had better dress,” Yvonne said in her half-smiling voice.
“Yes.” The Princess stood, and with her usual lack of modesty let her nightgown fall and then accepted the clothes Yvonne selected from drawers and wardrobe. Mrs. Patrick also attended her, combing and arranging her black hair. While this was going on the Princess said,
“Dory, as soon as everything is…settled, we will be going back. There will be checks for all your salaries for the rest of the month.”
Debbie’s too? she had to think, always a prisoner of detail. She said, as if she had to dare anything to try to upset her own iron composure, that she’d have Dibley help her close up Cascom Manor, if he would, when the time came. The Princess was startled, and looked at her closely for a moment.
“How we trust you, Dory,” she said. “But…”
“It’s all right,” Dory said. Already she was constructing the near future in which she would enter upon duty and live for its satisfactions. Tonight there would be transportation, who in what car. Tomorrow Northlee Hospital, where the bodies would be taken, then Balcher’s Funeral Home in Leah, after what she had already been told was a mandatory autopsy in such cases, according to state law. Tonight there would be room in her father’s car for Cynthia, Dibley and herself. Or she could take
the station wagon and their things. That could wait. It was already tomorrow, though, so she would have to organize everything now. She would have to take care of her mother and father. She could take the car tomorrow while they were at work, but would they go to work? There was even, in the center of all calculations, the spread and mattress of the couch in the studio, soiled beyond redemption.
In the next few days she was told more than once that she was “a pillar of strength.” She kept busy, organized everything, took everything to its conclusion. On Friday, Cascom Manor was closed, drained and locked. “Dory’s been a pillar of strength,” her mother said after the funeral on Saturday.
Cynthia didn’t come to the funeral, though Robert and Dibley did. Three of Debbie’s classmates came—the dutiful ones, that type. The others who came were relatives, their cars full of casseroles for afterwards. Her family didn’t go to church except for occasions like this, and weddings. Reverend Gile knew Debbie well because she’d baby-sat for them, and was moved beyond sonority by her “loss.”
Sunday evening, when everything immediate had been taken care of, the casserole dishes washed and ready for their owners, she went to bed at eight and woke at four in the morning. It was windless in Leah, black and still, no difference between closed or open eyes. Fragments of dreams nudged her memory, but they were just states of mild emotion decorated with little friezes of this or that—leaves, a bell, a sail. She could not go back to them, and felt bittersweet regret for their loss.
She and Dibley simply hadn’t thought of Ernst Zwanzig’s studio, and she couldn’t think of a single reason why they hadn’t thought of looking there. This vacuum was disturbing. It was like reaching out for someone and finding that your hand had been cut off at the wrist. There was no explanation. Debbie might still have been alive, her wrists and ankles wired to the couch frame with coat hangers. She might have been alive then, her panties stuffed in her mouth. It must have been some time before she died. No one had accused Dory of negligence or lack of care, but that disappeared studio, its growing bust of Thomas E. Dewey—how had it not come into her mind? It almost seemed deliberate. It wasn’t the sort of thing she did. While Debbie was in torment. It was not good enough to be honorable and conscientious. Good was not enough. It might be better to be dead than to lie here with the black air pressing like cloth against the eyes.
The Moon Pinnace Page 33