Foolishly, I believed him.
The subject of Roderick’s lost wife did not arise again between us, as fearful to me as it must have been painful to him. Nor did I learn anything more of the history of the first Mrs. Hawthorne, my long dead doppelganger. These shadows on his past did nothing to decrease my fascination with him, which only grew more intense as the year faded towards winter.
Over the next weeks, I came by insensible degrees to spend almost every evening in his company. I always went to him; he would not venture even so far from his house as my adjacent stable. No stranger to the terrors that agoraphobia can visit on a sensitive spirit, I did not press him, but returned his hospitality by providing our nightly dinners. An unenthusiastic cook, I provided take-out from one of the local restaurants, but I will never forget the first time I descended to his kitchen in search of a teapot and hot water, only to discover that the stove was wood-fed, the water pumped by hand into the sink, and the milk kept in an icebox chilled by an actual block of ice.
“It has always been that way,” he said when I came up again, defeated by the primitive technology. “I do not choose to change it.”
On subsequent visits, I found the stove had been lit and water pumped ready in the kettle for our nightly cup of tea. Indeed, Roderick showed himself unfailingly solicitous of my comfort. When I complained that I was too tired, on returning home late each night, to keep up with my work, he gave me the room across the hall from the music room as a study. There I would sit, lapped in antique fur and velvet against the chill, grading papers by gaslight while the glorious waves of Roderick’s music washed over my senses. Often, emotion so overcame me that I would have granted him whatever he might ask, even to those intimacies I could hardly bring myself to contemplate. But every night, when the great clock at the foot of the steps chimed midnight, he would lower the cover over the keys, wish me goodnight, and escort me to the door.
I soon became aware of an inconvenient lack of energy. At first I blamed my growing enervation on too little sleep and the extreme stimulation of Roderick’s conversation and music. I confided my state to Roderick, who insisted that I leave at eleven, so that I might retire earlier. “For now that I’ve found you, Arantxa, I cannot do without you. I might have sunk into melancholy altogether, and my house with me, had it not been for you.”
Indeed, both Roderick and his house had improved since I’d first seen them. Someone had cleaned and dusted, washed and polished everything to the well-cared-for glow that bespeaks a truly dedicated housekeeper. When I asked where he’d unearthed such a jewel, he smiled and turned the subject. I began to sleep longer and for a time, felt a little better. But my classes were a struggle to prepare and my students a constant irritation.
Early in the spring semester, my department chair called me into his office. He was concerned about my health, he said. I seemed languid, forgetful of meetings and deadlines. There had been complaints. It was all very troubling. To silence him, I made an appointment with a doctor at the University Health Services. He subjected me to a series of annoying and expensive tests, and in the end confessed himself no wiser than when he started. He diagnosed me with non-typical chronic fatigue, and prescribed a stimulant.
Roderick laughed when he heard this diagnosis. “Chronic fatigue? Nonsense. You possess more vitality than any woman I have known.” He took my hand and raised it to his lips. “Dear Arantxa,” he murmured, his breath warm on my knuckles. “So strong, so utterly alive. You must know that I adore you. Will you marry me?”
My heart stuttered in my breast with fear or passion—I hardly knew which. His bright and fixed gaze filled my mind and my senses, leaving room for nothing else. Words of acceptance trembled on my lips, but were checked at the last moment by inborn caution.
“You overwhelm me, Roderick,” I said shakily. “I have never thought of marriage. You must give me time to consider your proposal.”
Releasing my hand, Roderick shrank back into his chair. “You do not love me as I love you,” he said, his oboe-like voice clouded with disappointment.
I leaned forward, and for the first time, touched his softly curling beard. “I might,” I said truthfully. “I don’t know. I need to think what to do.”
He nodded, his beard sliding under my fingers. “Then you shall think. But please—think quickly.”
That night, he played the red piano with unsurpassed passion. I lay on the music-room sofa overwhelmed with sound, my arm flung over my eyes to hide my slow, helpless tears. Of course I loved him. I had never found anyone who listened to me as he did, looked at me with such hunger. Why then did I hesitate? In my extreme perturbation, I could hardly find the energy to rise from the sofa, and was forced to accept his arm to support me to the door. “Are you well?” he asked anxiously. “Shall I help you home?”
Knowing what the offer must have cost him, I was deeply moved. “My goodness,” I said, forcing a light tone through my deadly fatigue. “Do I look that bad? No, I’ll be fine by myself.”
“I will see you tomorrow, then,” he said, and for the first time, laid his lips against mine. His kiss, both passionate and cold, excited my nerves, lending me the strength to traverse the short distance to my own door.
I slept fitfully that night. Whenever I fell asleep, I was haunted by a groaning, as of pain unbearable, echoing up the spiral stairs. I would wake with a start and lie quivering in the darkness, ears straining to hear past the beating of my heart. The next day passed in a kind of stupor. I could barely totter down to the kitchen to boil water for tea and recruit faltering nature with soup and toast. By evening, I was simultaneously exhausted and restless beyond bearing. Which was, perhaps, why I found myself sitting on the piano bench.
I had not come near the piano in some time. As I sat before it, I noticed that the little carved faces were familiar. I knew that domed brow, that coolly sensual mouth in its nest of hyacinthine curls. My exhaustion was such that I saw nothing odd in finding Roderick’s visage carved upon his ancestor’s piano. It only inspired in me a desire to touch him, speak to him, draw comfort from him. Impulsively, I raised the cover, lifted my hands to the ebony keys and ran my fingers from treble to bass. If I was too weak to drag myself to him, perhaps I could touch him through our linked instruments.
Tentatively, I embarked upon a simple song I had learned as a girl. I stumbled at first, and then sense memory took over. My fingers began to move as of their own accord, progressing from the song into a nocturne, and then into improvisation. As I played, I forgot my fatigue, my undone work, even Roderick and his proposal. The music I made lifted me into a realm of beautiful abstraction, spirit without substance, clean and pure and bright. When at last I stopped playing, it was a little after midnight. Strangely, I felt better—tired certainly, but not exhausted. My mind was clearer than it had been for months.
I slept soundly that night, never stirring until early afternoon, when I rose well-rested and able to eat a proper meal and do some real work. When I looked up from my papers, it was far too late to go to Roderick’s. Wanting to recapture that feeling of perfect communion, I sat down once again at the red piano, and rose some hours later, strong, refreshed, and as sure as I could be that I loved Roderick Hawthorne and wanted to be his wife.
The next afternoon, I dressed myself with more than usual care. I brushed out my hair, which had grown during my illness, into a dark cloud that made my face more delicate and white in contrast. I put on a dress I had not worn since college—black velvet cut tight to my hips, the skirt full and sweeping below. I clasped my mother’s pearls around my neck, and thus bedecked, once again rang the bell of Hawthorne House.
No sooner had my hand fallen from the pull than the door opened on a haggard figure I hardly recognized. Roderick Hawthorne’s hair was uncombed, his collar unbuttoned, his cheeks gaunt and his eye’s reddened. “Arantxa!” he exclaimed. “I have not slept or eaten in two days, waiting for your answer, fearing what it must be when you did not return.”
M
y heart contracted with pity. “Oh, my dear.” He smiled at the endearment, the first I’d ever used. “I could not come. I was so tired. And I did need to think.”
“My poor angel. Of course. I’m glad you’re better. And you are here now. It is yes, isn’t it? Your answer?”
Something in his voice—satisfaction? triumph?—stifled my agreement on my lips. I smiled, but said nothing.
Dinner was a depressing meal. The dining room was cold, the fire sullen and low, the food indifferent. Both of us avoided the subject most pressingly on our minds, every other topic of conversation an unexpected minefield of references to love or matrimony. At length, we rose from an unaccustomed silence.
“I will not plead for myself,” he said. “Perhaps you will let my music plead for me.” He took my hand; his was colder than ice. As we walked from the dining room to the music room, I noticed that the whole house was cold, neglected, dusty, as though none had swept or polished or built a fire there for weeks rather than the two days I’d been absent. Roderick hurried me up the stairs, and fear grew in me. On the threshold of the music room, I hesitated, searching for some way to excuse myself from a situation grown suddenly intolerable. Roderick’s cold hand grasped mine more tightly, drawing me inexorably towards the red piano and down onto the bench beside him
The carved faces peered at me from the music stand. It was the first time I had seen them close up, but I was not astonished to discover that they were as like the first Mrs. Hawthorne, like me, as the faces on my piano were like Roderick. In a flash, I understood everything. It utterly defied rational belief, but I could not afford the luxury of disbelief. My very life depended on acting quickly.
I took a deep, calming breath and smiled deliberately into his face. Roderick Hawthorne smiled back, predatory as a wolf, then released me, rubbed his long hands together, and flexed his fingers. He disposed them gently on the ebony keys, and prepared to play me to utter dissolution.
Before he could sound a single note, I seized the heavy wooden cover and slammed it shut on his fingers with all my force.
He screamed like a wild animal, a scream with a snarl in it, rage and pain mingled. Springing to my feet, I ran from the music room, snatching up my cumbersome skirts. Weak and in pain, he was still stronger than I, infinitely older and wise in the terrible sorcery that had animated him so far beyond his natural life. If I fell into his hands, I knew I could not escape him a second time. I ran headlong down the stairs, resisting the impulse to look behind me, knowing he must follow me, clumsy with pain, utterly determined to catch me and drain me of my strength and my life.
Tearing open the door, I stumbled into the open air a step ahead of him, and down the stoop into the alley. I knew that his life must be intimately intertwined with the house he had inhabited for so long. He might not be able to step over the threshold; then again, he might. I could not afford to take the chance.
In the light of a single lamp, my living room seemed calm and homelike. Then I clicked on the overhead, and there was the red piano, squatting beside the stair, oversized, over-decorated, garish, out of place among the beautiful simplicities of my collections.
A scream of rage at the end of the alley sent me flying to the box I kept under the stairs. Screwdriver, hammer, pliers, wire cutter—inadequate tools for the task ahead, but all I had at my disposal. Terror made me strong. I splintered the ebony keys and the music stand with the hammer. An inhuman howling came from the alley. I attacked the carved faces on the legs and case. Something heavy began to slam against my front door, causing it to quiver in the frame. Furiously I hammered at the carved wood, squinting against the splinters stinging my cheeks and chest.
With a great crack, the door burst inwards. I looked up, and there was Roderick Hawthorne, framed in darkness, his face stark in the electric glare. If I had harbored any lingering doubts as to the uncanny nature of the night’s events, I did so no longer. His face was scored and bleeding, his beard ragged and clotted with gore, his eye a bloody ruin, his mouth swollen and misshapen. I glanced down at my hammer, half-expecting to see it smeared with blood. In that moment of inattention, he sprang towards me, gabbling wildly, his beautiful voice raw and ruined, his beautiful hands bruised, swollen, bleeding, reaching for me, for the broken piano keys.
Snatching up the wire cutters, I thrust open the piano lid and applied myself to the strings. One by one I clipped them, in spite of Roderick’s howling and wailing, in spite of his hands clawing at my shoulders as he tried in vain to prevent me from severing his heart strings. As I worked my way down to the bass register, the howling stopped, and I felt only a weak pawing at my ankles. And then there was nothing.
When I completed my task, I turned and saw what I had done. For a moment, a horror lay on my rug, the red and white and black ruin of the man I had loved. And then his flesh deliquesced in an accelerated process of decay as unnatural as his protracted life. A deep groan sounded, as of crumbling masonry and walls, and then my world was rocked with the slow collapse of Hawthorne House, falling in on itself like a house of cards, dissolving, like its master, into featureless dust and rubble.
I was rescued from the wreckage by my neighbor on the other side. He gave me strong coffee laced with rum and chocolate chip cookies for shock and called the police and the fire department. He is neither beautiful nor mysterious, and he made his fortune writing code for a computer game I had never even heard of. He prefers klezmer music to opera and South Park to the Romantics. He reads science fiction and plays video games. We were married in the spring, right after final exams, and moved uptown to an apartment in a modern tower with square white rooms and views across the river. We have no piano, no harp, not even a guitar. But sometimes in the deep of winter, when the dark comes early and the wind shrills at the bedroom window, I think I can hear the red piano playing, deep and wild and passionate.
When I was in seventh grade, I discovered a book on my parents’ bookshelves. It was large, black, and impressive-looking, and had an oddly creepy illustration on the cover of a lady in a huge skirt, her breasts bare, and a man in a truly splendid black robe kneeling at her feet. The interior was creepier still, both words and pictures. The words were Edgar Allan Poe’s, the illustrations were Harry Clarke’s, and really, I don’t know which entranced and repelled me more. I was particularly drawn to their deathly ladies: pale, learned, sickly, beautiful, and doomed, doomed, doomed to die horribly so that their pale, learned, beautiful, and tortured lovers’ could enjoy—and lovingly, lingeringly describe—torments of grief and/or guilt. “The Red Piano” is a kind of homage to those women, to Morella and Berenice, to Ligeia and the Marchesa Aphrodite and the unfortunate Lady Madeline Usher. I only wish I could see what Harry Clarke would do with Arantxa and Roderick.
<
* * * *
M. Rickert’s short story collection, Map of Dreams, won the William Crawford and World Fantasy awards. Her next collection, Holiday,will be published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2009. She lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.
* * * *
Sleeping with the Angels
By M. Rickert
We shared the secret until she said we had to stop or we would burn. I told her to close her eyes and think about heaven. I was immediately filled with regret and waited in the dark for the devil to come but instead morning arrived with its golden wings. I placed the pillow under her head, crawled out of her bed into mine, and determined that I would never do something like that again. I wondered if I would meet something terrible in the days to come and then I met a girl made by fire. She threw stones at me while I stood outside the funeral parlor where everyone was weeping for Mazie. Poor Mazie, only nine and the family’s blessing, they whispered, their eyes sliding towards me and back again to her. Even dead, Mazie was preferred. Later, after Mazie was in the ground, my father was in the tavern, and my mother was in the cleaning mood that never left her I saw the fire girl again. She was standing near the graveyard, her braided hair ratty as a nest. “He
y Laurel, come here,” she said, “I wanna show you somethin’.
I followed her through the spit bugs and itchy grass into the woods behind the dish factory where butter flowers blossomed beside black water and the sky was green. “Hurry up slowpoke,” she said. “I ain’t got all day.” We climbed rocks and grassy hills, swatting at mosquitoes.
“You are going to be so surprised,” she promised. I looked at the wine colored stains on her neck and arms. “Whatcha staring at?” she asked.
“Nothin’,” I said. “That’s right, nothin’.” Her messed up braids were tied at the end with rubber bands, the kind that hurt.
“Wait till you see this,” she said and waved her arm like a magician over a pile of torn flowers, grass and a dead dog.
I bent down to get a close look. It was the Egler’s dog, Sally.
“You know what happened to that dog?” she said, stepping towards me.
I pretended not to be scared. “What? You think I ain’t ever seen a dead dog before?”
She was standing there with a rock in her hand. She let it drop like it was suddenly struck by gravity. “Come on,” I said, pretending to be in charge. I turned and walked back the way we came. When we got to the end of the woods, the street littered with tricycles and the torn noise of the Fellmore kids, I bolted. She shouted, but I pretended not to hear and ran all the way home, slamming the screen door. My mom hollered. She was in the kitchen washing the windows. She had on an apron with giant cabbages. Some of the cabbages had faces.
Poe - [Anthology] Page 18