The Winter People

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  It was Trent who came upon him late one night, Father’s head resting on his desk as though he slept. He had gone quietly with the stopping of his heart, and he had lived a full, happy life to the very end. Afterwards, my mother—the sturdy Viking!—had gone completely to pieces. She was put under sedation, given a nurse, and her sister was sent for to help us out. But before Aunt Olga came, Trent took charge because there was no one else at hand. He arranged for the funeral. He took charge, in a sense, of me, who had no one, with my mother ill.

  Determinedly I began to read the chapter on my father. I wanted to remember him—not Trent. My father’s kindly, not very handsome face seemed to swim between my eyes and the printed page. I remember very well his wisdom, his humor. He could be devastating in his criticism of a student’s work and yet wielded his scalpel with such wit and gentleness that hardly any pain was felt. He always left one with the feeling that better work was possible the next time. His students were, in great part, his life. The hours he spent out of the classroom were often lived in the rich, varied world of literature—at second hand. My mother in those days was far more of a realist than her husband, and Trent had caught one amusing episode which illustrated this. An occasion when Mother had dealt resolutely with a leaking pipe, from which my father had fled to a classic storm in a favorite book. Once Trent had told me that I was too much like him—coping gallantly with the imaginary and fleeing the results of my real actions.

  There—no matter which way I turned, Trent came back into my thoughts. I would never, as long as I lived, forget that rainy afternoon when we came home from the funeral and I went out in the wet side garden and flung myself down on the grass to let my tears flow as the rain flowed. It was Trent who found me, who picked me up in his arms and carried me, mud and all, back into the house. He mopped me off and wrapped me in a big towel, held me in his lap as though I’d been ten instead of sixteen. I’d wept myself out against his shoulder while he talked to me about my father, made me talk about him too—so the wound would bleed freely and not fester.

  I had loved them both so much that dark, rainy afternoon. They were tied up together in one huge, painful love that had possessed me completely. This had been all right as long as I had seemed a child to Trent. But I was not a child. I was growing into a woman, and suddenly I wanted more than a child would want. Trent woke up to me with rather a shock and he scolded me thoroughly. I wasn’t to go wasting all this brand-new wonderful puppy love on an old married man. I was to find a boy my own age, and make first love what it was supposed to be.

  But when does one ever order love? I found myself rejected, knew I deserved to be—and went right on loving him futilely for a long, long time afterward. Perhaps that young girl in me had never stopped loving him.

  It was this thought that jerked me awake, made me close the book and return it to the shelf. Not for a moment was I going to allow sixteen-year-old daydreams to interfere with a very real marriage.

  Glen hadn’t come home, and I knew what I must do. I ran upstairs to my room, pulled on warm slacks, a sweater, slipped into my brass-buttoned navy jacket, caught up a flashlight and started quietly downstairs.

  But not quietly enough. Before I reached the foot of the stairs Glynis came out of the drawing room, closing the door behind her. She prowled up and down the hall, awaiting me restlessly, and I thought of how Colton had called her his “beautiful leopard.” As she moved I caught the gleam of some shiny object she held in her hands, and when I reached her level she held it out to me.

  “This is for you,” she said, and I heard the sly note in her voice.

  I trusted her not at all, but at least I felt resolute again and I was not afraid of her. She was only a rather spoiled and jealous girl, who had grown too possessive toward her twin brother. She would probably be unpleasant to me on every possible occasion, but about this I did not care. My feeling that she and I might be friends had completely evaporated, and if I had to fight her to support Glen, then I would.

  The object she handed me was a hollow ball made of greenish iridescent glass. It was about six inches in diameter and it shone when I held it toward the chandelier, giving off green-tinted rainbow colors.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She smiled at me almost sweetly. “It’s a witch ball. For spells and incantations, you know. People used to hang them in windows to ward off evil spirits. I’ve collected them for years. If you like, sometime, I’ll look into it for you and read your future. You’ll need it, you know, if Glen is to perform miracles after all this time. You’ll need its help especially, since you’ve already disappointed him, failed him. I suppose he depended on you for inspiration. I could have told him better.”

  The sphere of glass was warm from her hands, and its surface squeaked rather unpleasantly as I turned it in my fingers. I did not like the feel of it, and I set it down on the hall table.

  “I don’t think Glen will have any need of spells and incantations,” I said lightly.

  “But they aren’t for him! It’s you who’ll need them in this house. You’ll have to work against Nomi’s bewitching, won’t you? I do believe she’s already got to you with her own spells.”

  I had no desire to be baited any further. “Good night,” I said, and let myself out the front door.

  She did not ask where I could be going in the blackness of a country night, nor did she follow me. The door creaked shut behind me and I turned on my flash, found my way down the steps. When I reached the driveway something padded softly beside me, and I looked down to find that Jezebel had chosen to keep me company.

  The night was cold—no memory of Indian summer lingered on the evening air. A strong wind blew across the hilltop and the sky was ragged with clouds. When the moon disappeared it seemed very dark, yet there was a little starlight and after a few moments my eyes began to adjust. When I started down the winding drive that led to the road below, Jezebel came with me here too, and I was grateful for her company.

  Perhaps this was only a wild goose chase. Perhaps I would chill myself for nothing. Nevertheless, I kept on down the drive. Once or twice some wild thing rustled through dead leaves, and Jezebel pricked to an alert. Once a fox barked in the distance and the sound was an eerie one in the empty world the cat and I traveled. Not even the lights of the house were visible behind us now.

  I kept on my way until the two stubby posts that marked the entrance to High Towers came into view. There had once been a double gate between them, but it had been long since removed and only the stone posts remained. I climbed to the top of one and perched on its flat surface, my hands thrust deep in jacket pockets, legs swinging as I waited for Glen to come home.

  6

  Wind whispered endlessly through tree branches above me with a sound like water rushing, touching me with fingers that warned of winter. I turned up my coat collar, pulled up my knees on the post and stared across the road toward the great dark fields that fell away below Chandler property. Here and there a light shone in the valley, but it was not densely populated and I could see no cars moving anywhere. Beside my gatepost Jezebel hunted through the brush, but she did not wander away.

  In the clear night air my thoughts seemed to quicken, to clarify and throw off their dreaming quality. Yet it was not Glen I thought of now. It seemed safer to put him out of my mind until he returned and I could deal with whatever then occurred between us.

  I distracted myself by thinking instead of my meeting with Pandora McIntyre, and of the strange thing Trent had said about my coming to his mother if there were any need. I considered again the surprising revelation of Glynis’s marriage to Trent, and the fact that the boy, Keith, was their son. There was much that seemed troubling here—it appeared to be further evidence of the damage Glynis could do. Neither Pandora nor Trent was pleased over her late-in-the-day charming of Keith, yet they were apparently helpless to keep the boy away from her. Or were they?

  I wondered how Trent felt about Glynis now. He had said nothing good about
her—yet he had never remarried in the years that had slipped past since he had become a husband at nineteen and Glynis must have seemed all that any man could want in a wife. And he had never taken his son away from her influence, as one would expect him to do.

  I heard the car from far away before I saw it. It was coming fast along a highway that was out of sight of the road that went past my gateposts. I heard it slow for the turn before it reached the lake, and then its headlights sped along the road toward me, growing brighter as they came.

  I stayed where I was on my stone perch and the lights picked me out clearly. The car was Glen’s, and he turned through the gateway and braked to a halt. His window was open, and he looked out at me. The moon had come from behind blowing clouds, and it cast shadows across his face.

  “Hello, Dina.” His voice was calm. “What are you doing out here?”

  His tone told me that he was no longer angry, or hurt, or upset. I jumped down from my stone post and ran to the car. At once he reached for me through the window, pulled me to him by my coat collar, kissed me quickly, lightly.

  “I was waiting for you,” I said. “I wish you had let me come with you.”

  “Next time I will,” he promised—though when that time came he forgot me again, under worse circumstances than these.

  I went around the car, and he opened the door for me. I climbed in and sat beside him. Jezebel had vanished when the car appeared—off about her own business, with no further need of my company.

  “Before I left the house tonight,” I told him, “Glynis gave me a glass sphere she called a witch ball. She said I would need it.”

  “That’s like her.” Glen smiled. “If there were any real witches left today, I’m sure Glynis would be one. Did she frighten you?”

  “I wasn’t frightened. I don’t need to ward off demons, or learn incantations.”

  He did not start the motor at once, and I sensed a quiet excitement in him. He reached for my hand and held it in both his own.

  “I shouldn’t have let them upset me,” he said. “Colton and Glynis. They were right about the clay head being bad. I didn’t need them to tell me. Everything went wrong this afternoon. That’s why I had to get away by myself and think things out. Somehow I never think as clearly when Glynis is home. Sometimes I’m not always sure whether I’m thinking my thoughts or hers. But for now I must go my own way. And you’re going to help me, Dina.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Whatever you want of me, darling.”

  “It was the clay that put me off,” he went on. “I’m full of the feeling that I must work in stone. Work in it the way those old fellows did who created the masterworks. I want the feeling of stone under my hands—not the poor substitute of clay.”

  His new elation both pleased and dismayed me. It was wonderful to see him excited again and eager to be at work, determined to let nothing Colton or Glynis might say discourage him. But at the same time, I did not know whether what he planned was wise or practical. I knew so little about carving in stone. I suppose there were writers who set off without the slightest plan and completed successful novels. But could you do that in alabaster, where no erasure was possible?

  He answered my doubts as though I had spoken them aloud. “The plan is fully in my mind,” he said. “That’s why I don’t need anything else. There’s many a sculptor who works straightaway in stone, once he knows his course.”

  He started the car, and we drove up the hill and into the clearing before the house. Lighted windows watched us, and the fox barked his lonely call again as we went up the front steps.

  Inside the house Glen spoke to no one, but climbed the stairs, pulling me with him. He did not stop at the second floor, but went straight up to the dark attic, still drawing me along. When all the lights that were available in the big studio had been turned on, he went to work without even taking off his jacket.

  “Tonight, you can watch,” he said. “I don’t need you for posing yet. You’re buried too deep in the alabaster for that. In any case, I know the shape of your head through my very fingers. First, though, I must get rid of the concealing excess.”

  The alabaster of the past—mentioned so often in the Bible—had been, he told me, a harder stone than this. Modern alabaster was softer and a joy to carve. It took almost any tool you chose to use, and he could even work with wood-carving tools when he wished.

  “This won’t be as good a portrait of you as I could do in marble,” he said, “because the translucent quality of alabaster blurs the form and wipes out shadows, but for my purpose of suggesting ice, it’s what I want.”

  Glynis could not bear to stay away, and eventually she came up to see what Glen was doing. He did not so much as glance at her, but I stared boldly into her face, although she did not seem to see me. She watched her brother as the corners of the alabaster block were pared away, so that one could see the shape of a head emerging. Glynis did not speak until he came to a pause.

  “Won’t you spoil the stone—working directly like this?” she asked.

  He avoided her eyes. “Do be a good girl and go away, Glynis. You don’t know this piece as I do.”

  I felt almost sorry for her—she looked so sad and lost at his words. If he was dependent on her, she was also dependent on him. They were close, these two—no matter what interruptions came between them. Too close, perhaps, for anyone else to hold first place with either. But I did not want to come between them. I had my own place. Glen was my husband first, and I wanted to see him develop into the artist he believed he might be. I must be the wife who would help him do that.

  Glynis went off without a word, moving as softly, as secretly as Nomi’s cat. When she was gone, I think Glen felt only relief. He worked with concentration for a time and then paused to clean the alabaster and wipe it free of stone dust. All his attention was for the alabaster, gleaming under his hands. “Go along to bed, Dina. I’ll come later. I want to finish this preparatory work so I can start in tomorrow seriously.”

  In the hallway I came upon Colton, standing in the door of his room listening to the sound of Glen working upstairs.

  “He has more to do,” I said. “To get the stone ready for work tomorrow.”

  He smiled at me kindly. “I’m enormously pleased. No sound of an artist working ever disturbs me. The important thing is that he has gone back to it in his own way. He hasn’t let the threat of failure defeat him as he has before. You are good for him, my dear.”

  I could scarcely have felt more pleased. Whatever Glynis might think of me, Colton Chandler had ranged himself on my side, and I already sensed that his was the governing hand in the household. He had greater strength than the rest of us put together, except perhaps for Nomi. She had needed to grow strong to live all these years among the Chandlers.

  I told him good night and went into our room. When I switched on the dressing table lights, something on the bed winked with a green iridescence. The witchball waited for me beside my pillow. I crossed the room indignantly and picked it up. Without hesitation, I went down the hall to Glynis’s room and knocked upon the door.

  There was no answer. I knocked again and then pushed the door ajar. There was no one there, but two lights burned in the room. One was on the bed table, the other spotlighted the black marble head. I carried the green glass ball to Glynis’s bed and set it down. Let it wait beside her own pillow! I wanted no such game-playing to haunt my dreams tonight.

  As I turned from the bed I saw a huge, hand-woven West Indian basket set upon a dropleaf table. A basket piled high with a collection of witch balls. They were of every size, from tiny ones that had been used as stoppers for bottles, to one even larger than the one Glynis had insisted upon giving me. They were of every color as well—amber, yellow, purple, red. But I had no time to be curious about them now. Before I left the room I had to look again at that anguished face of black marble that Glen had created.

  Now that I had seen Glynis, I knew that it was indeed her likeness, yet with so much t
hat lay beneath brought to the surface. Glen could not have shown her this way unless he knew her almost as he knew himself. The look of the carved face touched me, somehow, shook me from my state of intense dislike. Perhaps I wore too much of a chip on my own shoulder, perhaps, I, too, antagonized.

  “That’s not for you to look at!” Glynis spoke from the doorway and I turned guiltily.

  “I brought back your glass ball.” I gestured toward the bed. “I haven’t any need for it, you know.”

  She flew past me to the bed and picked up the green ball, cradled it lovingly in her hands.

  I tried to remember the self-doubt I’d felt only a moment before, tried to recapture my resolve not to antagonize.

  “Glynis,” I said, “isn’t it possible for us to start over? You’re Glen’s sister and I’ve looked forward to meeting you, wanted you to like me.”

  When she was excited her dark eyes looked like shiny jet, and she was excited now, tossing the witch ball from hand to hand as though she must take out her excitement in motion.

  “Like you!” she echoed. “When you’re so completely wrong for him! Do you think a silly little blond thing like you could ever make the right wife for Glen!”

  I moved toward the door, knowing that it was useless to stay. But before I opened it, I turned for one last question.

  “Don’t you think you’d feel exactly the same toward any girl your brother married?”

  She moved so quickly that I barely had time to dodge as the green ball came flying at me. It struck the door behind me and shattered, spilling splinters of glass over my head and shoulders. If I had not moved it could have struck me full in the face. Feeling as shattered as the glass that pricked my scalp, I walked into the hall.