Spindrift

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  I watched them all. Ferris appeared mildly amused and tolerant—as he seemed to be of all Theo’s whims. Bruce’s expression was more enigmatic. I suspected that he must have liked working for Hal on the paper’s business better than he did jumping to the tune of Theo’s whistling. If he did jump. I had a growing suspicion that she might have a slight rebellion going on beneath the surface here in Bruce Parry, and that he might be chauvinist enough to have a few opinions of his own. If I wanted help with Peter, he might be worth cultivating.

  Joel was neither applauding nor deriding. He had seen his mother’s enthusiasms before, and he had gone to open one long door that gave onto the rear veranda that overlooked the sea. I went quietly to stand beside him.

  “When am I to see Peter?”

  He spoke over one shoulder, not looking at me. “There’s plenty of time. He won’t be spirited away. When he’s feeling more chipper he’ll be happier to see you.”

  That hadn’t been the case in the past. When Peter was feeling his worst, I was the one he had wanted near him, the one he had clung to in illness.

  “I won’t wait,” I said, and turned back to the others.

  Bruce Parry was watching me as I came down the long room. Unexpectedly he smiled at me, and his sardonic look lightened.

  “You’ll have to come to the ball as young Zenia Patton-Stuyvesant,” he said.

  Startled, I looked up at the portrait of the woman who had once owned this house, who had danced in this very ballroom. Sargent had painted with an elegantly decisive touch, with broad, sure strokes, and it was the quality of his style that was arresting. His subjects told you little of themselves and he was never particularly profound, though in his day he had been considered the best of all portraitists. Yet in the end he had given up portraiture to return to his first love, landscapes, where his reputation had never been distinguished. I respected him for that. But now for the first time I looked at the lady with the geranium as a person. She had posed for his portrait in her midnight-blue gown late in the last century, when she was young and mistress of Spindrift. Her wealthy husband, Arthur Patton-Stuyvesant (railroads, I thought), had built this house for her. Why had Bruce connected her with me? Her look was mysterious and remote—she had been thinking of other things, but you couldn’t tell what.

  “There was some scandal about her,” Bruce said in my ear. “But that came when she was a little older. As you know, her husband died from a dose of poison—whether administered by his own hand or by someone else’s was never decided for sure. Suicide was the story accepted by the police, but there were murmurings for years.”

  I did know about Arthur and I shivered. He had been the first to die in the Tower Room.

  Bruce drew me back to the picture of young Zenia. “Don’t you see the resemblance?”

  I shook my head. “You’re making it up. Anyway, I won’t be coming to this party. None of this is real, and I—can’t bear it.”

  I moved away from him, left them all to center around Theo’s animated discussion of plans, and moved toward the door. There were only about forty-eight rooms in the house—it wasn’t as large as some on Bellevue Avenue or Ocean Drive—so I had better start searching them if I meant to locate Peter. Probably his room would not be far from Theo’s suite, and I would start there.

  There was no one around in the corridors as I went up to the third floor, and the red carpet hid the sound of my steps as I followed it down the wing, stopping at each door to open it carefully and peer within. I knew the woodsy perfume Fiona used. Ferris’s room was dark blue and austere, but that was his gold-initialed attaché case on the bed. The next room was Peter’s. He lay in a bed far too large for him, his head turned on the pillow, long lashes dark against pale cheeks, sound asleep, and at the sight of him my heart quivered. I stepped quietly through the door and pulled it shut behind me.

  The room had undoubtedly been done over just for him. It was all that some decorator might think a boy’s room should be. The wallpaper had a fish motif—and Peter used to collect fish in his aquarium at home. The colors were blue and gray, with a few splashes of bright red, and a dash of sunny yellow in the real sunshine coming in from the balcony door. But it was all too orderly. His toys weren’t strewn around as though he had been playing with them, and not a book lay open anywhere.

  I stood beside his bed with my heart beating thickly in my throat and my yearning feeling of love almost unbearable. I wanted to bend over him, gather him into my arms and rock him as I used to do when something had hurt him and he wanted most of all to be comforted and loved. His skin had that unbelievably smooth, almost transparent look that all children have until they begin to grow up, but there were shadows under his eyes, and his face looked a little wan against the pillow. I knew he needed to rest, to sleep, and I stole softly away. My arms were empty but I would wait a little.

  I returned to the central corridor and followed it. One mission had been carried as far as possible for the moment. Now I must give my attention to the next.

  This part of the third floor seemed even more hushed than the rest. Probably the house was not yet fully staffed and there were no maids busy with their eternal dusting and mopping. But for me it was a hush like death—though it had not been hushed the night my father died. All the focus of the house seemed to draw me like a magnet toward that one room at the far end of the right wing. The Tower Room, Theo always called it, and it was the room that my father had liked best. When Adam stayed here he insisted upon having it for his own.

  Once it had been a favorite retreat for Arthur Patton-Stuyvesant and Adam’s wry twist of humor had savored the macabre connection with the former owner. It was here that Zenia Patton-Stuyvesant’s husband had presumably taken a draught of poison and gone not too quietly to sleep. The Patton-Stuyvesants and the Townsends, who lived in the next “cottage,” had been close friends. It had been Theron Townsend who found the body, and his wife, Maddy, who had stood by Zenia through all that troubled time. Theo Moreland relished Spindrift’s history, and it was known to all of us.

  It was this room that Zenia was said to haunt—this room and the ballroom, where she was sometimes seen flitting about as she had in her old age, still greeting guests that were only memories in a house where no guest ever came again until Theodora Moreland took it over and brought it once more to splendid, artificial life.

  Such stories had been meat to Adam Keene, who also had a taste for the spectacular and dramatic, as any good newspaperman should. What could be more interesting than to consort with ghosts, and if Fiona would not sleep in that room, then he would meet her elsewhere—“clandestinely” was the word he had teased her with. The room had always fascinated me, and even as a child I had always hoped for a glimpse of one of the ghostly owners. A hope that had so far been denied me.

  All the doors along the corridor were closed—as they always were when not in use, to keep out dust and the inquisitive. Theo had a thing about closed doors, as though she feared someone behind her back and wanted protection. But every room had been fully furnished, and sometimes Theo had filled nearly all of them at one time when notable world figures gathered at Spindrift.

  As I passed one door I opened it and looked in. Red and cream paisley marked slipcovers and spread. No antiques here. The dressing-table mirror waited for its next lady, chastely reflecting the order of the room. I closed the door and went on. The Tower Room was at the end. I had to take a deep breath and brace myself for the return of shock before I opened the door. I put my hand on the knob and steadied myself. Then I turned the brass sphere and pushed a little. Nothing happened. The door was locked and there was no key in the lock. I shook it indignantly to make sure, the feeling rising in me that it was locked only because of me. It would not matter if anyone else went into this room, but Theo didn’t want me here. She had ordered it locked.

  My hand on the knob began to tremble and a remembered sense of weakness swept through me. There were too many against me here. Too many who would kee
p me away from my son, and now from my father. I couldn’t bear it any longer. Still holding onto that knob that would not help me, I slipped down to the floor, leaning a shoulder against the door. The tears came, wetting my cheeks. I let go of the knob and huddled with both arms clasped around my body—the way I’d sometimes done in the hospital, holding myself because there was no one left to hold me. My temple felt the hardness of the wood as I pressed against it and wept my heart out. For my son, for my father—for all lost love.

  3

  I did not hear his step as he came down the corridor toward me. I did not know he was there until, through my tears, I saw his brown shoes with the brass side buckles. Then I looked up quickly in resentment because I did not want Bruce Parry or anyone else to find me there, disheveled and crying, with all my guards let down, the weakness I had to conceal so easily displayed.

  He didn’t ask me what the matter was, as Joel would have done. He simply stood in silence beside me and waited for me to stop my weeping. I felt in my slacks pocket for a handerkerchief, wiped my eyes and blew my nose. Then I pulled myself up, grasping the knob, and faced him.

  “The door is locked,” I said. “I didn’t expect that. It did me in.”

  “I’ll get you the key,” he said. “But not now. Give yourself a little time. You have to get used to it all again. I remember, you know. I remember that night very well.”

  I knew what he meant. He had come with the others when Fiona had gone screaming to call them. They had all come to find me there, holding my father’s body in my arms, his blood staining my white dress.

  “I want to go in now,” I said. “I want to go into that room right now.”

  He regarded me coldly, somberly. “You’re not a petulant child,” he told me. “Don’t act like one.”

  His words angered me, strengthened me, which perhaps was what he intended.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “But I do want to go into this room now. I’m not acting out of weakness. I’ve had to brace myself to face the room. It has to be faced, and I don’t want to postpone it any longer.”

  He nodded gravely, seeming to understand, and his dark eyes were not unsympathetic. “Yes, I suppose you have to make your peace with this particular place. But it isn’t wise to live over what happened there.”

  I let that go, seeming to submit. I wasn’t ready to tell him why I must face this room, what I must try to wring from it. He stood watching me for a moment longer, considering. Then he said, “Wait here,” and walked away.

  There was a hall window nearby and I went to sit on the window seat and look out toward the ocean. The sunny afternoon was graying and wisps of fog drifted in from the sea, curling about the ragged outthrusting of rock into the water. From this high window I could see the Cliff Walk curling its way above the edge of the rocky drop. The velvet lawns of Spindrift, still green in October, ran down to the walk, with a few plantings of evergreen near the house. Once that winding path had been a contested area. The owners of the castles had wanted it done away with, wanted the citizenry forbidden access to a path which edged their properties. But the town fathers had decreed that the walk should remain open and that anyone at all could use it when he pleased. I had walked along it myself with my father many times, and with Joel and Peter.

  But now I was watching the corridor as well as the sea, and I saw Bruce Parry when he came into view. He moved briskly, with purpose, and I knew he had the key. I hoped he would go away and leave me alone with the room and that I wouldn’t have trouble with his lingering.

  He seemed taller than ever as he came to a halt beside my window seat, and I had to look up a long way to that grave expression that he so often wore—as a guard against the world? I wondered. Perhaps this was what came of working for Theodora Moreland—the development of a constant guard.

  “Why do you?” I asked, speaking my thoughts aloud. “Work for her, I mean? Work for Theo?”

  He smiled but this time there as no lighting of his face. “I suppose I inherited the job when Hal died.”

  “I don’t see how you can stand it,” I said.

  For an instant he seemed to withdraw from me, and I felt the unspoken rebuke. Then, unexpectedly, he gave me a reply.

  “She needs me,” he said.

  “I don’t think she needs anyone, except to feed her ego. She devours people.”

  “She won’t digest me easily.”

  I could sense that this man might very well work for Theo without being devoured—as Joel had been devoured. But it was the key he held which interested me now and I reached for it. He did not put it into my hand, but turned to slip it in the lock of the door. When he would have turned the knob, however, I sprang from my window seat and ran to reach across him, cover his own hand on the knob.

  “Please!” I said. “Let me open it myself. Let me go in alone.”

  My plea was too excited, I knew. He would not now think me calm, but he did not try to dissuade me. He offered no admonishments, but simply bowed his dark head courteously and went away from me down the corridor. I watched him out of sight, and then turned back to my own world, forgetting him.

  The door opened easily this time and swung upon the unusual architecture of the Tower Room. Part of the room was square, with the tower bulging from the far corner. The bulge was a turret, really, having its being in connection with this room only, and not rising from the ground like a true tower. I closed the door softly behind me and stood in the weighted silence, staring.

  Brownish patches stained the beige carpet. No effort had been made to clean them away, or even cover them. In fact, as I saw quickly, no effort had been made to tidy the room or put anything away since that night. Only the bed covers had been taken away.

  On the desk in the bay window made by the tower, my father’s things still lay scattered—his small pocketknife, a notebook and pen. The closet door stood open and I saw his cowhide suitcase there and the few clothes he had brought with him still hanging from the rod. I had not expected this, and the shock was shattering.

  I would have expected his things to be put away, the carpet to be cleaned or removed entirely. I would have thought some erasing of that night would have been attempted. But it was as though the door had been closed in horror upon a dreadful scene and never opened again. It was as though the very air that we had breathed that night had been shut into this space, sealed away, waiting in this deadly hush for someone to return and dispel the memory of what had happened here.

  I knew this couldn’t be so because the police must have been in and out endlessly, but the air of waiting was here. A waiting that had been solely for me?

  Suppressing the quiver at the pit of my stomach, I skirted those disturbing stains on the carpet and walked to the closet where he had hung his clothes. With a hand that I had to steady I touched the sleeve of the plaid sports jacket he had liked best, and it was as though I reached for my father. This fabric had covered this arm, it had been warm with the life in his body. But now it lay inert beneath my fingers. I couldn’t find him here.

  I looked into the adjoining bathroom, where his oval hair brush lay, his shaving equipment, a bar of soap he had used, a mirror that would never know his face again. Yet for all my inner quivering, I was beyond tears, beyond the weakness of weeping. If called out his name as I was tempted to do, he wouldn’t hear and I would only torture myself.

  Instead, I let my emotion spend itself in indignation because none of his things had been put away. This neglect was somehow unseemly. You packed away the possessions of the dead or gave them away. You removed the immediate reminders and let the person you loved go—because that was what you had to do, and there was more dignity for the dead that way. A certain loving respect could be shown in the very act of packing away, and here I would do it myself. I would come back to this room and I would handle the possessions he had owned with tenderness, just as Fiona must have done with his things at home.

  But at home in their apartment there had been intrusion. No one
had told me for a long while. I had been too ill. But one day Joel had asked me if I had any idea why anyone should break into Adam’s apartment shortly after he died and go through everything he owned before there was time to put his things away. I hadn’t known, of course, and the knowledge had upset me, so no one talked about it to me again. But the fact remained that someone had searched for something unknown among Adam’s possessions. Fiona had no answers. She had been upset too, but she would not talk about it on the few occasions when she came to see me.

  I went back to the closet and felt along the high shelf. My fingers met something made of cloth and I took down the folded hat of faded olive-green corduroy that my father liked to wear in the country when it was cool and he wanted to walk outdoors. It flaunted a bright red feather in the band, somewhat the worse for wear, though he refused to give up the hat when it grew shabby.

  I was not as controlled as I thought, and touching this familiar possession of my father’s broke me up without warning. The hat seemed more a part of him than anything else, and I dropped into a chair, holding that bit of corduroy close to me, as if I held my father, remembering him.

  He couldn’t have been more wonderful, as far as I was concerned. Rather ruggedly good-looking and able to dress well at those times when he wasn’t working with loosened tie and mussed hair. Courageous—able to stand up to anyone if he had to. Kind, thoughtful to Fiona and me, though not always gentle. Good to those who worked under him, adoring him, for all his blunt ways. Imaginative, brilliant—that went without saying. His was the real mind behind The Leader. And if there was any integrity in the Moreland Empire, Adam Keene had furnished it. I had admired and loved him with all my heart. A bit of Oedipus? Perhaps there is a little of that in every loving daughter. If I could have married a man just like him, I’d have done so. Instead, I had married a man almost totally his opposite. But I had loved Adam and I’d forgiven him the one weakness he could not help—gambling.