Ben walked across the corridor quickly, disregarding the pain and the swinging pendulum. As soon as he put his hand on the knob he smelled the gas rising from under the door. He twisted the knob and pushed against the door, and then again, and then with all his weight, shouting, “David! David!”
The door snapped open and he rushed into the room, ripping at his pajama tops and covering his face against the fumes. He threw aside a chair and ran to the bed, shouting David’s name as he reached down and scooped him up, dragging the covers with him. Marian had come to the door and then pulled back suddenly.
“What is it?”
When she saw Ben lifting him and carrying him toward her, and David with his eyes half-closed and twisting in Ben’s arms, she came into the room with a cry.
“Get out of here!” Ben yelled at her, pushing her back toward the door.
“My God! Is he all right? Ben! Is he?”
She followed him into their bedroom. Ben lay David on the bed and went to the windows, throwing all of them open. When he came back to the bed Marian was leaning over him, helplessly, rubbing his face, his hands. David’s eyes were open; he was gagging. Ben lifted him again and carried him to the window, holding his head out and saying, “Come on, Davey, breathe in deep, deep. Marian.”
She was beside them, repeating, “Is he all right?”
“Hold him. Like this.” He put her arms around him. “That’s it, Dave,” he said, “that’s it.”
He left them and went back into David’s room, throwing on the light and going for the gas heater which was hissing at one end of the room. He covered his face again and reached for the knob, twisting it shut and cutting off the sound. All the windows were closed; he flung them open and then came out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.
Aunt Elizabeth was standing in their doorway, her robe drawn tightly around her. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Ben said, moving past her. “He’s going to be all right.”
Marian was leaning beside David at the window. Ben put his arms around him, pressing his chest lightly. He looked up at Ben; his lips and chin were wet and trembling; he gagged and then started to cry. Ben thrust his head out the window again and said, “You’re going to be okay . . . okay, Dave.”
“Is he?” Marian formed the words silently, grabbing Ben’s arm.
Ben looked at the back of David’s head and nodded, too tentatively, to reassure her completely. He said, “Call a doctor.”
She rose to her feet, repeating, “Doctor . . .” vaguely, and then she remembered the list downstairs on a kitchen counter. She hesitated, looking anxiously at David, and the enormity of what might have happened hit her suddenly. She began to cry and knelt beside him again. “I don’t understand,” she said, “I just don’t understand how it could have – ”
“Get that list and call a doctor!” Ben yelled at her, and she saw his eyes close against something inside him and his body tense. He turned away from her. “Go ahead,” he said; his voice had faded to a whisper.
Aunt Elizabeth was wringing her hands in the middle of the room, staring at the window. Marian passed her without speaking, and as she left the room heard her saying, “Ben . . .” in a small, trembling voice. She went down to the kitchen and found the list, sliding her finger down the page until it reached W. G. Ross, M.D. She dialled shakily, and while she was waiting for the phone to be picked up – four, five, six excruciating rings – the clock beside her in the entry hall chimed the half-hour. All Marian heard was an angry voice saying, “Dr. Ross.”
He had asked her, brutally direct – first, was he breathing, and second, was he conscious; and if he was, then there was nothing to be done, certainly not at one-thirty in the morning. “Nothing?” she had protested, and the voice had become surlier, repeating, “Is he breathing okay?” Then fresh air and sleep for now, and he would see the boy in his office at nine in the morning. “If it was a gas heater, then it’s either fatal or it’s not fatal,” he had assured her; “nothing in between. Have the boy get some rest.”
He was conscious and he was breathing regularly, Ben told her. He made David walk to the bed – unsteady, but he was walking. Marian covered him and sat beside him for a while, watching him sleep on Ben’s side of the bed. She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. His breathing was deep, and, yes, regular, and he stirred when she pressed her lips to his forehead which was cool, not feverish.
Ben had gone into David’s room. “It’s off,” he said when he came back; “It’ll be all right.” That was all. He went to the armchair next to the window, sat, and propped his feet up on a hassock.
“But how, Ben? I don’t understand.”
“Get some sleep,” he said. He closed his eyes and sank deeper into the chair, rubbing his hand across his brow. The pain was back, more intense; it had probably never even gone, if he weren’t too drained to remember.
“Ben?” Marian called uneasily. “Is there something you know?”
“I don’t know anything at all right now, Marian.” Nothing at all except, thank God, there were still some of those lucid moments left. But not now; all he wanted was the comfort of the word – nothing. Nothing. Turn off the pain and think nothing.
Marian watched his hand fall and dangle over the arm of the chair. She got up from the edge of the bed, smoothed the covers over David, and crossed to her own side. She looked from David to Ben, and then around the room distractedly, as if she were trying to trace a sound or a memory or a fragrance. Her eyes stopped at the closed door and she remembered: Mrs. Allardyce. Had she heard? Had the noise reached the sitting room? Until that moment she hadn’t even thought of her; and while the inattention – if that’s what it was – was justified, still . . . not even to have thought of her.
They were sleeping, both of them. She walked quietly to the door, and her excuse for opening it and leaving the room was not simply the responsibility of a helpless old woman, but that ticking out in the hall which she was hearing for the first time.
Coincidence, she said to herself. Firmly. Coincidence as well with all the other clocks she hurried downstairs to check. Nothing more. And if there was any doubt, any feeling of dread; if she remembered saying even once, “My God” – then the remembrance was lost after a while in the solace of the sitting room, where the hum and the patterns in the carved door could elevate even the sound of a clock ticking to a benediction.
Ben called her from the village the next morning to tell her that the doctor – a cantankerous old man even by day – had looked David over, and the recovery, as far as he was concerned, was complete. Ben was taking him to Southold to hunt up a toy shop and a new “G.I. Joe” outfit. They’d be back by noon. He added, cryptically, “How’s Aunt Elizabeth?”
“She’s not up yet,” Marian said.
She understood what might have been in back of his concern later, when Aunt Elizabeth found her in the greenhouse. She knocked on the glass door timidly, and Marian, who was loosening the soil around the large skeleton of what was once a wax begonia, beckoned her in. Aunt Elizabeth pointed to the doorknob and shook her head. Marian dropped the spade and opened the door for her, twisting the knob to test it.
“It wasn’t locked,” she said to Aunt Elizabeth, and walked back past rows of orange and blue pots, most of them holding lifeless brown stumps.
The windows, the lower panes at least, had been cleaned, the broken pots removed, and all the “possibles” lined up neatly on the shelves and the long tables.
Aunt Elizabeth was making her way slowly to Marian’s work area, scraping her feet against the thin gravel floor.
“Have you had breakfast?” Marian asked.
“It’s too late for breakfast,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “I overslept shamefully.”
Her voice had changed; it sounded strained and quavery. Her face, when she came
closer, was pale, with dark circles around her eyes.
“How is David?” she asked.
“Better. With that kind of thing it’s either one way or the other. Thank God it turned out the right way.” She packed the dirt around the plant and watered it.
“You can’t imagine how frightened I was – to see him like that. My Davey.” Her voice shook even more; she steadied herself against the table.
“So were we all,” Marian said. “If I keep myself busy enough I can try not to think of it. He’s all right, thank God.”
She squeezed past Aunt Elizabeth for the plastic bag of potting soil. The change in her, close up, shocked Marian. She was trembling, the skin on her face and neck was loose and so thin that it seemed almost transparent.
Aunt Elizabeth wiped her eyes. “Marian?” she said hesitantly. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t touch the heater.”
The statement took Marian by surprise. “Well . . . of course you didn’t, Aunt Elizabeth.”
“If I did,” Aunt Elizabeth continued, “I’d certainly remember.”
“No one said you did.”
“I just covered him, that’s all.”
Marian stopped. “Covered him?” She looked at Aunt Elizabeth. “What are you talking about?”
“It was cold. Sometimes I’ll look in on him. And if he’s thrown off his covers . . .” She was forcing the words out slowly, the effort leaving her breathless.
“You were in David’s room? Last night?”
“I told Ben. Sometimes I can’t sleep and I’ll – ”
“Wait a minute,” Marian interrupted her. “When were you in David’s room, what time?”
“I don’t remember exactly.” Her lips were dry, trembling.
“And Ben knows this?”
“I told him, last night. You’d gone downstairs.”
Marian remembered asking him whether there was something he knew; he’d disregarded the question. And even this morning it had been some kind of freak accident, or David himself had turned the heater on and was too frightened to admit it immediately. Why hadn’t he told her about Aunt Elizabeth?
“What exactly did you do in his room, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“I told you – only covered him; he’d thrown his blanket off.” Her hand came up to her other arm as if to ward off the remembered chill. “It was cold, this house has gotten so cold . . .”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
“The windows?” Aunt Elizabeth shook her head. “The door? David’s door is never locked, never even closed. It was locked last night; Ben had to force it open.”
“I didn’t touch the door.”
“It couldn’t have closed itself.”
Marian was looking directly at her; Aunt Elizabeth avoided her eyes. “I might have . . . closed it . . . without thinking.”
“All right, think now.”
“I don’t remember.” She shook her head suddenly. “No, I do, I do. There was a draft. I thought by closing the door . . .”
“What else do you remember?”
“I couldn’t have locked it. Why would I do that?”
“All right, you didn’t lock it, it locked itself. What about the windows?”
“The windows were open.”
“They were closed when Ben went in there; tight.”
“Then David might have closed them.”
“David was asleep.”
“Before he fell asleep.”
“And then he opened them again before you came in. Make sense, Aunt Elizabeth.”
“How can I make sense when you’re shouting at me? I can’t think when you shout like that.”
“I’m not shouting.”
“You are and you’re accusing me of – I don’t know what you’re accusing me of.”
Marian lowered her voice pointedly. “I’m not accusing you of anything. Isn’t it reasonable to want to know what caused that heater to go on?”
“Ben never once implied I was responsible.”
“If,” Marian said, her voice rising above Aunt Elizabeth’s, “if I’m implying that, I’m also implying that it was an accident; it certainly wasn’t done to hurt David.”
“Hurt David? Me?”
“Accidentally, I said.”
“Not even accidentally.” She was fumbling in her pocket for a handkerchief, her knuckles white and bony, cadaverous almost.
“There’s no sense in pursuing it. It’s over, he’s all right.” She watched Aunt Elizabeth dab at her eyes. Her dress, a short-sleeved cotton print Marian had seen her wear before, hung shapeless from her body. She was suddenly very old to Marian, so old that it seemed like an illusion. It might have simply been the fact that she wasn’t wearing makeup or that her weekly trips to the hairdresser had been suspended. But the trembling, the change in her voice?
“Where’s Ben?” Aunt Elizabeth said. “Ben will believe me.”
Marian sighed with resignation. “I believe you too.”
“You don’t,” Aunt Elizabeth said and pulled her elbow back, out of Marian’s reach.
“We’ll just have to be more careful, that’s all.” She had taken the gardening gloves off; she started to slip them on again.
“Of me?”
“You’re seventy-four, Aunt Elizabeth.”
“What does that mean?”
It hadn’t struck Marian as cruel, merely honest. She wished now she hadn’t said it. “We all forget things,” she said.
“I don’t forget things, Marian,” Aunt Elizabeth said weakly. “I know what I do.”
“Of course you do,” Marian said. “Let me get your breakfast.”
“I don’t want any breakfast.” She turned to leave. “Please tell Ben I’m in my room.”
“I’ll bring it to your room if you want.”
Aunt Elizabeth stopped; her hand went down to the table for support. “Just like you bring it to her room – the other old woman? Please don’t bother, Marian.”
He had awakened with the pain above his eyes, and the aspirin hadn’t helped, nor the dark glasses he’d worn for the drive to Southold and back. At one point on the road he’d had to stop the car, not only for the pain, but for the sudden, momentary blurring of his vision. It passed, but the pain persisted.
He spoke above it, telling Aunt Elizabeth, “I’ve never known you to blubber like this.”
She was sitting on the edge of the chaise in her room, twisting the handkerchief in her hands. Ben was beside her, with his arm around her shoulders very lightly, as if the slightest pressure might weigh on her insupportably. Even the pain couldn’t distract him from the change in her.
His words brought the handkerchief up to her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Benjie, I can’t help myself. She had no right to talk to me that way.”
“She was upset, she didn’t know what she was saying.”
“I’d die,” Aunt Elizabeth said, touching his knee for emphasis, “die before I’d do anything to hurt Davey.”
“I know that and so does Marian.”
“Does she?”
“Of course she does. You know how Marian feels about you, Aunt Elizabeth.”
“I don’t know how Marian feels about anything anymore. Except this house.”
Ben was silent. “That’s not like you either,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry, Benjie. She’s gotten me so upset I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Look,” Ben said, “you two have never had words before. Why, all of a sudden?”
“Ask Marian.”
“I did ask her, exactly that. It’s possible, isn’t it, that you misinterpreted what she was saying?”
“I know what I heard, same as I know what I do. I may be a
n old lady, Benjie, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all my marbles.”
“You’re not an old lady,” Ben said. He looked at her hair, so fine it was almost transparent; the scalp showed underneath, white and lifeless. When had it started? Or was this too all in his mind? “Stop thinking yourself into old age, hunh?” He squeezed her hand affectionately.
“I am old, Benjie,” Aunt Elizabeth said.
“Old, my ass. All you need’s a little touch-up paint.”
She gave him a small, wet-eyed smile. “Tomorrow maybe.”
“Why not now?”
She sighed and wilted beside him. “I don’t have the strength at the moment.” She looked longingly at the bed and started to raise herself, leaning on his arm. “More than anything I’d like to be able to get into that bed and close my eyes for just a while. Like a very young lady,” she assured him, “who’s just suddenly so tired. Help me, Benjie?”
He found Marian preparing Mrs. Allardyce’s lunch tray in the kitchen.
“David’s on the terrace,” she said, “with a book. He says it stinks but he seems to be plugging away. The ‘G.I. Joe’ was good for twenty minutes. How much did you pay for it?”
“I forget.” He told her about Aunt Elizabeth, and Marian, without any wasted motions – hot soup into blue Spode bowl – said, “If I hurt her I’m sorry. The fact is she was in his room.”
“Why would she lie, Marian?”
“She’s not lying; she just doesn’t remember what she did. She didn’t, then she did close the door, and the windows, and – ” Marian dismissed it with a wave. “Face it, darling, Aunt Elizabeth is getting old.”
Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Page 17