Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Robert Marasco

  “She wasn’t ‘old’ back in town.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Marian said; “and we didn’t live with her then either.” She placed the bowl on a plate and moved them onto the silver tray, adding an immaculate linen napkin and a silver spoon which she held up to inspect. “We saw her once every week or so then. Usually fresh from the beauty parlor.”

  There was a deliberateness in her last statement which seemed especially intended for Ben. “You’ve seen the change?” he said.

  “I’ve seen it,” Marian said. “She’s letting herself go. She has been ever since – ” She caught herself and repeated the phrase, shrugging it off: “Ever since.”

  “Ever since what, Marian?” The pool. Neither he nor Aunt Elizabeth had ever mentioned it. Was the memory of it as painful and obsessive for her as well, still? And could a shock like that have done it, or at least started it?

  “Ever since we took on country ways,” Marian said lightly. She placed a Venetian bud vase with a single yellow rose on the tray. “She’ll be fine, once she begins to recognize her limitations. Seventy-four is seventy-four.”

  “Go up and talk to her, Marian,” Ben said.

  “I will, darling,” Marian said. She lifted the tray. “Later.”

  He brought his hand against the edge of the tray. “Now. For me?”

  “Ben, I’m late,” Marian protested. “As soon as I’ve – ”

  “I’ll take that up to the old lady.” He tried to take the tray away from her.

  “What are you doing?” She held it tighter, instinctively protective, and with a threat in her voice and face that the quick, nervous laugh failed to cover.

  “It’s important that you talk to her now,” Ben said.

  “I’ll talk to her later,” Marian insisted, and looked down at Ben’s hands on the tray. “Now, darling – please.” He let go of the tray and the threat softened to an ingratiating smile, playfully scolding. “My responsibility, after all,” she reminded him. She kissed the air between them and left Ben in the kitchen.

  Aunt Elizabeth’s door was closed when Marian passed it. She might have been too harsh with her, though probably not as insensitive as Aunt Elizabeth had no doubt made out to Ben. She should have realized that age was Aunt Elizabeth’s vulnerable point and any reference to it would bruise her vanity. She took the keys to the double doors and the sitting room out of her pocket. She’d go in to see her later and apologize.

  Marian climbed the five steps and unlocked the outer door, steadying the tray quickly as the bud vase slid toward the Spode bowl. She pulled the key out and left the door open behind her.

  Vulnerable: the word came back to her. Ben and the pool; why had she even hinted at it? Not deliberately certainly, not to hurt him. She tried to remember the context as she turned the key to unlock the sitting room door. If it had come out as a taunting reminder, that had not been her intention. How could it be?

  She entered the room and the silver vases, the gold pitcher and candlesticks she had found yesterday glittered in the room’s soft, peaceful light, and for the moment crowded Aunt Elizabeth and Ben and what Marian had or hadn’t said out of her mind. She carried the tray to the tea table, set it down, and then turned slowly, surveying the room – from the carved door (gold faceted today, a huge medallion) to the bowls of flowers and candelabra set on polished tables to the mass of faces graced now with vases filled with wildflowers. She started to move toward the pictures and then stopped suddenly and spun around to face the door she’d left open. Ben was watching her silently.

  She felt her heart jump. “My God!” she cried. She looked quickly at the carved door, and then back at Ben, her voice hushed. “You frightened me.”

  He was coming into the room, which made Marian hold out her hands, cautioning.

  “Please, darling,” she whispered, moving toward him, “she doesn’t like anyone in here.”

  Ben stopped and looked slowly around the room. “Where is she?” he asked with something more than simple curiosity.

  Marian’s voice became even softer. “In her bedroom.” She nodded at the carved door. “Asleep.”

  Ben listened to the hum. “What’s that noise?”

  “I don’t know; air conditioner probably. It’s in her bedroom.”

  She had slipped her hand through his arm and was trying to guide him back to the door. He moved away from her and walked toward the bedroom, following the sound of the hum.

  “Exquisite, isn’t it?” Marian said as Ben looked at the carvings in the door.

  “It’s something,” he said. He began to trace the pattern, and Marian found herself tensing, as though his fingers were moving over her own body.

  “Come on, Ben,” she called softly, “let me lock up.”

  “In a minute,” he said. He walked slowly across the room, stopping at the gold pitcher which he remembered seeing the day before. “You brought it up here,” he said.

  “Yes.” He seemed surprised. “I showed it to her yesterday,” Marian said defensively. “She asked me to leave it here. The candlesticks as well.” It came out effortlessly, and however right it seemed in view of the intrusion, it was a lie, which disturbed her.

  “You see her regularly?” Ben asked.

  “Fairly,” Marian said, and that disturbed her as well.

  He was moving toward the photographs, and Marian felt herself tensing even more. “Her collection,” she said, keeping her voice low. She came beside him. “Fascinating. People she’s known all over the world. It’s her whole life, these pictures.” She saw him lingering over a photograph on the edge of the table – a child unsmiling. Marian tugged at Ben’s arm. “It’s very personal, darling; one of her crotchets, I’m afraid.” She tugged again. “I know this would upset her.”

  Ben looked at her, and though she was trying to cover it with a smile, he saw the face over the tray again. “What are you so nervous about?” he said.

  “I’m not nervous. I told you, she doesn’t like anyone in here.” She pulled the keys out of her pocket. “Can we leave now?”

  “I’ve been curious about this room,” Ben said.

  “Well,” Marian said with a sweep of her hand, “you’ve seen it.”

  “Why do you keep it locked?”

  “She prefers it that way.”

  “And she gave you the keys?”

  “They were in the envelope the Allardyces left.”

  He was beginning to walk across the room, thank God, toward the door. “Were the keys you used to wind the clocks in there too?” he asked casually.

  Marian hesitated, just briefly. “The clock keys were in the cases, most of them. Why bring that up?”

  “I just wondered if you wound all those clocks.”

  “Of course I did. You’ve seen me doing it.”

  “They’re working now, you know. How’d you finally manage it?”

  “Persistence. Look, this is beginning to sound like the third degree.”

  “I don’t mean it that way,” Ben said. “You just seem to know more than any of us around here.” He nodded at the tray beside the wingchair. “Her lunch is getting cold. You’d better call her.”

  “She’ll come out when we leave. Can we now?” Ben didn’t move. “God, you’re acting strange. I’ve told you, honey, she doesn’t like anyone in her room.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me, yes.” She looked at the carved door again, anxiously. “We agreed, didn’t we – she’s my responsibility?”

  “You think maybe she’s become too much of a responsibility, Marian? The house too?”

  “I’m not complaining, am I?”

  “No,” Ben said, “you’re not.”

  “Then don’t you.” She came closer to him and gave him a long, overly exasperated sigh. He s
tared at her, and though she could see her face in the pupils, the eyes seemed turned inward. “What is it, darling?” she whispered. “Tell me.”

  It had happened again, very briefly – the sudden blurring, the wedge of pain between his eyes. He winced and felt her hands on his face.

  “Ben?”

  Her features slid back onto her face.

  “How important is it to you, Marian? This house?”

  The questioning, the almost belligerent way he had come into the room should have prepared her. It hadn’t and she could feel her throat tighten around the reply. “Important enough, I guess. Why?”

  “If I asked you to,” he said very slowly, “would you give it up?”

  “Give it up?”

  He nodded, and when she asked, “Ben, are you serious?” he nodded again.

  “Why?” Her voice caught on the word.

  “You can ask that, after what happened here last night?”

  “Last night?”

  “What if I hadn’t reached David in time, Marian?”

  She shook the thought out of her head and said, “Don’t even suggest something like that.” Then, trying to keep her voice steady: “What has that got to do with the house, with leaving? Look, I can’t believe you’re serious.”

  “I am, Marian.”

  “Ben, Aunt Elizabeth admitted she was in David’s room – ”

  “ – and everything else that’s been happening to us here, Marian – is that Aunt Elizabeth’s fault as well?”

  “I’m not blaming Aunt Elizabeth, and I’m certainly not blaming a house. Honey, I don’t even know what the ‘everything else’ is supposed to be.”

  “How could you, Marian? You’ve become too obsessed with it all to see anything else clearly.”

  “I am not obsessed with it.”

  “What would you call it then?”

  “Just what it is: a responsibility.”

  “One that’s a hell of a lot more than you thought it would be.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s mine as long as we’re here.” She paused and let him see how wearying it all was. “Ben – do you know how ridiculous it sounds? To read threat into a house. If I don’t see it clearly, isn’t it possible there’s nothing clear to see?” She passed her hand over his hair. “And maybe whatever you think is happening, is only happening here?” She was rubbing the back of his neck. “In your mind?”

  “Would you give it up, Marian?” he repeated. “For me? Whether it’s in my mind or not, would you give it up?”

  “Are you asking me to do that, Ben?”

  “Would you?”

  “It’s everything we’ve ever wanted,” Marian said faintly.

  “Everything you’ve ever wanted, Marian.”

  “For us.” She looked at him silently for a long while and then rested her face against his shoulder, watching the carved door behind him. “Of course, Ben,” she said. It was hardly a whisper, almost indistinguishable from the sound of the hum. She fixed her eyes on the center of the medallion, projecting the same thought over and over: Don’t let him ask it, don’t let him ask it . . .

  “Something’s happening to me, Marian.” She heard him far away.

  “Yes, Ben?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Things are . . . real to me . . . that I know don’t exist. So goddamned real. There are times when I just can’t control what comes into my head. It’s become terrifying.” He was holding her closer; she felt his head bury itself against her. “It’s like . . . hallucinating. I know it’s not there . . . and yet it’s real. It’s never happened before, Marian, never before this house. It is the house. As crazy as it sounds, I know it’s the house.”

  Her fingers moved slower, soothing, against the back of his neck.

  “How is that possible, Ben?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was no reason to disbelieve at least part of what he was saying; but belief or not, or sympathy, or fear – they were all swirling around somewhere beyond the periphery of the medallion. And as much as she tried to feel them, the only thing that was working on her emotionally was the thought that he would ask her to give up the house. “If it were true, darling,” she said, “if I could believe what you’re saying – God, don’t you think we’d leave? I’d drag us all out of here so fast. But it’s a house, nothing more than a house. And if everything is suspect all of a sudden – from me all the way down to the ticking of a clock – well, forgive me, Ben, but isn’t that part of the hallucination as well? Trust me, darling. There’s nothing here to threaten us. Nothing.” She waited and then asked him again: “Are you asking me to give it up? All of it? Is that what you want?”

  He said “No” finally; not said it, merely indicated it by leaving her question unanswered and listening quietly to Marian’s renewed promises and the assurance, repeated several times, that there was nothing wrong with him. It was everything from too much sun to not enough sleep; it was imagination and tension and all the residue of the city; their adjustment to the house, the responsibility of it; and, yes, if it had to be brought up again, the reverberating shock of the pool incident. And all the rest of it. He was not losing his mind. He was not on the edge of a breakdown.

  Ben left the room eventually; possibly no more reassured, but at least the question of giving up the house had been suspended, and that had to be some kind of progress; there had to be some slight validity in what she was saying.

  The house. The word he’d used: obsession . . .

  It delayed itself until she was alone again, with the sitting room door closed; and at first the realization jolted her like a shock wave: the house was insinuating itself into the deepest part of her being; it was taking possession of her. So completely that she couldn’t say with certainty what her life would be like, even with Ben and David, if she were confronted with the terrible choice of giving up the house or not giving up the house. How could she, in view of the mystery of it, and the approbation it showered on her so constantly – in every room, more and more, in the grounds and the pool and even the clocks ticking? Like the Allardyces had suggested, it was coming alive, bit by bit, and all through her.

  She could read confirmation in the lines and curves cut into the door, and hear it in the voice of the room, and the peace that had replaced the shock wave, descending on her like grace.

  (9)

  It was mid-afternoon when Marian came out of the sitting room. The security and peace – the feeling that what she was being called upon to do was right, was morally defensible – faded with the click of the lock; reality obtruded, and with it an edginess, a sudden loss of clarity. She had lied to Ben, and however noble the reason, she had never deliberately done that before. Of course he had put her in that position; worst of all, he had made her confront the fact that her life might slowly be divorcing itself from his. And while there might be strength to face that awful possibility in the sitting room (where, at one point, she even recognized it as a kind of elevation), the sitting room was behind her now, the insights locked inside. And what a minute before had been enlightenment could become, if she let herself dwell on it, moral upheaval; and edginess, panic. Unless she found something in the house – the greenhouse, the terrace, whatever – to distract herself.

  Aunt Elizabeth’s door was still closed, thankfully, and so was the door to Ben’s study. She looked out the kitchen window for David; his book was on the terrace, with the “G.I. Joe” and the tangle of “Hot Wheels” equipment.

  David. David. If ever there were the question of a choice, then wouldn’t David be involved? And if David were involved, then how could there possibly be any choice?

  She went outside and scanned the rear lawn for him. (It was greener, the shrubs growing fuller.) She called, “Dav
id?” and walked the length of the terrace. She called again, and heard him say, “Coming!” from the living room. Then she heard a crash of glass in the area of the voice.

  She rushed into the room and saw him standing, very frightened, above a shattered crystal bowl.

  “It slipped!” he said.

  “Slipped?” She was staring at the pieces scattered over the Aubusson. “What were you doing with it?”

  “Nothing.” He backed away. He’d been holding it in front of his face, scanning the room and watching the distortion through the base of the bowl.

  “That bowl was precious,” Marian said. “Look at it!”

  “It just slipped,” David repeated. “I didn’t mean to break it.”

  “I don’t care what you meant.” She fell to her knees and spread her hands helplessly over the broken crystal.

  “Daddy can glue it maybe,” he said.

  Marian closed her eyes tightly and heard her voice rising, trembling with emotion. “I’ve told you – you’re not to come into this room.”

  “There was nothing to do,” he whined.

  “I don’t care,” Marian yelled across the room. “You are not to touch her things!” She hammered her fist against her knee. “Ever!” Again. “Ever!” and again. “Ever!”

  When she opened her eyes he was gone. Marian bent forward and began to gather up the pieces gently. The knot she had felt inside herself when she left the sitting room tightened, and she began to sob. For the bowl at first, and then David, and then herself.

  She was still sobbing when she found David later, sitting in the middle of the steps in front of the house. He started to rise when he saw her, but she put her arms around him and sat beside him.

  “Forgive me, baby,” Marian said. “Whatever I said in there, I didn’t mean any of it. Please forgive me.”