Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

  It was alive, all around her it was alive, and how else had it come alive but through her? And wasn’t that the uneasiness she was feeling – the growing awareness of her power in the house, the enormity of the mystery enveloping her life, which, but for the sanctuary of the sitting room, would be unthinkable?

  But there was something more immediate feeding the uneasiness – an emanation from somewhere else in the house that filled the greenhouse with a sickly, over-ripe sweetness.

  Marian stopped suddenly. She was standing exactly where Aunt Elizabeth had been standing that morning.

  She said the name aloud: “Aunt Elizabeth . . .” and felt something coil inside her. The sweetness became intolerable. She brushed past the overhanging foliage, flicked off the lights and closed the door behind her, fixing her eyes on the opposite end of the living room and then the head of the stairs and then the door to Aunt Elizabeth’s room. She pushed it open and stood frozen in the doorway.

  Aunt Elizabeth’s head was thrown back against the pillow, her mouth pulled open hideously, her eyes staring back at the headboard. Ben was in the chair beside the bed, slumped forward, his arms clutching his stomach.

  Marian approached the bed and stared for a long time at Aunt Elizabeth before her hand touched Ben’s shoulder. Ben raised his face to her slowly.

  “Oh, God,” Marian whispered. “Oh, God.”

  Ben continued to stare up at her, blank and silent, even when she brought her hand to her mouth and turned her back to the bed.

  A while later, the phone rang. It was the doctor who told Marian, “I’ll be damned if I can find any Seventeen Shore Road, as long as I’ve lived here. Where in God’s name are you?”

  (10)

  When Marian came back into the room, Ben had covered Aunt Elizabeth’s body with a blanket. She told him about the doctor, and he replied, tonelessly, “It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?” He moved away from the bed, his face still blank with shock, and stood with his back to her, looking out the window. She came behind him.

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said quietly. When she tried to put her arms around him, he moved away from her, going to the bureau which was piled neatly with Aunt Elizabeth’s effects – toiletries, the huge sunglasses, a few paperbacks, a lace handkerchief. Her paint box and the two canvases were against the wall, the straw sunhat on a chair next to them.

  Marian watched him pace silently; every once in a while he would look at the small shrouded figure on the bed.

  “We can’t do anything until he gets here,” Marian said. “Then who do you want to call?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and it was like a casual wave of his hand, dismissing her.

  He stopped pacing and leaned his elbow against a large armoire with spiring finials. He was facing the wall and massaging the back of his neck. Her presence was obviously as much of an intrusion as his had been in the sitting room.

  “We’ll have to tell David,” she said.

  Ben lowered his elbow and looked across at her. “Where is he?”

  “Downstairs.”

  Ben thought a moment. “I’ll tell him,” he said, and before Marian could reply he had walked out of the room.

  As stunned, as numb with fatigue as he seemed, he handled everything with a strength and determination that surprised her – the doctor, the call to the undertaker, and especially David’s wide-eyed, inarticulate grief which found the release of tears only later, when Marian came into the sewing room.

  Ben avoided her through it all, pointedly enough for her not to force herself on him, and shock and grief, she knew, were only partly responsible for the distance. It was unspoken this time but it was clear enough: the house, despite the testimony of the doctor, despite all reason, was responsible for Aunt Elizabeth’s death, and Marian was acting in complicity with the house. He believed it, there was no question in Marian’s mind that he actually believed it.

  She had not willed Aunt Elizabeth’s death, never for one moment; and whatever premonition, brief and frightening, she herself had had in the greenhouse, however beyond her understanding the mystery of the house was at this point, no amount of silence and suspicion would convince her that she had. The idea was unspeakable.

  They would wait until morning to leave, he told her later, and her only reply was a cold, “Whatever you say.” (Absolutely unspeakable.) He spent the night closed in the study, with David on the couch and himself, as far as she could tell, propped up in a chair. The shutting of the door was like a blow against her, which no amount of grief or confusion of mind could excuse as far as Marian was concerned.

  She went back to the greenhouse and paced the aisles for a long while, until the turmoil inside her – the feeling that she was being forced, against her will, into an impossible position, one absolutely incapable of resolution – until it drove her up to the refuge, the sweet light and comfort of the sitting room, where there was, so quickly and so simply, peace and resolution.

  The next morning she announced to Ben that she was not going back with him for Aunt Elizabeth’s funeral.

  She had come into their bedroom where Ben was packing a small suitcase. He stopped between the open drawer in his bureau and the bed. “Not coming back.” He repeated it slowly, as if there were an anagram hidden in the words. The lines in his forehead and between his eyes deepened.

  Marian shook her head and let him see how difficult the decision had been. “I can’t.” She raised her hands helplessly.

  Ben was silent for a few moments. He threw several balls of dark socks into the suitcase, moving away from her. “I suppose you’ve thought about it,” he said.

  “All night.”

  There was another pause; he walked back to the drawer and slid it shut slowly. “Okay,” he said; “any way you want it.”

  “I don’t want it, Ben,” Marian said, and her voice became more sincere and apologetic. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

  “I understand, Marian,” Ben said. He lowered the lid of the suitcase and played with the latches.

  Marian came to the edge of the bed and sat beside the suitcase, covering his hand with hers. “How can I leave her, Ben? You know how she depends on me for everything.”

  He pulled his hand away, and softened the gesture with a tight smile. “I said I understand, Marian. Don’t agonize over it.”

  “I am. I know what Aunt Elizabeth meant to you. I’d give anything to be able to come back.”

  “Simple question of priorities.” He snapped the latches shut and lifted the suitcase to the floor. “By all means stay.” He went to the closet and pulled out a blue tie and a blue-and-black check sport jacket. “David comes with me of course.”

  “David?”

  He closed the closet door. “David,” he said firmly. “Can you pack a bag for him?”

  She hadn’t planned on his taking David, hadn’t even considered David in making her decision; and the locked-out feeling of the night before came back to her, more intense, deeper than mere hurt or resentment, though there was that too. She rose from the bed and had to clear her throat before she could ask, “How long do you expect to be gone?”

  Ben shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  It was becoming harder for her to speak. “That’s no kind of answer, Ben,” she said.

  “I’m being honest. There’ll be things to do after the funeral.”

  “I know, but – three days? Four? A week?”

  “I’ll let you know, okay?”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I know myself.”

  But you will be back? she wanted to say. But of course they’d be back, how could they not come back? He must have seen the question in her face, because he looked at her very deeply, and it was either pain or weariness, or just that simple fact of his life once
again, that seemed to creep into his voice and warm it a little. “When this is over, Marian, we’ll talk.”

  “Yes,” Marian said, and maybe after a small separation she would feel comfortable enough with him to speak, to have it out finally one way or another.

  “One more time,” he said, and the warmth had gone out of his voice with the ultimatum.

  She nodded slowly and waited for something inside herself to be called up again, either through love or through fear. There was neither, only a vaguely unsettling resignation. She tried telling herself that there was nothing important enough to keep her alone in the house, nothing worth the pain of separation. From David. From Ben. Who had been her whole life. Who were her life.

  None of it worked, none of it was strong enough to make her say to Ben, “All right, I’ll leave the house. I’ll come with you.” If it was a question of choice this one time, the new life or the old, then the choice had to be the house and Mrs. Allardyce. That was her chief responsibility (Ben and even David could do without her for a few days), and that, she’d admit to herself eventually, would be the really wrenching separation. This one time.

  She told Ben again how truly sorry she was, how she would give anything to be able to call back her words to Aunt Elizabeth on the day of her death, how truly she had loved her, and would mourn her.

  “I’ll pray for her soul,” Marian said.

  Ben’s eyes clouded. He nodded and turned away from her. She saw him raise his hand to his head and then feel his way almost blindly to the edge of the bed.

  “Ben?” she called. “Are you all right?”

  He leaned forward. “Pack David’s bag,” he said. His hands covered his face, his fingers bent and bloodless against his forehead.

  She hesitated until he said, “I’m all right.” It was pain, not grief in his voice. He lowered his hands then, and went into the bathroom without looking at her.

  She called his name again and there was no reply, only the sound of water running.

  Marian went into David’s room, and while she was piling his clothes into the suitcase, she started to weep quietly. She was still weeping when she saw them to the car. Ben’s face was pale and there were beads of sweat like blisters along his hairline. He was all right, he insisted again, and his kiss, when Marian brought her face down to the open window, was brief and mechanical. The car pulled away and she strained to see David look back at her through the rear window, which made her weep for a long time after they had passed out of sight, beyond the green and rolling sweep of lawn.

  Whatever her resolution, the loneliness of those first few hours without them would be unbearable, she had thought. She was wrong. Halfway around the house, distracting herself with the new growth in the flowerbeds, her eyes were dry, and while she would miss them of course, right now she felt secure and completely at peace in the vast, quiet shade of the house and the trees. Even the realization (and had it ever occurred to Ben?) that she was without a car and was, effectively, sealed off from the outside world, heightened her sense of freedom.

  There were suddenly no encumbrances, nothing to distract her from the house. And, curiously, no guilt at all in the feeling – as though the spirit of the sitting room had been released and was hovering guardian-like over her as she walked the grounds.

  She had come under the rounded bay in the west wing. She looked up at the curtained windows and felt Mrs. Allardyce very close, even closer than in the sitting room. And if ever, surely she would show herself to Marian now, with the two of them alone together in the house. And maybe reveal even a part of the mystery. The pool, the clocks, the greenhouse, the grounds; the force in the sitting room that at times made Marian feel like an extension of her.

  Last night came back to her. The dinner tray. Had it happened or had she only dreamed it? She couldn’t remember.

  The breakfast tray, when she went up to the sitting room, was untouched; and so, later, was the lunch tray. Each time Marian carried the food back down to the kitchen and eventually ate it herself. Had she done the same the previous evening, or actually sat in Mrs. Allardyce’s wingchair and used her silver, her linen, her tray? In her place? She still couldn’t remember with any certainty.

  Around four, just as she finished clearing out Aunt Elizabeth’s room, Ben called her from the apartment. He brought up the car immediately. “I just wasn’t thinking this morning. You might’ve guessed as much.”

  “I’ve got everything I need here,” Marian said.

  “I don’t like you being that isolated. What if there’s an emergency?”

  “There won’t be any. Stop worrying.”

  She asked him about the funeral which would be on Thursday. There were frequent pauses on his end of the line, which Marian did nothing to fill in; when he spoke it was all slow and toneless and wearying.

  “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” he asked her.

  “About coming in? Honey, I told you – it’s impossible. Now please don’t make me feel any worse about it.”

  “That’s not my intention,” Ben said. “It’s just that . . . it might be a little easier if you were here.” There was another pause. She could hear the courtyard noises in the background. “Christ, Marian – ” Ben started to say. He stopped and she could hear his breath catch. She ran her finger along the edge of the hall commode. “How the hell did we wind up like this?”

  Please – not now, she wanted to say to him; give it a little rest. Instead, she said, “Don’t worry about us, darling.”

  “I do.”

  She changed the subject to the apartment, and his voice became a little less mournful. “It’s just the way you left it.”

  “Hot?”

  “Cool.”

  “Noisy?”

  “Listen.” He held the phone closer to the window.

  Marian put a roll of her eyes into the laugh. “Hello to the Supervisor. And a big kiss to my baby.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Ben said.

  “I’ll be here.”

  They both waited. “Miss you,” she said to end it. “ ’Bye.”

  Ben said, “ ’Bye.”

  The house was no different, no more intimidating at night, not even with all its long shadowy stretches, and basements and sub-basements, and the sporadic sounds of wind and wood creaking. She moved easily through the rooms – regally even, in the blue-and-gold gown she had put on again for the evening.

  A little after nine she turned off all the lights on the lower floor and went back up to the sitting room which was banked even more with flowers cut that afternoon from the greenhouse and the flowerbeds. The dinner tray was where she had left it at six.

  Marian lifted the matches from the table and relighted all the candles, working her way toward the hieroglyphs in the door. She stood in front of them for a while, and then cleared her throat and knocked gently, feeling the pulse of the room against her knuckles.

  “Mrs. Allardyce?” She waited, and then announced: “They’ve gone.” She brought her face closer to the door, listening. “They won’t be back for a while, I suspect.” Another pause. “There’s just me now . . . just the two of us . . .”

  Her voice had lowered to a reverent whisper which would hardly be audible beyond the thickness of the door. The side of her head touched the carvings, and her right hand.

  “I’ve been doing what I can,” Marian continued. “I don’t know what else to do. I don’t honestly know what’s expected of me, Mrs. Allardyce. It would be so much easier if you could somehow tell me . . . just a little more.” She moved her head away from the door and slid her fingers down the sculpted surface. “It’s so difficult, so frustrating to have this door between us all the time.” Her hand fell to her side. There was only the hum intensifying the stubborn silence beyond the door. “In any event,” Marian said, “the
y’ve gone.”

  She raised her arms and brushed the gray back against her temples. Ben, David – abstracted to an anonymous “they.” How many times had she just said it without thinking? She walked slowly across the room and lost the thought, watching the candlelight glow in the faces on the table. And then, near the edge, framed in lace-like silver and dimming the mass of faces surrounding her, she saw Aunt Elizabeth staring up at her.

  It took a moment for the numbing shock to pass, and then Marian’s hands jerked up to her mouth to stifle the cry. She squeezed her eyes shut, the palms of her hands came together, forefingers pressed tight against her lips, and all she could think was no and no and no. The room became suffocating all of a sudden, and the hum seemed to be boring into her. She opened her eyes again and caught herself against the edge of the table. It trembled, and a metallic rattle wove its way over the surface.

  She looked at the picture again, and again, closer, and each time a chill passed through her. It was a small color photograph of Aunt Elizabeth in the bright silk print she had worn the day they arrived at the house. She was looking up blankly, her eyes a washed-out blue; her hands were crossed placidly in her lap. There was something about the pose and the face – the line of the mouth especially – that looked tampered with and unfamiliar, as though a strange hand had tried to recreate her features.

  The shock passed slowly. Marian breathed in a long draft of air, and gradually the hum faded into the background again and became a gentle, soothing presence that steadied her hand as she reached out to touch the picture.

  “Aunt Elizabeth,” she said mournfully, “Aunt Elizabeth.”