by Zenith Brown
“Oh, I’m crazy—but it’s . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “If you really want him to stay I’ll speak to Irene.”
Not, I thought, that it would do much good. I closed my door and put my bag with Alan’s letters in it on the desk. Natalie had come along with me. She sat down on the window seat and stared out the window. I changed my dress and powdered my nose. She just sat there, and when I was ready to go she got up and came with me. It made me rather uncomfortable, having her tag along after me, as if she couldn’t bear to be alone. But we only got as far as the first landing. And there we stopped, both of us, and witnessed what still seems to me the most extraordinary scene I’ve ever witnessed outside of an old-fashioned melodrama. Not that there was anything in the least melodramatic about it. There wasn’t. It was all too horribly real, and at the same time so refined and civilized and unerring in its cruelty that it was almost unbelievable.
I was just ahead of Natalie, a little below the turn in the carved pine stairway. In the hall below, coming from the library hyphen, so white and at the same time so dark that she looked more like a sleepwalker bound by some terrible dream, was Mara Winthrop. Behind her, graceful and casual as a summer breeze, a little smile on her red lips and in her flower-like eyes, was her mother. She held out her hand to Major Tillyard, and drew it back as the sound outside of a car stopping and quick feet, one pair light as thistledown, one heavy as a percheron’s, came up the stairs.
Mara, one hand on the newel post, her foot on the bottom step, stopped and looked dully at the door as her mother looked brightly at it, her perfectly arched brows raised ever so slightly. The screen rattled alarmingly, Yarborough appeared from somewhere and unhooked it. And in came Dan and Cheryl.
It seems silly to say that the whole hall was suddenly lighted up, but it’s quite true. Or that they came hand in hand through fields of black-eyed susans, because they weren’t hand in hand, and there weren’t any black-eyed susans nearer than the cow pasture. But that was the illusion I got—and unfortunately I wasn’t the only one. Irene’s delicate hand completed its downward arc to her side. The smile on her lips never faltered, nothing about her changed. But Cheryl stopped as if she had been struck, and Dan stopped too, a slow dark flush rising in his cheeks. Mara’s eyes closed as her hand tightened on the newel post. The silence, broken by the long unearthly scream of a peacock, that I’d got so used to now I never heard it any more, fell on us like a clap of thunder. In it, very clearly, and as smooth and—I couldn’t help but think—treacherous as quicksand, moved Irene’s voice.
“If you were brought up to regard divorce as undesirable, Cheryl, I’m surprised you weren’t taught that death has its conventions too—and that a lady doesn’t go dancing about the countryside with an old lover before her husband is even in his grave. But if you have no feeling, I have; and Dan has too, if you will leave him alone. I’ll ask you not to come a step further into this house, if you please. You may wait outside—Anna will bring your things, Jim will drive you wherever you wish to go. I’ll send the few items you brought with you.—Ring for Anna, Dan.”
For a moment that seemed an eternity Cheryl stood there, too stunned to move, her lips parted, ivory pale. And Dan stood there too. And then he turned, without a single glance at any one of us.
“Let’s go,” he said. He took her by the hand. “We’re taking your car, Grace.”
I felt myself nodding my head quite mechanically, just as the idea came hurtling into my mind that this would never have happened if it hadn’t been for that terrible business of the cigarette lighter.
Dan took a step toward the door. His mother’s voice was like a bell, and yet I know she never raised it, or changed a note of it.
“Dan,” she said. “If you go out of his house with Cheryl, you will not come back . . . nor will you get one dollar of your father’s estate.”
“That’s okay with me, Mother, and okay with Cheryl.”
His voice was as quiet, as even, and as rock-ribbed as her own. He took another step toward the door, pulling Cheryl with him.
“Dan!” Irene said. “You’re perfectly free to choose your life. I’ve never interfered with that. I only wish to say, before you make your choice, that if you make this one, not only will you get none of your father’s estate . . . Mara will get none of it. It will go—all of it—to Natalie. You’re free to choose, my dear, for both your sister and yourself.”
Dan’s hand gripping Cheryl’s tightened; but his eyes, after one incredulous glance at his mother, moved to Mara, still clinging there to the carved newel post.
She raised her head, her eyes widening, lips opening, as the meaning of what Irene had said seeped slowly into her mind. Then her eyes moved, bewildered and stricken, from her brother to Cheryl.
And Cheryl drew her hand away from Dan’s. “Good-bye,” she said.
20
I’ve tried since to think which was the worst of the individual cataclysms focused just then in Romney’s mellowed carved pine hall. Cheryl’s, for instance, as the door closed softly but with such dead finality behind her; or Dan’s, standing there helplessly, torn between his own heart’s desire and his unselfish loyalty to the dark child clinging to the newel post, the memory of that scene at the Fountain Inn still between them. Or Mara’s own, as she realized what her brother and Cheryl were giving up for her . . . or Irene’s as she saw her own ego triumph once more over the lives of her children.
Or perhaps, I thought, as I became aware of him, the toilworn farmer’s standing there like a dim ghost outside the screen, his hat gripped in his knotted hands. How long Mr. Keane had been there, or when he was there no longer, I haven’t an idea. I only know that when I looked where Cheryl had been it was his shadowy earth-colored figure I saw, and when Mara turned and crept up the stairs, and Dan without so much as a sideways glance at his mother went grimly up after her, leaving the doorway clear, Mr. Keane wasn’t there any more.
I’m sure Irene hadn’t seen him at all. She stood perfectly motionless, her face as pale as alabaster, like a medicine man who had willed the sky to fall and finds that it has, and stands stunned, appalled at his own power. Then suddenly it was all over. Her breath exhaled slowly. She moistened her lips with her pointed delicate tongue and glanced quickly around at her guests. They stood, each in his own spot, like a collection of Lot’s wives changed to stone instead of salt.
She turned easily to the old darky blocking the hyphen door, putty-colored, his eyes all whites behind their thick lenses.
“It must be time for dinner, Yarborough,” she said, as if nothing of this had really happened.
“Mus’ is,” Yarborough said mechanically. He opened the door, and we went in, Natalie, Mr. Dunthorne, Major Tillyard, Irene and I, to a meal that would have made a Trappist monastery sound like a nest of holiday magpies.
I’ve tried to remember too whether a little later I was really surprised, or whether by then nothing Irene did could any longer surprise me. We were having coffee in the library. Mr. Dunthorne—his face the color of a scalded beet, except where his sunglasses had left long whitish rings, so that he looked rather like a dreadfully debauched owl—had excused himself, and had been followed almost at once by Natalie Lane. And Irene suddenly got up, sending her spode coffee cup crashing to the floor, shattering into forty pieces, and stood in front of the fireplace, her fragile body as rigid as a glass rod.
Major Tillyard and I watched her, too startled to make the slightest movement toward the broken cup and saucer. Her lovely Dresden-china head raised slowly, as if it was suddenly aware of the weight of folly upon it, until her eyes rested on the painted face of her husband’s portrait in the overmantel. She looked at it a long, long time, her delicate hands clasping the mantel until her scarlet fingernails stood out livid against the old wood. Then she dropped her head against them, her shoulders quivering convulsively. Both Major Tillyard and I stared at her. I don’t think either of us believed our eyes. Then he put down his coffee a
nd got up.
“Please, dearest!” he said gently. He put his arm around her trembling shoulders. She turned and buried her face against him a moment, clutching convulsively at his dinner coat lapels. Then she pushed him gently away and turned, facing us, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, I’m a beast! A beast!” she said passionately. “I don’t know why I do these horrible things!”
She raised her eyes to her husband’s portrait.
“Forgive me—oh, forgive me!” she whispered.
She stood silent a moment, then brushed the tears from her eyes and turned to the other man, the living one.
“Oh Sidney, don’t think I’m too horrible! You’ve been right from the beginning! Go get Dan and Mara—bring them both to me! Please, my dear!”
Major Tillyard raised her hand and pressed his lips to it. “I knew you’d come to yourself, Irene,” he said quietly. “I’ll get them, now.”
She watched him go with an expression nearer tenderness than I’d yet seen on her perfect face. When he closed the door she sat down beside me on the sofa. She didn’t speak for a long time. Then she said, “I’m going to let them have their money. Sidney thinks it’s the only thing, and . . . I guess it is. Dan can . . .’”
Her voice caught, but she went on with it.
“. . . can do as he likes. And Mara can go abroad and get away from the Keane boy. And . . . my conscience will be clear.”
She made a weary final gesture, dropped her head back on the linen slip cover and closed her eyes.
“What if Mara won’t go, Irene?” I asked. “What if she’s really in love with Alan Keane?”
She didn’t even open her eyes. “Mara’s a child emotionally. She’ll forget him in two weeks.”
“And . . . if she doesn’t?”
She took a deep, vaguely exasperated breath and raised her head. “If she doesn’t . . . well, I expect Sidney Tillyard knows enough about him to send him back to the penitentiary until she does.”
I looked up at the strong kindly face in the overmantel. There was no change in the painted eyes. The days when pictures fell off the walls and statues off their pedestals to avenge themselves or their loved ones were gone, I thought to myself . . . and I could almost hear old Yarborough answering, ‘mus’is.’
I put my coffee cup on the silver balcony tray and got up. There was a great deal I should have liked to say, just then. But I knew if I said anything I’d probably say too much, and make things worse, possibly, than they already were. So I only said, “By the way, Irene, Natalie seems terribly anxious to have Mr. Dunthorne around. I said I thought you wouldn’t mind. You don’t, do you?”
“Not at all,” she said—almost cordially, to my amazement. “At least not until he starts peeling. I should think he’d be awfully unattractive with all the skin off his nose. Still, he has quite a lot of money, I believe. He can have the Green Room. Tell Yarborough, will you, dear?”
I don’t know why I should have been so upset by that. I ought to have been delighted that some things at Romney were simple. But I wasn’t. I was even angrier than I was upset, and for a moment I stood there struggling against an almost overpowering temptation to speak my mind . . . knowing all the time that it would be a barren momentary luxury that somebody would have to pay for. Irene bent forward, dipped a coffee spoon daintily into the gorgeous cream jug and raised it to her lips. The mood of remorse that had so devastated her seemed to me to be definitely slipping. Perhaps—I thought—if I left her under the clear eyes of the man over the mantel it would last until Dan and Mara came. I moved toward the door, the one that Alan had gone through, and Mara, that opened into the gardens toward Mrs. Jellyby’s white vine-covered cottage.
Irene put her spoon down on the tray.
“Grace,” she said, a tiny cloud between her arched brows. “Is it just my imagination, or does it seem to you that Natalie’s attitude has . . . well, changed, some way?”
“Why?” I asked. “Isn’t she . . . co-operating?”
“It isn’t that, exactly,” Irene said, thoughtfully. “It’s just that since this . . . awful business she’s been . . . well, I don’t mean ungrateful, but a little as if being here wasn’t a privilege, say, as much as a . . . a right, if you see what I mean.”
I thought suddenly of the auburn-tipped figure that I’d seen disappearing behind the fluted columns when I’d looked out the open window the night before, after Dr. Birdsong and Major Tillyard had gone.
“It sounds insane, but it’s sort of as if she thought—to put it in the most vulgar possible way—she had something on me,” Irene said.
“You wouldn’t think she knows you’re supposed to let her have any part of her uncle’s estate, if she needs it?” I inquired, tentatively. “I take it she doesn’t need it.”
She shook her head.
“She couldn’t know, possibly. You see, the will that was probated left everything to me. Joe’s instructions about Natalie, and your children, are in a letter to me. I don’t actually have to follow them—I mean you’re the only person I’ve ever told. Of course, I wouldn’t not follow them for the world—my will does—but as for letting her have the money now, I don’t think that’s necessary. I mean, I’ve been very liberal with her. I don’t think it hurts a girl to make her own living, it teaches her self-reliance, and of course Natalie’s father should have left her comfortably off. He had more money than we had to begin with, but he lost it all in 1929 and jumped off the roof of his club in Detroit. Natalie used his insurance to pay back people he’d borrowed from, which I do think was too quixotic of her—she wasn’t obliged to, legally.”
I stood there, silently revising my opinion of Natalie Lane.
“Of course, if one of the boys had married her . . . But she acted almost as foolishly as they did. She could have had Rick perfectly easily, if she’d taken the trouble.”
I realized she was talking to justify herself in her own mind, not in mine.
“As a matter of fact I can’t really say how much there’ll be for her. I’ve spent quite a lot on her. For instance, I got a fur coat for her last year that cost $795.00.”
“You mean, you’re keeping an account of everything you . . .”
She looked astonished at my stupidity.
“Of course! My dear Grace, I couldn’t afford to give her an eight hundred dollar coat. Don’t be absurd.”
“She’d probably rather have worn her old one, or had a cloth coat for a hundred dollars,” I said.
“Well, that’s being silly. A girl ought to dress well.”
It occurred to me again that above all odds Irene Winthrop was the most exasperating woman I ever knew.
“I hope you aren’t charging her board here,” I said, turning to the door. I couldn’t tell from the expression on her face whether I’d struck on the truth, suggested a new idea, and I didn’t stay to find out. I heard someone coming through the hyphen, and got out. I didn’t want to be in on what, in Irene’s rapidly changing mood, was bound to be a pretty stormy session.
I closed the door, and stood a moment, the cool fragrant night soothing my exasperated temper. It was very lovely, the stars and the moon on the shimmering river, and on Mrs. Jellyby’s little white-washed cabin under the willow tree. The yellow light in its two windows on either side of the open door made it look like a friendly jack-o’-lantern peering up from the river bank. As I watched it the door closed, leaving only the two eyes, and they closed one by one as someone drew down the blinds. Then the door opened again, and two dark figures came out and up the brick walk. They came almost even with me, and stopped. I heard Mrs. Jellyby’s harsh voice.
“It’s not as easy to do as talk about. Nothing is, if it’s worth doing. You go home, and brew some tea from those leaves, and get some rest.”
It was Mr. Keane’s slow bitter drawl that answered.
“With my boy in jail?”
“If you think it’ll help him having you go all to pieces, don’t do it,” Mrs. Jellyb
y said. “Alan’ll be all right. Jail will keep him out of mischief. We’ll get a lawyer for him that’ll skin the pants off Barney Purcell.”
“I haven’t got money to pay any more lawyers,” Mrs. Keane said helplessly.
“Stuff,” Mrs. Jellyby said. “I’ll get the money. You could get it yourself if you’d go to Irene Winthrop and tell her half the money the government paid for ploughing down fifty acres of soy beans, and fifty acres of clover, and all the other practices—sharp practices, I call them—belongs to you, not her.”
I could hear the farmer’s long-drawn breath as he said, “I’ve spoken to her about that, more than once.”
And I could see Mrs. Jellyby’s head nodding grimly.
“The trouble with you is you’re a gentleman and you think Irene Winthrop’s a lady. She’d skin a flea for its tallow. If you’d go and tell her you’ll leave the farm if she doesn’t draw in her horns, she’d eat out of your hand.”
“I don’t aim to have her do that,” Mr. Keane said. “All I want is the boy given a chance. If Mr. Winthrop had lived—”
“If Mr. Winthrop had lived,” Mrs. Jellyby said crisply, “none of this would have happened. Or if he hadn’t thought Irene had a man’s head. What a woman needs is a woman’s head and a woman’s heart. Irene’s got a man’s head and a stone’s heart and a woman’s vanity.—Good night, Mr. Keane. Don’t fret about Alan. If he’s in jail he’s not hanging around the slot machines in a saloon that calls itself a Bar B Q.”
Mr. Keane put on his hat and moved off toward the drive. Mrs. Jellyby stood watching him a moment, and I heard her rusty voice whisper, “Good night—old friend.” She cleared her throat violently and turned back the way she’d come.
21
I moved out from the shadow of the boxwood, its eerie rustle and faint nostalgic perfume full of a thousand memories, started toward the back porch, and stopped. Mr. Keane had stopped too, and was standing, looking up at the door. Even in the pale white light I could see the indecision on his face as he took a step up, and backed down again . . . trying, I knew, to get up courage enough to see Miz’ Winthrop. I turned back and wandered slowly down the lawn toward the river. At the end, where a stone balustrade covered with starry cypress vine marked the bank, I saw a white figure sitting, looking out over the placid moonlit water, the white smoke of a cigar rising like a spirit picture about his head.