I made some reply and turned into my drive. The Invisible Voice came from Robert’s sun porch. Beth’s station wagon was in the garage. Leaving my car in the drive, I went in through the kitchen door. There was no light on, except for the fluorescent stove panel, which glowed eerily. Kate was standing by the table—not doing anything, just standing there.
“Hi, sweetheart.” I lay down my sketching case and kissed her, dredging up a semblance of cheerfulness.
“Hi.”
“Nice day?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She picked up my case from the table and laid it on the counter, then stood with her back to me. I went to her and turned her, holding her face between my hands. She looked pale, a little tired.
“Nothing?”
“Honest—nothing.”
“Where’s Mom?”
She nodded toward the closed door of the bacchante room, beyond which I could now catch the low sound of the T.V. set.
Kate placed something in my hand: my pencil flashlight. “I borrowed it from your studio.”
“O.K.”
She started out, stopped in the doorway with a look I couldn’t read. Then she went out through the hall.
I dropped the flashlight into my jacket pocket and opened the bacchante room door. Beth did not look up as I came in, but sat on the green velvet sofa, hands folded in her lap.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.” An imprecise emphasis, betraying nothing of her present mood.
“No martini?”
“No. I didn’t think so. Tonight.”
“Guess I’ll have a Scotch.”
“All right.”
“Anything wrong with Kate?”
“No.”
I made a drink, then sat down in the club chair. A small fire crackled in the grate, and a large bowl of fresh chrysanthemums bloomed on the Victorian sideboard. I moved a copy of House and Garden and put my feet up on the coffee table. “Have a nice day?” I asked over Walter Cronkite’s voice.
“Umm.” She placed her palms together and rubbed them with a slow rotary motion. “Did you?”
I tried to force my voice to sound casual and light. “Yeah. I was out at the Hookes’.”
“How are they?”
“O.K. I guess. Sophie seems upset for some reason. I wanted to make a couple of sketches of the pear tree for the painting.”
In the light from the screen, I could see a little furrow of impatience appear between her brows. She picked up the remote control and switched off the set. I sipped my drink, watching the firelight play on her face.
“Cozy,” I said.
She turned on the floor lamp and pulled her work basket to her.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Yes. Of course.” She gave me a quick glance, then drew the quilt onto her lap and pulled the needle out. I listened to the ticking of the Tiffany clock.
“Coming right along,” I offered, referring to the quilt.
“Yes. I should have it done by Christmas.”
I held my glass up, watching the play of firelight in the swirl of amber Scotch and ice cubes. I caught her staring at me. Her eyebrows lifted the faintest fraction, then she resumed her work. Something was terribly wrong, I could tell. Her face was pale; she needed lipstick.
“And—?” she said.
“Hm?”
“And then what did you do?”
“After the Hookes’?”
“Yes.”
“I—uh, I went to see Dr. Bonfils.”
She gave me a quick, tight glance, then looked down again at her work. I put my glass on the table and sat beside her on the sofa, trying to take her hands.
“I’m sorry, Bethany.”
“Sorry?”
“About the baby.”
“He told you.”
“Yes.”
“He shouldn’t have. He should have let me.” She made a futile gesture with her shoulders, then laughed. “It appears I’m a wishful mother, nothing more.”
“Beth—”
“Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
She shook her head uncomprehendingly. “There’s no fetus. Nothing growing in me—”
“I know. I’m sterile. It was the mumps. The doctor did a test. You can have children, but I can’t. It’s my fault.”
“It’s—not—me?”
“No. Me.”
She paused, holding herself rigid, motionless. Then she visibly relaxed. She dropped her head to hide the tears in her eyes. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Any more.” She spoke calmly, matter-of-factly, dismissing the topic as if we’d been discussing an unfortunate change of weather.
I stood up and looked around the room. It suddenly seemed different—not a room we had made, part of our house, but—simply a room. I glanced at Beth; she seemed different too, somehow. A stranger-wife. I knew she was upset about the baby, but there was something else as well, something she had not said yet.
She raised her head. “What is it, Ned?”
“I was wondering…”
“What?”
“If maybe we ought to move.”
She looked at me, then around the room, then shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean, I’m thinking maybe we ought to leave Cornwall Coombe. Sell. Get out.”
“What on earth for?” She laid aside her work and gave me all her attention.
“I don’t know. I just have this feeling.”
“Where would we go?”
“Mm—back to New York, maybe. Europe, maybe.”
“But we’ve been so happy here.”
“Have we?”
“I thought we were. And if we haven’t—really, Ned—I don’t think you’ve given this much thought, have you? I mean, it isn’t exactly fair to Kate. Taking her out of school again. And there’s all the work we’ve done on the house. The money that’s been spent.”
“We can get it back.”
“On a resale? I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because they won’t—Because somebody isn’t just going to buy us out and move in.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She looked at me. “Because they won’t let anybody. Not just anybody.”
“Weren’t we ‘just anybody’?”
“No. We weren’t. You know that. They wanted us.”
“The hell they did.”
“Yes, they did. It took some time, but they did. The Widow wanted us.”
“Did she?” I set my glass down rather sharply.
“You knew that.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, she did. That was the reason Maggie called us. It was all because of—”
“The Widow. You mean, she arranged it.”
“Yes.”
“She can arrange for somebody else, then.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Bethany, listen. I don’t know what’s happening around here, but I don’t like it. I don’t know what’s happened to you, or to us, or to anything. I want to get out. Now! Get the hell out while we still have the chance. Can’t we? Beth, remember Paris? And the lilacs?”
“I remember.”
“We could go back to them again.”
“You’ve got lilacs outside that window, if you can wait until spring. Besides, who can ever go back again? Can we?”
“Sometimes it’s not a bad idea, going back.”
“I want to go ahead.”
“To where?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Bethany?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that night?”
“Which?”
“That night. The ‘experience.’”
“Yes.”
“That was arranged too.”
“Who—?”
“Who do you think? When I came into our bedroom
, you had been watching, hadn’t you? I mean, you’d seen?”
“Seen what?”
“Whoever it was that came out of the cornfield.”
“No. I didn’t see anyone. I was waiting for you. I was—”
“What?”
“Dreaming, I imagine. Ned, listen. Some things are better left not talked about. Some things are better left—”
“Unsaid.”
“I like it here. You’ve liked it here. Kate does, too. It’s the first time I’ve felt—”
Safe. I saw it then. In Cornwall Coombe she had found a place. She was secure. And not only secure, but changed. It had become more and more apparent. Not only city mouse into country mouse; she seemed in some way on the brink of something, as though poised for some indefinable leap. I saw her as she had been, blazing with unfulfilled yearnings, something she had been searching for. Baby—loss—
There are things women long for, and longin’, ought to be given their way.
The Widow, Edna Jones, Asia Minerva, Ruth Zalmon…
Mothers. All of them, all mothers. For her. Mothers. And the Mother.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said the words before I realized it.
“I love you,” she replied simply.
“It’s not the same, is it? It’s not the same at all.”
“You make all the decisions,” she said, “You always decide what’s to be done. Even about coming here. You decided. I’d like to do my share.”
“Is that what you want, to run things? Go ahead.” I finished my drink. “Or do you want to run me? Some women do.”
“I’m not that kind.”
“Make sure you’re not, or go find another fellow.”
She gave me a long look, then drew out her needle again. “How was the rest of your afternoon?”
“All right. I—went for a swim. Can you beat that? This time of year.”
“What happened to your lip?”
“Huh? Oh, I must have hit it on something. A rock, maybe.” Remembering how I must look, I started quickly for the kitchen. “Guess I’d better change. What’s for dinner?”
“Crab casserole. Ned.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to sound like True Confessions, but tell me it isn’t true.”
“What?”
“That you raped Tamar Penrose.”
“Ohh—listen—Beth…” The Widow in her buggy. And I had thought the old lady wasn’t interested in gossip. Beth was returning my look, waiting. I tried to fumble an explanation. I had no defenses. How could I explain what had happened? What excuse could I make? “Beth, listen to me, it’s not the way you think. It’s not that way at all. It happened—but it didn’t happen that way.”
“She says you raped her.”
“It’s not true! Beth, listen.”
“I am.” Her tone was weary, as if she weren’t really interested. I pushed the table aside and crouched, took her hands in mine. They felt unresponsive, lifeless. I had so quickly run out of anything to say. She faced my imploring look quietly with no sign of emotion.
“Why did you promise?”
“I meant it. I meant that promise. Honest to God I did.”
“Then. But not now.”
“Beth. Don’t listen to them. Don’t listen to what they told you. Let me tell you what they’re like. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to tell you. Because I know how you feel about her.”
“About whom?”
“The Widow. Mary Fortune. But she’s not like that at all.” Now the words came spilling out, and I told her about Jack Stump, about the attack, about the paper from the One-B Weber’s tea box, about finding the shears. She tried to pull away and I held her by the wrist, forcing her to listen. “And that’s not the worst. They killed Grace Everdeen. Murdered her.”
She pulled away again and jumped up. “Don’t talk such rubbish!” I had never seen her look so angry. “After what she has done for us, after saving our child’s life, after the days and weeks she’s spent in our house looking after us, cooking for us, helping us, you try to make me believe such things! You must take me for a complete fool. You made me a promise. Which obviously was impossible to keep. You had to have her. Not just have her, but against her will—”
“It wasn’t against her will—”
“And then to get out of it you tell terrible things about the Widow. Everyone knows who attacked Jack. Everyone knows Grace Everdeen committed suicide—”
“She didn’t. I can prove it. The Widow—”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear any more about the Widow. Not another single word.” Her face was drained of color, her mouth was pulled down in an angry curve, her body trembled. “Just because you’ve had a lark in the woods with the town slut and you’re sorry—oh yes, you’re sorry, not sorry you did it, but sorry you were found out. Did you think she’d never tell? Never say anything? And just because you were found out, you try to turn the facts all around, you try to besmirch the name of the finest woman who ever walked God’s green earth.”
“She murdered Gracie Everdeen. She and Tamar and the rest of the women. On Harvest Home.”
“Don’t speak about Harvest Home. You don’t know anything about—”
“‘What no man may know nor woman tell?’” I could not resist the taunt. She started forward, then managed to restrain herself. I could not believe what was happening. I fought down a feeling of panic. She was going to tell me again—as she had that other time—that she was going away, that she wanted to leave me, to take Kate, get a divorce. Just as it had happened then.
Still I could not resist. “They’re murderers.” The word hung there, sounding ridiculous. Murderers were people you read about in the paper, in New York or somewhere—not in Cornwall Coombe. I looked at her, then away, through the dining-room doors; my eyes absently traveled the Shanghai Tea party—ships in the harbor, coolies with pagoda-shaped hats—familiar and curiously real. I looked back. I went on. “I can bring you proof.”
She was making visible efforts to keep herself calm. She pressed her palms together again, rotating one against the other. “Bring it. It won’t prove anything.” Her eyes were wet; her chin took on the stubborn tilt that had been her father’s. “I will have the child…I will…I will…” In the blind and futile assertion, I sensed a kind of withdrawal. At that moment she looked quite strange, not only in her features but in her whole manner, her being. A sudden flash went through my mind that she wasn’t Beth at all, but someone else entirely.
She stared back, saw, failed to recognize me. The stranger-husband. Each of us now was imprisoned behind the bars of mistrust, of doubt, of disappointment. What could heal the breach? For no apparent reason, I thought of the rainbow we had seen on that first day, bridging us between the life we had known and the life that was to be. This was the life that was to be. This room would be peopled with ghosts, not of others who had inhabited it, but our own, future ghosts, relic-specters of a might-have-been. At that moment I knew we were doomed. She had already retreated from me spiritually; now it would be physically as well. She would leave me.
“I will…I will…”
With her free hand she struck the flat of her stomach. “If there is no child here, it’s because you couldn’t put one there. I’m not the barren one—you are.”
I looked at her again, backed away to the door. “Murderers,” I said; said again I would bring proof.
Upstairs, Kate’s door opened; her footsteps sounded along the hall. I opened the front door and stepped out. Kate was coming down the stairs. Closing the door, I heard from the other side the whispered word.
“Mother…”
But it was not Kate who whispered it.
I drove to the bait shack. Mrs. Brucie was doing things in the kitchen; Jack was in the chair by the fire. He seemed not to know me at all; I suspected they must be keeping him drugged on something the Widow had concocted. He looked at me as I fumbled inside his shirt, but showed no sign of rec
ognition. Mrs. Brucie came and stood in the doorway, watching. I pulled out the red cloth bag and tugged it open, then inserted my finger and felt. It was empty. The ring was not there. The oddly shaped bone ring that had been not the Widow’s charm but Gracie Everdeen’s engagement ring, which I had seen hanging at her throat in the doctor’s X-rays. I dropped the bag inside Jacks shirt. Mrs. Brucie was smiling at me, saying nothing.
The evidence gone. Jack Stump cut and stitched…by the women…because—because why? What were they trying to hide? The peddler had been silenced because he had found Gracie. Gracie had been murdered because, blighted, she had come to Harvest Home…
Harvest Home…
What happened on Harvest Home?
Suddenly I became terribly afraid. And as suddenly I felt certain that Worthy Pettinger had never left town at all.
At the Common, the street lights had been turned off, and in the dark the villagers waited expectantly for the bonfire to be lighted. I pulled my car up near the post office and went looking for Amys Penrose, stopping to stare up at the gigantic wood structure, towering thirty feet and more into the air. The doors of the firehouse were thrown wide and the beams of the engine headlights illuminated the applauding crowd as the apparatus was brought onto the turf and hoses were run to the hydrants. The ladders that had been used to build the pyramid and to set the scarecrows on it were taken to the curb and stacked, while the firemen, donning their helmets, walked around the base, moving the spectators back to a safe distance.
I found myself caught up among them, and as I backed away with the others, the firemen ran to fling burning torches onto the pile. The bonfire began in clear limpid pockets of bright flame, glowing here and there. Then, as the wood and debris gradually caught, it became an awesome sight. I stopped where I stood, watching it grow, the flames slicing their way up the outside shell, orange, yellow, red, eating away at clapboards, boxes, beams, whatever they discovered, while from the wooden heart of the pile came the roar of the conflagration.
Of its own volition, the crowd retreated from the intense heat, and into this widened breach leaped a troop of living scarecrows, an array of ragged, wildly prankish straw-clad figures, bobbing and turning, doing a crazy dance while the onlookers joined hands and began circling the blaze in a clockwise direction, forming a great urgent chain.
Scornfully I watched. It was like a grotesque sports rally, and as they passed, link after link in their human chain, I hated them, these hayseeds with their stupid dance, their stupid singing, their stupid beliefs. “The old ways”—how I despised the phrase. I moved aside as more came to break their way into the circle, which grew larger, spreading out toward the edges of the Common, moving counterclockwise now.