“Oh,” she giggled, “she just kicked, the monster. Feel?”
“Mmm.” Rider turned his head sideways between her breasts while her hand traced the curve of his back along his spine. “Hey,” he said suddenly, lifting his eyes, “somebody’s watching!”
Niles saw Holland start, pull back, flick the flashlight off.
“That face,” Rider went on, and Torrie giggled again.
“I think it’s sweet,” she said, reaching to fluff out the skirt-shade of the fat, impish-looking doll-lamp. “Oops, there she goes again.” She took his hand and replaced it on her stomach.
“Well, let’s hurry and have this one,” he said huskily, “so we can make another.”
She raised his head and looked at him, her face languid, suffused with tenderness. “Darling Rider,” she said, brushing the backs of her hands along the hollow of his cheeks, “It’s going to be a lovely baby. A beautiful baby.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I know. Niles says so. He keeps telling me.”
“How does he know?”
“It’s that silly game they play.”
“What game?”
“I swear they’re gypsies.” Torrie’s voice was muffled behind the wall as she explained about the game, how she and Niles and Holland used to try to be a tree, a bird, a flower; how silly she thought it, how dismayed Ada was with her. There was a summer day when Ada had brought the three of them down behind the carriage-house to see one of her half-dried sunflowers, a giant, over twice their height. Dominated by Ada’s will, they had looked, tried to know it. What was it like? Color, texture; how tall, how old? Smell. Hot, cold. Rough, smooth. Their young brains compelled by hers to concentrate, to discover the heart of it, its essence, as Ada called it. Your mind is wandering (this to Holland, skylarking about the sunflower patch, doing handstands and cartwheels, an antic gleam in his eye, Don Quixote mad). Look there, look there. Leading them a strange way along a strange path to play a strange child’s game. The sunflower viewed, noted, memorized.
Then: What does it feel like?
“And do you know what Niles said?” Torrie continued. “He said, ‘I feel pretty.’ Isn’t that marvelous? Then a crow flew by and picked a seed from the face of the flower—and Niles cried, said it hurt. And Holland—”
“What’d he do?” Rider asked.
“He laughed. And Ada shushed him. But I remember her saying this one thing. She said, ‘Now do you understand what it is you can feel?’ See what I mean about gypsies? Honestly! But Niles is just tremendous. He’s uncanny sometimes, the predictions he comes out with.”
“Did he predict we’d be rich?”
“No, but he said the north meadow’d be onions again, and next year it will—and that was when you were still planning to be a lawyer.”
“Pity he couldn’t have predicted for Vining or—”
“Hush. Not in front of the baby.” They nestled closer and, lying in each other’s arms, whispered and laughed and dreamed aloud, Torrie reaching at one point to smooth the skirt of the doll-lamp, Niles’s present. And the baby would be beautiful, a girl, as he predicted. They would find the perfect name for such a perfect child. It would be a thanksgiving baby, for it had been conceived Thanksgiving night; out of the storm of grief over her father’s death passion had arisen, and though they had planned to wait, it was Torrie’s desire that the life lost be replaced. Now, come August, she would give birth. She had hoped it would be a boy—another Vining to take her father’s place—but Niles insisted it would be a girl.
A short time later, when Rider had snapped off the doll-lamp, the murmurs became even breathing and they slept.
“Jeeze,” Holland hissed, spreading his fingers over the flashlight lens to create weird patterns on the walls. Niles followed him back across the room. When they got to the door Holland whispered sharply, “That’s what they were doing!” He gave the cradle a push which set it rocking noiselessly.
“Who?”
“Torrie. Rider. Making that baby. Making it together. Thanksgiving night. I saw them.”
“Saw them?” Niles was thunderstruck. “You watched?”
“They were on the bed. In the light. He was on top of her—right on top. Moving.” The words formed dryly in his throat before he spat them out, describing what he had seen through the crack in the wall. “With the lights on. Damned hermaphrodite. That’s what they are—a hermaphrodite. Half-man, half-woman.”
“That’s what a marriage is.”
“Well, I’m telling you this, it won’t be a pretty baby like she thinks. Like you think. It’ll be ugly and white with pop eyes and a great big head. Like the baby in the bottle!” In his strange humor Holland struck the cradle another blow, rocking it more violently, and his voice was a strangled cry as he threw aside the flashlight and fled the room.
In a moment Niles crossed the floor and picked up the light. Bright moonshine spilled onto the sill where King Cophetua lay, a slain warrior. In the sky stars glittered like snow, brittle and crystalline, turning the summer night into winter spectacle.
Then, standing and looking out, Niles saw a strange sight. The screen door at the head of the outside stairs had quietly opened; a figure appeared: Mother. Pausing uncertainly on the landing, she tripped hurriedly down, one white hand skimming the banister, its enamel paint gleaming in the moonlight. Silently she slipped over the lawn, her lavender wrapper shimmering across the dark grass, like a beautiful spectre, crossing the gravel and into the fir trees, where she made her way between the dark trunks, the pale violet blur almost lost to view, stepping on the thatch of fallen pine needles, until she reached the well, where she stood for a long time, hands hanging limp at her sides, the clover a dark floor around her feet. And as she looked down at the heavy seal over the well mouth, it seemed to Niles that it was as though she were waiting for it to speak.
3
One morning several weeks later, seated in the kitchen, Niles held himself in patience while Aunt Josie performed certain ministrations on his face. Sinister, that was the look; and properly so, just what he’d wanted, precisely the effect Holland had managed: faded, a little decadent, a sort of seedy type, one who, he suspicioned, had a dirty mind; probably did things with little kids; hair parted in the middle, slicked back, patent-leatherish, and, where Aunt Josie had been at pains with the makeup, interesting-looking. A dusting of white practically blotted out his features, with a touch of rouge (roodge, she called it) on the cheeks, a bit of penciling around the eyes, the brows worked up, a reddened mouth, and finally two magnificent curlicue mustaches drawn on.
“Sweetheart, you look just like Mr. Coffee Nerves in the Postum ads,” Aunt Josie said as he stepped into Winnie’s room to view himself in the mirror.
“Hey—good,” Niles called back. “That’s really great.” He came to stand in the doorway. He had on a top hat and a cape with a red lining, and he leaned sportily on a cane, one foot crossed over the other. “I should have long pants,” he said, looking ruefully at his rolled shorts. “And a stiff shirt.”
“Soup ’n’ fish? I think you look just fine, sweetheart.” (Switthot, she said.) “Here, you got a bit too much roodge there.” She wet her thumb on her tongue and worked at his cheek. “Okay, Perfesser, I guess you’ll pass mustard.” She looked at him with her expression of perpetual surprise and winked. “Shall I go along and announce you, Perfesser Rabbitwaters?”
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “you go ahead. I’ll be out after. There’s something else I want to get.” He disappeared up the back stairs.
“Be sure to stop in and show yourself to Zan,” she called after him.
The screen door whined as she went along the walk to join the others in the arbor. Built for Granddaddy Perry’s wife with his own hands, it stood at the far edge of the lawn next to the vacant lot on the north side of the house, a cool oasis of white posts and trellises, with turf between the flagstones and grapevined shade. The walk was brick, laid down in sand in a herring
bone pattern, the corners mossy green and rounded with use, the faces heaved by winter frost. The month was deep into July, the aunts had arrived, and today, gathered around a table in wicker chairs were Aunt Fania and Torrie, with Mrs. Jewett, after an hour of tutoring Niles in arithmetic, and Ada behind an easel, capturing Granddaddy’s roses on a watercolor block.
Mrs. Jewett had opened the front of her bouclé knitted dress—rather too warm for the weather—and was fanning her bosom. “Well,” she declared as Aunt Josie came up, “no matter what anybody says, carelessness breeds accidents.”
“To say nothing of babies.” Aunt Josie’s deep laugh rumbled through the arbor like approaching thunder.
Behind her hob-nailed glass, Aunt Fanny hooted in spite of herself. She toyed with the bits of fruit floating in the wine punch Winnie had concocted to dissipate the afternoon heat.
“Oops,” said Aunt Jo, seating herself. Aunt Josie was a card. For her, nothing in life was without its humor, neither Man nor Beast, War nor Peace, Hate nor Love. Ah, Love especially. Her own spinsterhood she regarded as a prank life had played on her, a sly one at that, but what was there to do but laugh? A trouper from way back, she had for years toured in vaudeville sketches around the country, but with talkies in she had found more regular employment assisting a journalist-photographer in New York, where she shared with her sister an apartment on Morningside Heights.
As happens, the aunts looked nothing alike, and resembled Ada even less. If it were possible to liken Josie to a favorite chair—comfortable, ample, a bit lumpy—Fanny was more the auditorium seat: austere, meager, rigid. Where Josie was merry and plump, Fanny was all angles and dour; Josie’s voice a gravelly rumble, Fanny’s more a bark; in moments of mirth an abrupt cackle was the best she could manage. But—most important—while Aunt Josie was fun, told stories, cracked jokes, performed parlor tricks, played pinochle, did devastating impressions, Aunt Fanny, alas, remained prim, wore her corset, eschewed cards, knew no jokes worth telling, and abhorred magic.
“Well,” she said, picking up Mrs. Jewett’s remark, “it seems to me it was careless of Mr. Angelini, leaving a hayfork around.”
Pausing over her watercolor box, Ada shook her head sympathetically. “He’s just a ghost, the poor man. I feel so sorry. It is awful to see him blame himself and suffer so.”
“Daresay,” Fanny agreed, “but it looks to me like he’s been nipping a bit; least he don’t seem any too steady on his feet.” With a brisk click of dentures she snapped her mouth shut, bobbing her head in time with the piano music that had been drifting across from an open window over at the Rowe house. “Tum-da-da-da-dum,” she sang, arranging her skirt and tidily crossing her ankles.
Where Josie was the offhand sort, looking more frequently than not as though she had put on the first thing that came to hand, an old sweater, the odd skirt, Fanny was meticulous in her costume. Today she was wearing an ankle-length dress of écru linen, pale silk gloves, cream-colored hose and comfortable white shoes with punctured patterns which permitted the air to circulate around her feet. On her head was a man’s Panama hat with a black band, her face swathed mummy-fashion under the voluminous swirl of white maline she had purchased at the five-and-ten, a precaution against bees and other stinging insects.
“Did you find Russia awfully changed, Josephine?” Mrs. Jewett inquired lugubriously.
“Poor,” Josie answered. “Rah-sha iss poor.”
“I should think so. Those Bolsheviks haven’t a sou to their names.”
“Rubles, Edith.” Josie had spent the month of February in the Soviet Union, assisting her boss on a picture story for the National Geographic—a hydroelectric project in the Ukraine. It was the first time she had been back since she was a little girl. “Russia is so poor now,” she went on, “the peasants use borscht for blood transfusions.” Everyone laughed except Ada, apart from the group and concentrating on her work.
“Did you get to Siberia?” asked Mrs. Jewett.
“No—Siberia’s not for the poor folks, dearie. And I’m strictly proletariat.” She leaned to snap her garter, rolled in her stocking above a sausage knee. “The aristocracy’s all in Siberia.”
“Hmp, Roosevelt they should send to Siberia.” Sipping, Aunt Fanny adjusted herself in her chair. “Ta-dum-dum-da-da-dah. What is that song?”
Torrie rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Rowe and her Turkish Rondo—at least I think that’s what it is.”
“Oh, Beethoven, of course,” said Mrs. Jewett, blowing down her front.
“I think it’s Mozart.”
“Do you mean to say that old woman still sits and plays the piano?” Aunt Fanny asked. “Does she signal the airplanes any more?”
“Sometimes,” Torrie said and Aunt Fanny cackled.
“If she can hear the motor over that racket.”
“I should think so.” Deciding she was going to learn little of modern Russia on this day, Mrs. Jewett cast about for another subject. “How’s Valeria?” she asked brightly, “still in Chicago?”
Torrie nodded. “We think she’ll stay a while. She’s taken it all very badly.”
“Do her good to get away from George for a bit, shouldn’t wonder,” said Fanny with asperity. Her views on marital bliss—so called—were well known. She regarded her own separate state as a blessing. Although Josie was still a Petrichev, Ada a Vedrenya, Fanny was a Fish—Mrs. Epifania Fish. With Mr. Fish, whose first name had long ago escaped memory, she had embarked on a whirlwind elopement and six months later had secured a mysterious divorce. Now she was more a spinster than Josie, and though she kept the name, there were few who could recall the last time they had heard her mention Mr. Fish.
“And how’s George?” Mrs. Jewett wanted to know.
George was fine, Torrie said, leaving out mention of the fact that he had become most irascible and that evenings found him holed up in either the dining room or his bedroom with a bottle of Southern Comfort.
“And Alexandra?” Mrs. Jewett continued, determined to assay by turn the health of the entire family. “Does she still keep to her room?” she asked, unable to see Alexandra’s window from her place under the tangle of grapevines. “Can’t think how she’s stayed cooped up in there for—how long’s it been?” She ticked off her manicured nails. “March, April, May, June, July—why that’s five months already.”
“Four,” Torrie corrected her. “She’ll be better when she’s a grandmother. She’s already helping me plan the layette and soon as there’s formula to fix and diapers to change—”
“If Winnie’ll let her,” Aunt Josie said, draining her glass with a slurp and a smack. “I think Winnie spiked this stuff with slivovitz. A girl could get a jag on if she’s not careful. Wouldn’t think you could get vinegar from these old grapes, would you? Watch it, Fanuschka, here it comes again.” Her sister had been flapping a flyswatter at a wasp buzzing around the fruit overhead, and which was now studiously drawing z’s around her glass.
“Eee!” shrieked Fanny, dropping the glass and retreating to a corner of the arbor. “Shoo! Shoo!”
“Shoo, wasp,” Torrie said calmly with a wave, and retrieved the unbroken glass. “It’s all right, Fan,” Josie rumbled, “it’s gone. Come sit.”
Aunt Fanny’s fear of stinging insects stemmed from an experience she had once had when a bee stung her and she had almost died, the poisonous toxin entering her body and invading her whole system. Now, visiting in the country, she took elaborate precautions because, she said, she had a theory (Russian superstition, Ada said) that “stingers,” as she called them, actually knew those victims who were most prone to their danger, hence the veiling and the flyswatter. Aunt Fan was taking no chances.
“Ooh my,” Josie boomed, casting an eye up toward the house, “here comes Winnie with a refill.”
At the back-entryway the screen door slammed and Winnie hove into view bearing another pitcher of frosty purple liquid. In a second the door whined again and a figure appeared at the end of the brick wall, shrouded in b
lack, the white face sinister, macabre, mocking . . .
“Oh my God!” Her veil lifted around her glass, Aunt Fanny turned pale as she stared, making a cross of her thumb and finger and kissing it in the Russian way, and accidentally spilling some wine onto the netting as she did so. “Holland—”
“Oh for heaven’s sakes, Fanuschka,” Josie said, “It’s not Holland, it’s Niles. Look! Watch this, now.” The figure approached, the tips of the cape trailing, now and then a flash of red, the silk hat tipped jauntily over one eye. Incredibly, buttoned across the sneakers were a pair of pearl gray spats. Lifting the hat, twirling the cane, bowing, along the herringbone brick came Professor Rabbitwaters.
“The spitting image,” Mrs. Jewett said, leaning out of her chair. “Never saw anything—hel-lo Mysterious One,” she called coyly.
Without acknowledgment, as though to avoid encounter with the playful Mrs. Jewett, the dark figure cut over the croquet lawn to the horse-chestnut tree and intently studied the bark. He looked up at the branches, thinking of autumn, when the nuts would have completely formed in their prickly jackets and could be knocked down with a stick. Suddenly he stiffened and wheeled as, with a faint crowing, Chanticleer, the old stringy rooster, came haughtily pecking under the tree in search of worms, then, shaking out its tail feathers like a clutch of sabers as it spied the boy, stopped and fixed him with a beady eye. Niles returned the stare, then, head immobile, he backed silently away, cane extended as though to ward off harm, giving the bird a wide berth as he made his way out onto the lawn again, passing Winnie on her way back to the kitchen.
Ada, brush poised in mid-air as she caught the boy’s action, observed him thoughtfully while his eyes remained fastened on the rooster. It was the same old story; neither of them had changed, neither boy nor bird. With a pang she thought of how it had gone, that shocking business—the twins must have been ten that year; she had been sitting in almost the same spot under the arbor, shelling limas for succotash; Winnie was in the kitchen shucking corn, Holland and Niles near the well. Head high, pecking, from time to time ruffling out its feathers in the same insolent way, the rooster had circled the pump. Then, eyes riveted on the bird, Niles had slipped quietly behind it, his head duplicating precisely the pecking motions, bent arms jerking, rump sticking out in back, a tailful of feathers seemingly sprouting there. From his throat came the identical half-crowing sound of the bird. A comical sight to be sure. Even from where she sat she could see the beads of perspiration appear on his brow, the fixed, almost obsessed expression on his pale face, the eyes glassy and intense.