“Yes. Torrie’s bringing the baby home this afternoon.” She tossed a look across the street where Ada was marketing. “Missus wants to keep everything as much the way it used to be as we can. Mrs. Valeria’s back last Wednesday, too.”
Miss Josceline-Marie tsked and blew a stream of smoke in Winnie’s face. “Well, I don’t know if that’s such a good idear, is it? That place seems to meet misfortune at every turn. I hope Mrs. Perry appreciates the pains I took,” the proprietress said, handing the silver box to Winnie. In a moment Niles returned again with a magazine.
“What’s that, m’dear, a ten-center or a quarter? Oh, Doc Savage, is it? My, ent that some cover—positively lurid. Now look there, ent that a lovely-looking gift?”
Niles thanked her and took it from Winnie, juggling box, magazine, and music box to pay for the purchases.
“I’ll just run next door for a sec,” Winnie told Niles, “then you meet me at the market to pick up Ada’s order.” She went out; Niles collected his change, gathered his things up, and hurried after her, colliding in the doorway with another customer who, bent on looking at something in the window, failed to see him. Niles’s things scattered in all directions, and he busied himself picking them up.
“Hot enough for you, Rose?” Miss Josceline-Marie called a greeting through the open door.
“For the love a Pete!” exclaimed Rose Halligan angrily, teetering, “why can’t you be more careful, kid!” She grabbed at a shoe and lurched toward Miss Josceline-Marie’s stand. “Say, who is he, anyway?”
“That? That’s Niles Perry.”
“Well, there’s twice he’s knocked me down, damn near.”
Miss Josceline-Marie was surprised. “Knocked you down? When?”
“Why, just now is once, and then the other day when I got off the streetcar from the thertur he hit me with his bike. You remember—he’s the one ran my stocking and called me a dirty name.”
“Tut, dear, you don’t mean that one. That’s Niles.” She trilled a little laugh. “Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were talking about Holland.”
“Holland? Who’s Holland?”
“Holland—Niles’s twin brother.”
“You mean there’s another?”
“Takes two t’make twins, don’t it?” She tittered. “A holy terror, Holland. Only it couldn’t of been him.”
“Why not?”
“Holland Perry? Simple,” she went on, elaborating her statement, her round cheeks quivering, her bud mouth opening and closing, pink and eager to offer her logic, and then, astonished, drawing back with an alarmed cry as, in a furious crash back through the open door again, Niles flung himself upon her, his packages spilling helter-skelter, shouting Lies! Lies! Damn you, it’s not true, it’s not! while Rose Halligan teetered and lurched, hands flying at him, trying to stop his hands, and Ada appearing just at that moment from the market, she too trying to seize him, his hands hammering, reaching up over Miss Josceline-Marie’s plump bosom, trying to shut the hateful little bud mouth, and she, all ruffled dignity, refusing to countenance such outrage when he had breathlessly backed off, saying she could not, could not understand such a thing and Rose saying, “But what was it, for Pete’s sakes, all you said was—” and Ada breaking in to apologize, chagrined, hurrying after the boy as he fled the place.
She caught up with him outside the church, where, through the open doors, organ music sounded. He stood, red-faced and furious, looking up at the Angel of the Brighter Day, her brilliant colors now obscured, seen from outside in, and refusing to acknowledge Ada when she approached.
“Child, child, what a thing to do! What could have possessed you to act in such a manner?”
“It’s a lie,” he said stolidly, meeting her eyes at last with a defiant look.
“Nyet, it is not a lie and you know it. Come, child, you shall admit it.”
“No!”
“You shall! This must not continue!” And then, all at once, stern and forbidding, she was dragging him along the walk, through the wrought-iron gates and into the cemetery, hurrying him along beside her, her soft features hardened and set.
Grassy lawns sloped away in every direction where eleven generations of Pequot Landing people lay buried under leafy trees. Beyond, a field, green with tall corn, a scarecrow’s face askew above the rows. She pulled him past the blossom-decked monuments, over the markers, ancient and new, large and small, ornate and plain, of red sandstone and polished granite, identifying their various owners, Talcotts and Standishes and Welleses, until she had brought him relentlessly to a large oak tree, where, sequestered in its deep green shade, like a dark cave, the sun bright and golden without, lay the family plot. Blinded by his tears, he peered vacantly at the sides of the gravestones, where dying flowers sat in chipped green containers. The noontime air was torpid, the scent of bloom sour, nearby a faucet dripped on stone, somewhere in the branches a locust chirred. Overhead the summer sky was bright blue, the perfect, translucent blue of a Dutch china plate, glazed with an awful clarity, stunning to the eye, but brittle like the shell of an egg; if he stared too long at it, it would crack, shatter to bits, a deadly blue hail falling about him.
“Now, child,” she told him, “you shall say it.”
“What? Say what?” he demanded, bewildered, shaking his head in wonder at the very thought of whatever strange thing she was willing him to say.
“Say the truth, child,” she said, her voice patient and tender and sad. “Say the truth. Out loud, so we shall both hear it, the two of us together.”
He felt a chill. He ducked his chin, butted his forehead against the material of her dress, felt his eyelashes brushing its softness. She took his chin in her hand and forced his head around. “Read, child,” she instructed, and with a submissive sigh he repeated the words chiseled on a grave marker:
VINING SEYMOUR PERRY
Born August 21, 1888 Died November 16, 1934
In Loving Memory
He bent and pulled a blade of grass, cupped it, and began to whistle on it.
“Go on,” he heard her urging. She was holding him in front of her, gripping his shoulders, directing his look past the brown marker to one of newly polished granite. “Look there. There, child.” Uncomprehendingly he blinked up at her, trying to see her face above him. Vibrating against the sky, repeating exactly the shape of her head, was a white outline, not, he thought, unlike the halo around the Angel of the Brighter Day. “There!” she repeated, her voice choked and hushed as she pointed.
Across the blue shell of sky, curved like a bowl, a network of fine lines appeared, like the roadways on a map, the veins in a leaf. He studied it; alas, too long. The lines multiplied, one upon another; the shell cracked, splintered into a million jagged fragments; they showered around him, sharp, painfully sharp and tinkling like blue rain. The grass felt prickly as he threw himself down, knocking aside the withered flowers—daisies and coreopsis and sunflowers that Ada had used to decorate the grave—dug only in March of this year—his trembling fingers spreading over the cold stone with the panicky touch of the newly blind, groping their way Braille-like across the freshly carved lettering that formed the terrible inscription:
HOLLAND WILLIAM PERRY
Born March 1922 Died March 1935
Part Three
Now that was an event, wasn’t it?
Poor Holland.
You can see how it is. Very simple, really. Holland is dead. Dead as a doornail, to repeat Miss Josceline-Marie’s unfortunate simile, used an hour ago in Niles’s hearing. It’s true. Make no mistake about it. Do not be further deluded. Holland is gone. Trying to hang Ada’s cat in the well, he killed himself also. Such are the ironies of life. Killed himself in the well by the cloverpatch, back in March, on his birthday. This is why the mother stays in the room and drinks, because she cannot face the loss, and this is why, bereft, forlorn, all alone, unwilling that Holland should be dead, Niles has re-created his twin, has conjured him up, so to speak, has resurrected
him.
Witness this astonishing reverence, this passion for a corpse; the boy is in thrall to a cadaver, obsessed by a ghoulish inamorato; not a ghost, not a vision, but a living breathing thing of flesh and blood; Holland, he himself. Such are the properties of the game. Be a tree, be a flower, be a bird—be Holland. With this—creature—he acts out his little pageants of blissful agony, the happy, subtle tyrannies, loving his twin, yet supplanting him, idolizing him, yet tearing him from his place; it is not enough to be Holland’s twin, he must become Holland himself. Peregrine for Perry. He who wears the ring . . .
You can see how it is. It is summer. School’s out. Niles solitary. Remember, I pointed out that he has no friends, or, having them, does not seek their company. Did you ever hear of a schoolboy without companions? Seldom, I think. But there is Niles, finding faces—as Ada has taught him—faces in the clouds, one face, his face, the face of him—the other. In clouds or in the pool pump or on the ceiling, it’s all the same. He is there—the other. In the cracked and yellow plaster with the ripply brown watermark. You will understand. I do the same thing here, lying on this bed, with my watermark on my ceiling. See? The two eyes, the nose, the mouth that curls slightly at the corners? What is it Miss DeGroot calls it? I still can’t remember. I must be sure to ask her when she comes. I don’t think it was an island after all, I think it must be a country. Oh, that reminds me—it seems to me her first name is Selva. Selva DeGroot. Odd name, isn’t it?
In any case, there is Niles, whiling away the summer, playing Ada’s game—on dead Holland. And how else does he pass his time? Remember Russell Perry? And Mrs. Rowe, who lived next door? Well, no matter. Whose fault is it, you ask, these tragic circumstances, the bizarre transference of the boy to his dead twin. No one’s, you may say. It just happened. I would disagree. As far as I’m concerned, the fault is Ada’s.
I have been thinking about her a lot. I do not like her. Oh, I suppose she is worthwhile enough, taken all in all. Though not without sentiment, she is not guilty of sentimentality, that most lugubrious of pitfalls. An interesting enough type, she is, I suppose, a kind of peasant-aristocrat; and the Russian mind is sometimes strange. She has a certain humor in her thinking, in her dealings with the boy. She is not self-indulgent. She has restraint. She does her work, keeps her house, tends her flowers (ah, the sunflowers!), accepts her tragedies, tries to keep the family together. There is marrow yet in those poor old bones; they do not break easily. She is seemingly unconquerable, yet—and she does not know this—she has been conquered. The old woman has indulged the child too far, indulged him in his mad fancy; and madness, surely, it is; where else was it they took the other grandmother, Isobel Perry, if not to the asylum? And Ada knew there was insanity in the family. You will see in time how bitterly she comes to regret this (nodding and smiling, all compassion, watching Niles looking into the water in the pump pool—and for what?), this failing to take into account the all-too-obvious fact, and in time the realization will break her heart, knowing that it was she who first planted the seeds of the tragedy. And while you may suffer with her, the foolish woman, I shall not. The poor benighted creature, all the time unwitting, not in the least mindful of the lengths to which it has gone . . . the macabre lengths . . .
Well, not entirely unwitting. If Niles is afraid Holland may go away, she is afraid he has come back . . .
1
Now see Niles in the parlor, standing behind the keyboard of the piano. The buzzing is in his head, the annoying buzzing sound that is always there when he hears people say Holland is dead. Dead, or buried, or gone away. It isn’t true, of course, he tells himself, but it does make him anxious. (It is for this reason that he went today to the cemetery and peed on the flowers on Holland’s grave—it doesn’t help much, but it does cause the buzzing to go away. Except when he hears the twanging of the harmonica in his ear. That buzzes too.)
There, on the gleaming piano top, lies the packet of blue tissue paper, the paper all unfolded, its contents open to view, Niles staring, with Holland’s spellbinder look on his face, fascinated, almost hypnotized by the finger. The finger: hard, dried, slightly crooked, the nail carefully manicured. If someone comes, he will snatch it from sight; but in the meantime the child is rapt in his grisly souvenir.
Now, coming from outdoors, from the bright sunshine, he finds the parlor gloomier than usual, the air fustier, the atmosphere more dense. Where once the room held a gaiety and vividness most particular to it, now the dark woods, the worn plum-colored plush of the davenport, the damask curtains all lend it a somber, ponderous air. The reds in the rugs are tired, worn to the color of—what? A cooked, sunbleached lobster claw, he thinks. The Atwater-Kent radio has been silent—silent, that is, until Aunt Vee’s return from Chicago three days ago—and most of the trifles that bring a room alive, that give it its character, have been put away; their accumulation of dust only makes more work for Winnie.
Grandmother Perry’s silver vase sits in a saucer on the piano, filled with blown dahlias, their ivory-colored blossoms flatly mirrored in the polished wood. His fingers strike a chord and Niles observes how the vibrations of the instrument cause the petals to drop, with them a fine mist of yellow pollen sifting down. He sits, fingering the treble notes of a duet from the sheet of music before him, watching the soft curling petals slipping silently here and there around the stiffened finger, its desiccated flesh absorbing all his thought.
The finger . . . the well-remembered blue-black dot where Russell stabbed the knuckle with a pencil . . . Holland’s gift. The buzzing has stopped; replaced by a cry. Hear? A fierce miaow! Miao-o-o-ow! A cat somewhere, somewhere there, locked inside his head. Cat; here kitty kitty kitty . . . that day last March, he was playing in the driveway, then the cat was yowling, crying, screaming. Ada’s cat, Pilakea, as Holland comes dragging the animal along by a rope around its neck. Then the struggle, only a blur, the cat swinging in the noose, the fall, afterward the dull impact below; he had dashed to the well, had clambered onto the curb, craned his neck over the edge, looked down into the blackness, the stones rough, cold, mossy green; fingers gripping in pain and horror until someone came to tear him away, blood pounding in his ears, streaming through his brain. He felt dizzy, wanted to vomit, to fling himself after. Help! Rescue! Gladly would have blinded his eyes rather than let them see what lay at the bottom of the well—hurt, who knew how badly? Help! Down there on the stones, the shallow water lapping at the tangle of rope and cat and broken child. Help him! Someone help him! The grotesquely twisted body, and the redness and the black. In seconds all the blood vessels in his head seemed to have broken; had ruptured and exploded in his brain, had come pouring into his throat, strangling him. There was Holland—in the well—hurt—Holland has hurt himself! He stuffed his fist in his mouth to stop the screams. He was still screaming when they led him away. Afterward, when he stopped, finally, he didn’t talk any more, not for days, didn’t say anything to anyone, or eat, or move, scarcely, or see or hear.
He was gone, then, departed to some other country in some unfamiliar landscape where everything was fuzzy and people spoke in distant echoes (where, mercifully, the picture of the well was obliterated), where people with pale frightened faces came to gather around and peer down at him, strange faces: an unknown man with a silver phone and black rubber tubes from his ears; another face, worried yet determined; far-off voices conferring.
“Traumatic experience . . . shock . . . he’ll come out of it.” “Oh God, please.” “Missus, Mr. Foley’s downstairs in the parlor . . . says the ring won’t come off the finger . . .”
Hearing, he stirs in alarm, a groan from his lips. No . . . no . . .
“How’s dat—de ring?” Another voice, in surprise. “What do you mean, the ring? What ring?” . . . “His father’s ring with the bird on it. He must of been wearing it. But his finger’s all swole up and it won’t come off, Mr. Foley says. What should he do?” A pause; then: “Dat damn ring! Melt it down . . . throw it away . . . anythin
g . . . nothing but sorrow. No, wait—tell him to leave it where it is . . . leave it on the child’s finger; better it should be buried too . . . safe under the earth . . . what more harm can it do, sealed up in the casket . . . let it be buried.”
Wait! No! The ring? Peregrine for Perry? That was to go? No! Yes, said they, yes, making horrid faces: here they all came, fie-ing their fingers at him like imps, like elf-changelings, shame, shame; selfish boy, let it be an end then, an end to the ring. Oh for shame, to want the ring so! Thou shalt not covet . . . let it be buried, certainly. Let it go . . . let it go . . .
No! No-o-o-o!
The glint of silver; a quick jab, peace. He sleeps. Unquiet, dreamful sleep, fearful unhappy dreams: everywhere night; you can see—a desolate, forbidding landscape—but still night, earth and sky one darkness. And from the deep center of this darkness rushes the peregrine falcon—not that golden bird on the weathervane, but another, alive, crying out, its wings swiftly beating. And the dark wings become white ones, the bird becomes another creature, becomes—an angel! The Angel of the Brighter Day! See how her white robes sway, the wings rhythmically lifting and falling, the face ever so kind and lovely, the mouth smiling. See how her arm stretches, the hand beckons . . . beckons . . .
And now he comes—The Other—all bathed in a golden light, and Falcon Peregrine perching, wicked-eyed, upon his shoulder. He raises his hand, that hand, and on that finger he wears the ring. Now, behind him, the Angel enfolds him into the soft curtain of her wings and before Niles’s very eyes they seem to float away together, Angel, child, bird—and ring.
No, wait—don’t go! Stay!
But he cannot stay them. Back, back they go, together into the deep darkness. A whisper—Goodbye . . . fading . . . fading. And he is left with the memory of a face, the familiar face, smiling, mocking; whose . . .