Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (112 page)

When they reached her car Abner put his arms around her. “You’re a groovy kid,” he said, rather huskily. “What you told me today … well, I have a feeling you need me, and in view of that I won’t leave for a while. Because I have the feeling that I’ve come in on the second act of a melodrama. Honey, let’s go driving somewhere nice, with apple blossoms falling and birds singing, and then go back to your shack. Maybe I can take a catnap on your bed again. I’m an old man, after all; I need my rest.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, tenderly. “And now let’s go driving. I’ll show you some old headstones, that should interest you. Douglas took me to see them.”

“Who’s Douglas?”

“John’s twin.”

“You mean two such ethereal fellas?”

“John
ethereal?
”

“Makes me think of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Patience.
‘And everyone will say, as he walks his mystic way, what a very honorable fine young man this fine young man must be.’ “

“But Doug isn’t like that at all,” she objected.

“I don’t know about Doug, but his twin is …” He leaned forward as they came to the old church, and the old burial ground. “Jeez, this looks interesting,” he said. “Let’s get out and browse. I’ll make a few notes. This is the ticket, boy, is this the ticket.”

• • •

She had to drag him away. “Abner, it’s after six,” she told him. “You wanted a nap … there won’t even be time for it.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, scribbling on a piece of paper. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

It was after seven when they got to Brand House. John was presiding at the bar.
Ethereal?
Margo thought, and decided no, very much a man of today’s time. Abner stowed away three martinis, sitting between Norma and Margo. He kissed his fingers. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. “Gorgeous girls and potent drinks.”

“May I call you Abner?” Norma asked, flashing her dimpled smile.

“What else? My name’s Abner and I’m not ashamed of it. I’d hate to be Jack or Bill. I smell something nice, my guess is Virginia ham. Just don’t tell those in my district, they’d defrock me. My taste buds are watering shamelessly.”

They sat in the candle-lit dining room and Abner had a boarding-house reach. “Excuse me, another piece of cornbread, pass the butter, please.”

At the end of the evening, when he had gone off, John said, “He’s the man who came to dinner. I have a feeling he’ll take up residence here and never leave.”

“But he’s such fun,” Norma cried.

“He’ll eat us out of house and home. You saw what he consumed.”

“He has perfect credentials,” Norma said, giggling.

“He got a crush on you, Miss Margo,” Pompey said. “What Mr. Doug going to think about that?”

“Oh, shut up, Pompey, let’s do the dishes.”

• • •

Getting ready for bed, she took the phone off the hook. Twice bit, thrice shy.
This is the way we wash our clothes, so early in the morning
, she thought, standing beside the small table with the phone that clicked the busy signal over and over and over. She went into her room and climbed into bed, dreaming that Abner Zeiss gave her a music box from Vienna, which played “The Emperor Waltz.” There was a scent of verbena, or perhaps she simply imagined that. Nobody used it any more, though Aunt Vicky had.

It was simply her imagination playing tricks on her.

She never knew what woke her. It was the humidity, perhaps, or the fine rain that had started to fall. Or an unpleasant dream? She lay in the darkness, wondering. What was it that made her wary and wakeful?

You must get a grip on yourself
, she thought, and closed her eyes again.
Think of something nice, think of Douglas, for example. “Un elephant, se balance, ping pong … sur un assiete faiance” … My mother sang that to me
, she thought,
my long-ago mother. Where was Mother now, in Kiev or Leningrad?
What did it matter, that in her babyhood a woman had sung fey songs to her? It didn’t matter, of course, and she fell into a deep sleep, so deep that she didn’t hear the approach of the intruder. She lay, powerless and a victim and the veil came across her face, and she smiled, smelling the soft scent, and kissed the fabric, thinking it was her mother’s dress.

Why, Mother, you came back?

In the next moment she was clawing at the air, gasping for breath. Suffocating … and the caul was over her eyes and nose and mouth, she was without breath, the air had gone from her, and she was dying.

I’m dying
, she thought, almost resigned, and then thought of the sun and life and people she loved and remembered that she was young. She started fighting, saying, inside herself,
No, I won’t be a victim, there are too many victims, I’m young and strong
, and she tore at the net that cut off her breathing, struggling in the bed like a great whale. She never knew she had such strength. She heard the animal noises, and they were her own noises … her arms flailed in the air … the suffocating dark enveloped her and she writhed, pitting herself against the unseen enemy. She fought the smothering thing and conquered it, sat up in bed, filling her lungs with air, and screamed, “Where are you, where are you … show yourself!”

Someone glided out of the room, she could see the outline of a figure, unclearly, in the misty moonlight, a wraith of a shadow sliding out and through the door. Breathing deep, a hand on her chest, she gathered herself together and sprang up, coughing. She reeled across the room, found the door, fumbling, threw it open. Wheezing, frantic, she stumbled out into the corridor.

It was empty, there was no one there. The wall sconces, softly lit against the darkness of the night, that was all, and the pale light of the moon through the windows at both ends. Otherwise it was silent and deserted.

She screamed.

No one came.

She screamed again.

A voice, belated enough, called down. “What’s that?”

It was John’s voice.

She screamed again, and this time kept on screaming. Things blurred around her, but she finally saw John, in a maroon-colored robe.

“What the hell goes on here?” he demanded, and she saw him, wavering and indistinct, and screamed again.

“Margo,” he said sharply, his voice cutting the quiet like a knife. “Margo … what happened?”

“They tried to kill me,” she screamed.

“What?”

“Came into my room, tried to smother me …”

The hand that slammed across her face brought water into her eyes, sent her reeling. But it did the trick: she stopped screaming, and things began to focus again. They were there, in the dimly-lit corridor, she and John, and her wits came back to her. He put a hand on her shoulder.

“Tell me,” he said, quietly.

“Someone came into my room,” she said just as quietly. “Someone tried to smother me.”

“Was it a dream?” he asked.

“Damn you,” she said without emphasis. “Damn you, will you listen?”

“I’m listening,” he said. “I’m listening. Talk.”

“I woke up and someone was trying to smother me.”

“How?”

“With a caul.”

“What’s a caul?”

“Babies are born with it. Some babies are born with it.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t know how I was born, I was just born, that’s as much as I know.”

“What made you think of a caul?”

“It was like that. Like the fishing nets I’ve seen in Italy, in France. Coming over my face. I’ll have to go away. They want me dead here.”

Home
, she thought, and felt the weak tears surfacing. Home? Where in God’s name was home? She had no home. Except for this house; only someone didn’t want her here.

“Who would want harm to come to you?” John asked, staring at her.

She laughed at him, at his obtuseness. “You can ask that?” she cried. “I was almost killed when my car went out of control. I fell downstairs in the middle of the night because someone was calling to me? And just now someone came into my room and tried to suffocate me? Imagination, is that what you think? And the telephone ringing night after night?”

He had his hands in the pockets of his robe. “Pompey did tell me about the telephone,” he said. “But I — ”

“Night after night. I started taking the receiver off the hook. Imagination, you say? And then this caul over my face? Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“The way you’re looking at me! Maybe it was you, maybe it was Ben, I told Norma I’d throw him off the place. Maybe it was — ”

“Margo, you’re not making sense.”

“If someone did these things to you, you wouldn’t make sense either,” she cried. “You
honorable
young man; what a very, very honorable, fine young man this fine young man must be. Oh, get away from me, get away. I want Pompey, Pompey … I want Pompey!”

And suddenly Pompey was there, holding her, and then putting her to bed, bending over her in the soft light of the lamp he had lit. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me, Miss Margo.”

“Why, someone here wants me dead,” she said flatly.

Rocking her back and forth in his arms, he crooned, “Don’t think them things, they’re not true, how can they be true?”

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “I’m in danger, don’t you realize that?”

“Miss Margo — ”

“I’m putting you on notice. When I’m dead you just remember that I told you. You just remember, Pompey.”

She saw John standing in the doorway and sat up. “You too,” she said. “You remember too. And when I end up on a stone slab, you think of what I said tonight. And then see if you can sleep, either. You’ll see, you’ll see — ”

“It’s all right, Mr. John,” Pompey said. “Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of her, don’t worry.”

• • •

She slept, woke, looked up. “Pompey, are you there?”

“Yes, darling.”

“You won’t go away.”

“I won’t go away.”

The tree frogs sang, the night turned into a pale dawn. “Pompey, are you there?” the anxious voice asked.

“Yes, Miss Margo.”

“I’m all right now. Don’t leave me. Wait until I brush my teeth, okay? I’ll come down with you. Could you make me some griddle cakes? But don’t leave until I’m ready, you promise?”

“I promise.”

“Thanks for staying with me. I’m not crazy, I know I’m not crazy. Someone was in this room, and they put the caul over my face, and wanted me dead.”

“But Miss Margo, who would want that?”

“I don’t know. Someone does. You ask me why? I don’t know. All I know is that it happened, and I’ll never forget it, not to my dying day. Hate is a horrible thing; someone hates me. I don’t know why, I just don’t know why,”

• • •

There were two eggs, sunny-side up, toast with butter, charred bacon, and the sun streamed into the cheerful dining room. It seemed light years away now, that someone had come into her bedroom, put a shroud around her face, and maliciously tried to do evil to her. John came down, dressed for work, troubled, questioning. “You’ll be all right?” he asked.

“Yes, John. Thanks.”

“I’ll be home early this evening.”

“Thanks very much.”

He went off, his car chugging down the drive.

An hour later, while she slowly dressed, there was a telephone call from Abner Zeiss. He was querulous. “Pompey said you’d been attacked in the night,” he said. “What happened, for Christ’s sweet sake?”

“Someone in my room, trying to smother me.”

“Who?”

“If I knew I’d be happy to say,” she answered, and there was a thoughtful silence.

“I said a melodrama, didn’t I?” he reminded her.

“You weren’t far off.”

“Sweetheart, get dressed and meet me in Mithford at noon. Get out of that house. There’s a small town called Harper’s Crossing, just outside of Picksville. Ask Pompey, he’ll tell you how to get there.”

“Yes, Abner, thanks, thanks very much.”

She was just so grateful. She thought of presents to take him, and raked through her possessions, finding a book a French savant had given her —
The Life and Times of the Wandering Jew
, one of the most fascinating books she had ever read — and a book of short stories by a 19th-century author, Franz Gottschalk, one of her treasures, discovered in a small bookshop in Marseilles. And at the last moment she stuffed Benjamin Brand’s letters into a manila envelope.

Armed with these small gifts, all she had to offer, she drove off to the small town of Mithford, three quarters of an hour away, putting aside all worries and sorrows, and at just before twelve noon found the place Abner had described. It was another outdoor restaurant, but this time very Colonial, at the back of a house she gauged to be 18th-century, perhaps at one time a manor house much like Brand House. There was a flagpole, where the standard flapped in a smart breeze, furling and unfurling the Stars and Stripes, and the tables were laid with pristine damask cloths, the menus purple-inked, with the average entree seven dollars or more.

Abner sat, all two hundred pounds of him, having a palaver with the owner. As she approached the table she heard him saying, “Did you know, sir, that where this restaurant is, Walt Whitman started his immortal poem cycle, ‘Leaves Of Grass’?”

She stood there, unseen and listening, while Abner proclaimed, his beard quivering and his eyes alight.

“That’s very nice,” the proprietor said politely.

“Nice? It’s immortal,” Abner snorted, and then saw Margo. “Come forward, lass,” he cried. “Why dost thou hidst thyself?” She sat down across from him and he groped for her hand. In his nasal voice, his red mouth half-hidden by his beard, he proclaimed, “So some old vagabond, in mud who grovels/ Dreams, nose in air, of Edens sweet to roam/ Wherever smoky wicks illumine hovels/ He sees another Capua or Rome.”