Dark on the Other Side

THE HOUSE TALKED.

The objects in it talked, too—chairs, tables, couches, a
big, squashy hassock that squatted obscenely in a corner of the
bedroom. But the voice of the house was loudest. It was a thin, high
voice, like that of an old woman. Hunched on its hill, like a fat old
woman crouching on her haunches, its wings spread out like the folds of
a ragged skirt, its wide terrace apronlike, its tower a thin neck,
wattled and scaled with lichen, the house talked. Sometimes it said,
Run
away…leave him…if you can
. Sometimes it wailed,
I
wish he’d die….

Sometimes its suggestion was more direct.

II

Gordon didn’t tell her that there would be a guest until
just before dinner. Linda was sitting at her dressing table, elbows
carelessly asprawl on the polished glass top. In the tall triple
mirrors, her bedroom looked strange—not like a reflection of reality,
but like another room, all the more disturbing because it contained the
same furniture as her room, in the same positions, and yet looked
subtly wrong. Like hers, it was decorated in shades of blue and
white—cool, virginal colors, restful and remote. The drapes framing the
tall windows were the deep, rich blue of the sky at late evening; their
heavy velvet did not reflect light, but drank it in and absorbed it, so
that the hoarded gold gave the blue a glowing luster. Because she had
expressed a dislike for wall-to-wall carpeting, Gordon had had the
floors redone; they were stained dark, unvarnished but shining like
black glass with repeated applications of wax. Glass, or black water….
The scattered rugs lay like little icebergs on a dark sea. Now,
reflected, the ragged white islands seemed to move, rocking slightly as
if shifted by the dark, shimmery surface on which they lay.

When Gordon came in, she didn’t look up. Behind her
mirrored image his face floated into view like something conjured up
into a crystal ball—but familiar, wearing its old look of fond anxiety.

He was a very handsome man, Gordon. He’d be forty on his
next birthday; and he was as alarmed, and as amused at his own alarm,
as any pretty woman would be at the onset of that ominous day. The
years had only added to his good looks—a brush of white at the temples,
stark and distinctive against his thick black hair, a deepening of the
lines of laughter that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. A man
with eyes like that oughtn’t to look so masculine; they were big and
dark and luminous, fringed with lashes so long and thick they looked
artificial. But there was nothing in the least effeminate about
Gordon’s face—or mind, or body.

Next to his, her own face was wraithlike. Too pale, too
thin, with suggestive dark circles under the eyes and an undue
prominence of certain muscles. Those long tendons in the throat
especially—the throat he had admired, had compared with that of the
lovely statue of Nefertiti…

She turned her head, watching the effect, and her pale
mouth, as yet unpainted for public appearance, writhed distastefully as
the lines tightened and drew. Gordon’s mouth moved. She raised her eyes
to meet his mirrored eyes, and felt herself frowning.

“What?”

“I said,” he repeated patiently, “that we have a guest
for dinner, and the weekend. So look your loveliest, won’t you? If you
are to be immortalized, I want it to be as you really are.”

He was always so patient. It was almost the most
maddening thing about him.

Then the meaning of what he had said finally penetrated,
and she turned her head to stare at him.

He had retreated to the hassock, the one she particularly
loathed, and was sitting with a grace a twenty-year-old might have
envied, one knee bent, his long brown hands curled around it.

“Immortalized?” she repeated, articulating carefully.

“But, darling, I told you last week….” He stopped. That
was one of the things he must never do, remind her that she kept
forgetting things. He started all over again, as if she had never heard
the subject mentioned; only the straight vertical line between his
brows showed his perturbation.

“Our guest’s name is Michael Collins. He’s the young man
Manhattan
magazine has commissioned to do a series of profiles on me. I’m very
flattered, you know; usually they select important people as subjects.”

“You’re important,” she said. It was not a compliment. It
was simply a statement.

“Maybe I was, once. But you know I don’t give a damn
about being what the idiot world calls important.”

Linda shrugged and turned back to the mirror. The top of
her dressing table was covered with bottles and jars, with creams and
lotions and cosmetics, all the expensive playthings of a woman of
wealth and fashion. They were in perfect order, their shining caps free
of the slightest speck of dust. Anna, her maid, straightened them every
day.

She reached out at random and took a lipstick out of a
jeweled holder that held a dozen of them. Applying it to her mouth, she
said, “I suppose you want me to get dressed up.”

“What about that robe I got you last week? The one with
the gold threads?”

“It’s too big.” She tipped her head, studying her mouth.
“My lipstick’s on crooked.”

“As a mere male it’s not up to me to comment,” said
Gordon drily. “But if you will insist on talking while you apply the
stuff—”

He broke off at the sound of a knock on the door. In some
big houses servants weren’t supposed to knock; so Linda had read. But
Gordon insisted on his privacy. She watched, in the mirror, as the door
of that other room opened, and the reflected image of her maid, Anna,
sidled in. The girl looked even sillier in the glass. She was a
silly-looking creature at best, with her teased blond wig and
adenoidal, half-witted gape; and the mirror distorted her face as it
warped every other object it reflected. The sidelong glance she gave
Gordon had a sly, conspiratorial gleam. Of course, she had a crush on
him; all the women in the house had, from the fat Bavarian cook to the
gardener’s ten-year-old daughter.

Even in the foul mirror Gordon’s face remained unchanged.
She couldn’t accuse him of leering at the maids. But he had better
taste than that. Anna’s figure was good, and was adequately displayed;
Gordon insisted on uniforms, but he went along, good-humoredly, with
the shorter skirts, and Anna’s black dress verged on a musical-comedy
maid’s outfit. She had good legs. But that staring, vacant face…

Linda whirled around.

“I don’t want you,” she said. “Get out.”

“Now, honey.” Gordon rose; coming up behind her, he
lifted the heavy masses of her black hair between his hands. “Let the
poor girl fix your hair, at any rate. I told you, I want you to look
beautiful. Anna, Mrs. Randolph will wear that gold thing—I don’t know
what you women call it—”

“The Persian brocade hostess gown,” Anna said promptly.
“If you mean the dress you bought last week, Mr. Randolph.”

“That’s the one. Hostess gown? You’re right; that’s what
the salesgirl called it.” He grinned at Anna, who, without moving a
muscle, managed to suggest a puppy wriggling happily at a caress.
“Well, I’ll get out of the way and leave you to it.”

Linda wiped off the crooked outline on her upper lip and
sat with lipstick poised, watching Anna trot over to the long closet
and take out the dress. As the girl laid it carefully across the bed
her hands lingered, smoothing the heavy fabric. It was a beautiful
thing; heaven only knew what treasured antique the dressmaker had cut
up in order to make it. It didn’t look like modern fabric; the muted
blues and pinks and golds might have formed part of a sultan’s regalia
a century before. Linda reapplied her lipstick. It was a bright
orange-red. The color would clash horribly with the dress. She ought to
use another shade.

She dropped the carved gold case on the table top and
reached down into the lowest drawer of the dressing table.

“Get me a glass,” she ordered, taking the top off the
bottle. The contents, half gone, swam amber gold with the movement of
her hands.

Anna hesitated, her eyes bulging as they focused on the
bottle.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Linda asked gently. “Hurry up. You
lazy little fool.”

Anna jumped, and then ran into the bathroom. Linda took
the glass without looking at it or the girl who held it. She poured it
half full. Her elbows on the table, she sipped, and watched Anna in the
mirror; and Anna stared back with her big, bulging, watery-blue eyes.

Cocktails in the den before dinner. Very classy, Linda
thought, for a cop’s daughter from Cleveland. She came down the stairs
carefully, holding up her heavy skirts with one hand. The other hand,
beringed and graceful, trailed nonchalantly along the curved mahogany
rail. She didn’t need to hold on. A couple of drinks—or even three or
four—didn’t affect her at all, physically, except to dull the sharpness
of her hearing. With a couple of drinks—or maybe three or four—she
could hardly hear the voice of the house.

There was no one in the marble-floored foyer to
appreciate her entrance, so she turned to the right and went along the
hall, past the drawing room, past the morning room, past the dining
room; her skirts rustling stiffly, her head high. Why not the drawing
room for cocktails? she wondered. Why the study? That was Gordon’s
room, as the dainty-chintz morning room was supposed to be hers.
Usually he didn’t allow casual visitors into his sanctum. Oh, but this
man was not a casual visitor. He was…something about a biography. That
explained the study. Michael What’s-’is-name was going to get the full
effect—the rows on rows of learned volumes, the windows opening onto
the beauty of the countryside. And in the midst of it all, Gordon
himself, the sage, the scholar, who had abandoned the hollow sham of
the world for a life of contemplation.

The door was open. She could hear their voices as she
approached: Gordon’s mellow baritone, the softer, higher voice of Jack
Briggs, Gordon’s secretary, and another voice…deeper even than
Gordon’s, slower, drawling. For no reason at all, a shiver ran through
her and she stopped, knees waxy-soft, and put one hand out blindly for
support against the satiny surface of the paneled wall.

The spasm lasted only a second. She shook herself and
went on, wondering. Something was going to happen. Good or bad? Were
there such categories, or were things—happenings, people—amoral, to be
judged only by their effects on others? “There is nothing either good
or bad, but thinking makes it so….”

She came to the door and stood there, looking at them.

Amid the bustle of their rising, she caught two swift
impressions. One was the barely perceptible relief in Gordon’s face as
he took in her appearance: exquisitely gowned, coiffed, and made up,
poised and calm. The other impression was simply that of a man, a
stranger, and never, afterward, could she reduce it to details. He was
there; his presence was enough.

Yet he was not, on second glance, a particularly
good-looking man. A few inches taller even than Gordon’s respectable
height, he seemed to be strung together with old elastic, so that his
movements looked gawky and abrupt beside Gordon’s disciplined grace.
His hair was mousy brown, combed carelessly back from a side parting;
his mouth was too wide and his face had a lopsided look, as if one jaw
were longer than the other. The only feature that might be called
handsome were his eyes, and their beauty lay in their expression rather
than their color, which was a brown slightly darker than his hair.

“How do you do,” she said, and gave him her hand. With
the touch of his hard, square fingers, the flash of empathy faded. He
was just another man, and this was just another normal social occasion.

She sat down in one of the big, soft leather chairs and
watched with amusement as Collins tried to get his long arms and legs
folded back into a sitting position. Gordon was hovering. He looked
pathetically pleased, and it was significant, she knew, that he nodded
at Briggs without making her ask for a drink.

Briggs bustled over to the bar and began fussing with ice
cubes, bottles, and glasses. Linda’s nerves tightened as she watched
him. She detested him even more than she did the other
servants—although, as Gordon’s secretary, he was not to be regarded, or
treated, as a servant. He was a pale, puffy man; the texture of his
skin suggested clay or bread dough, some substance that would not
rebound elastically from the prod of a finger, but would retain the
impression. Gordon claimed that he was a very efficient secretary. She
found that hard to believe. His movements, when away from the
typewriter, were fussy, slow, and inept. Finally he came back with her
drink, and she tried not to touch his hand as she took it. His fingers
were always damp.

“We were just discussing Michael’s last book, Linda,”
Gordon said. “I think you read it; I know I recommended it to you.”

So they were on first-name terms already.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I read it. It
was very good.”

She saw Michael flush a little at the coldness of the
compliment, and added smoothly, “I particularly liked the chapter on
the relationship between Emily and Bramwell. You caught something there
which no other biographer has understood.”

His wide mouth curved up, bringing out a line in one
cheek, a line too long to be called a dimple.

“What was that?”

Linda looked at him in surprise. So Michael Collins
wasn’t quite the gauche young fool he looked. A compliment was
meaningless to him unless it was genuine.

“The fact that, though he loved her desperately, he
resented her talent. Oh, I know the point’s been made; but you seemed
to comprehend so fully the effect on the frustrated male ego, and the
conflict between her feeling of feminine inferiority and the inevitable
awareness of her own genius. Very few men can look at that problem
dispassionately, with sympathy for both points of view.”