She kept her eyes on the water. “Yes.”
We sat down beside the water, Billy and Dora close together, I apart, my back pressed against a tree.
Seeing them so close, my brother’s arm at Dora’s waist, filled me with a strange unease, a restlessness that finally drove me away from them, where I stood alone, smoking idly, now eager to be on my way to Royston, the sweet oblivion of a brothel bed.
“I want to get something from the cottage,” Billy said suddenly. He hastily got to his feet. “I’ll meet you two at the car.”
With that he bounded off toward the cottage, leaving Dora and me beside the water. I scooped up a small stone and plopped it into the creek. When I glanced back toward the cottage, Billy was coming out of it, carrying a small blue vase.
“He keeps taking things from the house,” I said. “Pieces of her.”
Dora looked at me pointedly. “Be careful, Cal,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of needing love too much.”
I laughed. “I think it’s my brother who has that problem.”
Her eyes were very still. “No,” she said. “It’s you.”
N
o one had ever spoken to me with such disturbing intimacy, and all during the drive to Royston that evening, I replayed the moment, the stillness in Dora’s eyes, the way she’d said “It’s you” with such certainty that it was me, rather than my brother, who was perilously in need of love.
I was still brooding on what she’d said when I arrived on Blyden Street at just after six. Night had fallen, the lights of the town shimmering on the water. I could hear the piano in the bar next door, the steady hum of the crowd inside.
Maggie Flynn sat on the porch as I came up the steps, fanning herself languidly in the warm night air. She’d pulled her dress up, and her large round knees shone like pale orbs as she drifted back and forth in the old wooden swing.
“I’d just about given up on you, Cal,” she said.
Normally I would have gone directly upstairs, but an inexpressible heaviness pressed me down upon the step. I took off my hat, fanned my face, then lit a cheroot. “I’ll go in shortly.”
“Want a drink?” Maggie asked.
“Not yet.”
I blew a column of smoke into the night air.
Maggie eyed me closely. “How long you been coming here, Cal?”
I took another draw on my cigar. “Twelve, thirteen years, I guess.”
“Long time. You still single?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled and nodded. “You were just a kid when you first showed up.” “I was twenty-one.”
She laughed. “A kid to me.” The laughter trailed off. “You look a little out of sorts tonight.”
“Just tired.”
“Maybe you’re getting tired of us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It happens,” she said with a shrug. “A man starts needing more.”
“I don’t need more.”
Maggie’s gaze was piercing. “Don’t be so sure. It hits you like a hammer.”
I felt a strange alarm, rose quickly, tossed my cigar into the street, and went inside. My regular met me in the front parlor, poured me a drink, then escorted me
up the stairs. Down the corridor we passed Polly Jenks’s room, empty now.
“Polly finally quit,” she said. “Left on Wednesday.”
“So who does Mr. Castleman see now?”
“Me,” she answered airily.
In her room, I took my usual position, lying on my back in the bed while she undressed behind the screen.
“Do you want another drink?” she asked when she emerged.
“No.”
“You got here late,” she murmured as she curled on the bed and began to untie my shoes.
“I had more work than usual.”
“Something big?”
“Not really.”
“So, there’s nothing new in Port Alma?”
The answer sprang from my mouth before I could stop it. “My brother’s in love,” I said.
“That’s nice,” she said cheerfully. She drew off the second shoe, placed it beside the other, then crawled up the bed and sat down beside me. “You like the woman, the one your brother’s in love with?”
“She’s interesting.”
She leaned forward, her lips poised at mine, but careful not to kiss me. Her breath smelled faintly of meringue.
“Well, that’s enough about
her,”
she said. She got to her feet, let the robe fall open, then took it off entirely and sat naked upon me. “You’re here to be with me.” She unbuckled my belt, gently tugged it from my trousers, and twined it sensually through her stubby fingers. “To have a good time.” She took my hands and cupped her breasts within them. Sitting astride me, peering down, she was utterly confident of her skills, an Eve who’d learned the lessons of the ancient garden,
taken charge of the serpent, knew just how it would answer her command. She raked her nails languidly over my chest, pretending to find me desirable. Then she bent forward and whispered in my ear. “Who am I?”
My mind had already begun to wander. “What?”
“My name. Who do you want to be with tonight?”
It never left my lips, but the way it flashed into my mind, so swiftly and spontaneously, should have rung like a fire bell in the night.
Dora.
W
e think of our destruction as something that falls upon us abruptly, in a sudden rush of wind and fire. But I’ve come to believe that our fall slinks through the undergrowth instead, creeps from one place to the next around the little shelter we’ve built until, at last, it finds the single rotted board we neglected to replace, the crevice we left unsealed, that place in the dark it can nudge through, and slither in.
And yet, for all that, I could have avoided it. From the moment I’d stepped into Dora’s cottage that rain-swept afternoon, whispered her name, then glimpsed my brother in the shadows at the other side of the room, I’d recognized the one thing I could have done to prevent the catastrophe that had instantly overwhelmed me. I could have stayed away from Dora. I could have controlled my own steadily building impulse and determined never to be alone with her. I might even have taken a passionless pride in such self-control.
At first, I tried to do exactly that. I dove into the petty cases Hap tossed onto my desk as if they had the
gravest importance. I stopped walking by the
Sentinel.
Had I seen her coming toward me, I would have crossed to the other side of the street. At home, safely alone, I sank into my books, and occasionally the bottle.
But as the days passed, Dora intruded upon me. While hunched over some document in my office, I’d lift my eyes, certain she was in the room, and be disappointed—even angry—when she wasn’t.
And so, one warm June evening, as I sat on my front porch, finishing off a second brandy, I called to her as she walked past the house, no doubt on the way home from the
Sentinel.
It was the first time in a month that her name had passed my lips.
“Dora.”
She stiffened, as if a hand had gripped her shoulder from behind.
“It’s Cal,” I said, rising from my chair, waving my glass slightly. “Here. On the porch. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just happened to see you passing by.” An idea came out of the blue, kicked up, as it has since seemed to me, by a cloven foot. “I thought you might want to see my drawings. The ones Billy told you about.”
She hesitated for an instant, perhaps to gauge my intent. Then she nodded and came up the stairs.
“I was on my way home,” she said when she joined me.
“I thought so,” I said. “Is Billy still at the office?”
“No, he’s gone to Royston. To buy paper.”
A salty night breeze toyed with a strand of her hair. I grew bold enough to return it to its place. “So, you’re alone for the evening.”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “You once asked me if I liked solitude. Do you?”
She peered at me distantly. “I’m used to it.”
“You must have lived alone for quite some time, then.”
“Long enough not to be afraid of it.”
“Years, I suppose.”
“Yes, years,” she answered, as if challenging me to ask her more.
Instead, I retreated back to an earlier subject. “Well, let me show you those drawings.”
We walked inside the house, down the corridor, and into my study. It was the room in which I spent most of my time, and which, over the years, I’d turned into a kind of inner sanctum. Thick curtains were drawn over the windows, and an Oriental carpet covered the wide pine floors. The room had been decorated according to my taste, which tended toward heavy furniture and somber colors. Billy had always found the room uncomfortable, teasing that it reminded him of a funeral parlor.
“What a quiet place,” Dora said as she entered it.
“Billy calls it my tomb.”
She looked at me. “More like a burrow, I think.”
“Well, I’m the only one who burrows here, that’s for sure.”
The drawings hung in various places on the walls, some well lighted, some in shadow. There were a few still lifes, but most were of stone walls and wooden fences, rigid pastorals that portrayed the security of limits.
As I watched, Dora walked from one drawing to the next, always taking time to stop, gaze, ponder. She seemed remarkably at peace as she moved about the room, as if she inevitably felt safer and less exposed in worlds created by others, particularly imagined ones, where nothing real could intrude upon her, seize her unawares.
“Not very exciting stuff, I know,” I said when she’d looked at the final picture, a stone wall that ran through an otherwise open field.
She smiled, then made a second sweep of the room, this time eyeing the books rather than the drawings.
“I like the way you look at books, Dora,” I said as I came up behind her.
“They gave me a place to go.” She drew a single volume from the shelf, opened it. “I remember this.”
I looked at the title. Pascal’s
Pensées.
“He says that people are unhappy because they prefer the hunt to the capture,” Dora said.
“And you think he’s right?”
“Not for everyone.”
“How about you?”
“Not for me at all,” she answered bluntly.
“Then you must find Billy very refreshing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because all he’s ever wanted to find and capture was his one true love.”
She lowered her eyes to the book. “William is noble” was all she said.
My brother’s character suddenly struck me as a vaguely charged subject. I decided to leave it. “I know your secret now.”
Her eyes darted toward me.
“You’re a Catholic,” I said with a smile. “Only Catholics read Pascal. My mother, before she left the Church. And a few odd ducks like me.”
She closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “Thank you for inviting me in, Cal.”
“If you saw anything you’d like to read…”
“No.”
I smiled. “And, of course, the drawings are for sale.”
She laughed. “Even that one?” She pointed to a
small, rather crude drawing of a young girl with long, dark hair, dressed in white, her figure ghostly, vaporous, almost translucent, something the slightest breeze would have torn apart. “It’s different from your other drawings.”
“It should be,” I said. “I didn’t draw it.”
“Who did?”
“Billy.”
“Who is she?” Dora asked.
“She’s no one,” I said. “She’s imagined.”
Dora glanced at me quizzically.
“Billy thought of her as his … how shall I put it? His damsel in distress, I suppose.”
She laughed again, a quick, self-conscious laugh, which, for all its slender brevity, seemed to lift her like a wind. “You don’t like it, do you?”
“No. I hang it only because Billy gave it to me.”
“Why don’t you like it, Cal?”
“Because the woman is unreal. An illusion.”
Dora smiled quietly. “Pascal would understand.”
“Yes, he would.”
She said nothing else, but only stepped away and headed for the door.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked quickly. “Tea. Coffee.” I lifted my half-empty glass. “Something stronger?”
“No. I’d better be getting home.”
“Well, good night, then,” I said when we were on the porch again.
“Good night.”
I stood and watched as she headed back down the walkway to the street. She seemed curiously self-possessed as she moved through the darkness, and I recalled how, only a few short months before, I’d stood outside my brother’s house, pronounced her far too frail for Maine. Now she seemed carved of native stone. So
much so that I could not imagine how my brother might ever penetrate, much less win her.
And yet, even at that moment, he’d already hatched a plan.
I
learned about it two weeks later as Henry Mason, Billy’s employee at the
Sentinel
, and I sat in Ollie’s Barber Shop. It was late in the afternoon, only an hour before closing, a blue evening shade already falling beyond the twirling barber pole.
“I guess you heard about the new arrangement,” Henry said, his breathing somewhat labored, as it always was, his voice coming through a shaky wheeze.
“What arrangement?”
“At the paper.”
Henry was in his late sixties, a frail, sickly man, surrounded by a consumptive air, so that he seemed forever on the brink of physical collapse. His wife had left him years before, and since then he’d been the sole support and caretaker of a retarded daughter, Lois, who, now in her forties, often wandered from her home, sending Henry in all directions looking for her. “What will she do when I’m gone?” I’d often heard him ask my brother plaintively. “Who’ll take care of Lois then?”
“The arrangement with Dora March,” Henry said, then coughed into his fist.
“What about her?”
“Well, you know how William is.”
“What do you mean, Henry?”
“The way he’s never taken much interest in running the paper.” He cleared his throat, shifting in the chair, his bony fingers gripped to its padded armrest. “I mean, the day-to-day affairs.”
“What does that have to do with Dora?” I asked just
as Lloyd Drummond, Ollie’s second-string barber, began applying a thick white lather to my face.
“She can write checks now,” Henry replied. “Write checks from the company book. William never let anyone do that before.”