The Black House (23 page)

Dick still looked puzzled. So did both the Bucks, maybe Julie Buck less so.

The end
, Harry thought.
Ruin, finish
. He tried to stand up straighter but mentally he was on the floor, crawling along like a worm.

“Maybe you'd like to talk a little—by yourselves,” said Nelson Buck to Harry and the girls, gesturing toward the library on his right, which now had more cartons on the floor and fewer books on the shelves. His gesture, his glance had included Harry and the two girls.

Did Nelson Buck think he maintained a harem, Harry wondered.

“No,” said Lesley, coolly. “Not your fault, Mr. Buck. It's a lovely house. Really. Thank you too, Mrs. Buck. I think I must be on my way, because of an appointment in New York tonight. Maybe I can phone for a taxi?”

“Oh, I can take you to the station!” said Nelson.

“Or I can,” said Dick. “No problem.”

It was agreed that Dick would take Lesley, now. Harry walked out with them to Dick's car. Dick went ahead of them, and opened his car door.

Lesley said to Harry, “What was the idea, Harry? That we'd
both
commute?” She laughed aloud, and in it Harry heard a little bitterness but also a real amusement. “I knew you had a friend, but
this
—It's a bit much, isn't it? Bye-bye, Harry.”

“
How
did you know?” Harry asked.

Lesley had got into the front seat. “Easy,” she said in her easy voice.

“Not coming, Harry?” Dick asked.

“No. I'll stay here with Connie. Bye-bye, Lesley.”

Harry turned back to the house as they drove off. Stay here with Connie? What was
she
going to say? Harry walked back into the hall.

Connie and Julie and Nelson Buck were conversing pleasantly in the big hall, Connie with her hand on the newel post, one trousered leg and sneakered foot extended. Her face was smiling, her eyes steady as she looked at Harry. The Bucks faded away, Julie to the rear of the house somewhere, Nelson into the living room on Harry's right.

“I'll be going too,” said Connie, not changing her stance. “I hope you'll be happy with Lesley.”

“
Lesley?
” said Harry in a tone of astonishment. It had simply come out of him. He had nothing to say afterward.

Connie gave a silent laugh, shrugged her shoulders. “Nice to meet her finally. I knew she existed.”

Were Harry's cheeks warm because of shame? He was not sure. “How?”

“Lots of little things. The dishes were always stacked differently when I turned up on Sundays. Different from Wednesdays maybe. Little things.” Slowly she got a cigarette from her canvas jacket pocket, having put her briefcase with her manuscripts in it on the floor between her feet.

Harry sprang to light the cigarette for her, but Connie swung herself slightly, out of his reach, and had the cigarette lit. He had lost her, Harry knew. “I'm sorry, Connie.”

“Are you? I don't know. You couldn't have got your
dates
mixed,” she said, not like a question, not quite like a statement either, something in between. Connie's serious, straight blue eyes, her shake of her head seemed to penetrate Harry's body from his head down to his feet. Connie was finished, had said good-bye to him, inside. “My taxi's there,” Connie said, looking past Harry through the open front door. She went down the hall to find Julie.

Then Connie went out to the taxi, talked to the Bucks for an instant through the open taxi window, before the taxi moved off.

The Bucks came into the house, both looking puzzled, Julie barely managing a faint smile, absurd below her frown.

“Well,” Nelson said, a little heavily.

The moment was relieved by Dick's car crunching up the driveway. Both the Bucks turned to it as if it were a lifesaver. How soon could he take off, Harry was thinking. Thank God for Dick! Dick could whisk him off. Unthinkable that Harry would have taken the same train as one of the girls, or both of them.

“Harry, old boy,” Dick said, then added, as Nelson had and in the same tone, “Well!”

“Maybe you two would like a word by yourselves,” said Nelson to Dick and Harry.

“I should be leaving,” Harry said. “I thank you both—for your time.”

A few more polite phrases, then Harry was in Dick's car, rolling away.

“Harry, what in the name of God,” Dick began in the gruff tone of a senior brother, a man of the world who had made some mistakes in life but learned a little from them.

“I think I did it deliberately,” Harry said. The words came out before his brain had formed them, or so he felt. “I couldn't make up my mind. I had to—get rid of them both. I love them
both
.”

“Rubbish! Well, it isn't rubbish, I don't mean that. Something—could've been arranged . . . But my God, Harry, to bring them both like that! I had the feeling they hadn't met before.”

“They hadn't.”

“Come to our place and have a drink. Won't hurt you.”

“No, thanks,” Harry said. He knew they were heading for Dick's house. “I'd better get to the station, if you don't mind.”

Harry insisted, over Dick's protests. Dick wanted to put him up for the night, have a talk with him. Dick knew the next train, and it would not be the train the girls would have taken. There were quite a few trains, Dick said, and probably the girls had taken different ones, and anyway there was plenty of room on the trains, so they needn't have ridden in the same car. On the way to the station, Dick began again his speech about there being a way to patch things up, to decide which girl he wanted, and then either drop the other girl or hang onto her in some way.

“They're both
lovely
,” Dick said. “I can understand your problem! Believe me, Harry! But don't give up. You look like a guy who's just been through a war. Don't be silly. You can patch things up.”

“Not with those girls. No,” Harry said. “That's why I liked them so. They're different.”

Dick shook his head in despair. They had arrived at the station. Harry bought his ticket. Then Harry and Dick shook hands with a hard grip that left Harry's hand tingling for a couple of minutes. Harry walked alone onto the platform and waited, then the train came and he rode back to Grand Central. Deliberately. He knew he had done it deliberately. He had somehow wanted to do this, break it all up, but what did he have now? People said the world was full of girls, pretty girls. True maybe. But not many as interesting as Lesley and Connie.

During the next week the girls came, separately, and picked up their few belongings from Harry's Jane Street apartment, each leaving her key under his doormat.

The Kite

T
he voices of Walter's mother and father came in jerky murmurs down the hall to his room. What were they arguing about now? Walter wasn't listening. He thought of kicking his room door shut, and didn't. He could shut their words out of his ears quite well. Walter was on his knees on the floor, carefully notching a balsa wood strip which was nearly nine feet long. It would have been exactly nine feet long, but he had notched it too deeply, he thought, a few minutes ago, and had cut that little piece off and started again. This was the long center piece for the kite he was making. The crosspiece would be nearly six feet long, so only by turning the kite horizontally would he be able to get it out his room door.

“
I
didn't
say
that!” That was his mother's shrill voice in a tone of impatience.

A couple of times a week, his father went mumbling into the living room to sleep on the sofa there instead of in the bedroom with his mother. Now and then they mentioned Elsie, Walter's sister, but Walter had stopped listening even to that. Elsie had died two months ago in the hospital, because of pneumonia. Walter now noticed a smell of frying ham or bacon. He was hungry, but the menu for dinner didn't interest him. Maybe they would get through the meal without his father standing up and leaving the table, maybe even taking the car and going off. That didn't matter.

The work under his hands mattered, the big kite, and Walter was so far pleased. It was the biggest kite he had ever tried to make, and would it even fly? The tail would have to be pretty long. He might have to experiment with its length. In a corner of his room stood a six-foot tall roll of pinkish rice paper. Walter looked forward with pleasure and a little fear to cutting a single big piece for his kite. He had ordered the paper from a stationery-and-book shop in town, and had waited a month for it, because it had come from San Francisco. He had paid the eight dollars for it from money saved out of his allowance, meaning from not going to Cooper's for ice cream sodas and hamburgers with Ricky and other neighborhood chums.

Walter stood up. Above his bed he had thumbtacked a purple kite to the wall. This kite had a hole in its paper, because a bird had flown through it as if on purpose, like a bomber. The bird had not been hurt, but the kite had fallen quickly, while Walter had wound in his string as fast as he could to save the kite before it got caught in a tree. He had saved the kite, what was left of it. He and Elsie had made the kite together, and Walter was fond of it.

“Wally-y? . . . Dinner!” his mother called from the kitchen.

“Coming, Mom!”

Walter was now brushing balsa wood chips, tiny ones, into a dustpan. His mother had taken away the carpet last year. The plain wooden floor was easier to sweep, easier to work on when he was gluing something. Walter dumped the chips into his wastebasket. He glanced up at a box kite—blue and yellow—which hung from his ceiling. Elsie had loved this kite. He thought she would admire the one he was making now. Suddenly Walter knew what he would put on his kite, simply his sister's name—Elsie—in graceful script letters.

“
Wally?
”

Walter walked down the hall to the kitchen. His mother and father sat already at the rectangular table which had X-shaped legs. His sister's chair, the fourth chair, had not been removed, and perhaps was there just to complete the picture of four, Walter thought, a chair on each side of the table, though the table was big enough for eight people to sit at. Walter barely glanced at his father, because his father was staring at him, and Walter expected a critical remark. His father had darker brown hair than Walter's, and the straight brows that Walter had inherited. Lately his father had an amused smile on his lips that Walter had learned was not to be counted on. His father Steve sold cars, new and used, and he liked to wear tweed suits. He had a couple of favorite tweed suits that he called lucky. Even now, in June, his father was wearing brown tweed trousers, though his tie was loosened and his shirt open at the neck. His mother's blonde hair looked fluffier than usual, meaning she had been to the beauty parlor that afternoon.

“Why so quiet, Wally?” asked his mother.

Walter was eating his rice and ham casserole. There was a plate of crisp green salad on his left.
“You're
not saying anything.”

His father gave a soft laugh.

“What've you been doing this afternoon?” his mother asked.

Walter shrugged. She meant since he had got home from school at half past three. “Fooling around.”

“As long as he hasn't been—you know.” Steve reached for his mug of beer.

Walter felt a warmth in his face. His father meant had he been to the cemetery again. Well, Walter didn't go often, and in fact he hated the place. Maybe he'd gone there just twice on his own, and how had his parents even found out?

“I know Wally was home—all afternoon,” his mother said gently.

“Caretaker there—he mentioned it, you know, Gladys?”

“All right, Steve, do you have to—”

Steve bit into garlic bread and looked at his son. “Caretaker there, Wally. So why do you jump the fence? . . . If you want to go in, just ring his doorbell across the road there. That's what he's for.”

Walter pressed his lips together. He didn't want to visit his sister's grave in the company of an old caretaker, for God's sake! “So what if I did—once?” Walter retorted. “Frankly—I think it's
boring
there.” Ugly and stupid, all those tombstones, Walter might have added.

“Then don't go,” said his father, smiling more broadly now.

Walter looked in rage at his mother, not knowing what to reply now, not expecting that she could help him either.

“
Cuck
-oo!—
Cuck
-oo!—
Cuck
-oo!—”

“And I'm goddam sick of that
cuckoo
clock!” yelled his father, jumping up from the table at the same time. He lifted the clock from the wall and looked about to throw it on the floor, while the bird kept popping in and out, announcing seven.

“Ha-ha!—Ha-ha-
haa-aa
!” Walter laughed and tried to stifle it. He nearly choked on lettuce, and grabbed his milk glass and laughed into that.

“Don't break it, Steve!” cried his mother. “Wally,
stop
it!”

Walter did stop laughing, suddenly, but not because his mother had told him to. He finished his meal slowly. Now his father wasn't going to sit down again, and they were talking about the Beachcomber Inn, whether his father was going there tonight, and his mother was saying she didn't want to go, and asking Steve if he expected to meet anyone there. One person or several, Walter couldn't tell, and it didn't matter to Walter. But his mother was getting more angry, and now she was standing up also, leaving her baked apple untouched.

Steve said, “Is that the only place in this—”

“You know that's where you were for days and nights—
that
time!” said his mother, sounding out of breath.

Steve glanced at Walter, who lowered his eyes and pushed his half-eaten dessert away. Walter wanted to jump up and go, but sat for the next seconds as if paralyzed.

“That is . . . not . . . true,” said his father. “But am I going out tonight? Yes!” He was pulling on a summer jacket that had been hanging over a chair.

Walter knew they were talking about the time his sister had caught fever. Elsie had had her tonsils out a week or so before, and everything had seemed all right, even though she was home from school and still eating mostly ice cream, and then she had become pink in the face. And his mother had been away just then, because
her
mother—Grandma Page—had been sick in Denver, something with her heart, and everybody had thought
she
might die, but she hadn't. Then when his mother had come home, Elsie was already in the hospital, and the doctor had said it was double pneumonia or at least a very bad case of pneumonia, which Walter thought nobody had to die from, but Elsie had died.

“Can't you finish your baked apple, Wally?” asked his mother.

“He's daydreaming again.” Steve had a cigarette in his mouth. “Lives in a dream world. Bikes and kites.” His father was about to go out of the back door to the garage.

“Can I leave now?” Walter stood up. “I mean—for my room?”

“Yes, Wally,” said his mother. “That police program you like is on tonight. Want to watch it with me?”

“Not sure.” Walter shook his head awkwardly, and left the kitchen.

A minute later, Walter heard the car rolling down the driveway. Walter crossed the hall from his room into the living room. Here there were bookshelves, the TV set, a sofa and armchairs. On top of one of the bookshelves stood two pictures of Elsie.

In the larger photograph, Elsie was holding the purple kite lightly between her palms, the kite that later the same day had been hit by a bird. Elsie was smiling, almost laughing, and the wind blew her hair back, blonder hair than Walter's. The second picture Walter liked less, because it had been taken last Christmas in a photographer's studio—he and Elsie in neat clothes sitting on a sofa. His father had taken the kite picture in the backyard just three months ago. And now Elsie was dead, “gone away,” someone had said to him, as if he were a little kid they had to tell lies to, as if she would “come back” one day, if she only decided to. Dead was dead, and dead was to be limp and not breathing—like a couple of mice Walter had seen his father take out of traps under the sink. Things dead would never move or breathe again. They were hopeless and finished. Walter also didn't believe in ghosts, didn't imagine his sister walking around the house at night, trying to speak to him. Certainly not. Walter didn't even believe in a life after death, though the preacher had talked about something like that during the service for Elsie. Did a mouse have a life after death? Why should it have? How could it? Where was that life, for instance? Could anybody say? No.
That
was a dream world, Walter thought, and a lot sillier than his kites that his father called a dream world. You could touch kites, and they had to be correctly made, just like airplanes.

When he heard his mother's step, Walter slipped across the hall into his own room.

Within two or three minutes, Walter was ready to leave the house with a red and white kite some two feet in length, and a roll of string. It was still daylight, hardly eight o'clock.

“Wally?” His mother was in the living room and had turned on the TV. “Got your homework done?”

“Sure, Mom, this afternoon.” That was true. Wally went reluctantly to the living room door, having dropped his kite out of sight in the hall. “I'm going out with my bike. Just for a few minutes.”

His mother sat in an armchair, and she had pushed her shoes off. “That program you like's at nine, you know?”

“Oh, I can be back by then.” Walter snatched up his kite and headed for the back door.

He took his bike from the garage, and installed the kite between two rags in one of the satchels behind the seat. Walter rolled down the driveway and turned right in the street, coasting downhill and standing on the pedals.

Walter's school friend Ricky was watering his front lawn. “Going up to Coop's?” Ricky meant the hamburger-and-ice-cream place.

“Naw, just cruisin' for a few minutes,” Walter said over his shoulder. Walter had no extra money at the moment, and was not in the mood for Coop's with Ricky, anyway.

The boy rolled on, through the town's shopping center, then turned left, and began to pedal harder up a long slope. The wind was picking up, and blew against him as he went up the hill. Houses grew fewer, then there were more trees, and finally he saw the spiked iron fence of Greenhills, the cemetery where his sister was buried. Walter cycled around to the right, had to walk his bike across a grassy ditch, then he walked several yards more until he reached a sheltered spot concealed from the road by a big tree. He leaned his bike against the fence, poked his kite and string through the bars, and climbed the fence, bracing his sneakers against the bars. He eased himself over the spikes at the top, dropped to the ground, and picked up his kite and ran.

He ran for the pleasure of running, and also because he disliked the low forest of mainly white tombstones all around now. He felt not in the least afraid of them, or even respectful of them, they were simply ugly, like jagged rocks that could block or trip a person. Walter zigzagged through them, aiming for a rise in the land a bit to his left.

Walter came to Elsie's grave and slowed, breathing through his mouth. Her grave was not quite at the crest of the hill. Her stone was white, curved at the top because of the figure of an angel lying on its side with one wing slightly lifted.
MARY ELIZABETH MCCREARY
, the stone said, with her dates that Walter hardly glanced at. The dates did not span ten years. Something below about a
LAMB GATHERED
. What baloney! The grass over her grave had not grown together yet, and he could still see the squares cut by the gravediggers' spades. For an instant, he felt like saying, “Hi,
Elsie
! I'm going to try the red and white. Want to watch?” but instead, he set his teeth and pressed his lips together. Trying to talk to the dead was baloney, too. Walter stepped right onto her short grave and over it, and walked to the crest of the hill. Even here the ground was not free of gravestones, but at least they lay flat on the ground, as if the owners of the cemetery or whoever controlled it didn't want tombstones showing against the sky.

Walter dropped his roll of string, took the rubber band off the rag tail of the kite and shook it out. This was also a kite that Elsie had helped him make. She had liked to cut the paper, slowly and cautiously, after he had marked it out. This tail consisted of parts of an old white sheet Walter had taken from the rag bag, and he recalled that his mother had been annoyed, because she had wanted the sheet for window polishing. Walter took a run against the wind, and the kite leapt promisingly. He stood and eased the kite up with long tugs on the string. It was going! And Walter had not been optimistic, because the wind was nothing great today. He let out more string, and felt a thrill as the kite began to pull at his fingers like something alive up in the sky. An upward current sent it zooming, took the string from his hand, and Walter had to grab for it.