The Callender Papers (10 page)

That night after dinner I went to my sitting room and, by the warm light of the kerosene lamp, reread Aunt Constance's letter. The mails took three days, so she had not received my letter when she wrote, but she had received Mr. Thiel's. Her letter told of the events of her Cambridge days, of people we both knew, of my garden, of books she had read. She remarked that Mr. Thiel seemed satisfied with my work (he hadn't bothered to say anything to me about that) and asked how the work progressed. Her letter was, like Aunt Constance herself, calm and gentle, loving. It soothed me to read it, so I did so several times, telling myself that I was trying to compose an answer to it. That was not true. I was trying to divert my mind from what Mac had told me that afternoon. I succeeded in that.

Asleep, however, my mind returned to the falls. In dreams I looked over the edge of the ravine to see somebody there, helpless, barely moving. She lifted her head to look at me and I fled, stumbling, back to my room in Mr. Thiel's house. Something had followed me there. Something, somebody, tall and dark, wrapped in a cloak, able to move soundlessly through the house. He stood beside my bed. He pulled down the bedclothes. I wept and silently begged him to go away. She was still back there in the ravine, I knew that. I wanted him to go and help her. He did not speak, but motioned with his arm to me. I was helpless. I was afraid. I did not know him. But he knew about the woman in the pool beneath the falls. The hood of his cloak hid his face in shadows.

I did as he insisted, arose from the bed. He led me down the stairs. At every step I willed my feet to turn back, to stay, to refuse to obey him. I followed him.

He opened the door of the library and motioned me in. He stepped in behind me and closed the door. The library was lit by moonlight. Each of the boxes was draped like a casket with black cloths. I tried to run but my feet would not move. The hooded figure lifted a cloth from one box and I saw that all the rug around it was damp. She was not in the ravine then,
not any longer. His hand behind my head pushed me toward the box.

I could hear my heart beating. In that box, the large form, and beside it, almost cradled in its arms, another form, tiny. He had a lamp that he brought forward, the circle of yellow light approaching, to show me what was in the box. I forced my eyelids down, slowly, slowly, racing against the growing light. I could not bear to actually see. He pushed my head toward it, toward them, with one hand, his other hand on my shoulder. I screwed my eyes tight, and at last he spoke: “Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes.”

It was irresistible, that cold voice. My will swayed, my body swayed. I opened my eyes.

In the flickering light of a small lamp, I saw Mr. Thiel's face. It was his hand on my shoulder, and his face was above mine because I lay in my bed. I screamed.

I had never screamed before, and the sound frightened me. It frightened him too, I think, because he pulled back from me and his face was hidden in the shadows.

“Are you awake now?” he asked.

Then I did something else I almost never do. I burst into tears, sobbing.

“What has gotten into you?” he demanded.

I couldn't tell him, so I sobbed.

“Can't you stop that noise?” he asked. “It's no good weeping.”

The door burst with light and Mrs. Bywall entered, carrying another lamp. “What is it? What's happening?” She sounded frightened.

“I dreamed—” I said, and could not finish. The darkness of my dream still lay there, behind them, waiting for me. Mrs. Bywall sat on the other side of the bed and stared at me. She looked across the bed at Mr. Thiel where he too sat waiting. “I'm sorry,” I was finally able to say. “It was a nightmare.”

“Well, I should think so,” she said.

I noticed that both of them were in robes and nightclothes. Mrs. Bywall had braided her hair into a colorless plait. Her face showed no surprise. Mr. Thiel looked shocked and a little alarmed. “If you would fire up the stove, sir,” Mrs. Bywall said, “we'll give her a glass of hot milk. It's my mother's remedy for the nightmare, and she's had many children.”

“Of course,” Mr. Thiel said. He left the room, relieved to be gone.

“Can you come now?” Mrs. Bywall asked. I nodded. I put on my robe and we went downstairs.

The kitchen was bright and familiar. Mrs. Bywall quickly heated milk and poured each of us a glass. Mr. Thiel looked at his with distaste, and at the expression on his face the dark shadows of my dream left my mind.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I've woken you. I don't know what—” But I did know what.

“Tell us what it was you dreamed,” Mrs. Bywall said. She looked quickly at Mr. Thiel, as if she might have spoken out of turn.

“I can't,” I said.

“She was sobbing,” Mr. Thiel reported to Mrs. Bywall, “and calling out.”

“For Miss Wainwright,” Mrs. Bywall said, nodding her head.

“No,” he said shortly. “Do you often have nightmares?” he asked me. “You don't seem the type.”

“Not since I was small,” I told him. “Neither do I scream,” I added. But somehow, remembering that, I felt an unbidden urge to smile. “I apologize for screaming at you.”

“I choose to forget that,” he said, but his dark eyes remembered.

“It was loud enough,” Mrs. Bywall said brightly, with another glance at Mr. Thiel. “If we lived close to
other people, we'd have everybody in here. It raised me up in my bed like a popover in the oven. I was that surprised.” She kept looking over at my employer, as if asking permission to utter the next sentence. “You've got a good scream, Jean, loud and healthy.”

At her practicality, I did smile openly, struck by the humor of what she was saying. Gradually, the ordinariness of the room entered my spirit. That sounds odd, but that's just what it felt like. It was as if the familiarity of the room, of the people sitting in it with me, sipping foamy milk, as if the everyday quality of it swept the fears of my dream out of my memory. Mrs. Bywall still looked half asleep, but she talked on. I began to understand who it was she was afraid of, who it was that caused her to check and consider what she said. I began also, I thought, to glimpse the woman she really was behind her impassive face. I ignored Mr. Thiel and gave her my full attention.

“Don't I know about dreams,” she said. “I had nightmares myself, before going to prison. Then, when once I was there, do you know what I dreamed of? Marlborough and my family. I had happy dreams then. I'd dream it was a birthday, when I was a child. Once I dreamed that Charlie, my Charlie, you know, came and carried me away, rescued me. I
guess I never wanted to wake up from that dream.”

“I don't dream now,” Mr. Thiel said, entering into the conversation. “I used to. Now I paint. It may be much the same thing,” he said. All during this time he watched my face closely. What did he suspect me of, I wondered; why should he watch me so closely?

“It's what you don't think of during the day that comes creeping out of your mind at night, that's what makes dreams,” Mrs. Bywall said. “I can't put proper words to it, but that's what I mean.”

I agreed with her theory of dreams, but did not say so. Instead I said, “It must be the middle of the night.”

“Nearly so,” Mr. Thiel agreed. “The wind has died down, the rain has stopped. And you have bare feet. If your aunt could see you now, she'd probably give me the rough side of her tongue.”

“Yours are bare too, aren't they?” I pointed out. I looked under the table. They were.

“I'm a grown man,” he told me. “I'm allowed to catch my death of cold, whenever I want to. Can you sleep now?”

“I think so,” I said. I remembered my manners. “Thank you for waking me.”

He shrugged, as if to say that didn't matter. I returned to my room, turned down the lamp and lay
quiet in the darkness. They remained downstairs. The dream did not return. Instead I found myself wondering: for whom did I call out, if not for Aunt Constance? I fell into a deep sleep before I had begun to think of an answer.

The next morning, before I started to work, I spent some time thinking carefully. I stood at one of the library windows, looking out toward the stream, over lushly grown trees. The sun was bright. The world glistened. Leaves shone in the sunlight. It was a cheerful view.

The view inside my imagination was not at all cheerful. It was gloomy and muddled, filled with vague ideas and fears. I kept my eyes on the clear world outside and thought carefully, as I had been taught.

First, my own feelings. I was, of course, embarrassed at the commotion I had caused the night before. Mr. Thiel and Mrs. Bywall had been extremely kind to me. I appreciated that, but was still embarrassed. And I understood well what Mrs. Bywall meant about things creeping out in dreams.

To learn of those deaths, those mysteries, even though they were now ten years old, frightened me.
Remember, I had spent all my life under the guidance of Aunt Constance. My years, my days themselves, had been safe, secure, orderly. I knew what would come in the seasons, in the hours. Aunt Constance's patience and kindness guided me. Now, unexpectedly, I had come into a place where such deeds of darkness happened. Worse, they might have been committed by the people among whom I was living. It was as if you went to sleep in your own bed and awoke to find that same bed afloat in an endless sea, with sharks swimming about. Nothing was sure any more.

I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear.

Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow. Fear that morning hung off the bottom of my heart, like a monkey with a devil's face. Its four strong hands clung at my heart, pulling down with its weight, and its hairy countenance grinned diabolically up at me with wise, dark eyes. I knew I had to look at the creature. I forced myself to do so.

I thought carefully: I
could
trust those who were not involved. I could trust Aunt Constance. I could
probably trust Mac. But what of those among whom I was living? What of Mr. Thiel? What of Mrs. Bywall? And the Calldenders, down the hill? All of those people were somehow concerned in this.

Aunt Constance had allowed me to come here. But could she not be deceived by this man who was so generous to her school? Whom she saw only once or twice a year? Who could so easily mislead her, by his interest—however ironic—in her ideas?

What did it all have to do with me? Why should I feel this unreasonable fear?

What had Mr. Thiel been doing in my room? Had he really heard me calling? What had he heard that brought him from his room in bare feet?

That was not careful thinking, I knew. So I started again, reassuring myself by remembering that all this had occurred ten years ago and had nothing to do with me. The death of Josiah Callender came first. Then the death of Irene Callender, Mrs. Thiel. There was the disappearance of the child and of the nurse. Those two were close together in time and probably were connected. So far, it made sense. What was the key?

Added fact: Old Mr. Callender's heart had failed him when his daughter had been brought into the house, when she had been found; although it had not
failed him when she had been missing. (All of the Callenders had searched the night through, as well as Mr. Thiel.) So that old Mr. Callender must also somehow be concerned.

Arranging it in this way, like a geometry problem to be solved, eased my spirits. The answer would lie back, ten years or more, in time.

Then something struck me that should perhaps have been obvious before. There might be a clue, or the answer itself, in these boxes of papers. I thought carefully, although my imagination wanted to rush ahead. The Callenders seemed ordinary people, wealthy it was true, but even so just people, with the usual problems and quarrels, purposes and confusions. It was not usual for ordinary people to die in such fashion or to disappear. Something must have occurred those many years ago to change everything, to make these ordinary people subject to such unreasonable events.

That, also, made sense. I was an outsider, and so could not know what had happened. Mac knew, I thought, no more than he had told me, so that I could assume that the villagers also knew no more. Only the Callenders knew, and Mr. Thiel; and perhaps it was this of which Mrs. Bywall was so careful not to speak. As an outsider, I could bring no private information
to the case. But I had before me seven boxes of papers, where the truth might be hidden. If so, it would most likely be in that last, half-filled box. Carefully, if I were to continue through the papers with this object in mind, I might notice something, something I would overlook in the ordinary course of things. I had organized my approach to the work, and what I was doing now was primarily tedious, just reading closely and sorting. I knew by now what to expect, so that I could work more quickly, less carefully. I could hurry through those intervening years.