Crying Child Read online

  But then, I reminded myself, old-fashioned houses were dangerous places for children. The fireplaces, despite screens and constant attendance, must have caused many injuries.

  The glow from the window was brighter now, a lovely luminous light; the moon must be almost full. I looked at the window. And saw something looking back at me from outside.

  I didn’t have to remember that the window was forty feet above the ground, on a flat wall; I didn’t have to tell myself that nothing human could have reached it. I retreated, with speed. It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck. I went down the stairs like a rocket and I didn’t stop until I had passed through the door at the bottom and slammed it shut behind me.

  I stood there gasping and wheezing, with my back flat up against the door as if I had to press on it to hold it shut. There was nothing behind it—no pressure, no presence. The corridor where I stood was carpeted in soft blue, there were shaded lights and a small table with a mirror above it and a bouquet of wax flowers… I recognized the corridor, the first-floor hall that led from the parlor to a small morning room at the back of the house. From another corridor to my left came the seductive odor of roasting chicken; and from the parlor came a voice, calling my name.

  I pushed myself away from the door.

  “Yes, it’s me,” I said. “Coming, Mary.” I was back in the real world, back through the Looking Glass.

  Ran wasn’t home by seven, so we ate without him. By the time dinner was over I felt like a turkey being stuffed for Thanksgiving. I had the absurd feeling that Mrs. Willard might take the spoon out of my hand and feed me if I didn’t finish everything she put in front of me. When she finally agreed that we had eaten enough I wasn’t sure I could get out of my chair.

  After she and Mary went upstairs, I subsided into a chair in the parlor to recuperate. This was a lovely room, with a big bay window along one side and a beautiful paneled fireplace. Furniture design is not my field, but I knew that some of the pieces were valuable antiques. The heavy embroidered material of the draperies looked like eighteenth-century designs. Above all, it was a pleasant room. The soft rose and green and blue of the draperies were restful to the eyes, and so were the simple lines of the furniture. The dark wood surfaces gleamed; Mrs. Willard hadn’t been fooling when she said she could handle this place.

  After my busy day and abundant dinner I should have been sleepy, but for obvious reasons I found myself increasingly restless. The lamplight cast a mellow glow, the velvet chair was very comfortable, but the copy of Vogue I had picked up didn’t hold my attention, not even the ad layouts. Pictures and text seemed horribly slick and superficial and fake. I knew why I was ill at ease. I was trying hard not to think about the problem, not yet. Preconceptions are fatal to common sense, and fatally easy to fall into. I had enough prejudices to begin with; but at least I knew they were prejudices, unlike some smart-aleck doctors…

  I threw the magazine down with a snort of disgust. There were rows of books in the white-painted shelves flanking the fireplace. It was a good collection—classics, old and new, with a sprinkling of thrillers and science fiction and a few new books I had been wanting to read. Ran had catholic tastes and evidently they were hereditary; some of the volumes were cracked and rubbed with years of use. But none of them caught my interest. The grand piano drew me; I don’t play well, but I like to play, and I hadn’t been able to indulge in a piano of my own, not in my thin-walled apartment and on my thin salary. But my mind shrank back from sound. The house was utterly still. Mary probably wouldn’t have been disturbed by my playing, so long as I didn’t burst into the “Revolutionary Etude” or one of the more vigorous Beethoven sonatas. But it seemed—somehow—dangerous to disturb that silence.

  With that kind of thought for company, I was relieved when I finally heard the car. It stopped in front of the house with a squeal of brakes and I recognized the driving style. Ran always drove that way, impatient with the time it took to get from the place where he was to the place where he wanted to be. I went out into the hall to meet him. My heart was beating more quickly than it should have done.

  The front door opened and there he was. He was almost too handsome—not in the sleek leading-man style, but with a dark, hard leanness that most women find even more attractive. My stomach twisted with the old familiar feeling. I had it under control immediately, but it scared me; I had hoped, and believed, that that weakness was gone for good.

  “Jo! My God, it’s good to see you!”

  He dropped his briefcase and put his arms around me. It was a brief, brotherly hug—nothing more. Then he held me at arms’ length and grinned at me.

  “You’ve lost ten pounds. No, make that eight pounds. What are you doing out there, starving?”

  “Seven pounds,” I said. “Dieting, not starving.”

  “We’ve missed you.” He put his arm around my shoulders and led me toward the parlor. “I wish you’d give up this crazy idea of earning your own living and—”

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “No more of that. We agreed, remember?”

  “Okay, okay. How was the trip? Will meet you all right? What about a drink?”

  “No thanks.” I dropped into a chair and watched as a bar materialized out of what had appeared to be a Chippendale sideboard. “Yes, Bill—Will—whatever his name is met me. And told me off, but good. Has he had the gall to tell you what he thinks of your wife?”

  Ran stood staring down at his glass, moving it gently back and forth so that the ice tinkled delicately.

  “What do you think about Mary? You’ve had a chance to talk to her.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said helplessly. I did know; but I couldn’t say it, not yet. Not in the comfortable room with lamplight yellow and warm, and the night shut out by flowered draperies. “She’s so much worse than I expected. What happened? I can’t believe she would flip over something like—”

  “Jo, you are so damned young. Haven’t you learned that you don’t know Mary—or any other human being— any more than they know you? You see the one tenth that shows above the surface. You never see the pressures, the cracks, and weaknesses that develop underneath.”

  “Weaknesses, is it? You sound like good old Will. What the hell gives him the right to analyze Mary?”

  “He’s a damned good doctor. He’s here on the island by choice, because he loves the place. He could have had his pick of jobs.”

  “That’s beautiful. It doesn’t alter the fact that he’s opinionated, antagonistic, and ignorant.”

  Ran looked at me in mild surprise.

  “What did he say to get you so worked up? With me he’s humble and definitely sympathetic.”

  “He says she’s spoiled. Neurotic. Weak. Childish.”

  “Come on, Jo. Will wouldn’t—”

  “Will did. He doesn’t like me, either.”

  “He doesn’t—” Ran’s baffled stare changed to a look of amusement. “Oh, Lord, I forgot. I should have warned you. Will is scared of women—young, pretty, healthy women, anyhow. That mask of hostility is a defense mechanism.”

  “Now, Ran, you don’t have to spare my feelings. I don’t care what he thinks of me.”

  “No, it’s the truth. Will had a—well, call it an unfortunate love affair.”

  “Call it anything you like. I’m not interested.”

  “I knew Sue in grade school,” Ran said with a reminiscent gleam in his eyes. “She had red gold-curls and blue eyes. And the way she walked, even then…”

  “Never mind your lecherous preadolescence. I gather Sue was La Belle Dame sans Merci. I hope she gave it to him good.”

  “She did.”

  “Ran, I couldn’t care less about Will’s broken heart. So he’s prejudiced against women. That’s about as logical as hating Frenchmen because one Frenchman picks your pocket in the Metro. What really concerns me is why you brought Mary here. Wouldn’t she be better off in town, with decent doctors close at hand?”

  “I told you, she won’t see a p
sychiatrist.”

  “But at least you’d have them near, so that you could take immediate advantage of a change of mind. Here, you’re hours away from professional help if she should agree to see someone, or if…”

  I didn’t need to go on. We both knew what I meant: or if she got worse.

  “That isn’t going to happen,” Ran said angrily. “And if it should—well, whatever you think of Will’s qualifications as a psychiatrist, he’s a first-rate doctor. He could take whatever emergency measures were needed.”

  I shivered. The picture was an ugly one: Mary struggling and violent, having to be subdued by an injection before being carried off, an inert, hoarsely breathing bundle, to a padded cell in Boston or New York. Shades of Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins… But it could happen.

  “But here, of all places,” I argued. “Talk about isolation! Don’t you ever have storms, times when no one can get off the island?”

  “Not these days. You’re a hopeless landlubber, Jo.”

  “Even so… I didn’t even know you had a house here. You lived here when you were small?”

  “Everybody lived here when I was small,” Ran said, with a faint smile. “My grandfather was still alive; he was the patriarch of the clan, he gathered in loose relatives. Mother came here after Dad died, and we stayed till she remarried. Mary fell in love with the place when we came up this spring to settle my great-aunt’s estate. When I suggested we get out of the city, she wanted to come here.”

  “I see.”

  I saw a number of things; one of them was the way Ran was drinking. He was on his third now, and all three had been pretty dark. This was a new habit, and one which filled me with disquiet.

  “I’m glad you do,” Ran said. “Are you willing now to acquit me of kidnapping my wife and carrying her off for my own sinister purposes?”

  “I never thought—”

  “Naturally you’re partisan. I want you to be. I want somebody—somebody who is on Mary’s side.”

  I stared at him.

  “I know,” he said, not looking at me. “But try to understand, Jo. When two people live as closely as Mary and I do—not just the ordinary closeness of marriage, we’ve always had more than that—emotions are never simple. I love her. But my ego is so wound up in her that her un-happiness makes me feel guilty and resentful. I can’t admit that I’ve failed, so there must be something wrong with her. Most of the time I feel love and compassion and a desperate desire to help. But there are moments when —when I want to grab her and shake her and yell, ”Snap out of it! Stop acting so childish!“ Now tell me what a louse I am.”

  “I don’t think you’re a louse,” I said. “I think you’re a rare bird—an honest man. I know a little something about twisted emotions myself.”

  He looked up at me, his face a mixture of gratitude and relief.

  “Thanks, Jo. I’m sorry; I’ve let my worries make me selfish. Have you had a bad time this past year?”

  “No. No worse than… Forget it, Ran. Your worries are my worries, don’t forget. We’ll work them out somehow.”

  “What was she like today? What happened?”

  “Has she ever spoken to you—has she ever said anything about…”It was odd; I couldn’t say it.

  “About hearing a child cry?” From Ran’s tone I knew the subject worried him as much as it did me. But there was a kind of relief in hearing the words said, like the fading of pain after a boil is lanced.

  “Ran, she thinks the baby is alive. At least that’s what I understood from what she said: ”It is a boy. His name is Kevin.“ ”

  “She told you that?” Ran’s heavy brows lowered. “My God, Jo, she hasn’t said that much to me. Only about hearing the crying. What else did she say?”

  “That was about all. Mrs. Willard came in then, and I was too shaken to pursue the subject. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Kevin,” Ran muttered. “That’s odd.”

  “The whole thing is odd.”

  “Not really. It’s a predictable delusion for a woman who wanted a child so badly. But I wonder where she got the name. We always thought… if we ever had a boy…”

  There was no break in his voice, no change in his expression of concentrated thoughtfulness; but I sensed that this was suddenly more than he could bear, and I realized with a sharp stab of guilt that his desire for children had been as keen as Mary’s.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “Randall junior. Elizabeth if it had been a girl… Maybe I didn’t hear the name correctly. I was, as you might say, taken aback.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said slowly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know… For a second there, when you said it doesn’t matter, I had the weirdest feeling… of warning, almost.”.

  “Cut it out, Jo. Don’t you go psychic on me.”

  The words were brusque but the smile was not. I laughed self-consciously, feeling that peculiar sense of relaxation that follows an emotional outburst.

  “Sorry. The crucial question is, how do I react to remarks like that one of Mary’s? Do I accept it? Question it? Contradict it? I can put on any act that’s required, but I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”

  “I know what you mean. I don’t know the answer, not yet, but I did something today that—”

  His voice broke off; and then I heard the other sound.

  It was faint, as though it came from a long, long way away—a high, shrill keening sound. The sound of someone crying.

  Ran moved so fast that the breeze of his passage riffled the pages of the magazine lying open on the table. When I stumbled out into the hall he was already halfway up the stairs, taking them three at a time. The sound was still going on, a desolate wailing that tore at the ears. It was real; there was no possible question of that. But I think I knew the truth, even before I saw.

  Mary’s room was down the hall and across from mine. When I reached the top of the stairs I could see the door —and Ran bent over at an odd angle which made sense only when I heard the click of the lock. He flung the door open and disappeared inside. The sound was loud now, and unmistakable; it came from inside the room.

  They stood locked together near the doorway; it wasn’t apparent, at first glance, whether Ran’s arms were embracing or restraining her. She was still crying, but more normally, with sobs and muffled words.

  “Couldn’t get out… Let me go, Ran, let me go… He wants me… Couldn’t get out!”

  The last word rose to a scream, and then she struggled wildly while Ran tried to hold her. I saw her face as she writhed. I don’t think I’d have recognized it if I hadn’t known who she was. Her eyes, black holes in a white mask, saw me, but without recognition. Then her face vanished behind the heavy shape of Ran’s shoulder. I heard him speak, sharply; and then there was a flurry of movement and Mary went limp. Ran gathered her up as she fell. He turned toward me with her body cradled against him. Her cheek lay on his breast. On his cheek I could see the livid marks of her nails. I started toward him.

  “Get out,” he said. “Get out of here, Jo.”

  I fell back a step as the door slammed in my face.

  THREE

  I was lured downstairs next morning by the smells from the kitchen—-bacon and eggs and coffee and muffins, fresh out of the oven. The muffins were dark with cinnamon and sticky with warm sugar. I ate three of them, sitting at the kitchen table while Mrs. Willard watched approvingly.

  “Don’t suppose you usually eat a decent breakfast,” she said. “That instant stuff, or dry cereal. That’s just like grass. No body to it.”

  “If I ate like this every morning, I’d gain five pounds a week,” I mumbled, through my third muffin. “It might be worth it, at that… Where is everybody? Am I late or early?”

  “Ran already had breakfast. He’s in the library; said he had some work to do this morning.”

  “What about Mary?”

  Mrs. Willard turned away to wipe a
n already immaculate counter top.

  “I take hers up to her. She doesn’t sleep too good.”

  “I know.”

  Mrs. Willard turned. Her pink face was impassive, but from the cloth in her hand a small trickle of water dripped down onto the spotless floor. Her fingers must have been tightly clenched to squeeze water from a cloth she had already wrung out.

  “She was up again last night?”