The House on Coliseum Street Page 15

  “For God’s sake,” Doris said.

  Michael wiggled his toes under their black socks. “Hi.”

  His hair was rumpled, standing straight up on top, its hair oil glistening. As if a hand had run through it. His very fair skin had taken on a deep flush and his dark beardline stood out stronger than ever against the pink.

  If I got close to him, Joan found herself thinking, I’d find out that there’d be a batch of little red veins appearing around his nose. And spreading out across his cheeks. Like cobwebs.

  The radio was playing very softly in one corner. Joan turned her eyes to it slowly. Masses of strings were slithering slowly up and down.

  “It sounds like Frere Jacques,” she said irrelevantly.

  “Old duck,” Doris said, “go away.”

  She’s drunk, Joan thought, I’ve never seen her so drunk before.

  And her eyes focused on the tray right beside Michael’s feet. A tiny round tray, two bottles and a pitcher of water. And an ice bucket. A silver ice bucket…

  “That’s mine,” Joan said.

  “It is not,” Doris said. “You gave it to Aurelie.”

  She had, of course. Only last Christmas, with a burst of feeling she had gone into a jewelers and asked to see the Danish silver. She had bought an ice bucket with ivory handles. When Aurelie said, “You shouldn’t have,” she answered simply, “But I felt like it.” She had. Afterward though she wondered why. She didn’t really like her mother very much.

  “Go away, old duck,” Doris repeated. And fluttered her hands, as if she were chasing chickens.

  Michael waved at her, mockingly, a child’s wave, stiff wrist and moving fingers.

  “Out,” Doris said, “out.”

  Joan turned then and left. Only it wasn’t so much leaving as it was fleeing. She could feel panic shaking her body like a chill.

  She got to the hall and sat down on top of her coat on the little Louis XIV chair. Somebody got up and slammed the door shut. Even through it she could hear them laughing.

  She sat perfectly still. After a few minutes she tipped her head back and rested it against the wall. She did not move again.

  She did not know exactly how long she sat there, not thinking, not listening really. Just waiting. And she did not know what she was waiting for.

  She did not move when she heard the steps on the front porch, and she scarcely turned her head when Aurelie opened the door and stepped into the hall, her deep laugh swirling around her like a flip of a scarf, carelessly.

  Somebody was with her, somebody stood just outside the door.

  Joan watched the shock on Aurelie’s face turn to annoyance. I ruined an entrance for her, she thought dully.

  “Child, child,” Aurelie said, “whatever are you doing?”

  “Something wrong?” a man stepped through the door.

  Even in the little half-light of the hall Joan could see him clearly. Short, stocky, balding, with the remains of blond hair cut close to his head.

  “You’re ruining your coat,” Aurelie said.

  Joan stood up, shook the coat and hung it across her arm. She nodded toward the closed door of the little parlor.

  Aurelie marched over to it, with her most determined step. The man followed her, more softly. He gave Joan a quick glance as he passed.

  “I’m Joan,” she said quietly, automatically. “The oldest.”

  She had been identifying herself to Aurelie’s friends that way for years.

  She looked at the man more curiously as he passed close by her. He was very blond; his skin was sunburned a deep tan and there were millions of little crisscrossing lines in it.

  He looks all right, Joan found herself thinking. I bet anything, she marries him…

  Aurelie pulled open the door. “For heaven’s sake!”

  They weren’t sitting apart any longer. They were together in one armchair. Joan turned away.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Aurelie said again. “I seem to have come home just in time!”

  Joan went over and sat down on the lowest of the steps leading upstairs. She patted the carpet with one hand, slowly. That’s what she’s going to be, she thought, the highly outraged mama.

  Aurelie had been saying something else. Joan listened. “Leave this house right now.” A pause. “Shall I ask Mr. Bryan to help you out?”

  Mr. Bryan pulled himself up, taking a deep breath, like a fighter.

  Joan thought: strutting like a rooster. And Bryan is an Irish name. He looked like the sort of man who would have sons. And isn’t it a shame Aurelie can’t have any more children…

  Aurelie was saying: “I’m just shocked. Just absolutely shocked.”

  Joan saw Mr. Bryan move over closer to Aurelie, protectively, so that his shoulder was almost touching hers.

  “Oh God,” Joan said softly under her breath.

  Michael got his coat on and walked to the door, with the exaggerated steadiness of the very drunk. “It has been a most pleasant evening, Miss Doris,” he mocked formally.

  Doris followed him. Aurelie stood perfectly still in the parlor door. Mr. Bryan stood beside her like a watchful poodle. Joan looked down at the outline of her knees through the thin silk of her dress.

  At the door Doris caught Michael’s arm and whispered something to him. He gave a quick heel-clicking bow.

  Doris turned and leaned against the closed door. “Boy oh boy,” she said, very quietly. “Remind me to stick needles into you sometime.”

  Joan did not look up.

  Doris walked by her and up the stairs. As she passed Joan caught a whiff of perfume. Mitsouko. It was her scent. The bottle was on her dresser; she could see the round flat shape. Or maybe it wasn’t any more.

  She turned and said to the climbing legs above her: “Did you take the bottle or did you just use it?”

  Without stopping Doris turned her head, symbolically spitting to one side.

  Joan felt very tired. She put her head down on her knees and began to listen to her breathing.

  “Child, child,” Aurelie said, “you must be exhausted. Go on up to bed.”

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Bryan said.

  Joan got to her feet very slowly. She brushed down her skirt, picked up her coat and gloves and purse. “We’ve always had very bad luck with the men in this house,” she said calmly. “You have just seen the last example.”

  Mr. Bryan looked startled. His eyes, which were a light brown, like the shell of a pecan, blinked once.

  Aurelie laughed. A true chuckle. Mr. Bryan’s eyes lighted up again. “I hope you don’t have many like that,” he said.

  “We all have bad luck,” Joan said, and went upstairs.” Even I have bad luck. And I don’t get many to have it with.”

  “You see,” Aurelie said to her departing back, “my daughters are all individualists.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Bryan said. But he sounded doubtful. The pecan-colored eyes might be just a bit darker.

  “Would you like a nightcap?” Aurelie asked.

  Joan went into her room and closed the door.

  She had been lying in bed quite awhile, lying across the bed, muscles rigid.

  She heard Mr. Bryan leave. Heard him whistle his way across the sidewalk and start up his car with a cheery roar. She heard him spin around the corner with a screech of rubber.

  I think, she told herself quietly, I’ll call him Papa. And I wonder what he would say if I did.

  She heard Aurelie come up to bed. Heard the old pipes rattle with quick running water. Then the thick early morning silence. At a quarter past the hour a streetcar rattled past over on the avenue, rattled off into the distance with a hollow metallic jangle. There would be nothing more for an hour. An occasional car went by too, a light brushing sound of tires. But it was all very far away from the house on Coliseum Street.

  She got up and opened her windows, letting the clear cold air slip into the musty room.

  The house had a definite smell, she thought. And all the cleaning in the wo
rld would never get it out. Because it wasn’t a smell of dirt. It wasn’t a smell of cooking. Or of anything in particular. It was the smell of everything. Of everything that had gone on in the house for the past hundred and twenty years. It was the smell of the people and the things. Of the living that had gone on between the walls.

  The smell of generations being born. Dying. And being laid out in the front parlor with a sprig of sweet olive from the door in their clenched hand.

  People left their smells behind them. It was almost like the paper you’d cut dolls out of—the dolls were gone but you could see their shape and size and form. You could see just the way they had been.

  It seemed to her sometimes that she could hear them too. That they left little sounds behind them, echoing around the walls. Like faint rustly mice. Seemed she could hear the sounds of all their breathing. Left-behind breathing. Echoing. Gently, like leaves.

  Still dressed, she reached down and pulled the quilt over her.

  She lay and listened to the rustling of time past. Her musty grandfathers, echoing from the St. Louis Cemetery. And heard the rustling of the future time. And tried to understand it. And gave up finally, sadly.

  I wanted none of the things that have happened, she thought. None of the things that have happened. They just came along. I didn’t intend them. Time and things like a river, passing.

  Before me, she thought, and after me. Things will go on happening when I’m dead. Pass around me and over me and go on.

  And instead of being frightened, she felt comforted.

  She had lain there she didn’t know how long when she heard the footsteps. She heard them first on the cement of the sidewalk, then on the brick of the path. And in between she heard the slight rusty squeak of the front gate.

  She slipped out of bed, moving gently inside her clothes so that they didn’t rustle and spoil her hearing. She got to the window and looked down. She saw nothing. She was too high and the space between the houses was too narrow. She would have had to lift the screen and look straight down into the deep dark of the pathway.

  She crouched by the open window and felt the cold night air pour over her. Like a river.

  Nonsensically she found herself singing, silently: we shall gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river… That was all she knew. That was all she had learned. Aurelie didn’t approve of her girls learning and singing Protestant hymns.

  The sound of uncertain steps on old slippery mossy brick: hollow sound of bricks set in cinder. Then a quick flurry, a rush, a grunt.

  Her eyes pinpointed the noise in the night. She couldn’t see but she didn’t have to. Somebody had leaped for the lowest rung of the fire escape, the iron fire escape that led to the empty attic rooms where Herbert Norton had once lived. And somebody caught hold of the iron bars, caught hold with a little hissing grunt and swung up.

  The ladder was a dozen feet from her window. Holding her breath, she leaned against the screen and stared at the figure that emerged from the dark, climbing quickly, outlined against the bricks.

  She caught a scent, clear in the still air. And she recognized it: Aphrodisia. He has good taste, she thought. He had not worn it the day they went across the lake. But then, she thought, he hadn’t been dressed up then. It hadn’t been anything special.

  The fire escape passed close by the bathroom window, which Aurelie had always kept nervously locked. It was open now.

  Joan listened. And followed the little sounds through the bathroom, into the hall and back again into Doris’s room. Once she heard a muffled giggle.

  The wind ruffled the hair at the nape of her neck. It was very cold and she shivered. She held her hands straight out in front of her and studied the nails. But in the dark she could see nothing.

  All of a sudden she knew what she had been waiting for. She knew what she was going to do.

  Joan opened her own door, moved out in the hall. She hesitated, noticing for the first time in the still night air how the sharp sweet odor of rats hung about the house.

  Then she was moving down the hall, silently, with only the light rustle of her silk dress. (I’m still dressed, she thought. I forgot. The same dress I was wearing for dinner with Fred. And that was such a long time ago. A very, very long time ago. And Fred, now, I will miss him.)

  She closed the front door behind her, and moved off down the street.

  Michael’s voice was echoing in her head: “If it had come out, honey bunch, I’d be fired so fast I wouldn’t even see the door slamming.”

  She found herself running, on tiptoe, silently, quickly.

  SHE KNEW THE HOUSE she wanted—a square box of yellowing stucco, set on a foot-high terrace. In the dark (the entrance light was turned off) she stumbled on the steps. She climbed them wearily, and it seemed that she would never get to the top, though there were only seven of them. She felt around the door until she found the bell.

  She rang, timidly at first, then with more and more insistence. A light came on upstairs. A window opened and someone called: “Who is it?”

  She did not answer. She stood under a little portico, hidden from sight. She kept ringing. While she waited, she fingered the scraggly tendrils of the Confederate jasmine that twisted around the entrance.

  A hall light. A clatter as the door unlocked.

  A not very friendly mutter: “What is this about?”

  “Dean Lattimore?”

  A grunted yes.

  “Would you mind asking me in?” Joan said. “It’s quite cold out here and I seem to have forgotten my coat.”

  Afterward, looking back, and trying very hard, she found she could not remember parts of that morning. She could not remember going into the house. But she did remember being in a room, a living room that was half dark. There were only two lamps on. And the room itself was not very tidy. There were newspapers on the floor in a little heap, and butts in the ash trays. A couple of glasses still stood on the table, one with the froth marks of beer.

  It was all so familiar. As if she’d been there before, saying the same things. As if it had all been done so long ago.

  She remembered being very quiet, very assured. She remembered smoothing out her skirt carefully before she sat down. She remembered crossing her ankles, properly.

  And she stepped out of herself. She stepped back, far back, and watched. It was like watching a movie screen. She was not involved at all. Sometimes she didn’t even hear the words. Sometimes she could see her own lips moving and she knew that she was talking but she did not seem to hear the words. And then the sound would come back…

  “A horrible time, I know. But if I hadn’t come now I wouldn’t have come. Because I have to steel myself up for this…”

  As she went along she knew that she was not telling the truth, the whole truth. That she was changing it slightly, very slightly. That she was deliberately destroying a man.

  She knew it and it did not matter to her. She had no control any more. She did not feel vicious. She was not afraid. She did not feel anything at all. Except not part of herself any more.

  “He drove me across the lake. We were just going for a spin across the causeway, but we didn’t stop once we got on the other side… He brought beer out to the car and we drank can after can… He told his class he was sick…”

  Michael was so very handsome. White skin, dark eyes. Delicate face for a man.

  “I didn’t believe it at first…”

  There was a cigar butt in the room somewhere. They really should have thrown it out. Dead cigars smelled terrible. Aurelie would never have left a cigar butt in her living room. …

  She saw herself lean back in her chair and rub her fingers against her temples. There was a question. She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “And who arranged this—this thing for you?”

  She shrugged and lied deliberately. “He did. It was his.”

  She used to believe that the earth would open and swallow you if you told a lie…
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  There was a woman in the room, Joan noticed. A grey-haired woman in a dark dressing gown. Deans were always married, of course.

  “He told me not to say anything, that it would ruin his career.”

  The dean snorted. “If this is true, young lady, it certainly has.”

  Joan stared at the windows. They had shades instead of Venetian blinds, and one of the shades was pulled slightly crooked.

  “One other thing,” she found herself saying, “you might wonder why I came now…” They always liked to know the why of things. They always liked to have reasons. Neat and nice. She could give them a reason; it wouldn’t be true but it would be neat. “He’s started on my sister, my little sister…” She heard a sharp breath from the dean’s wife. It does sound good, she thought. “Only tonight my mother had to ask him to leave the house…”

  Aurelie, Aurelie, you’ll have to say that it’s true, because you won’t dare not to.

  It’s still pitch black outside, because I can see our reflections as sharp as in a mirror.

  “If this is true…”

  “You can check.” Of course they could. There was just enough truth about it. They would find that out at once. And they would think that the rest was true too.

  She could hear Michael’s words echoing around in her head: “I’d be fired so fast…”

  Michael, Michael where are you right now? You don’t know what’s happened. And when you do it will be all over… By then I won’t be in love with you any more. I’m almost not now.

  “I’m going to leave, of course. I’ll have to leave.” And where would she go? There had to be somewhere. It didn’t seem to matter. Not that much. She could always go somewhere.

  She put her hands on her knees and pushed herself upright. “Thank you for your time.”

  She was finished. She had done what she had to do. Now she could start to forget. The stand of pine and the soft needles. The early morning trip on the coast, with the bugs splattering on the windshield.

  It was ended now, the whole thing.

  “You’re not going to walk out at this hour?”