Illyria (3 page)

19

joined the military. My oldest sister, Brigid, was engaged. Occasionally Michael would pound Rogan, or try to, but Rogan was bigger now. After a while Michael lost interest in the sport and, concomitantly, in Rogan himself. We weren't watched as closely as we once were. When our parents went out to dinner at the club, Rogan and I were left alone.

Or sort of alone. My sisters, perversely, paid more attention to me now than when I was younger; a chilly feminine vigilance to ensure I did nothing to embarrass them, especially with Rogan.

So he and I would engineer games of hide-and-seek with the kids from Mile Square Road, and
then
disappear. We'd hide beneath the porch at Fairview, and forgo the candle to lie in the dark with Rogan on top of me. We'd hold each other and pretend we'd been shipwrecked.

"I can't breathe," Rogan would whisper as he clutched me. Sometimes he'd pinch my nostrils shut. "You can't breathe, your mouth is filled with water ..."

We knew we weren't drowning. We knew what we were doing, even though I never quite had a word for it, Rogan's smell and breath and our hearts hammering as we moved, the raw feel of my groin rubbed beneath layers of cotton and denim. Afterward we'd lie on the cold earth and talk and listen to the voices of the others outside as they looked for us, excited then laughing then irritated then bored and finally, as the summer wore toward fall, angry and obdurate. The day came when Rogan called and asked Ookie Connell to come over. I could tell by Rogan's face that the answer was no, and when he put the phone down he shrugged.

"What?" I asked.

20

"He says if we have a baby it'll be retarded."

In September we started high school. The only two classes we had together were English and Latin. For the latter, Sister Mary Clark made a point of separating us.

"But I help him," I protested. "I help him concentrate."

"I'm sure you do." Sister Mark Clark had taught two generations of Tierneys. She liked my sisters, and she liked me. She was a bony, raw-faced woman who still wore a habit and laughed a lot, though her eyes were long and bright as a knife. "Rogan needs to concentrate by himself. He can't rely on you, Madeline. He has to do his own work."

"He does! He--"

She grabbed my elbow and pinched it hard. "I want you over here."

She guided me to the other side of the classroom. I sat, scowling, as Sister Mary Clark started back across the room. Abruptly she stopped and turned to me. Her eyes narrowed.

"Madeline, where are your glasses?"

I stared back. "I don't need them anymore."

She looked at me, then at Rogan watching me from the other side of the room. He flushed, and her gaze hardened.

"Do not peer too close," she said, deliberately misquoting Pindar. "Everyone, get out yesterday's homework."

A few weeks later we were walking home from school. It was the end of September, a Friday afternoon. Rogan wore a battered fatigue coat over his uniform; I wore his brown corduroy jacket, too big for me. Several other kids from school walked near us. Their voices dropped as they passed. Ookie Connell said something I couldn't hear, and the others laughed.

21

"I quit the choir," Rogan said as we started down the hill toward Arden Terrace, walking along the curb so we could kick through drifts of leaves.

"How come?"

"Old Mrs. Connell complained." He shook his head, his red-gold hair spilling to his collar. "She said my singing distracted her." I laughed. "Distracted! Can she even hear you?" But Rogan didn't smile.

"She's a bitch." He glanced back to make sure the others were gone, then leaned down to touch his head to mine. "This friend of Michael's, Derek, he was over last night. He's in a band. He told me I should come hear them. He said maybe I could sing with them sometime."

"Really?" I smiled, but felt a twinge of unease. I didn't recognize it as jealousy. "Where do they play?"

"I dunno. Someplace in Ardsley. Listen, I want to show you something. When you come over. I found a place."

A place.
I knew what that meant. When summer ended, our spot beneath the porch grew cold and overrun with beetles. Field mice sought shelter against the coming winter, and hibernating bats.

"The isle is sinking into the ice," I'd warned Rogan as we lay there in the chilly dark. "We must seek safe harbor, or drown."

"There is no safe harbor," he'd said, and kissed me till I couldn't breathe.

Now I slowed to look at him. The worn fatigue coat made him seem older--a beautiful stranger, like someone on an album cover. His hair was the same color as the maple leaves, his cheeks were

22

reddened from the cold. His eerie eyes caught the cloudless sweep of sky and glowed a startling, mineral blue. "Is it a good place?" I asked.

Rogan grinned. "It's a
great
place. Wait'll you see it."

When we reached Arden Terrace I went home and changed. My sisters were out. My mother had taken a job in the women's department at Wanamaker's and wouldn't be home till dinnertime. I grabbed my Latin text and went across the street to Rogan's house, to pretend to do homework.

Rogan's father, like mine, was a successful stockbroker, but he always said there wasn't enough money in the world to maintain Fairview. Everywhere shingles were missing. Paint flaked from the balconies on the upper floors. The great porch sagged where it overlooked the Hudson, its wicker furniture unsprung and its balustrades devoured by carpenter ants.

Inside, the house was cold and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and dust. Rogan's mother, too, had taken a job. Autumn leaves had blown across the antique Caucasian carpets. There were semicircles of ash in front of the fireplaces; in the kitchen and bathrooms, sinks bore serpentine trails of rust beneath their faucets.

But on the third floor, where Rogan slept, little had changed. Adults ventured there seldom, chiefly to complain or enact justice: it had the austere air of benign neglect associated with a lakeside home in the off-season. Rogan's brothers Michael and Thomas had the two bedrooms overlooking the front of the house. As usual, they were off with their girlfriends. Rogan stood on the landing, waiting for me.

23

"Greetings, fair Amazon." He swept out his arm in welcome. "Come into the parlor."

Once his room had been the nursery. It was a wide, sunlit space that occupied nearly half of the third floor, with a row of windows that looked straight across the river, though when you gazed out you mostly saw unbroken sky. It should have seemed cheerful and bright.

Instead, the room felt empty and exposed, even desolate. Temporary quarters, despite Rogan's having lived there his entire life. A sink stood in one corner, an institutional relic of nursery life, and next to it the door that opened onto a tiny morning balcony, big enough for just one person. There were alcoves filled with moldering books and Samuel French scripts that had been defaced by mice. Rag rugs covered the floor. A creepy archaeology of wallpaper peeled in layers from the walls--fox hunters, lurid pink lilacs, Humpty Dumpty.

A bunged-up kitchen table served as desk, and there were two spindly chairs that had been painted meat-red. Beneath the windows stood a very beautiful hand-carved cradle, rumored to have belonged to one of Madeline's twin brothers. Rogan used it as a hamper. A wooden hatbox hid his cigarettes. In the middle of the room was an immense theatrical trunk, its brass fittings black with age, where he kept his clothes. You could just make out the name stenciled on its top in faint white letters.

MADELINE ARMIN TIERNEY

I used to wonder why the trunk was here, rather than in Aunt Kate's carriage house. That was until Rogan and I attempted to move

24

it. It wouldn't budge, not even when we enlisted Michael's help.

"Jesus, what's in there? Rocks?" Michael complained, wiping sweat from his lip.

"Uh-uh. Just this--"

Rogan tossed a pair of socks at him. The two ended up scuffling on the floor, until my uncle pounded upstairs and cracked their heads together. Before he went back down he gave the trunk a baleful glance, then looked darkly at Rogan.

"Next time it'll be
you
in there," he said.

Rogan slept in a wrought-iron bed against one wall. There was a bookshelf beside it, and next to that a small door that opened into a long, low, paneled space that was half closet, half attic. It was crammed with boxes of toy machine guns and water pistols, old Halloween noisemakers and masks, crepe-paper streamers and piles of
The Saturday Evening Post,
tinsel garland, and compacts of greasepaint and rouge. Glitter had sifted over everything, like silver dust. It smelled like Christmas, of cloves and balsam.

"Come here, Maddy." Rogan took my hand and drew me to him. "Come and see ..."

He stepped to the wall, opened the door to the little attic, and ducked inside, stooping so he wouldn't graze his head against the ceiling. I followed.

"Wait--stay there for a minute," he said. Carefully he stepped between cartons of wigs and old magazines, until he reached the end of the narrow space. He pulled out a flashlight and switched it on, then gestured at the door behind me. "Close that, then come over here. Try not to knock anything over."

25

I shut the door and joined him in the back of the room. "What is it?"

We stood side by side, backs bent, between boxes of Shiny Brite Christmas ornaments. Directly in front of us, more cartons were stacked against the wall.

"Take this," Rogan commanded. He handed me the flashlight, then knelt. Very gingerly he began to pull the pile of boxes toward him, wedging himself against the stack so that they moved as one and didn't topple over. "Now look. Do you see it?"

He leaned back and shone the flashlight on the wall.

Where the boxes had been was another door. Barely three feet high and not as wide, with a simple latch and hinges that had darkened to the same oaky color as the walls.

"Wow," I breathed. "How'd you find it?"

"Just poking around the other night. There's stuff in here, I swear no one's touched it since Madeline died." Rogan grinned. "No one knows about it but us. Here--"

He undid the latch and pulled the door open, took the flashlight and shone it inside, then motioned at me.

"Go in," he urged. "I fixed it up. Go on, I'm right behind you."

I squatted, got onto my hands and knees, and crawled inside. I could see nothing clearly, but a moment later Rogan's head bumped against me.

"Keep going," he said. "Once you get all the way in you can kneel; just watch your head. But it's bigger than you think."

I laughed in delight, my heart beating fast, and crawled into the near-darkness. Something soft was under me; the flashlight moved

26

wildly as Rogan turned and pulled the door closed behind us. I heard the soft
thhkkk
of a match being struck, and then Rogan lit a candle and set it into a blue glass he'd stolen from church.

"That's not safe," I said.

Rogan snorted and turned off the flashlight.

"Voila," he said.

We were in a passage under the eaves. To one side, the ceiling slanted down to the floor. On the other side was a fretwork of wood and plaster lath. The wavering blue candlelight made it seem as though this wall was snow covered and moonlit. A neat pallet of Hudson Bay blankets lay on the floor, along with an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes.

Also several books, including the copy of
Tales from Shakespeare
that had once been Madeline's but which I had claimed years before, only to have it disappear.

"Hey!" I grabbed the book and stared at the cover in disbelief, then smacked Rogan with it. "You stole this!"

"Yeah, but I gave it back." He flopped onto the blankets. "What do you think?"

"It's amazing." I lay beside him and stared at the ceiling. "It's like being in a boat."

"That's right." He turned toward me. "It's the boat that saved us from drowning."

He kissed me, his mouth so much bigger than mine, and his hands; everything. When I grasped his shoulders it was like grabbing onto a ladder: I clambered on top of him and he slipped his hands beneath my flannel shirt.

27

"It's warm here," he whispered. "We can be warm."

We took our shirts off, and for the first time drew ourselves together skin to skin, breast to breast. His flesh was as white and smooth as my own, all but hairless; his nipples small and flat above the long hollow of his waist and his hip bone's sharp rise; his mouth bittersweet with nicotine and toothpaste. Everywhere I touched him was like finding myself in the dark. Rogan's hands moved where mine would move. His murmurs echoed my own. The space around us was another, warmer skin, its reek of sex and sweat cut with the chalky scent of plaster and that intense, oddly evanescent balsam smell. We kept our jeans on, striving together until first Rogan came and then I did, straddling his thigh.

Afterward we lay entwined. Small moons quivered all around us, blue and gold and silver, as the candle guttered in its glass.

"Shhh," I said, though neither of us had spoken. "Listen." I pressed my hand on Rogan's mouth and whispered, "Do you hear?"

"Mice," said Rogan. "They're everywhere."

"That's not mice."

From behind the wall came a faint tapping. Not scrabbling or scratching; more rhythmic. I sat up, my sweat cooling, and cocked my head.

"It's there." I touched the wall with the flat of my hand--warily, as though it might burn me. "Can't you hear it?"

It sounded like drumming fingernails. Or sleet, if sleet could fall inside a house.

Yet the sky had been cloudless.

Rogan yawned. "It's mice, Maddy."