Mrs. God (15 page)

Braced for everything, braced multidimensionally, Standish sat down, ripped open the envelope, and removed his wife's letter.

fourteen

Dear William
,

I bet you didn't expect to hear from me so soon. It's the funniest thing, yesterday I ran into Saul Dickman, who said that he was spending the rest of the summer in England. He only wished he was going to be in a cushy spot like you, with an exciting project like yours. Anyhow, I asked him if he could take a letter with him and mail it when he got to London, and if you get this, that's what he did. Three-day delivery, not bad, right?

I wanted to write for a lot of reasons—William, you seemed so tense before you left. When I took you to the airport, you were frothing at the mouth whenever anyone passed us, and when they called your flight you were so worked up you wouldn't have said good-bye if I hadn't reminded you. You had that awful look in your eye. This makes me so worried. But I don't know how much I should say, because I don't know how mad you'll get. Anyhow, I sure hope you got some sleep on the plane because some of this was just plain old lack of sleep. And William, you were never really a relaxed kind of guy anyhow, were you? I mean, a lot of stuff is just kind of normal for you, and I guess I'm not perfect either, you know what I mean
.

But you know why I'm worried, too. You should know. I don't want to make you mad at me, and things have been pretty good between us for the past couple of years. But neither one of us will ever forget what happened at Popham. Of course everything was hushed up and you landed on your feet. I got over it. We managed to forgive each other, didn't we? You even got another job. But it still
happened
. William, I don't ever want any of that to ever happen again. I'm not going to lose this baby, you can bank on that, but it's just as important that you take care of yourself
.

If you start feeling that old way again, just come home. COME HOME. Don't lose yourself. Don't forget me. Everything is
all right.

Zenith is nice, but couldn't we live anywhere? As long as you stay
William.

I need reassurance too. A lot of it, like you. I don't know if I'm trying to give it to you or to me by writing to you like this—I know I' d find it really hard to say things like this to you in person. I hope you'll write to me or even call me, maybe just to cheer me up. I'm so heavy I can hardly walk to the bathroom, and I pee every time I burp. I have heartburn that won't go away. I'm afraid that something is going to go wrong—I know there's no reason for this, but I'm afraid that it'll be like that other time, our terrible time, and that I'll have to talk to lawyers and policemen, and when I get so worried I wish you were here so I could see you were okay
.

Please write, do good work, and come home soon
.

Love
,

Jean

P.S. I looked up your place in a reference book
, Oxford Companion to English Literature?
Something like that. What a place! Have you found out ANYTHING? Is there really a big dark secret? Or shouldn't I ask?

fifteen

S
aul Dickman
, Standish thought. That figured. Yesterday I ran into Saul Dickman. Yesterday I just happened to find myself talking to good old Saul, who's been married twice and can be counted on to see the sex object in even an abject blob of hysteria like Jean Standish. Standish crumpled the letter and threw it into the wastebasket.

Showered and dressed, he emerged into the Inner Gallery twenty minutes later. A small razor nick beside his Adam's apple printed a constellation of red-brown spots onto his collar as he walked past the windows. He twisted his neck to look at the Seneschals' windows, and imagined seeing a boy with a shadowy angelic face, the younger duplicate of Robert Wall's, staring back at him. He could not see the boy unless he looked with Isobel's eyes—and then he could see, with dreamlike clarity, the dark-haired boy who would grow up to call himself Robert Wall, leaning against the glass across the way. The boy followed him in a manner that looked casual at first but was actually charged with an electric attention. It was what
they
had seen as they walked through the Inner Gallery. The seeming languor, the actual hunger.
It's better never to leave Esswood
—that was how they did things, by tossing these gauzy little spiderwebs over you and seeing if you figured out the pattern before they melted away. Oh, you were ten years old in 1914, were you, Mr. Robert Wall? And are you implying that your general appearance at the age of eighty-six, not to mention your sister's at the relatively even more astonishing age of eighty-three or four, is part of the reason why it's better never to leave Esswood?

Standish passed into the dark study and saw in his mind the eyes of the woman who had come into his room with her dead baby: he imagined Isobel locking him in her arms, clamping him into her stony embrace, all that desperation pouring itself into a romantic mold and overflowing it.

He ran down the staircase, seeing everything as it had been seventy-odd years earlier. These old men were two generations nearer, and what went on beneath their gaze was a deliberate mockery. Earlier Seneschals had lived quietly, buried their dead, improved the library, and hidden their afflicted. Unfortunates like the late Mr. Sedge had fed their awful appetites. Through Isobel's eyes Standish saw the riot with which Edith had replaced the secretive old order. Imaginary throngs sprawled over the furniture, talked ceaselessly, raided the wine cellar, stripped the kitchen of its food. They dirtied the sheets and stained the carpets and filled every room with a blur of sound and smoke and color. Chattering, impudent ghosts—full of spurious accidental “life,” some of them diseased, some of them coughing into their fists, some of them as drunk as Jeremy Starger, some as prissy as Chester Ridgeley, some men always pawing at women's breasts, touching touching, some women glancing always at men's fly buttons, in secret touching, like Jean Standish on the other side of an upstairs window in Popham. In the East Hall he saw them standing in pairs, twisting their hands together, their lips moving in their endless clever talk-talk, never dreaming what dreamed about
them
from behind the walls and waited.

You have been chosen, said “Robert Wall.”

He gasped in the sudden heat as he trotted down the stairs. His clothing felt hot and confining, and he yanked the blazer off his shoulders and tossed it aside as he reached the bottom step. Standish ran over the gravel to the side of the house and ducked into the trellis.

A hot swarming smell, sharply sexual, surrounded him. From behind the interwoven green walls and ceiling came a steady intense live buzz of sound, as from a hive. Standish burst out of the trellis, expecting to see a swarm of bees or wasps dancing over the terrace, but the air was clear and hot and empty. The intense, sizzling noise continued, coming from everywhere at once. Popham: the sweat dripping down his forehead. Standish paused and wiped his face on his sleeve. Imaginary guests looked up from their lawn chairs and tilted beards and sharp eyes at him and pretended to flick dust from the sleeves of their perhaps too carefully selected garments. He turned from their whispers as Isobel had done and trotted toward the iron staircase. Large dark splotches rose up out of his body and printed themselves on his shirt. Beneath the thin distracted heat-sounds emanating from real insects and the faint susurrus of leaves from the grove beyond the pond, there endured the buzzing of a hive, as of busy indifferent traffic at the back of a man in a Burberry raincoat in Popham, Ohio, on a night as hot as this. A week before she said she was pregnant. And expected him to believe the magpie was his. He reached the staircase and ran down the terraces in the sun.

At the bottom he could see with Isobel's eyes the slight figure of a beautiful boy, in a cream shirt perhaps, open at the neck perhaps, watching with tilted head from the top of the rusting staircase. No gamekeeper's boy, for old William lived without woman or get. Standish pretended to be indifferent to the traffic on the Popham street outside the apartment of a man whose name he would never permit even now to enter his mind except in disguise as when the eye fell upon the wrapper of a CERTAIN cough drop or in suchlike contact, as if you loathed a gentleman named Park and on a business trip to Gotham found yourself in Central.

Try not to think of a white bear. Standish had grown very good at not thinking of white bears.

The buzzing humming hivelike noise of the Popham street became louder at the bottom of the terraces.

Standish began moving more slowly toward the grove of gestural trees at the right of the long pond. It was from here that the hivelike sound came, and as he passed between the first of the trees Standish imagined that this sound underlay the earth everywhere, that it was an impersonal world sound, not to be noticed anymore, like the word Park unless you were in Central.

The twisting trees were oaks, hundreds of years old. Long ago they had been deformed by some process equivalent to foot-binding. The limbs rolled out and splayed into labyrinths around their thick dwarfish bodies. His ferocious beloved had stood here, watching him.

Standish gazed through the branches to the green rise of the fields, dotted with fat unmoving sheep.

Nothing is known once only, nothing is known the first time. A thing must be told over and over to be really told.

Before him, invisible except as a fold in the landscape from even the topmost terrace, the trees continued down a slope and gathered so thickly that he could not see the bottom of the slope. He began to move downhill. Eighty years ago when these trees were young, there would have been paths through them; now the branches had grown together. Standish had come down ten or twelve feet, but the locked trees would not allow him to go farther. He circled sideways, searching for an entrance to the web, and finally he moved back a bit toward the pond and got to his knees and crawled beneath the locked branches.

sixteen

B
eneath his hands was a smooth brown carpet of crumbling leaves and loose pebbly earth that felt as if it had passed through the digestive system of an enormous insect. The dwarf oaks formed a kind of low arched entrance, though Standish saw none of the patches of light through which Isobel had moved on her way to the clearing. The darkness increased as he worked his way forward, and he found himself moving wearily through an intermittent night. After a time Standish knew he was lost. He had inadvertently crawled away from the path to the clearing. His knees were wet, and his hands were gritty. Standish collapsed onto the damp earth. Sweat steamed from his body. He lay his head on the backs of his hands. The earth hummed and moved in almost impalpable tremors like the shifting of an animal's hide. He forced himself back to his knees.

Perhaps five minutes later the darkness modulated into mild gray, and soon after that sunlight began to pierce the locked arms of the trees. Blotches of light struck the ground. His back heated. The hive noise had grown louder, more dense, many voices working together to form one great voice. Then Standish was where Isobel and the gipsy had followed the boy Robert, for the interlaced fingers had separated above him and he was looking down at his squat square headless shadow.

The sizzling noise had ceased—he was at its center. Standish grunted himself up onto his feet. His knees were filthy and soaked, and his shirt was dark with sweat. He stood on the far edge of a circle of trees surrounding a round clearing perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, like something stamped out of the woods by a giant machine. Long soft grass blanketed the clearing. At its center stood the three mounds Isobel had seen. They were barely distinguishable from one another and the ground beside them. They have no headstones, they need none, we know their names.

Standish exhaled, understanding everything at last, and heard the sound instantly disappear into the louder but still inaudible sound of the soul-traffic that was the noise of the hive.
Magick
, Isobel had written, using the old spelling, and for once she had been right. It was magick. It had always been a sacred place, probably, for that was one way to put it, but now it was more so because of the people they had used and buried here. Edith was not buried here, and neither were any of her children, for none of them was dead. Others were.

Standish went through the grass and stood before the mounds. With a groan he threw himself down onto the mass grave. Against his cheek the grass felt like the long cool hair of his beloved. He spread his arms and embraced the grave. The sun poured down on his back. He groaned again, and gripped the silken grass with his fingers. Down in the soil with Isobel lay a lost child who screamed for release with all the others, screaming like a pale creature pressed against a window.

What power a lost child has, what a lever it is, what a battery of what voltage.

Standish pushed himself off the grave. He made a feeble effort to brush the dirt and broken leaves from his trousers. Then he wiped his dirty hands on the sides of his trousers and gazed up at the birds wheeling overhead. They had the proud wingspread of predators, raptors. Esswood's center kept shifting, widening out as one thing rhymed with another in the poem it was. Standish turned from the grave toward the circling wall of trees. Directly before him was the path on which Isobel and her lover had followed young Robert Seneschal to the clearing. In the earth beneath the twined branches he could see the marks of his own passing. He lowered himself to his knees, which cried out in pain, and began to crawl back into the woods.

In what seemed half the time of the trip to the clearing, light began to reach him and the trees separated and he was looking at the slope leading back to the pond and the first terrace. He stood and walked up the slope, now and then grasping a branch to pull himself forward.