Waltz Into Darkness (12 page)

The
young apprentice was at the door now, in the act of departing;
turning over to Aunt Sarah the boxed parcel. "Tell Mrs. Durand
I'm--I'm sorry to have misunderstood, and I'll come back tomorrow
afternoon at the same time, if that's convenient."

"Run
out and fetch me a locksmith!" he called out from midstairs,
shattering their low-voiced parting interview like an explosive
shell. The timid emissary whisked from sight, and Aunt Sarah tried to
close the door on her with one hand and at the same time come away
from it in fulfilment of his order.

Then
he changed his mind again before she could carry out the errand. "No,
wait! That would take too long. Bring me a hammer and a chisel. Have
we those?"

"I
reckon so." She scurried for the back.

When
she'd handed them to him, he sped upward from sight again. He dropped
to his knees, launched himself at the trunk with vicious energy, his
mouth a white scar; he inserted the chisel in the crevice about the
lock, began to pound at it mercilessly. In a moment or two the lock
had sprung open, dangled there half-severed from its recent mounting.

The
fall of the hammer and chisel made a dull dank in the new stillness
of the room, like a funereal knell.

He
plucked down the side-latchpieces, unbuckled the ancient leather
strap that had bound it about the middle, rose and heaved as he rose,
and the slightly domed lid came up and swung rearward with a shudder.

There
was an exhalation of mothballs, as if an active breath had blown in
his' face.

It
was the trunk of a neat, a fastidious, a prissy person. Symmetrical
stacks of belongings, each one not so much as a hairsbreadth out of
line and the crevices between artfully stopped with handkerchiefs and
such slighter articles, so that the various mounds could not become
displaced in transit.

The
top tray held only intimate undergarments, of both day- and
night-wear; all of them utilitarian rather than beautiful. Yellow
flannel nightrobes, flannel petticoats, thick woollen articles of
covering with drawstrings whose nature he did not try to discover.

In
a moment his hands had ravaged it beyond recognition.

He
shifted the upper section aside, and found neatly spread layers of
dresses beneath that. Of a more sober nature than any she had bought
since coming here; browns and grays, with prim little rounded white
collars, black alpacas, an occasional staid plaid of dark blue or
green, no brighter hue.

He
picked the topmost one out at random, then added a second one.

He
stood there, full length like that, between them, helplessly holding
one up in each hand, looking from one to the other.

Suddenly
his gaze caught his own reflection, in the full-length mirrored panel
facing her wardrobe door. He stepped out more fully from behind the
trunk, looked again. Something struck his eye as being wrong. He
couldn't tell what it was.

He
drew a step back with the two trophies, to gain added perspective.
Then suddenly, at the shift, it exploded into recognition. There was
too much of each dress. He was holding his hands, the hands that held
them, at his own shoulder level. They fell away straight to the
floor, and, touching it, even folded over in excess.

In
memory he saw her stand beside him again, in the mirror. She appeared
there for a moment, in brief recapture. The top of her head just
rising over the turn of his shoulder: when her hair was up.

He
dropped the two wraithlike rags, almost in fright. Stepped to the
wardrobe, flung both panels of it wide, with two hands at once.
Empty; a naked wooden bar running barren across its upper part. A
little puff of ghostly violet scent, and that was all.

This
discovery was anticlimactic to the one that had just preceded it,
somehow. His real fright lay in the dresses that were here, and not
the dresses that were gone.

He
ran out again to the stairs, and bending to be seen from below,
called to Aunt Sarah, until she had come running in renewed terror.
"Yes sir! Yes sir!"

"That
girl. What did she leave here? Was that something of Mrs. Durand's?"

"New
dress they running up for her."

"Bring
it here. Hand it up to me, quick!"

He
ran back to the room with it, burst the cardboard open, rifled it
out. Gay, sprightly; heliotrope ribbons at its waist. His eye took no
note of that.

He
retrieved the one from the trunk he had dropped to the floor. He
flattened it on the bed, smoothing it out like a paper pattern,
spreading the sleeves, drawing down the skirt to its full length.

Then
he superimposed the new one, the one just delivered, atop it. Then
stood back and looked, already knowing.

At
no point did the one match the other. The sleeves were longer, by a
full cuff-length. The bosom was fuller, spilling out in an excess
curve at either side when rendered two dimensional. The waist was
almost half again as wide. The wearer of the one could not have
entered the other. And most glaring of all the skirt of one reached
in a wide band of continuation far below, broad inches below, where
the other had ended.

There
was only one length for all skirts, even he knew that; floorlength.
There was no such thing as a skirt other than floor-length. Any
variation in length was not due to fashion, it was due to the height
of the wearer.

And
in this undersized, topmost one there still twinkled the pins of her
living measurements as he had known her, taken from her very body
less than a week ago, waiting for the final sewing.

The
clothes from St. Louis--

The
color slowly drained from his face, and there was a strange sort of
fear in his heart that he'd never known before. He'd already known
when he came into this house, a while ago; but now, in this moment,
he'd proved it, and there was no longer any escaping from the proof.

The
clothes from St. Louis were the clothes of someone else.

18

It
was dark now, the town had dropped into night. The town, the world,
his mind, were hanging suspended in bottomless night. It was dark
outside in the streets and it was dark in here in the room where he
stood.

There
was no eye to pierce the darkness where he stood; he was alone,
unseen, unguessed-at. He was something motionless standing within a
black-lined box. And if it breathed, that was a secret between God
and itself. That, and the pain he felt in breathing, and a few other
things.

Then
at last pale light approached, rising from below, ascending the
stairs outside. As it rose, it strengthened, until at last its focus
came into view: a lighted lamp dancing restlessly from a wire hoop,
held by Aunt Sarah as she climbed toward the upper floor. It paled
her figure into a ghost. A ghost with a dark face, but with a sifting
of flour outlining its seams.

She
came up to the level at last, and turned toward his room; the lamp
exploded into a permanent dazzle that filled the doorway, burgeoning
in and finding him out.

She
halted there and looked at him.

He
was standing, utterly, devastatingly motionless. The light fell upon
the pile of dresses strewed on the bed, tumbled to the floor. It
flushed color into them as it revealed them, like a syringe filled
with dye. Blue, green, maroon, dusty pink, they became. It flushed
color into him too, the colors a waxen image has, dressed to the last
detail like a live man. So clever it could almost fool you; the way
those things are supposed to do in waxworks. Verisimilitude without
animation.

He
was like one struck dead. Upright on his feet, but dead. He could see
her, for his eyes were on her face; gravely gazing on her face, that
part of the body which the eye habitually seeks when it looks on
someone. He could hear her, for when she whispered halffrightenedly:
"Mr. Lou, what is it? What is it, Mr. Lou?"; he answered
her, he spoke, his voice came.

"She's
not coming back," he whispered in return.

"You
been in here all this time like this, without a light ?"

"She's
not coming back."

"How
much longer I'm going to have to wait for supper? I can't keep that
chicken much more."

"She's
not coming back."

"Mr.
Lou, you're not hearing me, you're not heeding."

That
was all he could keep saying. "She's not coming back." All
the thousands of words were forgotten, the thousands it had taken him
fifteen years to learn, and only four remained of his whole mother
tongue: "She's not coming back."

She
ventured into the room, bringing the lamp with her, and the light
eddied and fluxed, before it had settled again. She set it down upon
the table. She wrung her hands, and knotted parts of her dress in
them, as if not knowing what to do with them.

At
last she took a small part of her own skirt and wiped sadly at the
edge of the table with it, from old habit, as if thinking she were
dusting it. That was the only help she could give him, the only ease
she could bring him: to dust an edge of the table in his room. But
pity takes many forms, and it has no need of words.

And
it was as though she had brought warmth into the room; warmth at
least sufficient to thaw him, to melt the glacial casque that held
him rigid. Just by being there, another human being, near him.

Then
slowly he started to come back to life. The dead started to come back
to life. It wasn't pleasurable to watch. Rebirth after death. The
death of the heart.

Death-throes
in reverse. Coming after the terminal blow, not before. When the
heart dies, it should stay dead. It should be given the coup de
grace, struck still once and for all, not allowed to agonize.

His
knees broke their locked rigidity, and he dropped down at half-height
beside the bed. His arms reached out across it, clawing in torment.

And
one of the dresses stirred, as if under its own impulse,; rippled in
serpentine haste across the bed top, and was sucked up into the
maelstrom of his grief; his head falling prone upon it, his face
burrowing into it in ghastly parody of kisses once given, that could
never be given again, for there was no one there to give them to.
Only the empty cocoon he pleaded with now.

"Julia.
Julia. Be merciful."

The
old woman's hand started toward his palsied shoulder in solace, then
held itself suspended barely clear of touch.

"Hush,
Mr. Lou," she said with guttural intensity. "Hush, poor
man."

She
raised her outstretched hand then, held it poised at greater height,
up over his oblivious, gnawing head.

"May
the Lawd have mercy on you. May He take pity on you. You weeping, but
you ain't got nothing to weep for. You mourning, but you mourning for
something you never had."

He
rolled his head sideward, and looked up at her with sudden frightened
intentness.

As
if kindled into anger now by sight of his wasted grief, as if
vindictive with long-delayed revelation, she went to the bureau that
bad been Julia's. She threw open a drawer of it with such righteous
violence that the whole cabinet shook and quivered.

She
plunged her hand in, unerringly striking toward a hiding place she
knew of from some past discovery. Then held it toward him in
speechless portent. Within it was rimmed a dusty cake, a pastille, of
cheek rouge.

She
threw it down, anathema.

Again
her hand burrowed into secretive recesses of the drawer. She held up,
this time, a cluster of slender, spindly cigars.

She
showed him, flung them from her.

Her
hands went up overhead, quivered there aloft, vibrant with doom and
malediction, calling the blind skies to witness.

She
intoned in a blood-curdling voice, like some Old Testament prophetess
calling down apocalyptic judgment.

"They's
been a bad woman living in your house! They's been a stranger
sleeping in your bed!"

19

Hatless,
coatless, hair awry, just as the discovery had found him in his room
moments before, he was running like someone demented through the
quiet, night-lidded streets now, unable to find a coach and too
crazed to stand still and wait for one in any one given place.
Onward, ever onward, toward an address that had fortuitously recurred
to him just now, when he needed it most. The house of the banker
Simms, halfway across New 'Orleans. He would have run the whole
distance on foot, to get there, if necessary.