Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (10 page)

“All ours,” she said; “look.”

Compliments of Roz and Brother,
Ben read.
Use it all
.
Please
.

“There’s enough food here for the whole summer,” Marian said, closing the freezer lid. “I feel so guilty. I mean, they certainly didn’t have to do
this
.” She moved closer to Ben and wrapped her arms around him. “Say it,” she teased him; “eccentric, suspicious.”

He let his eyes travel over the long shelves thoughtfully, then put his arms around her, smiled and kissed her.

“This kind of eccentric,” he said, “I suspect I can live with.”

By lunchtime, Marian had washed as well as she could the wrought iron table with its chipped glass top, and the four chairs. She helped Ben move them from beside the French windows to the rear of the flagstone terrace where they would have a sweeping view of the lawn beyond the stone balusters and the glistening bay. She found a bright red tablecloth and a set of blue ironware; looked through the pantry drawers for a set of everyday tableware and found three separate sets of beautifully patterned silver. She chose the simplest for outdoors, as well as four crystal tumblers and three champagne glasses. When it was all set up, with the roast chicken set in front of Ben’s place and the bottle of champagne on a small glass teacart, she called, “Ready!” through the kitchen door and waited for them to find their way to the terrace.

David said “Neat!” and Aunt Elizabeth breathed in the air deeply, repeating “Lovely, lovely,” despite the weeds growing through the flagstones and the broken balusters and her chair which wobbled threateningly beneath her. Ben opened the champagne and Marian beamed as he raised his glass and said, with no trace of sarcasm, “To our summer. The four of us.”

“And Roz and Brother,” she added. “Our benefactors.”

“Our benefactors,” Aunt Elizabeth said.

They took a sip and Ben raised his glass once more. The voice, when it came out, was pure Roz Allardyce. “And our mother, God save her . . .” He made a sweeping gesture with his glass, ending in the direction of the upper windows. “Wherever she is.”

And Marian, who could seldom remember being so totally content, went suddenly pale and almost dropped her glass. “My God!” she exclaimed. “Her tray! I completely forgot.” She pushed her chair back and ran toward the kitchen door.

“Aw, hon?” Ben called, “Can’t it wait?”

She had closed the door behind her.

(6)

Ben was already in bed, reading a book of Kenneth Patchen poems, when she came into the room. The covers were pulled all the way down, and the windows were open, shades up, curtains moving lightly in the breeze. There was nothing but black space beyond, no lighted windows, no wall of white brick; and, blessedly, no sound.

“What took you so long?” he said, closing the book on his chest.

She smiled wearily and said, “Things.” She had checked all the windows, doors, lights, moving easily through the rooms which had already become almost as familiar to her as their four rooms on the other side of the moon. Last of all, she had gone down the corridor to the sitting room, drawn the drapes and left a small lamp burning. The tray had been still untouched, like the tray that afternoon – which, she assured herself, she was not to worry about.

She went into the bathroom and left the door ajar.

“Dave’s bugging me about that pool,” Ben said. “I ought to have a look at it tomorrow.”

“There’s a page on pools,” Marian said behind the door, referring to the lists of instructions the Allardyces had left. “I almost dread it, y’know? You’ll have to lay down the law to him; no pool unless one of us is around, no beach either.”

She closed the door. Ben placed the book on the night table, pulled off his shorts, and lit a cigarette. He stretched out and let the breeze pass over his body. Marian came out of the bathroom in a short blue nightgown, thought,
Oh, no, Ben, not tonight, please,
when she saw him naked, and delayed getting into bed as long as she could, adjusting windows, inspecting the gas heater (“Are these things safe?” “We won’t be using them.”), and passing her hand reverently over the wood of the highboy.

“Come to bed.”

She went to the windows again, luxuriating in the space and the quiet. “I could get used to this very, very easily,” she said, and then took several deep breaths, rising on the balls of her feet. Ben watched her and spread his right hand over her side of the bed, smoothing the tight, cool sheet.

“Bed’s comfortable,” he said softly. “Just hard enough. Come and try it.”

She took her time, walking barefoot over the vast needlepoint rug, and then slid in lazily on her stomach, her face away from him.

“You’re right,” she said, muffled.

His hand moved through her hair and under the top of her nightgown, rubbing her back. “You’re overdressed,” he said, and she made a small, sleepy sound, burrowing deeper into the pillow. He slid his hand all the way down, and then under, spreading his fingers over her stomach and working them lower. He had moved closer to her and his fingers slipped between her legs, rubbing very gently. She raised herself and he pressed closer, and when she felt him, hard and moving against her, with his lips on the back of her neck, she said, “No,” almost soundlessly, “Please no, honey.” She let him pull the loose nightgown off and turn her on her back, and when he slipped in, she locked herself around him and closed her eyes. And at first she pushed up and let him drive himself deep into her. His face was buried in her neck, and then his mouth was covering her ear and the sounds were hot and wet and suddenly unpleasant. He was hurting her. She tried to move her head, to push her body deeper into the mattress, away from Ben. Her eyes were open, watching the shadows on the ceiling, and she had stopped moving under him altogether. And when he raised his face and pleaded, “Come on, baby, come
on,
” with a deep, almost punishing thrust, she kept her eyes determinedly on the ceiling and pushed up against him with no pleasure at all, with only an awful burning sensation. His back had become wet and sticky under her hands, and she dug her nails in so that she’d feel only the tips of her fingers, not his skin which had never been repulsive to her before. He was pushing in deeper and quicker, with the pleas becoming more intense, and all Marian could think was, “Let him come, for Christ’s sake let him come. Now.”

He cried out when he did and she pulled his face against her shoulder to cut off the sound. And later she gave him the obligatory assurance that, yes, it had been as good for her; and smiled and touched his face when he said, “Christ, the place really works after all.”

Marian waited for him to fall asleep. Then she crept out of bed and took a shower with the bathroom door closed, scrubbing away at whatever was left of the city.

The next morning was glorious, beautifully clear, with a nice, constant breeze blowing in from the bay. David and Ben woke at eight, Aunt Elizabeth a little later; none of them had ever slept as well. Neither had Marian, she told them, though actually she had slept fitfully, getting up around three and sitting beside the window. At one point she had gone out into the hall and looked toward the closed double doors, barely visible beyond the light of the lamp outside Aunt Elizabeth’s room. There was no sound anywhere in the house, and the distant hum she had heard, standing outside her bedroom door, had to be imaginary, suggested by the stillness and the vague whiteness in the distance. Associative: sitting room – hum (just as, for Ben, the apartment in Queens was always associated with the smell of lemon oil). Obviously the old lady was on her mind for some reason; she must have been, if Marian thought about it, while Ben was trying to make love to her; like some disapproving presence, as formless and pervasive as an imaginary hum.

She had come back into the room, closing the door on the sound, and when she saw Ben she felt a pang of guilt. Wonderful, she had lied to him, when if anything it had been unpleasant, almost unbearably so. His body, which she loved, as well as the physical act.
Why?

She had watched him sleeping for a long while, and then touched his body lightly – his chest, and then very lightly, the hair below his stomach. She kissed the tip of his shoulder which was warm and sweet-smelling, and then, still sleepless, got out of bed again and came down to the kitchen. Light was spreading above the trees to the east, and she brought her coffee out to the terrace and watched the sun come up, tugging every now and then at the weeds growing between the flagstones.

When Ben came down, Mrs. Allardyce’s egg was boiling on the stove and Marian was rearranging shelves in the pantry. She brought his breakfast out to the terrace, then David’s, then Aunt Elizabeth’s. At eight fifty-five precisely she left them chattering away brightly and carried Mrs. Allardyce’s tray up to the sitting room. She opened the drapes, turned off the lamp, and lifted the untouched dinner tray, resisting the impulse, which was even stronger than it had been last night, to go near the carved door.

Ben and David drove to the post office to arrange for a box, and Marian and Aunt Elizabeth had another cup of coffee on the terrace. (“Death,” Aunt Elizabeth intoned with a fist pressing against her chest, but she drank it anyway.)

“How’s the town?” Marian asked Ben later.

“Swinging,” he said. He put the bag with a carton of cigarettes and two quarts of milk on the table. It would hold them for the rest of the week. “We are in the middle of nowhere, but nowhere.”

“I like the idea,” Marian said.

They set up a schedule: mail pickup, milk and incidentals once a week. Television would have to replace the daily
Times;
Sundays, if Ben got ambitious, he’d drive to Southold.

“Were they friendly?” Marian asked.

“The natives?”

She nodded, putting the milk away, and Ben said, “Not especially.”

“Did you tell them who we were?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Friendly relations with the locals. Can’t hurt.”

“Next time.” He was peeling a banana. “Incidentally, who are we supposed to be?”

“The Rolfes,” she announced impressively, spreading her arms and then wrapping them around him. “Of Land’s End, and Heart’s Desire, and all that sort of thing. Think of something smart and intimidating.”

David stuck his head into the kitchen. “What about that pool?” he said to Ben.

“Canada,” Ben said to Marian. “We’ll call it Canada.”

Whatever doubts Ben had had about the house, nothing happened to corroborate them, not that day, or the next, or the day after that. The sun seemed to shine brighter each day, and the huge house was becoming more familiar and comfortable and manageable. Marian had been right: the tension poured out of him like sweat and all he had to do was jump into the warm bay and let it wash off him, effortlessly. He managed to get the pool’s filter going, briefly and not very effectively, following the typewritten instructions, and found the net and vacuum in the poolhouse. David would have to content himself with the beach until all the debris had been worked out of the pool. Ben looked at the chaise they had dragged from the recesses of one of the garages, and the faded beach umbrella growing out of a rusted table, saw books on the table and a rum collins and long shaded afternoons on the tiled surface, and found himself growing just as impatient as David. He could, too – get used to it very, very easily.

They explored the grounds, Ben and David, with Marian stealing a moment from the house occasionally, while Aunt Elizabeth set her easel up on the terrace and began to paint the view, a massive sunhat shielding her eyes from the sun. The picture started out accurately enough, with nice modulations of green and blue and brown; and then a lighthouse materialized halfway across the bay, and the white dot of a cabin cruiser, and children playing on the beach, watched by a thin woman in an enormous straw sunhat. She would call it, she told Ben,
L’été
, or
The Summer
.

She waved at them from the terrace as they walked to the stone jetty where David had fallen. Beyond it the beach ended against a cliff-like rise too steep to climb, although David tried, and then Ben.

The grounds were hemispherical, within the line of beach and the great curve of woods. They found the remnants of a tennis court, and much more interesting, an old cemetery with tilting nameless tombstones, way off to the west, beyond a grove of trees. The grass was low and sparse in some places, coarser in others; the earth rose irregularly, and some of the graves seemed fresher than others, though “fresher” probably meant generations old rather than centuries. Ben could eventually make out the traces of
ALLARDYCE
on two or three of the stones.

David found it absolutely spooky and fascinating. They’d come back some night when there was a full moon, Ben told him, hunching up his shoulders and making a crazy Igor-like face, and watch to see what rose from the graves. A whole horde of ghost-like gorillas, probably, all of them on bloodstained two-wheelers.

“Three-wheelers,” David reminded him. And when Ben started to limp toward him, David backed away.

“Where are you going, little boy?” Ben asked, all twisted and grunting.

David kept his eyes on Ben. “Find the bike,” he said, moving back faster. “It’s a whole lot scarier than this stupid place.”

Ben straightened up and smiled. “That’s enough scary stuff for today.” He put his arms around David. “Let’s go check on that crummy pool.” Which was fine with David.

For
the last time,
she told herself, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. If there were some complaint, or anything at all wrong with the old woman, she’d certainly find some way to communicate with Marian. The soup was cold, the spoon and napkin exactly where Marian had left them.

What was she living on?

Once or twice the awful thought came into Marian’s head that Mrs. Allardyce wasn’t living at all, she was dead behind the carved door. Or if not dead, then some kind of terrible joke the Allardyces were playing on her, the ultimate catch: there was no Mrs. Allardyce. If only she’d give her some slight sign to ease her mind, to make everything as perfect for her as it obviously was for Ben and David and Aunt Elizabeth.

Gradually, her concern was bringing her up to the sitting room more than the three times required each day. She’d stop in first thing in the morning and last thing at night; opening the drapes and putting out the light, and then closing them and putting it back on. If she had to come upstairs for anything, she’d visit the sitting room before going back down. Peer in, pause, listening for a footstep or the click of a door, and then leave. By the third or fourth day she was leaving excuses to climb the long circular staircase on the bureau in her room or the bathroom shelf or the hamper: rings, her watch, a tissue, a blouse for the laundry room. Eventually she dispensed with the excuses.

The old lady, the well-being if not the existence of Mrs. Allardyce, was becoming an obsession.

The room itself had become less discomforting; she was scarcely aware of the hum anymore, and the collection of photographs was now extraordinary rather than chilling. It was only the carved door and the deepening of the hum as she approached it, the impulse to touch it and lose herself in its puzzling intricacy, that she found mystifying and intimidating.

Of course, she said nothing to Ben who expressed polite disinterest every once in a while. If he asked, the old lady was either asleep or had said something to Marian from behind the closed door. “In your average old lady’s voice,” she told him, at which he said, “By cracky!” and hobbled off without any further questions. A few times he saw Marian carrying the uneaten food back to the kitchen. He’d shake his head sympathetically and parody what he assumed was an old lady’s belch.

He was happy, which was the important thing, even in bed, although that was taking more and more effort on Marian’s part. It would pass, she was sure; what she was going through now was some kind of metaphysical period.

She was pouring the soup down the drain when he bounded into the kitchen with a tennis-anyone? gesture. He was wearing shorts and a terrycloth pullover. His face and arms were burned a light pink and the wide smile dazzled her.

“When’re you coming out to play?” he asked her.

“Soon. How are the folks?”

“Busy, busy.” He took two cream sodas and a ginger ale out of the refrigerator. “I swear, Aunt Elizabeth just dropped another ten years.”

Marian smiled and washed the plate. “And you were the man with all the misgivings.”

“That’s right.” He pulled the tabs on the soda cans. “I’m still waiting for the piper to come skipping over the hill.” She took the tabs off the counter and threw them away. “Look,” he said, grabbing her hands, “how about doffing those work weeds and donning a pinafore? You can dust and sweep and oil all you want when the sun goes down. It’s a smashing day, babe.”

“I will, as soon as I get that room ready for you.”

“What do I need with a stuffy room? I can work as well outdoors.” He made his voice deeper, imitating Mr. Byron: “If indeed, work seems feasible at all.”

“It’s a perfect room.” She was talking about the library. “You can barricade yourself in and get away from all of us.”

“Like you’ve been doing?”

“I have
not
.” Her voice wavered a little and she tried to suppress the guilty smile. “I’ve just been . . . straightening up a bit.”

“Uh-hunh,” he said. “And the place is beginning to smell of lemon oil.”

“I’m enjoying myself.”

“Yippee!” he said; “ninety rooms to take on. Christ, the lemon oil alone’ll break us.” He drew her closer and let his eyes travel over her face. “Paleface,” he said affectionately. “You’ll never change.” He saw something on the side of her head. “Correction,” he said, raising his hand.