Murder by Reflection (5 page)

He had had something to do with radio and she collected art things, said the men who worked on the house. The Herons, though quiet, weren't a bit exclusive. They didn't import, for the decorating, some over-elegant young man from one of the over-big stores in the city fifty miles off. Local people got all the work and young Heron worked with them. He had enough taste, said the oldest carpenter, to have gone into the decorating line himself, had he ever needed money.

So when they were settled in—for there is much to do with a large, shingle-roofed frame house which has been left untended for ten years and more—everyone felt that they knew the Herons and nobody minded that they lived very quietly and didn't entertain or seem to wish to make friends quickly.

Nor were they content, it turned out, simply to make the house take on its old appearance outside and give it a nice modern interior. They were evidently wishing to do something for the community in a quiet, unobtrusive way. For first they made the “front” and indeed all its fronts really “colonial.” The original builder's notions had been a little vague. Now everything was made “periodly” correct—the long portico of pillars was perfectly proportioned; the tall hall-door and its flanking windows, sheltered under the portico, were made to the precise scale and decorated with that neat ornament to which the Brothers Adam reintroduced the polished world five generations ago. The garden was laid out with fine formality with long pools in which the façade was reflected, and across the end was reared an elegant worked-iron gateway with tall gateposts of white stone surmounted with urns on each of which stood a long-billed bird. The gateway made a sort of veil—not shutting out the house as you looked up at it from the city but making the whole perspective look longer and more stately.

But even more care was spent on the interior; indeed, there more had had to be done. The staircase had been a haphazard way of reaching the bedrooms. It was torn out, like the tongue from a medieval false witness, and in its place was set a magnificent spiral flight of broad, shallow steps edged by a sweeping rail of fine metal. Everything was white and silver save for dark blue carpets, dark blue upholstery, and dark blue borders to the vast white curtains which hung from ceiling to floor beside each of the long windows. Upstairs the same simple but telling scheme was carried out; only one room was left unfurnished, a big north room which evidently had been used as a bedroom in hot weather.

Both “mother” and “son” seemed agreed on having at every turn a sense of spaciousness. The great hall was fine enough in all reason now, with its sound and wide proportions let show in every direction, but, as though they still felt the need to expand after leaving the shrinking North, they put two ceiling-high mirrors on each side. As you entered you knew you were in a room which gave an uncommon sense of spaciousness; but when you reached the middle of it you saw, right and left of you, an interminable vista of similar stately rooms proceeding like a cloister built for that imaginary Thelema Abbey, where everyone was to do as he pleased, conjured up by the mind which created Gargantua.

While they were working at this reconstruction—or revivification, as they preferred to call it—the two were always together and in fine spirits. For a week or so after arriving, Mrs. Heron had seemed tired, but once the house-work got under way she seemed to revive with it. They were always going up to the big city, buying things for the place. And she herself began to show the effect of the place in another way. She began gradually to adopt a style which was certainly liker to the fashions of the time which the house represented than those of today. Her dresses became long, high-waisted and high-shouldered. She certainly looked stately in her great high rooms. Often she remarked that the house required that of them, that they could spoil it all by being too obtrusively as the slipshod world of today had made them. Once or twice she seemed to be urging on him that he shouldn't become too easygoing in this easy climate and she referred to that apocryphal Englishman who preserved his British phlegm from evaporation in Central Africa, solely by the device of changing into a starched shirt and full evening dress for his solitary jungle-surrounded dinner. She said she hoped that the house might help him to see himself and how well set up he might be. Certainly in those great, empty, mirror-searched rooms it was hard to avoid oneself, and also to avoid seeing that, perhaps, one was needing a little camouflage, like a rather dusty beetle which has crawled onto a fine new white tablecloth.

He did evidently humor her a little, and they had some talk about a housewarming, but he always asked her to postpone any such plans until the house was completed. His mood fluctuated on this matter and so did hers. Sometimes she pressed him, and they made, on several of their visits to the big city, some calls on a tailor. She had now been looking after his wardrobe for some time.

Finally he seemed to resist. The outdoor climate of the South seemed to win against the indoor, reconstructed style. He worked at the house devotedly but seemed to become more and more an outdoor person as he did so. He would bathe and change into a tuxedo in the evening—he conceded that, as she always dressed in the evening and they dined in some state with her lovely silver in use. She had, too, brought in a number of well-trained colored servants and put them into quiet, stately liveries so that the house was really inhabited, not “caretaken.” He would look at them in the evening and at her. But he still fought, now that he could have it, against himself being sunk, as she herself had sunk, right into the picture itself.

“I expect perhaps I only wanted the past because the present was so poor,” he said to himself. “Or perhaps I want to eat my cake and have it, to be in the picture and at the same time to be an onlooker free to move about if I want and to break up the
tableau vivant
when I will.”

He saw that she was disappointed and that the disappointment told on her. She began to lose her energy and verve. He knew it was because of his refusal to let her picture jell; because, right in the center of it he stood, and he stood out, would not come in, would not complete her pleasure by becoming nothing but the completing part of this revivified life. Part of him still wanted to—“Perhaps if I'd been by myself I should have done all this and become in every way part of it; perhaps it's her fault in pushing me and managing me. But then, but for her, I'd never have attempted it at all.” Part of him wanted, more than anything, independence. “What is all my love of the past but a wish to be for myself on my own?” She tired; and he, once the house was finished, spent his new energy out of doors.

“'Spect she's a semi-invalid,” said the mailman, who was called Doc mainly because of his practice of diagnosing his deliverees. “Meet her walking down their drive to get the mail from me and I guess I know a heart-walk when I see it. Why, there was old Simpson, 'member, up past the Episcopal church on Fifth; I saw he was ‘hearty' long before he or his doctor did.”

Certainly Mrs. Heron wasn't looking quite so young as she had when she arrived.

“The warm climate,” said capable young Dr. Hertz, when she consulted him. “One needs to acclimatize even to an improved climate,” he added smilingly, “and to go slow with all this additional citrus. Many people are allergic to oranges in the quantities and rich qualities we have here.”

Young Heron, however, seemed to find the warmth and semitropical conditions stimulating. As his mother became more lethargic he became increasingly active. At first they had kept very much together. There were all the trips that had to be made to the big city for the innumerable things which had to be bought for the house. And she even used to go with him on excursions into the lovely wilderness surrounding the small, shapely city. But gradually, as their respective energies diverged, he went off by himself and she spent nearly all her time in the spacious garden.

Certainly she was moping. She had spent so much energy and care on this transplantation of themselves; she had made such a dream of what they would do; she had worked with such resource to bring it about. And, outwardly, there it was. When she had first seen the house she had been sure that it was the thing, that she and he would be able to transform it into a perfect setting for their lives. It had been a wrench for her to break her connection with the circle she had brought round her in the East and to come to quite a new place. But she had banked on the calculation that by so doing she would be able to start a completely new life with him which would more than compensate.

She had thought out every detail, even to the name “Heron,” which would link up nicely with the name she was dropping, would keep her in touch with her bird-emblazoned silver and sound really nicer than Ibis, for which she still had no liking. And all her plans had gone perfectly; every object she had decided to have and to place, she found and it fitted. Indeed, only one thing was lacking in the radiating wheel of ordered, reconstructed elegance with which she had surrounded herself—that was the pin, the
clou
, the living figure which was to stand at the focus, everything revolving round him, everything reflected in him. She had estimated that all Arnoldo needed to sink into a completely encircled life was the environment which she had created for him. But the fact remained that though he had been interested, as interested as she had been, in getting ready the white-and-silver cage, when she wanted him to come in and stay in, he refused.

It was not that he neglected her. He would come back and tell her what he had seen. He had never been in the country before, and this southern country seemed to appeal to something in his blood. Natural history became a great interest with him. The fauna of the place roused his curiosity. The snakes especially came to have quite a fascination for him. An old fellow who collected rattlers and showed them off to people in a small plot by the main highway showed him how to manage the reptiles.

“They're simply reflexes,” he said. “A kind o' rubber-and-gristle-clockwork.”

The thought of this deadly but stupid creature being able to be managed but, if one made a false step, able to kill one in a particularly agonizing way, amused Arnoldo. He liked the tarantulas also. It was like looking at an ordinary spider with your eyes become magnifying lenses. And of course that normal-sized but amazingly malignant arachnid, the notorious black widow spider, delighted him. You could keep it in a pillbox—a little black spot which if it bit you in the right place might be your death.

He tried to interest Mrs. Heron in this new hobby of his, but as she was already disinclined to be friendly to this southern climate even at its friendliest, she was immediately frightened by its hostile species.

“Take them away,” she cried petulantly. “They are dangerous and disgusting. They are filthy things to have about. Why must you bring into this beautiful place these horrid vermin from outside?”

“Surely not disgusting,” he would reply in a way which provoked her, for she was convinced he did it as a revolt against the standards of taste and beauty which she had thought they both shared. “Surely not disgusting? Look at the rattler's markings and his movements—he's a fugue in motion. And the poor tarantula with his beautiful black fur. While this poor little black widow”—he held toward her a small box with a piece of cellophane quite loosely tied over the top—“that cardinal red inset on the neat black body is handsome coloring, you'll allow.”

But she wouldn't allow anything.

They were still mother and son, but they were discovering sides of the relationship that the early deaths of both their mothers had hidden from them. The world of sentiment is very unwilling to allow it, but quite as much as in any other relationship—from marriage through all degrees of friendship—in the mother-and-child relationship, what begins as impulse must, if it is to last, be developed by an increasingly understanding intelligence. Otherwise that which began as an effortless symbiosis—two beings involved equally in a common need for each other, and so, by satisfying their own need, each supplying the other's demand—must end, not as reciprocal satisfaction but as an interlock. The natural link, if left to itself, hardens with growth into a handcuff.

Mrs. Heron did not like being left alone, she who had had a small court of company, and in a place where she felt unsuited. Her son did not like leaving her alone. But he found that he was always more cheerful with her when they had been absent from each other for a couple of hours or even half a day. True, she was more difficult when he returned, but his increased energy more than made up for her complaining lassitude.

The Aumic elders, though naturally they would not intrude, took a discreet, well-bred interest in the Plantation House's personalities and of course made a few shrewd speculations. It was, after all, a fairly familiar pattern—the capable, middle-aged, rather tired mother, and the son, after years, no doubt, of companionable care and, maybe, having been rather retarded, beginning to go just a little faster and farther than she could now manage.

“'Spect,” said Doc, the mailman, sitting in the drugstore after finishing his daily delivery, “he'll be looking for a wife one of these days. The setup up there is one of the varieties of human behavior,” for Doc was as much interested in psychology as in medicine proper, and often said he could tell oncoming trouble in a house just from a general impression he got from the kind of handwritings that appeared on their mail. “It's normal enough, if not overcommon. Man in that position's like a late-flowering species o' plant—none the worse for that.” He chuckled and looked along the counter. “Any of you girls would be doing well for yourselves. He's a healthy fellow. I've met him miles up the canyon hiking. Lonely men make good husbands.”

“Well, you've made a good husband and no one would call you lonely, you old kibitzer,” laughed the store proprietor, coming up and clapping Doc on the shoulder.