Sick of Shadows (10 page)

Shepherd looked up and smiled. “No, it’s all right. Come on in. Nothing important. You’re welcome to sit in.”

Elizabeth tried to sort things out in her mind. Alban had “been” Ludwig of Bavaria—should she stay and hear the whole story or run? And why should she be permitted to sit in on a medical consultation?

“But—what about your psychiatrists’ rule about patient confidentiality?” she stammered. Surely they weren’t really going to allow her to listen to a description of Alban’s reincarnation delusions.

They stared at her, letting the question sink in. Shepherd’s face lit up in sudden comprehension, and he roared with laughter. “Patient confidentiality! Well, now you know what your family thinks of you, Cobb!”

Alban grinned. “I think I worried Elizabeth a bit this morning by mentioning reincarnation.”

Elizabeth wished they would stop laughing at her
and start making sense. “Will you please tell me what is going on here?”

They exchanged smirks. “We’re discussing a war game, Cousin,” said Alban. “It’s called Diplomacy. Ever heard of it?”

“Only in connection with Camp David,” she sighed. “A game? You’re playing a game? You just met!” She might have known it would turn out to be another batty family hobby. The fact that Shepherd was familiar with it did not surprise her in the least, once she considered the matter.

“Well, we’ve been playing in separate games—separate wars, even, because Alban’s game is a Prussian variant, but we still have a lot to talk about,” said Shepherd cheerfully. “It’s a very challenging game. See? These little short blocks are armies—”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Thanks, I’ll take a deferment.”

“Perhaps we can come up with a Jacobite variant,” suggested Alban with a trace of a smile. Catching Shepherd’s puzzled look, he explained. “The only war that interests Elizabeth is the Rising of 1745 in Scotland.”

They turned back to the technical matters of the game, and Elizabeth went off in search of Geoffrey. She found him in Amanda’s den, reading a newspaper.

“Hullo,” she said, curling up beside him on the sofa. “I’m bored. Anything interesting in the news?”

“Certainly not!” he answered in shocked tones. “This is the
local
newspaper, so it contains no news. Anyway, we only read it to find out who has been caught.”

“Then I won’t ask to borrow it.”

He nodded, absently turning a page.

Elizabeth tried again. “Chandler Grove isn’t a very exciting place, is it?”

“You can dial a wrong number and still talk,” said Geoffrey, without looking up.

“There’s absolutely nothing to do. Alban and Dr. Shepherd are in the library—playing with blocks!”

Geoffrey looked up, raising an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Have you talked to Eileen?”

He tossed the newspaper on the pine coffee table.
“As a matter of fact, I did knock on her door after dinner. Still no response. So I asked Mildred to take a tray up to her. If she’s not hungry, she can throw it, which may help her nerves enormously.”

Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, you may be a very nice person,” she said, as if the idea had not occurred to her before.

“How dare you think such a thing!” He huffed. “No, Cousin. I think it only counts as being nice if you do it to someone you don’t like, if I remember my catechism correctly.”

“Are you very worried about her?” asked Elizabeth, wondering if she should confide in him.

“Impertinent of you to ask, since
you
are not,” Geoffrey replied.

“I am so! I went up to see her right after dinner. And,” she added triumphantly, “she let me in!”

“Is she all right?”

“I think so. She says she’s tired and that doing the painting has been a strain for her. I asked her to quit, and she says she won’t.”

“Of course she won’t. That was an excuse. Eileen loves to paint. If she didn’t have that damned painting to work on, she’d never get out of the house and away from Mother.”

Elizabeth nodded sympathetically. “Well, it’s only for another week. If she can just keep telling herself that through the rehearsal and the fittings, and all the rest of it …”

“She’ll be all right. Satisky should be all right for her. He’s too much of a sponge to hurt her. With, of course, one possible exception.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh … just that frightened sponges can be deadly.”

“Oh, Geoffrey! Don’t talk doom and gloom! We’re being silly!” Elizabeth shivered, wanting very much to be talked out of her own apprehension. “The wedding is going to go off just fine, in spite of all our collective nerve storms, and after that, it will be up to Eileen and Michael, and that’s all there is to it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Geoffrey said grudgingly. “We are a nervy family. It’s probably the money.”

“You mean Great-Aunt Augusta’s legacy?”

“No, just money in general. Having it, I mean. People with money have to find other things to fret about. Haven’t you ever noticed that people on soap operas never worry about car payments or unemployment? They all have their minds on higher planes—like adultery and drug addiction.”

Elizabeth laughed. “And what does this family worry about?”

Geoffrey considered. “Well, I myself live in constant fear of boredom, but thus far I’ve managed to stave it off. Yes, Elizabeth, I know you find it dull here, but I don’t—perhaps because I enjoy my own company so much.”

“You’re never serious,” sighed Elizabeth.

“On the contrary, I am always serious,” said Geoffrey. “I learned long ago that if you tell the truth as matter-of-factly as possible, no one ever believes you.”

“Bill does that, too, sometimes,” said Elizabeth thoughtfully.

“Yes, but with him it’s a hobby. With me, it is an art.”

“He is certainly less arty than you are, if that’s what you mean,” said Elizabeth, with a suspicious hint of irony in her voice.

“Yes, but he is not nearly so interesting. Law school, indeed!”

“Oh, Bill can be very interesting. You should hear about his new roommate! He’s an archeology major and he brings
bones
home to study and leaves them lying around. I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

Geoffrey looked at her solemnly. “Why?”

“Because—well, because—oh, you know what I mean! Anyway, just because Bill isn’t one of the family eccentrics doesn’t mean he’s dull.” She sighed. “At least he knows what he wants to be, which is more than I can say.”

“Don’t you know?” asked Geoffrey. “Since you told
me that you were majoring in sociology, I naturally assumed that you were in the marriage market.”

Elizabeth laughed. “There doesn’t seem to be much demand for the product. Anyway, I guess I was in the marriage market, as you put it, but my campus romance broke up this spring, and—”

Geoffrey held up a restraining hand. “Spare me!” he pleaded. “Spare me all heartrending details! I beg you to carry the sword in your heart, and be brave!”

Elizabeth was struggling to think of a sufficiently witty reply when Satisky blundered into the room, with a ready frown of apology.

“The library is occupied, and I just thought—”

Geoffrey stood up. “They’ll be leaving soon, I expect,” he said casually. “I think I’ll go with them. They may need a referee. You never can tell with barbarians. Would you like to come along, Elizabeth? You could be a cheerleader. Scream for blood and that sort of thing.”

“No, thank you, Geoffrey.”

“Then I’m off.”

“You certainly are,” muttered Satisky, when his tormentor was safely out of earshot. He sank down in the armchair with a weary sigh.

“How was your trip to the library?” asked Elizabeth politely.

“Oh, pleasant enough, I suppose. It gave me something to do while Eileen was painting.”

“Have you seen Eileen this evening?” asked Elizabeth in a carefully neutral tone.

“No. I don’t even know what’s wrong. It isn’t anything
I
did. I mean, I heard that she took one look at Dr. Shepherd and went cra—I mean … Oh, you know!”

“Yes. She seems nervous. I think she may be pushing herself too hard to finish that painting. How much does she have left to do?”

“I don’t know! She won’t let me see it either, not that I—” He stopped short of saying “care.” If this cousin of hers went tale-bearing, he would really be in trouble. Elizabeth seemed nice enough, he grudgingly admitted, but he suspected her of having a sarcastic wit. Satisky
didn’t care for sarcastic women; they tended to use ridicule as a weapon in disagreements. He much preferred tears, which he could dry manfully, and forgive, while still getting his own way in the argument. There was a slight family resemblance in looks between Elizabeth and Eileen, but the dispositions were altogether different. Eileen was a sweeter, softer girl. She looked like a picture of Elizabeth taken with an out-of-focus camera. When Eileen was not actually present, he found it difficult to picture her features, but he remembered her as a pleasant beige blur. This Elizabeth person was too positive by half. Vaguely he wondered if he were being interrogated.

“I was thinking that you might tell her not to work so hard on it,” Elizabeth was saying. “I think the pressure of trying to finish is upsetting her. Could you tell her that you don’t care if it’s not ready in time?”

“Oh, sure. Sure.”

“You’re probably nervous, too, around all these strangers. Will your family be coming down for the wedding?”

“No.” Satisky never wanted to say anything more than no to questions about his family, but in the silence that always followed, he found himself explaining that his parents had divorced when he was eight and that he had been raised by his grandmother, who had died two years ago. He had lost touch with his father, and his mother, who had remarried and was living on the West Coast, would not be coming to the wedding. He rattled off this explanation to Elizabeth, hoping that she wouldn’t become cloyingly sympathetic and ask him about his childhood. He didn’t like to talk about it, but he had survived it, and things were going well for him now. The only effect that he could determine was a distance between himself and other people, which had come from his years of solitary childhood. He had spent much of his time reading, and that was good; his literary background had served him well as a student of English, but it had made him unsure of how real people wanted to be treated. He never knew what to say to people whose next line he could not
anticipate. He was uneasy with anyone who was not confined to the pages of a book, preferably a nineteenth-century edition. Perhaps that was why he had been able to love Eileen; she was not quite real.

Elizabeth was looking at him with interest, but not, he had to admit, with any particular sympathy. “How did you meet Eileen?” she asked.

He told her about the Milton seminar, and Eileen looking as vague and lost as—as Lycidas. She had been so shy and frightened that he had forgotten his own uneasiness around people. Eileen made him confident by comparison, so much so that he no longer worried about mispronouncing a name when he talked of literary matters. Like all people who read more than they conversed, Satisky had had his own way of pronouncing things before he had met anyone to discuss them with. This had led to embarrassing moments as an undergrad when he had spoken of “Frood” or “Go-Eth,” much to the amusement of his classmates. He did not explain all this to Elizabeth, of course. He had not even confided his insecurities to Eileen. How could Eileen depend on him if she knew how uncertain he was?

Satisky began to hit the arm of the chair gently with his fist. “Maybe I rushed her,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t ready—isn’t sure. Maybe she told Dr. Shepherd how she really feels about this marriage, and she’s afraid he’ll say something.”

He told Elizabeth about the sweet clinging girl he had fallen for, and his fantasy of rescuing her from dragons. Then she had turned out to be a very wealthy and complicated article. More than he’d bargained for.

“And even though I
do
want to marry her—I think—I’m afraid to ask myself why. Afraid it might turn out to be the money. It’s so much money! I don’t like what it’s doing to me! I don’t like what I’m becoming.”

“Have you tried to explain this to Eileen?”

Satisky looked shocked. “Of course not! She would be terribly hurt that I could even think of money instead of just of her. You know her—uh—background.
What if she killed herself because of me? Do you expect me to live with that?”

One of the problems of listening to other people’s troubles is the difficulty in finding soothing noises to make. Elizabeth considered saying that everything would be all right, but the chance of that seemed remote. If Satisky really was so unsure of his feelings, he probably shouldn’t go through with the marriage, but she shared his apprehension. Eileen’s nerves were not yet strong enough to see her through a shock of that magnitude. Elizabeth had no intention of offering any advice on the subject, because she wanted no part of the guilt that Satisky seemed to be stuck with either way. She wished he hadn’t chosen to confide in her. One thing was certain: she had better get him off that subject before whoever-it-was-that-just-walked-by-the-door decided to stop and listen. God help her if anyone thought she was encouraging Satisky to have doubts! She would be accused of trying to steal her cousin’s fiancé, or trying to improve her chances for the inheritance, or both. She could imagine Aunt Amanda’s reaction to the situation.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this!” she whispered to Satisky. “Don’t even think about it anymore! Just—don’t!”

A
MANDA
C
HANDLER SURVEYED
the breakfast table with the air of a general conducting an inspection. In honor of the houseguests and the forthcoming wedding, this breakfast would be a family occasion, like those on weekends, when she would set aside time for getting together to discuss the plans for the day—usually
her
plans for
their
day. Despite the protests of Captain Grandfather and Dr. Chandler, who had to juggle early appointments, the meal was served at exactly ten o’clock—the shocking lateness being a concession to Geoffrey, who maintained that nothing short of Armageddon would arouse him earlier.