The Architecture of Fear (39 page)

It was.

"There's something warm and wonderful in the walls," she said. "It should be drafty, but it never is. Isn't it magical, Donald?"

"It's very nice."

But he'd wanted to say, "Yes, magical. It's very magical. Frankly, it's supernatural."

"Nice," he said.

There was gray in Nona's hair, for she never dyed it, and she had a matronly beauty even with hair tousled or when wearing her frumpiest dress. Donald's hair was grayer still. Yet he had thought they'd both been getting
fewer
gray hairs as the weeks went by in the old house.

And how he loved Nona! The only woman he had ever loved more was his mother—who he hated to think about.

"There must have been an incredible amount of love in this house for it to hold that feeling for so long," said Nona. "Weren't there ever disagreements in your family?"

"Yes," he said. "But not many. It's hard for me to remember anything bad."

"I envy you," she said, bright eyes smiling. "Families don't love each other the way they once did, do they? How long has it been since we've seen my sister Sharon?"

"She's awful busy with kids and grandkids," said Donald, and then bit his tongue. Now he saw it: the shadow lurking behind Nona's eyes, the secret she kept too. She didn't envy his memories of family life in this house, she
resented
those remembrances! He and Nona had never had children, their own family was each other—each had become the other's family of one. They hadn't seen Nona's sister in years, though occasionally they talked on the phone—Christmas usually; it was almost time to do it again. Sharon had grown children, and the children had children. What did Nona have? She had Donald. That was all. But Donald had a magical past. He'd brought Nona to live in the echo of his childhood. What had he given her to balance that?

Her eyes fell upon the book in her lap.

***

For days to follow, the weather was uncommonly pleasant for winter. Snow melted into patches, revealing brittle brown maple leaves in the backyard. He leaned over the back porch rail, a brisk wind ruffling his hair and bringing him scents that tugged at yesterdays. He squinted nearsightedly across the clearing that led to the orchard and the woods. He tried to imagine the backyard as it had looked when he was a child—and found the exercise shockingly easy.

A rope-swing with wooden seat hung from one of the maples at the yard's edge. There were rabbit hutches nearby. Rabbits stomped the floors of their cages when Buff—an old, half-blind English spaniel—came too near. Then Buff pranced like a pup, despite his rheumatism, out into the woods.

A vegetable garden lay fallow; a crucifix hung with Christmas bells stood in the middle of the garden where, in the growing season, the ringing was supposed to keep birds away. A black crow of winter sat preening on the cross, shaking the bells with one foot then the other, not in the least scared of the sound. There was a stone-lined path from the porch to the garden. Between the rocks were brittle remnants of Grandma's flowers. He heard chickens in the henhouse around the corner, beyond sight.

Overcome with pointless inspiration, little Donny ran along the rock-lined path, shouting at the crow, as though its presence mattered in a garden fully harvested weeks before and spotted with snow. The crow complained and the cross-of-bells replied musically as the black bird sped toward the tops of leafless maples. Donny hopped over the fallow rows and went to check if the rabbits had enough feed and to make sure their water bowls weren't too iced.

He stood before a hutch, watching the pink eyes of a doe watch him. White breaths issued from her opening-and-closing nostrils. Buff wasn't anywhere to be seen, so the rabbits were placid. Donny opened one of the cages, pulled a rabbit out by the scruff. It hung in his grasp, dangling limp and unconcerned. He put the big doe on the ground, intending to stroke her soft fur, but something startled her and she took off, kicking up slush and snow with big hind feet.

He ran after her, slipping and getting the knees of his pants dirty, but finally caught the dodging doe. It took all his strength to hold her at arm's length while she kicked and kicked. Finally she calmed down and he held her near, bracing her back legs so she wouldn't think she was falling. "Nice rabbit," he said. "Good doe."

From the porch, an old lady with an apron, hair in a bun, dish-towel in hand, shouted with feigned anger, "Donald! You get that rabbit right back in the hutch where it belongs!"

Donald reeled on the porch and looked at the closed screen door. He could have sworn he actually heard his grandma reprimanding him. Of course there was no one there. He puzzled over the realism of his own imagination, then looked at his shirt, on which were a few white strands of fur, and at his knees which were inexplicably sodden.

That night, Donald lay close to his wife, closer than for many days. He clung to her and she misread his attentiveness, responding easily, and they made love though that hadn't been his initial intent. In her arms, it was always spring or autumn, never a hot summer or a chilly winter. Her breath was the cool autumn breeze. Her hair was a field of gently blowing grass. Her flesh was the lure of the sea, dangerous and sweet. Silly. Silly that he should ponder as a poet—an inadequate poet, but still a poet—at his age and after so many years together. It was unlike him, too. And he thought he recognized, at the heart of this emotion, a familiar sense of loss rather than togetherness. People we have lost are the ones we most idealize. Donald's were the sentiments of a widower, blind to the faults of a buried wife. How pathetically morbid! On the other hand, wasn't it better to have these feelings, these insights,
before
it was too late to embrace, to whisper in the night, "I love you, Nona."

"I love you, too," she murmured sleepily, still with the musk of their lovemaking about her. She snuggled closer, sighed heavily, and grew still.

"It's haunted," he whispered, after a long silence, and in a mild tone that suggested the continuance of some previous conversation. Nona opened her eyes though half in slumber, and answered, "I know; but haunted in a nice way."

"I'm not so sure," he said. The act of freeing his arm from under her shoulders woke her more fully; or was it his seriousness of tone that made her attentive? "Is it ever right that the past haunts the present?"

"It's a fine, fine house, Donald. It was built by your grandfather and great-grandfather with loving hands, kept by your grandmother with loving heart, uniting a family that loved one another so deeply it still glimmers from the foundation to the rafters. A good house, a house that has not known hatred."

Was that true? Had there never been hatred in this house? We always idealize the dead.

"Poetry," he said softly. "Yours is better than mine."

"It's a good haunting," she said, and Donald remembered some fragment of Rupert Brooke and said to Nona:

"So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,

Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,"

then kissed her and said no more. He let her fall into slumber while he lay awake with his continuing uneasiness. Living in the past, no matter how fine a past, was not the rational thing. It worried him. Even now, every atom of his being felt that the years were calling him back, calling him back...

"Donny," Grandma whispered.

"Yes, Grandma," he answered, screwing his eyes with his knuckles.

"It's time for breakfast. Come quietly. Granny Bess isn't feeling well and we want her to sleep a bit longer. Don't rub your eyes, Donny."

"Yes, Grandma."

He slipped quietly from between the sheets, dressed, tiptoed down the stairs, feeling that any untoward noise would break some uncomprehended spell upon the house.

From the kitchen window he saw Grandpa Nathan out by the hutches. Grandpa's breakfast dishes were already cleaned and on the draining board. Donny felt an aching disappointment. He loved Grandpa Nathan and wished to rush outside and take hold of the old man's overalls and not let go of him.

Fried mush and salt pork weren't his idea of a spectacular breakfast, but he enjoyed it more than usual, almost relished it. Grandma seemed amazed he didn't complain as the mush was in fact a bit dark around the edges. He was usually such a finicky lad.

Buff was under the table, wagging his tail, begging in a way Grandma mightn't detect. Donny was the old dog's conspirator in matters of salt pork, sneaking rinds and some fat to him whenever Grandma wasn't looking, and burnt edges of fried mush. A stray cat leapt up from the porch and clung with sharp claws to the screen door, looking right into the kitchen, mewing boldly.

Grandma had a pie in the oven; the aroma was overwhelming and wonderful. Donny ate a lot of breakfast, but tried to save room for the hot piece of cinnamon-sugared pie-dough that was right beside the baking pie, waiting for him, and for a lump of fresh-churned butter.

"Grandma?"

"Hmm."

"Why am I here?"

She looked down at him through wire-rimmed bifocals and asked, "Why, what sort of question is that?"

He wasn't sure.

"Oh. I like to be here. I love you and Grandpa and Granny Bess. But I'm not supposed to be here, am I?"

"Would you rather go home?"

"I don't know. Isn't this my home? I like it here."

Grandma kissed him on the cheek, smelling of pastry flour and witch hazel. "You go home anytime you like," she said. "It's up to you."

***

Donald rolled over in bed, trying to piece together the strange conversation of his dream. He'd wanted to go home. But had he wanted to go home to his mother in another state or back here to Nona? He wasn't sure if in the dream he meant he didn't belong there as a little boy or if it was his old guilt-of-happiness telling him his mother needed him, that it was somehow wrong for him to be with his grandparents and forgetting about his mom. Try as he might, he couldn't make any clear sense of the dream. It faded from him though he tried to hold onto it.

What with one thing and then another, he'd never gotten around to fixing the attic door that wouldn't open. In so big a house, with rooms they hadn't conceived a use for yet, there had been little reason to explore beneath the gables. It was an unfinished attic behind that special door, and as he recalled it had never even been used for storage.

Yet as he lay there, he was thinking of that door, of that attic. He sat up, put feet in slippers, grabbed a robe, and went out into the hall. The flight of steps leading to the third floor, newer than the rest of the house, was not nearly as wide as the walnut staircase from the main floor to the second. His slippered feet made no sound upon these narrower stairs, as though no weight was placed upon them.

The door leading to the space beneath the gable was an antique affair, part of Grandpa Nathan's salvaging operation, put in this odd spot because there was no place else for it. It was grandly carved with gryphons and mice—a motif that fascinated him as a child and still had a curious charm. The rarity of the door was one reason he and Nona decided not to force it; they might have damaged the antique workings of the handle and lock.

The knob was itself cast with intricate Celtic symbols.

For some reason, Donald felt he had to look up there. The only fear was of waking Nona. She'd think him daft, breaking down that beautiful door in the early dawn, in his robe and slippers.

But the door opened without so much as a squeak of its hinges. Had it really been unlocked the whole time? Perhaps it had come unstuck on account of the changing temperatures of the wood. Donald had a dreamy uneasiness and wondered, even now, if he was imagining things.

At the top of the narrow, rickety stairwell, festoons of cobwebs clinging to his hair and shoulders, Donald stood gazing into the darkness under the gable. The exposed beams of the ceiling below had had a few warped boards laid across them to walk on and some plywood on which sat a few boxes, one with faded, dusty Christmas decorations poking through the flaps.

"Donny, where are you?" called Granny Bess, her voice feeble but insistent. "Donny, come talk to your mother on the phone. Don't be like this!"

"Is he up here?" called Grandpa Nathan.

Donny hugged his knees and sat quietly at the top of the stairs.

"He must have gone outside," said Grandpa, and Great-grandma added, "Maybe. The poor boy. Is she going to come and get him?"

"Dunno. Ma's talking to her now. He
is
her boy."

A tear tracked Donny's face.

***

He and Nona had lunch in town. It'd been a few weeks since they'd been to the little restaurant, but when they first moved to town, they had been daily customers, so were handsomely greeted. Away from the influence of the house, Donald felt rational once more, nothing tugging horridly at his heart, though his intellect remained uneasy.

"You're so serious lately," said Nona, her soft round face compassionate. "Why so much brooding?"

"Don't know really," he admitted. "Haven't you felt any... any
distancing
between us lately?"

She reached over the table and touched his hand. "After what we did last night?" And she blushed from eyebrows to throat.

"Do you ever miss the coast at all? The city?" He lowered his voice, so as not to insult the waiter-cook-owner of the present establishment, and added, "The restaurants?"

She looked at him with gentle, hazel eyes that seemed almost to pity. But why should she feel pity? He must have imagined it. "You were never fond of the city," she reminded him. "Don't tell me you're homesick."

"Home?" He laughed at the irony. "I just thought you might be bored."

"If you need to get away from the weather," said Nona, "we could take a trip to Miami."

"What if we went to visit your sister?"

"Sharon?" She almost laughed, but then scowled and said in a low, almost miserable tone: "I don't think so, Donald. No, it wouldn't do."

"Do you ever think about when you and she were little?"

"Of course."

"Weren't you close?"

"I guess we were—then. The world moves beneath us, Donald. Things never come back again."