The Glass House People (23 page)

But then he saw Hanny Lynn's shocked face, and she didn't seem a child anymore but a woman. And one he had wounded.

"You said you loved me, Clifton Becker." Her voice was hard, though almost inaudible. The others fell into a sudden hush and her words dropped like icicles into the hot room, their points sharp and dangerous. "Only two minutes ago. We were holding each other in that bed and you said—and I quote!—'Hanny, I do. I do love you.' Can you deny that?" What she saw in his eyes made her wild with anger, and she leaped toward him, betrayed and screaming: "You bastard! You can't deny you said it!"

"Look, can't we discuss this reasonably? I did—okay, I did say that. But you didn't let me finish." He kept his voice calm, hoping to calm the others who were, he sensed, wound tightly just ready to spring at him.
Clifton Among the Savages,
he thought. It would make a good title when he got around to writing all this down. "I didn't have a chance to finish."

Mr. Savage struck his fist heavily on the oak dresser, rattling the big mirror. "This is appalling," he roared. "I won't have this kind of stuff going on in my house! We all thought you were honorable, young man. And look at this! What have you been doing here? Playing one girl off the other? I won't have that kind of game in my house, no sir! I'll thank you to get right out of here. You are no longer welcome."

"Oh, Daddy!" That was Iris, but Mrs. Savage shushed her, pulling her out into the hall.

"Let him go tonight, Iris, baby. Daddy's right. You and he can try to work things out later."

Hanny Lynn broke away from them all and tore into her room, howling at the top of her lungs. "Someone should slap her," Clifton said angrily. "She's getting hysterical." He pulled his small overnight case out of the closet, itching to slap her himself. Actually he felt like beating up the whole lot of them, savages that they were. Single-handedly.

He threw the case on the bed and started gathering his clothes.

"If anyone gets slapped around here, it ought to be you," yelled Mrs. Savage from out in the hall. "Carrying on like this behind my back. Behind Iris's back! You ought to be ashamed. I want you out of here!"

"Oh, Mama! Oh, Clifton!" wailed Iris, pressing tearfully into the room around her mother. Clifton shoved his underclothes and socks and a bottle of shampoo haphazardly into his case. "Clifton, how could you?"

"Let's meet for lunch sometime and I'll tell you the whole story," he said coolly, going out to the sunporch and grabbing the pages of his manuscript off the desk. Iris turned away, tears streaming down her cheeks.

At last he was packed—not all his things, of course, but enough for a few days until everyone calmed down and they could discuss this rationally. While he'd been packing he'd been thinking that this really might be just one of those storms in a teacup you heard people talk about. Give everyone a day or two—maybe even a week—and they'd be ready to listen to him. And then he'd hold Iris and make her understand how Hanny Lynn had been tormenting him. She would have to understand that! She, better than anyone, knew how Hanny Lynn was. And he'd talk to Hanny, too. Firmly and sternly. The whole Older Brother bit. Yes, he cared about her. Yes, he'd said he loved her—but hadn't been able to finish because Iris stormed in right at that second.
But—read my lips, Hanny Lynn!—I am going to marry Iris. Not you! I love you only
as a sister!
Get it? You're a nice kid, okay. And in the moonlight in my bed you look lovely. But none of that means I'm going to throw Iris over for you, you little twit.

He felt better just making these plans. Then Mr. Savage was there at his elbow. "You'd better not come back to the house for a while," he said. "We've all had quite enough of you and your games."

"I wish you would give me a chance to explain, sir," Clifton said.

"Oh, you'll get it. But I wouldn't be surprised if the damage you've done is irreparable. You don't mess around with people's love, my boy."

Clifton moved out into the hall. There was just no talking to these folks tonight.

When she heard him in the hall, Hanny Lynn came tearing out of her room and threw herself against him. "Don't go!"

He shrugged her off, only to be assaulted by Iris. "I wish you were dead, you—you—,"hissed Iris.

"Just go!" shouted Mrs. Savage.

"Iris! Believe me. We'll talk about this soon, when we've calmed down—"

"You do not love Iris! You
DON'T!
You just feel sorry for her!" Hanny Lynn clung to him again, even as Iris reached out to slap her.

Then Mrs. Savage was pushing him toward the stairs. "You have money for a hotel, don't you? Then go! We have had quite enough for one night."

Mr. Savage shoved the overnight bag into his hand, and at the same time both girls surged forward, Hanny howling: "Take me with you! I'll kill you if you leave me with them!" and Iris gagging on her fury: "You'll never have him! I'll see to that!"

Clifton almost laughed as he stepped back hastily away from all of them, laughed at the way they were fighting over him as if for some prized toy.

But then his laugh caught in his throat as his ankle twisted under him and he slipped and felt himself falling backward, falling down the entire flight of shiny wooden steps.
What a stupid thing to do!
he was thinking wildly, and then at the last, as his head shattered on the iron radiator at the foot of the stairs:
It's true what they say—you really do see stars.

At the dinner table Beth tried to find safe topics of conversation. She asked Bernard about the candy store's history. She asked Monica for information about art schools in Europe. As her guest talked, Beth could almost see their words filling the room like smoke. From where she sat, everyone began to look like figures worked in the sooty dark glass she was using for shadows in her window downstairs. Beth kept her eyes on Grandad. She stared at him across the table, trying to make her eyes as penetrating as possible. Trying to read his mind. Grandad never once looked her way. But he
had
winked, hadn't he?

Everyone declined second helpings. Bernard announced to everyone's relief that Monica and he wouldn't be able to stay for coffee but must be going. Good-byes were said quickly, and then the family was alone. Nobody said anything for a few minutes, then Grandad said he was tired and would go straight up to bed.

"We're all tired out," Grandmother murmured. "Please—let's just leave things till morning." It was a sign, Beth thought, of how upset Grandmother was: she was willing to leave the dirty china to soak overnight in the kitchen sink. Tom followed Grandmother and Grandad up the stairs.

Without conferring about it, Hannah and Aunt Iris stayed together in the kitchen to tackle the washing up. The silence as they worked was broken only by the clink of silverware, the trickle of rinse water, the clang of a pot lid being put away in the cupboard near the stove. Beth stood for a moment watching from the doorway. She sensed that, despite the silence, some of the tension between her mother and Aunt Iris was gone now. It had something to do with the way they held their bodies. Aunt Iris seemed to move with less rigidity. And when she handed Hannah the deviled-egg platter, their fingers touched briefly.

Beth slipped down into the basement, closing the door softly behind her. Unlike the others, she didn't feel tired at all. Instead she felt energized, almost edgy. It was, after all, not yet nine o'clock. If the dinner party had gone as planned, they'd all be upstairs drinking tea or coffee and eating Grandmother's peach pie with vanilla ice cream. She and Tom and Monica would have left the adults to carry on while they came down here to view Beth's new window.

She pulled the protecting sheet off the window now. It was nearly finished. She had only one last section to solder. She spread newspaper on Grandad's work bench and centered the window carefully. She plugged in the soldering iron and set out the clamps and the coil of solder. Then she perched on her stool and wrapped the last few shapes of glass in copper foil. She moved the pieces slowly into place, almost hypnotized by their colors and textures. Beth let the tangles of the evening recede from memory, losing herself in the pleasure of her work. An hour or so later she heard Aunt Iris and her mother leave the kitchen to go up to bed. No one came down into the basement, and no one called her name.

Beth felt the house around her as she worked. It was full of sleeping troubled people, but down here in her work space she felt a little core of energy, like light, pulsing as she worked. She wanted—no,
needed
—to finish the window tonight. She couldn't say why. But she stayed downstairs until two o'clock in the morning etching the last details onto the glass canvas, and the time passed as if in an instant.

It was only when she finally stood back to look at her creation propped against the wall next to Aunt Iris's Notfilc painting that exhaustion rushed over her like a wave. She felt too tired now to exult in the completion of her project. She cleaned up mechanically, washing the grinder, separating the different colored leftovers into piles, and sealing them in envelopes for future use. She swept the floor, plodded up the stairs to the kitchen and then into the living room and up the steep, narrow flight to the bedrooms.

Beth's head was pounding when she woke up. Her left wrist was cramped and painful, as if she'd slept on it bent back the wrong way. She shook her arm and pressed on her temples, then shielded her eyes against the morning light streaming through the window.

Tom opened the door from his sunporch and tiptoed quietly across her room to the door.

"I'm awake," Beth said, keeping her voice low.

He walked over to stand by her bed. "I've been awake in there for ages, thinking about last night."

"Don't remind me. I have a splitting headache."

His face was bright with excitement, but he kept his voice a whisper. "So, what do you think? Isn't it weird? All these years Mom and Aunt Iris have been enemies—and it was Grandad all the time! Here we were, suspecting Aunt Iris and Grandmother—
you
even thought it might be Mom!—and we never even considered Grandad!"

"But that's just it!" Beth struggled out of the mattress's valley and sat up. "Think about it, Tom! We never suspected Grandad for a good reason. He's the calmest, gentlest, most reasonable man I've ever met! Who could really believe he pushed Clifton Becker down the stairs and never told anyone?"

"
I
never would have guessed, that's for sure. God, he must have felt so guilty all these years!"

"But that's just what I mean. I can't believe Grandad wouldn't have owned up to what he'd done when it happened."

Tom sank onto the edge of the bed. "But he was trying to pretend it hadn't happened. He couldn't face it. You heard what he said last night."

"Yeah." Beth leaned her head against the headboard. "I heard what he said. But I saw him wink after he said it."

"What?"

She threw off the sheet and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She groaned as pain stabbed her temples.

"He
winked?
You must have imagined it...."

"Well, I didn't."

"Why would he wink? That doesn't make sense."

She shrugged and moved past him, out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. The hallway was quiet, and all the bedroom doors were closed. She splashed cold water on her face and pulled on some clothes from the laundry bin.

When Beth emerged into the hall again, Tom was gone. She stood on the landing, gazing down at the iron radiator. Then she slowly went downstairs, massaging her wrist, and let herself out onto the front porch. Romps began woofing in the backyard, and she ran to untie his leash. She looked up at the bulk of the house from her place by Romps's elm tree in the yard, and the house seemed peaceful. Now that Grandad had confessed, there was no more mystery—right? They could all let Clifton Becker rest in peace.

But Beth couldn't stand the quiet house and the sense of peace on this hot August morning. It all seemed so wrong. She clapped her hands for Romps, who was rooting in the rose bed. "Come on, boy!"

And she took off running down the street with the little gray schnauzer at her heels. She ran and ran, down block after block, veering away from Penn's Pike and the candy shop.

Maybe it was just the runner's high she'd always heard about but never experienced, but as she ran, she began to feel lighter. Her head thudded at first, right along with her pounding heart, and her wrist ached with every jolt along the pavement. But as her legs kept up their sturdy pumping, her head cleared. The strain of all the weeks in the tense house seemed to flow right out of her as she flew on, and when she circled back down Spring Street, her body felt loose and her wrist didn't hurt anymore. She sank onto the grass in the front yard, burying her face against Romps's heaving side. Then she lay back and stared up at the sky. The leaves of the trees and the clouds above seemed part of a giant stained-glass window, through which she watched Grandad wink and wink and wink.

She lay there a long time, thinking. Then finally, resolved, she hurried into the house. From the kitchen came the smell of bacon and scrapple and freshly brewed coffee, and her stomach rumbled with the first real hunger pangs she'd felt in weeks. She heard Tom's and Hannah's voices, then laughter. Laughter? In
this
house?

She climbed straight up to the front bedroom and tapped lightly on the door.

"Yes?" Grandad called.

"Open up. It's the police." She stepped into the air-conditioned room. "Come out with your hands up."

He was lying in bed, arms folded behind his head, the picture of contented repose. His smile lit his entire face. "Good morning, Beth!"

"Oh, Grandad." She pulled up the bedside chair. "You are the biggest liar in the history of the world."

He raised his bushy eyebrows. "What—me?"

"You!" She sat down with a thump, shaking her head at him. "I can't believe it."

"Maybe so, maybe so," he conceded. "But what's the proof, officer? A man's innocent until proven guilty in this country. It's what the founding fathers quite kindly arranged."