The Spirit Wood (26 page)

Thirty-six

B
YRON, LET ME
call you back. You shouldn't always have to pay for this.”

“And what do you think Peter would say if he got a gander at your phone bill and wondered why I never asked to talk to him? Let it go, Meg—I don't mind. You know I don't. This afternoon I even picked up a private tutoring job that'll bring in the mighty sum of fifteen dollars a week.”

“That still won't pay for the calls.”

“I'll find another tutoree. Anyway, let's not spend any more time arguing about this. You think I'm made of money or something?”

Meg laughed.

“Where is Peter, by the way?”

“Guess,” Meg replied. “He's over at the Simons, loading up the car with stuff for the auction.”

“I thought Anita and her pals were going to do all the work.”

“So did I. But not the manual labor, apparently. They
have
covered the town with leaflets decorated with little Greek designs and a dancing satyr—I'll send you one for your wall—announcing the auction and the good cause for which it's being held. They're even charging twelve dollars a head just to get in.”

“And they think people will shell out?”

“A lot already have. They've been selling tickets out of Lazaroff's shop all this week.”

“At least it'll be over soon; forty-eight hours from now you can forget the whole thing . . . and leave Arcadia if you want to.”

“Leave if I
can,”
Meg corrected. “I already want to.”

“Peter's mother still determined to stick it out? I give her credit—this has all been a nightmare for her, too.”

“So far she is. It's nice, of course, to have some human company around here—and I
am
glad she stayed—but it
does
give me one more thing to worry about all the time.”

“Her heart, you mean?”

“I think the place is really starting to get to her,” Meg confided. “She seems nervous, jumpy. She's not looking too great. Last night she nearly ran out of the room when Peter came down to dinner.”

“Any particular—or new—reason?” Byron asked.

Meg paused. “He's started wearing a hat lately. A white sailor cap with the brim pulled down around the sides, sort of like that guy on ‘Gilligan's Island.’ “

“Sounds ridiculous,” Byron said, “but not particularly scary.”

“Don't ask me why, but it scared Mrs. Constantine. That, and the way he was walking. He
does
kind of creep along now—it's hard to describe. And he sits—this is a new one—on a foam rubber pillow.”

“You're kidding. Why would he do that?”

“I asked him if he was having a problem,” Meg said, “and I offered to pick up some suppositories in town if he needed them, but he just glared at me and said he was more comfortable sitting that way. After that, I just let it drop.”

“So, in other words, he's still refusing to get any help, see a doctor, anything like that?”

“Categorically. Not that I ever have much of an opportunity to talk to him. If you thought he was reclusive before, you should see him now—or
not
see him, to be more precise. He's the Phantom of the Opera, skulking around, hiding out in his study, hanging out at the Caswells.”

“What about at night, when you're getting ready for bed?”

Meg was quiet for a moment. “I go to bed by myself now, By. If he comes in at all, it's an hour after I've turned out the light, and he sleeps on a chaise on the balcony, in his shirt and pants, under a sheet. With his hat on.”

“Every night?”

“Every night.”

Outside, Byron could hear a mother calling her children to come home. It was just getting dark. In Passet Bay, it already would be. “Then maybe he wouldn't notice if you weren't there either,” Byron said. He could picture Meg on the other end of the line, smiling ruefully, tucking several stray hairs behind one ear. “Maybe he'd be relieved—he could drag the whole bed out onto the balcony that way.”

“It wouldn't fit.”

“Let
him
worry about that. If he can cart that auction junk around, he can move a bed.”

“How's yours?” Meg asked. “Did you get it fixed?” Byron's mattress had been in dire need of support.

“Cumberland's building a new gym. I swiped a couple of two by fours from the building site.”

“That's good.” There was a long pause. “Well, I don't want to run your bill up anymore, By . . . I'll call
you
the next time.”

“Okay,” Byron said. “But just remember—anytime you want to come out to see the brand-new Cumberland University Athletic Center, you're very welcome.”

“Thanks,” Meg said. “I know.”

When they hung up, the mother was still calling. Leaning out his window, Byron could see her—in an apron, on a whitewashed front porch. For a moment, he felt so unutterably alone that he wished he could answer her call himself.

Thirty-seven

T
HE
OLD MAN
had been sitting on the back deck of the house in a canvas director's chair, smoking a cigar in the dark. Stan Simon had ushered Peter as far as the lighted threshold of the den, then stopped. Peter had recognized the man immediately.

“You're my grandfather's friend,” he'd said, moving slowly toward him. The deck was cluttered with items for the auction: a bicycle, boxes of books, a set of golf clubs. The old man had remained seated, observing him. “You're Kesseogolou. Aren't you?”

With one finger, the old man had touched the brim of his hat, as if to acknowledge it. He watched as Peter lowered himself carefully into the chair on the opposite side of the table. Then tapped the end of his cigar over a metallic blue ashtray.

“I do not need to ask who you are,” he'd finally replied in a very precise but nonetheless foreign accent. He wore a thick gray moustache that drooped down around his mouth. “You remind me very much of Alexander. Yes, I am Gregory Kesseogolou.” He extended one hand and shook Peter's from above, much as Nikos did. “Alexander would have been very pleased.”

With what, Peter wondered. His body had never been so contorted; he'd never looked worse. “What are you doing here in Passet Bay?”

“The lawyer, Kennedy, did not tell you? I came back to receive the things Alexander so kindly left to me in his will. I did not want to risk them being shipped to me in Heraea. My countrymen are not always so honest as they should be, no?” He winked broadly and drew on his cigar. “I am staying with your friends, the Caswells.”

“For how long?” Peter could still hardly believe he was seeing this man—and here, on this deck, just as he'd appeared in the Caswells’ home movie. He half-expected his grandfather to show up next.

“Not long. I might have simply taken my legacy from Mr. Kennedy in New York—he had kept everything, I'm pleased to say, in very fine condition—and returned home, had I not heard about this auction. That and, I must admit, a desire to meet you, the inheritor of Arcadia, persuaded me to stay on a little.”

“How did you hear about the auction?” From Jack Caswell, no doubt. He didn't wait to be told. “And you're staying for it?”

“I have no pressing business elsewhere. I thought it would be pleasant to visit Arcadia again.” He gave Peter a long, appraising look. “I'm told your mother is there now. Has she mentioned me to you? No?” He shrugged. “Perhaps she has forgotten. It was such a long time ago. Alex and I had some business together.”

“Nikos told me something about it.”

At the mention of Nikos, Kesseogolou smiled, his moustache lifting at the corners of his mouth. “This will be a surprise for old Niko,” he said. “And Angelos and Demetria, too.”

Demetria again. “She's not there anymore,” Peter said. “She was fired by my grandfather before I came. There's a new girl, Leah—Nikos's daughter.”

For a second, Kesseogolou was perfectly still. Then he erupted into laughter, slapping the table. “Yes, of course, I'd forgotten about all that,” he said. “Deme-
tria was very naughty. She killed the goose that laid the golden egg.” He laughed again, phlegm rattling in his throat, and subsided in his chair once more. “And Nikos, you say, has another daughter around the place now?” This all seemed highly amusing to him. It reminded Peter of Angelos giggling in the caretaker's cottage that rainy afternoon. “Leah,” he said, squinting his eyes, as if trying to remember her. “Yes, that
does
sound familiar. Good swimmer?” he added, with a sly smile.

Odd he should remember, or guess, that. “Yes, in fact she is.”

Kesseogolou nodded; blew out a cloud of smoke. “Given you any lessons yet?”

Peter's ears, concealed beneath the turned-down brim of his cap, twitched. He said nothing.

“After what happened to your father, I would hope she has.”

Peter squirmed in his chair; there was a terrible ache in the base of his spine. “What about my father?” he said. “What's swimming got to do with my
father?"

Kesseogolou looked up at him imperturbably, considering how much, or exactly what, he wished to say. His eyes lingered conspicuously on the sailor cap, the curly chest hair escaping from the top of Peter's buttoned, long-sleeved shirt, the way he rested his elbows stiffly on the arms of the chair. “It's got everything to do with your father,” he said, removing a fleck of tobacco from the corner of his moustache. “If he'd known how to swim, he wouldn't have drowned in the bay. And you would not be here tonight. Surely a bright boy like you—Caswell tells me you are working on a doctorate—can see that.”

Peter sat as if paralyzed.

“Or perhaps I must explain everything to you . . . even now.” He sighed, surprised, it seemed, at Peter's ignorance or faulty intuition. “Let me just light my cigar again,” he said, before beginning in earnest.

Thirty-eight

M
RS. CONSTANTINE AWOKE
to the sound of heavy tires crunching across the gravel driveway. It seemed only minutes ago that, finally, she'd closed her eyes and fallen asleep. Most of the night she'd been beset by memory, by all the things she'd spent a lifetime trying to forget. And by visions, too, of her mother, ironing a pile of clothes in a dismal kitchen, minding a pot on the stove, humming, sadly, a snatch of a popular Greek song. She remembered so little of her girlhood, and her mother, that the memories she
did
have had become, over the years, as static and predictable as snapshots in an old photograph album; she could flip through them just as easily, knowing every frame, every nuance, which one came next. The last was always the same: her mother, a woman lost in life, looking in death equally lost, laid out on blood-red satin, white flowers strewn around her, an expression of composure on her face as unlike her as the elegant dress she was buried in. Ellen, as she'd grown older, had gone from missing her to hating her to pitying her; what this simple country woman must have suffered, married to a mystery like Alexander Constantine.

The rest of the mystery—the questions about what Ellen had always referred to in her own mind as “Peter's heritage"—she was staying on at Arcadia to suppress. If Nikos could just be kept quiet until the
estate was sold, if Peter could just be returned to Mercer and his previous life, then the last danger might be successfully passed, and forgotten. Once this auction was done, there was nothing essential, according to Meg, to keep her from packing up her own things, and Peter's, and heading straight back to their college apartment.

From the voices she now heard outside the house, the preparations were already underway.

“The tent's going up on the back lawn,” one man was saying. “Bring around the stakes and rigging first.” She heard a corrugated door being lifted; the squeak of a dolly's wheels. When she went to the window and looked outside, she saw Meg at the bottom of the front steps in a pair of jeans and sneakers. Her hair was gathered together in a long blond pony-tail.

That, too, sometimes gave her a pang. She'd never been so young, like that. Never known those years. Her life had been brutally truncated, so early on.

“If you go around to the left, it'll be shorter,” Meg was saying. “The tent's supposed to go right in front of the gazebo.”

The men, three of them, loaded up the dolly with huge canvas sacks and followed Meg around the east wing of the house. Mrs. Constantine turned from the window and, in the restored silence of her room, went about choosing the proper dress for a summer auction.

Even on the balcony, far away from the gazebo, Peter heard the unloading going on. When Meg and the workmen had moved sufficiently far down the back lawn, he swung his legs, gingerly, off the chaise and, still clutching the sheet around him, shuffled inside. Tossing the sheet onto the bed, he went into the bathroom and, only when he had locked the door behind him, looked himself over.

There was more red in his beard than there'd been
the day before. Or at least it seemed so. It was getting so he could never tell exactly what was different anymore, whether something had actually changed or if, in his fear and consternation, he was imagining it. The pain was what he could put his trust in: if something hurt, that was usually where the certain and demonstrable changes would next appear. Today his mouth hurt the most. Turning on the light over the medicine chest, he opened his mouth and with blunt fingers pried his lips away from his gums. Yes, the gums looked raw, and slightly discolored. Chafed perhaps. And his teeth . . . could they have moved farther apart from each other? Were they always so separated as this?

In the soap dish on the sink was Meg's dental floss. He unwound a length of it, wrapped it hurriedly around his fingers, and wedged it between his teeth. Always, in the past, the floss had caught and become shredded. That's why he'd always hated flossing. It was impossible to get the stuff out from between his teeth. But today, the unwaxed string plunged in and out without obstruction, catching on nothing. His gums began to bleed; at least that had always happened. But this much? He spat into the sink, rinsed out his mouth with cold water. Then had to spit again.

He finished in the bathroom quickly, splashing some water onto his face, lifting off his hat and scratching his scalp; the front of his skull he instinctively avoided. He slapped the hat firmly back in place, flicked out the light, and, still wearing the clothes he'd slept in, hobbled into the bedroom.

He'd have liked to go outside—he always wanted to be outside now—but too much was going on out there. Before the day was over, there'd be a whole lot more. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he tried to raise his foot to tie the leather lace of his Topsider. But his knee was too stiff; it felt locked in place. He was about to try the other foot when he heard his mother's door open
across the hall; his own bedroom door—
damn
—wasn't locked.

“Peter?” Accompanied by a light rapping. “Peter?”

He slipped off the bed, crept toward the door. Crouching down, took hold of the lock. Turned it, just as the knob of the door itself turned. There was a click as the lock caught; had she heard it? Did she know he was there?

“. . . Peter?”

He held his breath. Waited. He heard her footsteps going toward the staircase. Without taking his eyes from the door, he moved backwards into the study and breathed again only when he had closed and locked that door behind him.

How could she face him, he thought. How had she
ever
been able to? If what Kesseogolou had said was true—and so much of it added up, so much made sense—how had she managed to pull it off, every day, for nearly thirty years? The maiden name story ("It seemed simpler, after your father died, to revert to the name I'd always known"), the mysterious “heart ailment” his father had supposedly suffered from, the total absence of relatives in Peter's life, the determination to keep him, always, from any contact with Alexander Constantine. It was all horrendous, all crazy, but only in Kesseogolou's account, all of a piece . . .

. . . though even
he
had to be exaggerating, lying, about some of it. It couldn't be so irrevocable, so unnatural, so . . . It just couldn't
be.

A shooting pain, like a heated dagger, stabbed at the base of his spine as if to say yes, in fact it could.

He bent forward in his chair to relieve the pressure, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. When the spasm abated and he opened them again, he almost laughed. Right in front of him, on the cluttered desk, was a stack of pages from his dissertation. He read from the page on top.

The idea of true modernity, as Wilde understands it, is inextricably bound up with Matthew Arnold's notion of culture, defined in his essay “Sweetness and Light” as a kind of mental activity or process rather than a passive body of assimilated information.

Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought, did anyone give a damn about Matthew Arnold's notion of culture? Or Wilde's idea of true modernity? Did Dunlop, the department head? Did he, Peter? He'd written this only a week or so before; already it seemed as if it had been done in another lifetime, and by someone with whom he was only barely acquainted. Mechanically and without hesitation, he crumpled the page into a loose ball and let it fall between his legs to the floor.

He read from the next.

Arnold based his humanitarian vision of the future on a vanguard of cultured men who, he argued, would lead the proletariat toward enlightenment and, ultimately, socialism; he sincerely believed that man would be inexorably drawn toward the Immutably beautiful and the good.

He was sincerely wrong; Peter crumpled this page, too. Man isn't drawn toward the immutably beautiful or good; he's drawn backwards. He's drawn whichever the hell way he was born to be drawn, whichever way his blood has already determined he'll be. That much Peter
did
know; that much he'd learned from Kesseogolou. And Nikos. And the bathroom mirror. Everything that he had been doing until now—studying, reading, writing—none of it mattered one damn bit when chalked up against the inevitable, against the crime that had engendered him and the corrupt blood
that was now percolating in his veins. He crumpled the next page, and the one below that. Kesseogolou had said, flatly stated, that there was no going back, no undoing it.

“You've drunk the wine, you've run with us, you've played the sacred pipes . . .”

The pages fell, one by one, between his twisted knees.

“. . . you've joined in the sacrifice—Nikos tells me you drank quite deeply . . .”

The taste of his own bleeding gums came back to him.

“. . . and now with this Leah—Demetria, too, if you like—you can finish what your father only started. You can become what you've always been, something ancient, and proud, and real—
real,
Peter,” he'd repeated with fierce insistence, “and complete the circle that's been broken too long.”