Black Light (15 page)

“I said
not in here
. Get her out,” the owner commanded, pointing at the door.
“Now.”

We went. “I don’t believe that stuff is legal,” Hillary fumed as he herded Ali into the car. “It
can’t
be good for you.”

“It’s not,” I said. “The next sound you’ll hear is her cerebral cortex hitting the floor.”

Ali laughed. Her pupils had shrunk to black specks and her wide tawny eyes looked gormless as a kitten’s. “Yeah. And the sound after
that
will be Lit picking it up again.”

Hillary shoved in an eight-track and started the car. “You’re a fucking mess, Ali.”

“Sure, man. But I’m
cute
.”

It took us most of an hour to get back, winding along old Route 22 through the maze of backroads and villages threaded into the foothills of the Siwanoy Mountains. Ali and Hillary fought over the eight-track.

“Black Sabbath.”

“T. Rex.”

“Black Sabbath.”

“T. Rex.”

“Duck season.”

“Wabbit season.”

“Duck season
—
”

“You are both total idiots.” I stuck my head out the window, trying to escape from flying tapes and Ali’s cigarette smoke. “Next time I’m walking.”

“Forget it, we’ll fucking
compromise
—”

Hillary punched off the tape player and fiddled with the radio dial. Finally he homed onto a faint signal.

I have to be careful not to preach

I can’t pretend that I can teach…

Ali joined in with her hoarse sweet alto, and after a moment Hillary did the same—

“And on the dance floor broken glass,

The bloody faces slowly pass…”

Then the signal faded, and the car filled with the soft hiss of dead air. I stared out at the late-autumn vista— golden hills, lowering sky—and recalled Hillary’s stricken voice the night before.

What the hell does it mean, Lit? What does it mean?

I rubbed my arms. Ali lay passed out on the seat between us, her head on my lap and her fist jammed up against her mouth. Now and then her leg kicked reflexively against his, and Hillary would gently push her away. I fixed on that tiny star-shaped bruise at the crook of her elbow, and tried not to think of Jamie Casson kissing her there.

“What is it, Lit?” Hillary said at last.

I shook my head. I had felt uneasy for so long it was like a dull pain in my breast, or a throbbing headache; not something that could possibly come from outside me. I gazed out the window a long time before answering.

“I—I don’t know. Just this—”

I gestured at the trees gone glimmering gold and crimson beneath tungsten clouds, the leaf-strewn river winding alongside the highway. I had always loved this stretch of the road, the secret knowledge that Kamensic Village was crouched behind that last dark curve of the river. Now I could hardly bear to look at it.

“All this…” I said numbly.

Hillary stared straight ahead, after a moment nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

No you don’t,
I thought.
None of you even have a fucking clue.

I glanced down at Ali snoring in my lap. Then with all my strength I slammed my hand against the door.

“Lit!” cried Hillary. “What the hell are you doing?”

A long red welt immediately bloomed across my knuckles. Ali opened her eyes to gaze at me blearily, then dropped back to sleep. Hillary glared.
“Lit—”

“This fucking life—this
place,
you’re just bored here but I feel like it’s
killing
me—”

Hillary reached across Ali’s snoring form and tried to take my hand, but I pulled away. “You know it’s true, Hillary. It’s not so bad for you—everyone loves you, everyone loves
her
—”

I poked at Ali, still oblivious, and Hillary sighed.

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not that long now. Probably you’ll miss it when you’re gone—”

“
Never.
I will
never
miss it. If Kamensic fell into the goddam river I wouldn’t shed a single tear—”

“Oh, come on. You’d miss
me.
And you’d miss Livia, and Unk—”

“I’m
sick
of Unk. What Jamie Casson said last night was true—all these has-been actors—”

“DeVayne Smith just won the Oscar, Lit. And Mariel Gillian’s doing that new Beckett one-act—”

“But it doesn’t
matter.
What difference does it make, even if they were all Shakespeare? Which they’re
not
— my mother’s in a goddam soap opera and my father is
Uncle Cosmo
—”

“Give him a break, Lit! Unk played Toby Belch last year at Avalon—”

“It’s all bullshit.” I set my mouth and stared straight ahead. “
Bullshit.
Eighteen million versions of
Oedipus Rex,
but it’s always the same goddam play, it’s been the same goddam play for two thousand years—”

For the first time Hillary looked pissed off. “So stop talking about it and write a goddam
new
play, Lit.”

“How can I
possibly
write anything here?”

“Maybe if you were sober once in a while…”

“Fuck you, Hillary. Just
fuck
you.”

“‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks—’”

I turned away. Outside railroad tracks appeared alongside the Muscanth River, so that I had a momentary vision of three parallel trajectories, road river rail, all arrowing into the heart of the village. A few minutes later, Kamensic itself came into view.

“That toddlin’ town,” Hillary sang to the tune of “Chicago.” In my lap Ali chimed in sleepily.

“Kamensic, Kamensic my home town—”

I stared resolutely out the window. And, despite myself, shivered at the sight of it—snowy church spires and courthouse bell tower, bare chestnut trees and white-gabled library all rising from the autumn haze like the memory of the drowned village that lay beneath the reservoir. Even after all these years, it still took my breath away.

Not because it was beautiful. Though it was, deceptively wholesome as a Currier and Ives print. Shops neatly tended, dogs sleeping peacefully on the sidewalk, a young boy leading a black horse alongside the railroad tracks. Healy’s Delicatessen, where lemons bobbed like turtles in a huge vat of iced tea; the library with its incongruous sphinxes standing guard beside the steps; and, hidden behind a bend in the road, the black depths of Lake Muscanth.

And everywhere the trees—four- and five-hundred-year-old oaks and ancient beeches, huge dark hemlocks and the pair of massive holly trees that fronted Mrs. Langford’s tiny cottage beside the courthouse. Like Bolerium they seemed to protect Kamensic, that phantom village, so lovely that even now I ached to see it.

Yet what haunted me was not its beauty, but the way it shut me out. For all that I had lived there my entire life, for all that every face that passed me on the sidewalk would greet me by name, remember my birthday—and not just my birth date, but the weather on the day I was born—still somewhere within the town there was a mystery.

And it was a secret kept from
me.
I was convinced of that, the way some children believe themselves to be adopted. What I had seen at Jamie Casson’s house proved it. A man with living trees in his eyes and horns sprouting from his skull; and for all I knew everyone in Kamensic had seen that creature, and had never bothered to tell
me
about it. So like any cast-out lover, I longed more than anything else on earth to hold Kamensic within my embrace. But the village only looked deep into the lake that mirrored it; and, dreaming, saw Bolerium’s decaying horns and turrets, and the shadows of the mountain.

A rattle as Hillary’s car bumped over the wooden bridge spanning the river, willow leaves like calligraphy upon its surface. Ali sprawled across the seat, her head bumping my knee.

“See?” she crowed. “My brain’s falling out, but Lit’s catching it!”

“Lucky for you,” said Hillary with a touch of bitterness. “I’m hungry. You guys want to eat?”

Ali was up like a shot. “Deer Park.”

“Okay with me. Lit?”

“No…” I shifted, trying to get comfortable. “Damn it, Ali, move
over
.”

“But aren’t you hungry?”

“No.”
I couldn’t bear the thought of being in that car another minute; couldn’t bear the thought of sitting with Ali or Hillary or anyone else.

“Hey, suit yourself—”

The car scraped against gravel as we passed the courthouse museum. And suddenly I knew where I wanted to be.

“Listen—drop me off here, okay?”

Ali grimaced. “I’m
not
going to Healy’s—”

“Me neither. I’m going to see Mrs. Langford.”

“Mrs. Langford?
Now
?” Ali looked at me as though I had just opted for a life of chastity, but Hillary silently angled the car in front of the courthouse.

“I just feel like dropping by. Plus I ate about five hundred pieces of French toast, so I’m
not
hungry. Here, keep this until I come over later—”

I shoved the shopping bag with my new dress into her lap. Ali made a face. “How’re you gonna get there?”

“I’ll hitch or something. See you—”

She waved as I bounced from the car, but Hillary said nothing; only pulled slowly back into the street. I waited to see if he’d look back. He didn’t, and I turned away.

The courthouse was older than anything in the village save Bolerium. When Bloodjack Warrenton burned the town, his men had inexplicably left it standing—Acherley Darnell in his
Northern Sketches and Fireside Tales
quoted a Leftenant Adams as saying it was “occupied by evil sprites.” Later, after Warrenton’s mysterious death, Polly Twomey was tried (and acquitted) there, and Darnell himself met his death in front of the small clapboard building. On the gallows he recited the First Pilgrim’s speech from
The Duchess of Malfi,
bringing tears to the eyes of those who convicted him as he cried, “Fortune makes this conclusion general, All things do help the unhappy man to fall,” and fell.

By the early 1900s, all cases were tried in county court fifty miles to the south. The Kamensic courthouse fell into disrepair, its cupola home to hundreds of little brown bats and its doleful bronze bell silent.

All that changed when Mrs. Langford arrived. Stage name Theda Austin, neé Hopiah Lee Magillicuddy, known as Hoppy to her friends—Mrs. Langford had been a celebrated stage actress, and the original Stella Dallas back in radio days. She and her husband, the actor Lawrence Langford, retired to Kamensic in 1931. Lawrence continued to work intermittently until his death in 1972 at the age of 101, but Hoppy took her retirement seriously. She devoted herself to reviving the courthouse, first getting its name on the Register of Historic Places, then raising the money to have it restored and turned into a museum. As such, it attracted perhaps a dozen visitors a year, who would push open the decaying screen door and be immediately absorbed by a zenlike torpor. I walked in now, the door wheezing shut behind me, and shaded my eyes against the steely light that spilled down from the clerestory windows.

The scrubbed pine floors and rows of wooden benches gave the place an air of prim sanctity, as did the portraits of gimlet-eyed magistrates on the whitewashed walls. This was offset somewhat by the very elderly woman in black velvet tam o’shanter and lime-green houndstooth tweeds who sat in the judge’s dock, peering through heavily bandaged spectacles at a newspaper. Beside her perched a voluminous carpetbag that in happier days had carried Mrs. Langford’s beloved toy poodle, Tinker. At her elbow a transistor radio leaned against a thermos. I could just make out the carnival strains of “C’mona My House” segueing into the Bossanova.

“Hello, Mrs. Langford? It’s Lit—”

“Is that Charlotte?” Mrs. Langford lifted her head, blinking. “Hello, hello…” She waved vaguely in my direction, then swatted at the radio, which gave a faint shriek and fell over. “I
hate
this music, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever…”

I picked up the radio—like her glasses, thickly swathed with masking tape—and switched it off. “How are you today, Mrs. Langford? Any customers?”

“Oh, fine, I’m just fine. I don’t think we’ll see anyone today. Didn’t you hear? Axel Kern is coming back tonight—” Her vibrato rose thrillingly and she gave me a look of utmost rapture; then slumped back into her seat, shaking her head. “I just don’t know what will come of it, after all this time.”

“What do you mean?”

She gave me an inscrutable look, lifted a hand clattering with costume jewelry and draped it suggestively upon a cashbox with a neatly-lettered index card taped to its lid.

ADULTS $1.00

CHILDREN OVER TWELVE $.50 CHILDREN UNDER TWELVE FREE CHILDREN UNDER SIX
NOT PERMITTED

“I think you’re over twelve now?” she said hopefully.

I laughed. “I’ll be eighteen in March—” and put a dollar into her palm. Her hands shook slightly, and I had to stop myself from helping her as she fumbled with the cashbox.

“Eighteen.” Mrs. Langford was eighty-six. “When I was eighteen I was playing Maria in
Twelfth Night.
It was a small part but I stood out. That’s how Larry noticed me, you know—I stood
out
.” She lifted her trembling hand in the gesture I recognized from her old publicity stills. These invariably showed the Amazonian Theda Austin cowering unconvincingly before the menacing villains played by her slight husband. Now her face was creased as crumpled paper and blotched from sun and drink. Her kohled eyes rolled skyward as she cried, “
Never
be afraid to stand out, Charlotte.”

With a sigh she shut the cashbox, and tapped her thermos with a gnarled finger.

“Darling, would you mind opening that for me? My hands are bad today, the arthritis you know, I
think
I need to take a little something hot—”

“Sure.” I unscrewed the thermos. A wisp of steam emerged, fragrant with the scent of black-currant tea and sloe gin. I watched as she poured a hefty shot into the plastic lid.

“Thank you, darling—”

She sipped, eyes closed so that I could see where the kohl bled into the violet labyrinth of broken capillaries. Then they opened once more: brilliant green eyes, the whites unclouded, lashes still thick and black as a girl’s.