Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (12 page)

Ben reached the center of the pool, his hands churning the water around him and sending waves against the worn rubbery lining. He raised himself, grabbing a mouthful of air, and then plunged down, his bottom, green and white stripes, sticking up and disappearing, and then his feet.

Light rippled around him, blue and gold, and as he plunged lower, a dull brown. Something was gleaming ahead of him, in the deepest part of the pool. He kicked himself lower, toward the discolored wall, and when he felt the pressure growing inside his lungs, he reached out and scooped up the source of light. It was a pair of eyeglasses, the frame rusted, one lens intact, the other shattered. He bent and pushed himself upwards, holding the glasses carefully.

David was lying on his stomach in the shallow water, waiting for Ben to reappear. He had taken off his yellow tube. Aunt Elizabeth, who had finally finished inflating the whale, held it up for David’s inspection.

“How’s that?” she said.

“You can use it,” David replied. “I really don’t need a tube. I can swim already.”

“No, you can’t,” Aunt Elizabeth said, tossing the whale into the pool. “But I’m sure you will, before the summer’s over.”

David said, “Wanna bet?” He covered his face with the mask and began to flail away from her, his knees touching the floor of the pool.

Ben surfaced under the rickety diving board. He shook the water out of his ears and eyes and held the glasses close to his face. The frame was silver under the rust; the prescription, from the unshattered lens, very strong. There was a small jagged hole in the middle of the second lens, with a cracked web filling the frame, as though something had been plunged through it. The idea made his right eye tear. He turned the frame, examining it; there’d be a few small splinters of glass somewhere at the bottom of the pool. Possibly; if it had happened in the pool, whatever it was that
had
happened. He looked around for something to explain that small break in the lens, something jutting, and when he realized what it was he was trying to reconstruct, ghoulishly, a chill ran through him. The glasses must have fallen on the concrete ledge or dropped into the pool. But if that was so, why had they been left there? He brought both elbows up to the ledge to support himself, and the more he puzzled over the glasses, the more troubling they became, which, he made himself realize, was the way his mind usually worked. The curse of the footnote.

He heard Aunt Elizabeth in back of him: “David, that’s deep water. Now you stop showing off.”

Ben turned and saw David attempting to swim, with splashy, uncoordinated strokes, to the center of the pool where the water would be over his head.

“Ben?” Her voice shook when she raised it. “You tell that boy to come back here.”

“All right, Dave, that’s it,” Ben said, and when he kept coming toward him, Ben placed the broken glasses close to the ledge – in plain view, where they obviously hadn’t been when they were stepped on or kicked or whatever – and called out again, “That’s far enough, chief. Back.”

He either didn’t hear him above the clumsy sounds he was making, or he was disregarding him. “Okay, wise guy,” Ben said, and began to swim toward him with long, easy strokes. David saw him and stopped; when he stood up the water reached the top of his shoulders. He pulled the mask away from his face to let the sound out, his legs pedalling under him, like he’d seen Ben do. “I told you I could swim,” he said breathlessly, in Aunt Elizabeth’s direction.

“I believe you,” she said. “Now come back where it’s safe.”

About ten feet away from him, Ben said, “Rule one: three foot limit; everything else is out of bounds.”

David pulled the mask down and let it hang from his neck. “But I can
swim
,” he protested.

“That so?” Ben said, and then he disappeared below the surface, and David could see his body, with the green and white trunks, waving underwater with the ripples and the light, and moving closer to him. He lifted his flippered feet higher, trying to float the lower part of his body and beat Ben to the low end. He was winded, sinking a little with each hard stroke and tasting chlorine somewhere in back of his nose. He turned, and as he did, something slippery touched his ankle. Then he yelled, delighted, and tried to step away from the flat shape with the pulled-back hair moving slowly around him, below his knees. Ben’s hands were around his legs and David yelled again; Ben’s head passed under him, forcing its way between his legs, and David could feel something strong supporting him and lifting his feet off the concrete floor. His voice rose and shook on a long, uneasy “
Ohhh
 . . .” as though he were about to topple. Ben was lifting him higher and higher out of the water.

“The sea serpent!” he yelled to Aunt Elizabeth, grabbing onto Ben’s forehead to balance himself.

“Thought you’d get away, hunh?” Ben said, bobbing under him. He added, “Wise guy,” in an okay-let’s-put-the-gloves-on tone David recognized, and then began to turn slowly, plotting something. David saw Aunt Elizabeth, who was playing appalled, and the house, and the trees and the wide bay where they’d gone swimming up until now. The water slapped Ben’s stomach lightly, and David gripped his shoulders harder with his legs. He was going to flip him, like he’d done in the bay. When he saw Aunt Elizabeth again, he called out, “Help!”

Ben continued to turn silently, catching his breath and squeezing the water out of his nose, and when David looked down he saw a funny, mischievous expression on his father’s
face, as though he were building up to one tremendous “Boo!”

Aunt Elizabeth was watching them in the shade of the umbrella, saying “Watch it, Davey,” and laughing encouragement. And then it seemed to her that Ben had lost his footing, although David could feel the shoulders tilting backward and Ben’s hands pushing up against the bottom of his feet, with no warning, no warning at all. David smashed into the water and disappeared for a few thrashing seconds.

“Oh, Ben!” Aunt Elizabeth said, disapproval in the laughter.

David surfaced, coughing, and he could barely hear Ben say, “How’s that grab you, hunh, Tarzan?” He turned his back to him, rubbing his eyes which were burning. A fly or a bee was buzzing around his head; it hit him and buzzed louder until he shook it loose, and when it came back, he aimed a gush of water at it, and at Ben who lowered himself and pushed toward him, shark-like. David was trying to stand. Ben was behind him and all around him, making bubbly noises, half-water, half-air. David slapped at the water and made it foam, swinging around to keep Ben in sight.

“Had enough?” Ben said. “Enough?” He kept coming at him, grabbing at his waist, and though David tried to smile in the spirit of the game, his mouth was filling with water, making him gag. And while he didn’t mean it, Ben was beginning to hurt him, his fingers pinching his waist. David said, “Ow!” and then, “Come on, Dad, that hurts.”

“What’s the matter, can’t you take it?” Ben said.

“All right, you two,” Aunt Elizabeth said, and her voice had become more commanding, “that’s enough now. David, you’re turning blue.”

“Tell him to leave me alone,” David called back.

“Benjie,” she said, “you’re worse than a child.”

“What does she know?” Ben said and then plunged under again. David felt his hands spreading his legs and Ben’s head under him, and once again he was being lifted, a little more shakily this time.

“No more, Dad,” he said, but Ben didn’t seem to hear; he was moving backwards into the deeper water which he had warned David against. David held on tighter, his fingers digging into the sides of Ben’s face. “I give up,” he pleaded, and Aunt Elizabeth could hear the fear that had come into his voice. “Dad, I give up,” he repeated, more insistently.

“Ben, you’re frightening him,” Aunt Elizabeth said, leaning forward in her seat, and when Ben continued to move toward the center of the pool, she stood up uneasily and said, louder, “Did you hear what I said?”

“I’ve got him,” Ben assured her. “You’re not afraid, are you, sport? Not while I’ve got you.”

His hands were cupping the bottom of David’s feet, and David could feel the upward pressure beginning again. “Lemme go,” David said. “I don’t like this kind of game.”

“Why not?” Ben said, and he was breathing hard too, “Why don’t you like it?”

And before David could say anything, Ben brought his hands up with a jolt and slammed David backwards into the water.

Aunt Elizabeth was at the edge of the pool. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted angrily. Ben was watching for David to come up. “Ben! Do you hear me?”

He disregarded her, and when David came gasping to the surface, he shouted, “Here he is, here he is!” and lunged at him and pulled his hands away from his face. “Had enough? Had enough, chief?” he asked and something terrible had come into his voice, something punishing. David was trying to force the water out of his throat. “No?” Ben said. “A little more?” And to Aunt Elizabeth’s horror, he lifted him and flipped him again.

“What are you doing?”

And then again.

She was standing helplessly on the ledge, her hands raised to her mouth. “
What are you doing?
”

“Just a little roughhouse. Right, Dave? Right?” David was choking, the water boiling around him as he tried to pull away from Ben. The facemask had come off, its band wound around David’s wrist. “Davey knows it’s all a game,” Ben said, and all Aunt Elizabeth could hear was the awful threat in his voice and David’s choking sounds. He grabbed for his arm and his leg. David kicked himself free, and then Ben grabbed again and started to lift him, and David, with more strength than he had ever used in his life, swung his arm viciously to protect himself and slammed Ben in the mouth with the mask. Aunt Elizabeth had taken a step down, into the pool, speechless, as Ben cried out and dropped David. He covered his face with his hands, rocking up and down in pain. David pushed himself away, stumbling to the end of the pool while Ben stood rocking silently. Aunt Elizabeth’s face had gone white, and when David reached her and threw himself against her, struggling for breath, she could barely hold him for the trembling in herself.

Ben had bent low, his hands still pressed to his face. Blood was trickling through his fingers and falling into the water, spreading itself and dissolving. He lowered his hands slowly and looked at the blood, then up at Aunt Elizabeth and David whose body was shaking with great sobs.

The water smacked against the sides of the pool, and it was a long while before Ben could find the voice to call, in fear and disbelief, “Dave . . . ?” And then again, “Dave . . . ?” On the second one, barely audible, the voice snapped, like something in his head.

(7)

There was a dream – the playback of an image really – which had been recurring, whenever he was on the verge of illness, ever since his childhood. The dream itself was a symptom of illness, as valid as an ache or a queasy feeling or a fever. The details were always the same: the throbbing first, like a heartbeat, which became the sound of a motor idling; then the limousine; then, behind the tinted glass, the vague figure of the chauffeur.

He could trace, with some certitude, the genesis of the nightmare, or the image. When he was young, he had seen a black limousine idling outside his building, in the rain. There had been a death in a neighboring apartment, the first death he could remember hearing about, and the limousine had come for the family. The sound stuck in his head, and the image, all black and gray, and even now if Ben were asked: What’s death? – he’d have to say a black limousine with its motor idling and a chauffeur waiting behind the tinted glass. Only half joking, or a quarter.

On the two occasions when he had been given an anaesthetic, it was the same image, appearing at the last moment of consciousness, that had finally put him under.

It had come to him again tonight – at least the beginnings of it: the throbbing, like a first, alarming wave of sickness. It stopped as soon as he opened his eyes – the sound did, anyway; the throbbing persisted as a sharp pain between his eyes, somewhere in the middle of his head. He got out of bed quietly and paced a while; then went downstairs and paced a while longer on the terrace, looking in the direction of the pool which was invisible beyond the dark slope of the lawn.

When Marian found him, he was sitting in the living room, just outside the lamp’s small circle of light. She was wearing a green silk robe over her nightgown.

“How long have you been down here?” she asked him from the doorway, and she made it sound very gentle and sympathetic.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. He was playing with a cigarette, shaping the lighted end in the small rose medallion bowl he was using as an ashtray.

“It’s after two.”

“Is it?”

She was obviously intruding, but she came toward him anyway, the silk billowing. “Did you sleep at all?”

He shrugged and said, “Some.”

“Want to come back and try some more?”

“In a while, maybe.”

She stood beside him for a moment; his upper lip was split and swollen, and he was having trouble drawing on the cigarette. “Must you smoke?” she said.

“Why?” he asked, without looking up. “Is it wrong for the room?”

She smiled and let it pass, lowering herself in front of the armchair and laying her hand on his bare knee which was sticking out from under the terr
y
cloth robe. A breeze blew in through the open terrace door, smelling of rain. Marian gripped his knee and then ran her hand down his leg, soothingly. “Brooding about it isn’t going to help, you know.”

He waited before he said, dully, “What is?”

“Look,” she said, and her hand tightened on his leg for emphasis, “can I say it again? It was bound to get out of control sooner or later. I’ve seen the way you two fool around. You’re too rough. How many times have I told you that?”

“This wasn’t the same thing,” Ben said, as though he had already said it several times that day.

“Ben, of course it was. The roughhouse just got out of hand.”

“Roughhouse, hunh?”

“That’s the word.”

“You weren’t
there,
for Chrissake.” He stubbed his cigarette roughly, splitting it, and Marian tried not to be distracted by the rose medallion bowl, or the tiny heaps of ash on the surface of the table which was japanned maple.

“No,” she admitted guiltily, “I wasn’t there.”

“I can’t get it out of my head,” Ben said. “Christ, it’s all I can think about.”

“That’s just the trouble,” Marian said.

He leaned forward and reached for her wrist. “I swear, Marian, I don’t understand what happened to me out there. Maybe I blacked out or went crazy or something, I don’t know – but I couldn’t control myself, I didn’t know what I was doing. Hell, it’s worse. I
did
know, and I couldn’t stop myself. That’s the most frightening part of it.
Why?
Why would I want to hurt my own son?”

“I told you, Ben, that’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not,” he insisted, “it’s the truth. I wanted to hurt him.
Davey
. Jesus! What if I – ?”

“What if you
nothing,
” she cut him off. “Ben, look – David is all right.” She was speaking clearly and deliberately, as if there were a hospital bed between them. “He’s all right.”

“How can he be all right after what I tried to do to him?”

“Darling, that’s all in your mind.”

“It’s
not
in my mind.” He pulled his hand away suddenly and then brought it up to his mouth and rubbed his upper lip with that painfully reflective, distant look she’d seen in him all day. The breeze was constant now, rising and moving the heavy drapes, faded blue, which she intended to change eventually or at least attempt to repair. He was silent a long while, and so was Marian, listening to the wind and the metallic tap of a chain against a lamp bulb. Finally, Ben asked, very quietly, “What did Aunt Elizabeth tell you?”

Marian shrugged. “Nothing more than you heard her tell me,” she said. “Sometimes you’re worse than a child yourself; you don’t know when to stop.” She smiled. “Amen.”

If it was a lie, then it was one that had to be closer to the actual truth. Aunt Elizabeth was, after all, seventy-four; there had to be some inaccuracy in what she saw and heard, and said (on occasion she rambled, Marian had recently discovered). What she
had
said, when Marian had pressed her, approximated what Ben himself was saying now. Except for his deliberately wanting to hurt David. She never even suggested that; and if she thought as much and were keeping it from Marian – if that suspicion was what had sent her to her room and kept her there for a good part of the day – well, it made no more sense to Marian than what Ben, overwhelmed with guilt, had somehow brought himself to believe. Insanely. The idea was inconceivable.

“And Davey . . . ?” he asked quietly.

“Resilient,” she said; “you saw that.” Ben had avoided him until Marian had literally pushed them at each other, and the embrace was, for Ben, premature and painful. Later, resilient or not, David bolted down his dinner, and instead of spending the evening in front of the television set in the library, went up to his room.

“As far as he’s concerned,” Marian continued, “it’s exactly what I said it was. The roughhouse got out of hand; you tried to teach him a lesson and you went too far, both of you. Which is all that
did
happen, whether I was there to see it or not.” She waited for Ben to react, and at least she had penetrated enough for him to look at her; in his face she could read, if not immediate belief, then something like a plea for reassurance. She touched his lip very lightly. “He got himself a good scare and you got yourself a fat lip. Let’s leave it at that and not spend the rest of the summer brooding. Okay, darling?”

The smell of rain had grown stronger, filling the room. In a minute it would pour, and while she kept her eyes on Ben’s face and continued to touch him tenderly, she couldn’t help thinking,
Windows; which windows were open
? And at the same time,
Why should something like that distract her now?
She tried to put it out of her mind, and with it the sudden, unnerving thought that she might be minimizing the incident for the sake of the house, to protect their summer. But what she had been saying to Ben was sincere, unquestionably sincere, she assured herself. The idea that he would hurt David was absurd, and it had to be somehow providential that she hadn’t seen the incident (thank God for Mrs. Allardyce) and could be reasonable about it and objective.

She brushed her hair back against her temple, repeating the motion several times. Ben watched her and then ran the back of his fingers against her hair.

“What if it’s not a joke anymore, Marian?” he said. “Not another car incident, or keys, or missing exam papers. What if it’s finally happened . . . ?” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Hell, how long can you be on the verge of it?”

“Of what?”

“It’s called a breakdown.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ben – ”

“I blacked out, Marian.” He leaned closer and looked directly at her. “Whether you believe it or not, that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“And you don’t know what you’re saying now either. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? And if I let it go, you’ll brood over it and embellish it until you really make yourself sick over it. The knots, honey – they’re all packed away, remember? We left them back in town with the Byrons and MacKenzies and the piano and The Supervisor.” She touched the arm of the chair which was covered in yellow damask and lifted her eyes to the fretted valances over the windows. “This,” she said, with that reverence that always came into her voice when she spoke about the house, “this is where we came to unwind.” She got up slowly and held her hand out to him. “Come and sleep with me.”

It had happened, though, and exactly the way he remembered it, whatever she chose to believe. And if all the knots had been left behind, well, one of them had managed to slip past the double pillars.

He took Marian’s hand and held on for a moment. “It’ll pass,” he said. “Just give me a while longer.”

“Promise?”

It came down with a strong rush of wind before he could reply, hammering on the metal chairs and the glass-topped table out on the terrace. “My God,” she said, “listen to it!” She slipped her hand out of his and walked quickly to the open door. It was coming down even harder now, the wind blowing her hair and her robe and filling the room with a green, steaming smell. Marian pushed the glass door closed and watched the rain stream against the panes.

“We need it,” she said. “Everything outside was bone dry.” The dim lights across the bay had disappeared completely.

Ben hadn’t moved. She came back to the chair and said, “I’ve got to get those upstairs windows,” apologetically.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“You’ll be all right?”

He nodded and smiled up at her. “I won’t do anything to wreck your summer. Promise.”

“
Our
summer,” she said. She bent and kissed his forehead. “It was all working so beautifully, Ben. Everything we could ever want.” She searched his face; the look was just a little less inward. “Trust me. Please?”

“Get those windows,” he said.

She left the room quickly, pulling the silk robe around her tighter.

Ben lit another cigarette and sat listening to the sounds outside, steady, muted by the glass. The pool came into his mind again, and the image of David slamming backwards into the water. And Aunt Elizabeth standing at the other end, the water covering her shoes. He tried to call it all back, to reconstruct what might have been in his mind during that terrible five minutes or ten or whatever. It was still blank. A part of his mind, like something separate and beyond his control, had closed itself off from him. And if it should happen again, and again . . . ?

The rain continued to beat down against the windows and the flagstone, and poured with a steady rhythm down the gutters. And for a few moments then, the sounds blended, and if he listened closely Ben could make out a low, steady beat, like a throbbing, outside the windows which were dark, like tinted glass.

When Marian woke up the next morning, Ben was sleeping soundly beside her. She raised the windows on bright morning sunlight (it had rained through the night) and an incredibly sweet, fresh smell, put on her shirt and jeans, and left the bedroom. David’s door across the hall was open; she went in quietly, opened the window and covered him with the sheet he had thrown off. Aunt Elizabeth’s door was closed.

The dinner tray in Mrs. Allardyce’s room had been untouched. In six days she had eaten, if that was the word, just once, and carrying up the tray and then bringing it down again was becoming an almost ritual gesture for Marian. Yesterday, rather than pour the untouched soup down the drain, she had reheated it and drunk it herself. She’d do the same with the chicken today. Somehow it made Mrs. Allardyce’s fast less disturbing to her.

There were puddles on the terrace, where she brought her eye-opening cup of colfee, and the lawn reaching down to the bay sparkled, a little greener than it had been. The pool was off to the right, the poolhouse just partially visible below the rise. She placed the cup on the balustrade and found herself walking over the cool, wet grass toward the pool – toward the incident really. She stopped suddenly on the small rise.

The water had overflowed the pool a bit, running over the concrete border and into the grass. It was clear in the pool, bright turquoise, and the metal rails descending were polished and shining. The concrete border was level and uncracked, and a wide swatch of grass around it, which had absorbed the overflow, was a deep, rich green. Marian moved closer, fascinated by the transformation.

She could hear the filter from the poolhouse humming steadily, with the same sound, only stronger, that she recognized from the sitting room. Ben had been struggling with it vainly for days, she recalled.

She walked around the perimeter. The debris had all been filtered out overnight, and finally she could see clear to the bottom which, like the sides, appeared freshly painted. She went closer and almost stepped on something near the edge of the pool. She bent and picked up the pair of shattered eyeglasses Ben had retrieved, and examined them. Ben wore reading glasses, not at all like them; and while Aunt Elizabeth should, she didn’t. Marian thought about slipping them into her pocket – that was pointless; instead she threw them into the trashcan beside the poolhouse. The pool itself was absorbing all her attention.

How could it have happened so suddenly? The rain? The filter which had fallen into gear at last, on its own? That might explain the clarity of the water, possibly even the lining of the pool which may have been caked brown by the dirt. But the pavement, she
knew
, had been cracked and uneven. She searched for some traces, pausing at the rails which had become steady and unrusted. There were, of course, any number of explanations. (She had once heard, from friends of theirs in Valley Stream, of a backyard pool rising ten feet out of the ground at one end, with the spring thaw. This was the same thing, in reverse. Wasn’t it?) Any number of explanations, and reasonable, all of them. And all of them, she realized, she was rehearsing for Ben, if he should see the pool, which she would prefer he didn’t.

Why?

She brought Mrs. Allardyce’s breakfast tray up earlier than usual, as soon as she had hurried in from the pool. She closed the door behind her and set the tray down.

There was a table now, along the left wall, which Marian had brought up from the living room where it had been hidden near the greenhouse alcove. It was small and exquisite, with a scalloped top formed by the odd turreted frame; on it was a tall Sèvres vase filled with roses from one of the few bushes that were blooming. There were roses in the Canton bowl as well, and clouds of asparagus fern. Marian had placed it, on its pedestal, beside the carved door.

The room calmed her almost immediately. Despite the intimidation she had felt initially, the sitting room, separate and quiet except for the soothing hum, was becoming the one part of the house where she felt most completely at ease and most private. To Marian it had become the very center of the house, the room closest to the core, just as the rounded bay, somewhere beyond the carved door, was architecturally the house’s unifying principal. Everything about the room had become pleasing – the light, the peace, the vast, empty stretches which seemed to be waiting for the imposition of some personality.