Dinner Along the Amazon (3 page)

It was much longer that morning before Bertha Millroy left the room on her mincing feet, and shut the door with a click behind her. And after that there was a longer pause than he could ever remember before his mother said to him: “Good morning, Harpie.”

And when she said it he didn’t reply. Instead he went back to the garden where he locked his guinea pig in its cage and put it out of the sunlight under the lilac trees.

There was a morning a week or so later that pronounced the coming of summer with the vehemence of heat and the clarity of a clap of thunder.

There was no sign of rain—there being not a single cloud in the sky—and yet the thunder came and went sharply, somewhere beyond the horizon of trees and rooftops. Harper had never heard thunder in the morning and he sat in the kitchen listening to it while Bertha went about brewing their tea as though nothing unusual was happening at all.

“Thunder is clouds bumping,” said Harper looking out the window.

“That’s right.”

“What clouds?”

“I don’t know, Harper. Must be one somewhere.”

“Two.”

“Two then. Just ‘cause you can’t see them doesn’t mean they ain’t there. Drink it up.” She put his cup of tea on the table.

“I’m going up today,” he said.

“That’s right, honey, she’ll be glad you did that.”

“It’s been over a week,” said Harper.

“She’ll be glad to have you back then. But I wouldn’t say nothing. You know that every morning you ain’t been there she still went on saying ‘Good morning’ to you? Went right on saying it just hoping you’d reply. It’ll do her good to hear you say it back today.”

“Did she mention me to you?”

“No, honey, she didn’t say a word.”

“But she said hello each day?”

“Uuh-huuh.”

Harper fell silent.

“I hope I don’t scare her by saying it back today.”

Bertha laughed.

“She’ll be delighted to be scared so. Just pipe up with it—don’t worry.”

So at ten o’clock they went up and Harper said “Good morning” from his place in the hall.

When she was gone into the bathroom and the noise of the bath water being run began and when she began to sing in there so that nothing could be heard through the door from the bedroom, Harper got off the little chair in the hall and tiptoed in to the highboy.

He moved his hand towards the middle drawer.

The key was gone.

Gone.

Everything was suddenly motionless.

Never before had the key not been there. The drawer had from time to time been locked, but the key had never been removed. In fact, in the whole house there was nothing shut away behind locks. If they were, there was no key. And if there was, the key was always in its place.

The moment of cataclysm passed, and there was a faint movement beyond the windows and the chiffon curtains parted as the breeze pushed its way gently into the room. Harper’s first sensual awareness was of scent—a light, almost itchy smell which came from his mother’s perfume bottles. He moved—and he began to wander, completely without direction, from one object in the room to the next—testing its openness with his eyes, and sometimes touching the handle of the drawer to see if there were any give to it. At the dressing table he lifted the tops from the bottles of scent. He stuck one of his fingers into the powder bowl and watched the faint pink dust explode into the air and settle in circular signals about the little round spheres and towers of glassware. It came into his mind that his mother would know by this that he had been there, where he wasn’t allowed: but it passed out again: he didn’t care: she had locked him out, and he had found his way in, as the wind had found its way back in through the windows.

Harper went over to the bed and sat on it like an Indian. He pulled the covers up behind him so that they made a teepee over his head. He drank the milk out of the milk jug on the breakfast tray and waited.

The door from the bathroom jerked open and a cloud of steam rolled into the bedroom. Out of this cloud, like a floating figure in a Japanese print, stepped Renalda Dewey, with the silence, the intensity, of a mime.

She went towards the dressing table, trailing little licking tails of damp chiffon negligee, her dark Italian head held like something beautiful on a stick above the collar of her gown inclined towards the objective of her progress. After, in a trance of perfect silence, she sat before the mirror and let her eyes fall upon the compromise arranged before her. The manufacturer’s labels, of gold and silver, out of deference to expense, had numbers on them, one and two and three and four—with instructions for their application—and a touch of this, a daub of that, a trace of the other, finally a deft indication with a brush dipped in the fourth. She sat there, working, for a half-an-hour, but it seemed like a full hour or more to Harper sitting on the bed. Finally, however, she was finished and sufficiently clothed to let Harper see her.

“You can come out of your tent now dear.”

The teepee fell back from his head.

She was pinning artificial roses onto her suit coat, three of them, grey and yellow.

“Come along, dear, I want you to tell me how I look.”

He stood up.

“I think they’re very pretty, don’t you?” she said touching the roses.

“Yes.”

“I think I’ll wear flowers all this summer.”

She looked into the mirror. It was as though she couldn’t find herself there. She had to go very close to it and lean one hand against the table to steady herself and she had to almost close her eyes before she found what she was looking for.

“Yes. And later on I can wear real roses.”

“Mother?”

“Harpie, look out the window, dear, and see if the car is there.”

They passed each other in the middle of the room. He looked—but she didn’t look back—she seemed, instead, intent on finding something—something, he sensed, that she wouldn’t allow herself to see until his back was turned.

“Yes,” he said from the window, “it is.” He stood watching the chauffeur, who was smoking a cigarette. His mother was in the bathroom running the taps at the sink.

In a moment she came out.

“Goodbye, dear.”

“Mother—aren’t you going to wear…?”

“You have a nice day with Bertha, dear. And don’t upset her. Oh—and if you play the piano for heaven’s sake close the dining room windows. I don’t care how hot it is, you mustn’t disturb Mrs Jamieson.”

“Yes’m.”

She was suddenly in the hallway—then halfway downstairs—then in the kitchen saying something to Bertha to which Bertha replied “I’ll try m’am”—and then she was at the door, where she called out:

“Goodbye, dear!”

She stepped along the red bricks of the front walk towards the car.

“Mother.”

She stopped.

The chauffeur threw away his cigarette.

She looked at the budding roses in the flower beds. She picked one and held it to the artificial flowers. For a second a look of displeasure crossed her face, and she made a gesture to throw the real rosebud away—but then she reneged and put it inside her handbag. Then she smiled.

He had never seen such a smile and he knew suddenly that she was smiling because she was escaping him.

She said something to the chauffeur and got into the car. Sitting in the rear seat she gave her attention entirely to the yellow rosebud which she had removed from the handbag—putting it this way and that in the air and holding it to her nostrils to catch its embryonic perfume.

The chauffeur got into the front seat and started the engine. It gave a roar.

“Mother.”

She was—

“Goodbye!”

—Gone.

One morning, a month later, Bertha Millroy got up from the kitchen table, tucked the paper under her arm, picked up the breakfast tray and said:

“You’re not to come no more.”

Upon which she fled, under the protection of shock, into the newly forbidden reaches of the upper floor.

So it was that later in the summer, when the heat came down into the city like a flood from the hills, Harper Dewey didn’t see his beautiful mother for days on end. And although it was obvious that she was still in the house (sometimes he would hear her call out, but never for him), her presence was not made visible to him.

Sometimes at night he would be awake in bed when she came home—and he would listen to her clicking up the brick walk and turning the key in the front door. Then he would sit up on the edge of his bed and she would be heard talking downstairs in the front hall. He never caught the words, neither what they were, nor their significance—he surmised that she was alone because of the form of intonation. They had a hollow sound, as words do which are not caught in the shell of an immediate ear; and they seemed to have been cast adrift, like pieces of foam from the edge of the sea, and they had disintegrated and drowned long before they reached his bedroom.

At night, his bedroom was his cave, where it was dark and he sat or slept like a secret unspoken in someone’s mouth.

While she moved about in the lower regions of the house he would follow her footsteps as she went from room to room and through the passages between. This walking about lasted for a long time and he determined that she must do it in the dark because there was—on most evenings—a constant shuffle, which accompanied the wander, as though she were bumping into things, or only just avoiding them and stepping aside in that sudden startled way of people in the dark. And her voice would go with her through the dark, calling out when she fell and whispering in satisfaction when she cleared some obstacle which had been in her dark path and when she found what she sought (and he did not guess what this was) she would sigh and mutter and then be silent.

It was the silence which followed each of these nightly preambles which frightened him and mystified him the most. Her very breathing and indeed his own as well, would appear to have stopped and in the whole house nothing would stir, not even Bertha Millroy in her attic room, not even she in the midst of all her dreams, would stir.

In the silence Harper set his mind upon the repose of things in the dark and he would see the Lilliputian heads of the pearls strung on a gargantuan string and he would begin to cry at the sight of their ghostly faces.

Finally he would lie down on his back and the silence would break, but no one would hear it break. He would be long asleep before she would turn out the lights below and climb the stairs and lock herself in her room.

Summer became itself on the street where Harper Dewey lived with his mother and Bertha Millroy. There were elm trees on the boulevards on either side of the street and beyond the boulevards wide sidewalks bordered with fences and low stone walls. All of the homes had a Victorian flavour about them, which most of the residents had had the sense to disguise. Thus the houses were mostly of painted brick and refashioned facade—of fronts stripped bare of ornament but still retaining high pointed convergences of line and many had little turrets and false gables.

All the houses were confronted with wide long lawns and most attempted to hide their Victorian manner behind screens of ivy vines and a profusion of trees and bushes, so that the whole length of the street was a vision of green mottle, relieved with floral colour and the rich red of the brick walks which, like the many courses of a maze, wove in and out of the gardens up and down either side of the street.

The residents were of varied stamp but all within the category of what is known as the ‘professional’ world. There were doctors, and one of the city’s prominent lawyers; also an ex-mayor, a retired colonel, two university professors, a clergyman, an author, two widows (Mrs Dewey and Mrs Jamieson), also a Mr Robertson whom no one knew anything about except that he was enormously wealthy and drove about in a Rolls Royce car and that he had two boxer dogs of whom everyone stood in distant respect (Mr Robertson never spoke to a soul and no one ever spoke to him); there was also an architect and a witch. The witch was Miss Kennedy.

She lived in a tall dark house at the end of the street, the one house that had not been stripped of its Victorian vestiges. It stood closer to the street than the rest, its tall facade looming darkly in the unrelenting shadow of the only oak tree on the whole street—a tree reputed to be two hundred years old, which meant, to Harper’s delight, that it had stood there in the days of the Indians. It was also said that in the early days of the city, when there was a stockade built about its periphery, renegades and witches (perhaps Miss Kennedy’s own forebears) were hung from this tree. In that time the burning of witches was forbidden, so that they were hung, as common criminals were, deprived of the dignity of a heretic’s martyrdom, traditionally fire.

One day in early August Harper went down the street to speak to Miss Kennedy.

He stood outside her gate, hesitant only for a moment, and then went into the shallow garden, in which nothing would grow because of the thick shadow of the oak tree.

Miss Kennedy hovered in an upper window, dressed in a dark Victorian wrapper. Harper pulled the chain which rang the doorbell.

Inside he could hear Miss Kennedy’s Pekinese dog snuffling excitedly at the space between the floor and the bottom of the door.

There was the sound of steps within and a gentle admonition to the little dog before the door opened to reveal Miss Kennedy—wrapper clutched at the breast, her red hair piled high upon her thin bony head, her eyes snapping, her mouth pursed, her ears dragged down at the lobes by the weight of elaborately long earrings. She smiled.

Harper was amazed. It had not occurred to him that a witch ever smiled. Leer, she might, but smile, never.

“Well, Harper Dewey. Is that right? What is it?” she said.

“I—I’d like to speak with you. I’d like to have—” he turned and looked back at the street, wondering if he should run off now while he could, but before he could remedy the situation, Miss Kennedy spoke.

“Come inside,” she said, “I’ll fix some lemonade.”

Harper imagined the contents of the lemonade and blanched.

“Thank you m’am,” he gulped, and stepped inside, never, he was sure, to return.