Snow Shadow (3 page)

Summer—no, not the whole summer, just six weeks
in truth—yet those stretched and stretched into a whole season. Six weeks from the morning in the college cafeteria when Mark Rohmer had sat down beside me at the table shared by the project people. Mark Rohmer, who led all the secretaries to reach for their compacts, who had caused even staid Miss Hawes to observe in a wintery tone that it was an excellent thing for our combined labors that all Major Rohmer’s assistants were of the male sex.

Not only was he handsome, but he had the added attraction of the exotic, his background forming an item of conversation. Since the consciousness of racial beginnings had become so important, a Blackfoot Indian, the first of his race to graduate from West Point, was doubly notable. To this he could add a dominant personality and a high degree of trained intelligence.

One did not, in the very prejudice-conscious Sixties, cling to the old mental picture of feathered warbonnet and facial paint, no matter how much one had been conditioned by film and book in childhood. On the other hand, neither did one quite imagine a cultivated man of the world (I had been used at that time to only Aunt Otilda’s beliefs and turns of speech) to be an Indian.

On that momentous morning of our meeting, I had frozen as I had always done on the very rare occasions I had met an attractive man. My Aunt Otilda had early conditioned me to accept the fact I was without any pretense to attractiveness, and unredeemably shy and gauche into the bargain. But for some reasons, Major Rohmer had not acted as if I were invisible. On the contrary, he had persisted with various conversational
openings until I dared to thaw a little. He must have considered me a challenge of sorts. Perhaps the game he then proceeded to play was born of boredom at being in Ladensville when all his desires lay elsewhere. At the time I began to believe that we had many likes and dislikes in common.

Acquaintance, on my part, grew to something else. Thinking about it even now, years later, could bring a burning flush to my face. Why spare myself? I had been a far too naive and silly fool! I should have anticipated the end.

There had been the Saturday when we had both been free for the afternoon, and he had asked me to lunch at a country inn. I had been nearly shaking with excitement—and—any—no! We had gone across the road after eating to where there was a church bazaar in progress. He had won a horrible rayon bedspread at a raffle and had laughingly given it back to be reoffered. There had been such good times—when his very company had released me from the hard shell of self-doubt my childhood had encased about me. If I could only remember those and forget the rest!

Six weeks of excitement, dreams, hopes—then his going. But letters—letters I fed fiercely to a fire five months later, as fast as I could. There had been a last letter to bring me to Washington.

Now my hands balled into fists. Go on—remember this—relive it—don’t try to dress it up, excuse your own stupid hopes for the impossible. I was so humiliated to think of what I had believed might be possible that thereafter my only relief was that Aunt Otilda never knew. If she had, I would never have been able
to survive the constant carping into which she had lapsed during the last two years of her narrow and self-imprisoned life.

The message awaiting me at the hotel desk—Major Rohmer would be detained—he would call after six. Four hours to kill, and I could not spend them in my room staring at the wall. I was restless, needing to walk off the excitement which invigorated me. Down the avenue—the purchase of a scarf. (I burned that along with the letters, a sorry waste, my prudent training argued at the time—but I could not look at it except with dull sickness.) Then, I was turning into that other hotel because Sally Logan had said they had such a superlative buffet luncheon. That had been an adventure; super hotels were not my usual style, but that day I felt so liberated I dared it.

Then—in the lobby seeing him—and her. She was, like Leslie Lowndes, everything I was not. The latest hairstyle, the perfect-featured face, the drawling voice which caressed languidly, clothes I could never hope to acquire. A hand with an emerald ring laid in obvious possession on Mark’s arm, eyes for no one but him. Then the voice of the deferential hotel clerk, pitched—perhaps—no, not just perhaps, but necessarily, high to reach me:

“Mrs. Rohmer, there is a message for you.”

Even as she half-turned to pick up the envelope he held out, she had not released that proprietary grasp on Mark. And—

Now I sat up in bed, dug my fists down on either side of me.

Remember—remember—you asked for it.

Mark’s eyes flitting around over her shoulder as she busied herself with that envelope. Meeting mine. Nothing—nothing at all in his face. It was as blank as a stranger’s. What my features must have expressed at that moment, I do not even dare to guess.

Somehow I turned—I was out in the street, thrusting through sidewalk traffic, before I was thinking straight again. Girlfriend and wife—I know that my reaction would be considered weird in these days of permissiveness. I can only offer that I was reared, and so imbued, by a stern set of moralistic rules that I found the situation not amusing—as it would be to my contemporaries—but soiling. Open marriages and meaningful encounters—I read about them, I touched upon them in the persons of some of my acquaintances, but that mode of life is totally foreign to me.

It had taken me very little time to check out of my hotel, find that there was a flight out, which I could just make after a mad dash to the airport. I sat crouched in my seat, sick and shaking, knowing that I had never been anything at all but perhaps a source of mild amusement.

For days after I cringed every time the phone rang, made an effort to sort the mail before Aunt Otilda (no matter to whom a letter was addressed, its contents must be shared in
her
house) could sight it. It took me a week at least back home before I realized with great thankfulness of heart that it could well be Major Rohmer did not know my address. Though why I expected to hear from him I cannot answer. His blank face in the lobby had been answer enough. If he had
put himself to the “give the poor girl a thrill” bit, he had succeeded admirably. Having achieved that, I should be thankful that fate had taken me to that point of contact.

Yes, I had gone to Washington, my nerve stiffened to the point of perhaps playing the very role which, after, disgusted me. What would I have done, in my euphoria, if Mark had suggested a togetherness weekend? Luckily, I never had to learn the depths of my infatuation.

No one had ever known back home. I had found it very easy to lapse into what Aunt Otilda expected of me, making no more gestures towards any kind of freedom. There was a soothing security to living by her rules. When she died at last, I found myself mistress of a small income, a house I speedily sold, and then a studio apartment, and a chance to see if there was anyone under my skin except Miss Jansen’s niece: the one who works in the library, you know—a very dull girl—but well meaning.

I had come again to Ladensville, mainly became the library of the university contained two collections of books and manuscripts needed in my present research. Or—or was it because some unregenerate part of me had—

Setting my teeth, I settled my head once more on my pillow, with an emphatic thump, I was older, and, I hoped, wiser. Maybe I was an anachronism in my generation, but then I had never felt any kinship with people of my own age. What had a psychotherapist friend of mine (who had once tried to get me to sort
out my badly confused inner self) said? Children were programmed from birth and it was the hardest thing in the world to reprogram them. Each must want to be another person with all his or her heart and soul.

I was satisfied—I had to be—with the Erica Jansen I was. With that Erica, I felt as safe as a hunted animal deep in some warm hole. As long as I did not try to venture forth, but just turned around and around where I was, then I thought—I knew—I could bear waking up each morning to face life, dark and colorless though it might seem to others.

But what had brought Mark Rohmer to Ladensville again?

I wrenched my thoughts, fought them. Tomorrow it will not matter at all. You’ll be firmly settled in that bastion of propriety, in Miss Elizabeth’s house. Holding to that, I somehow did achieve a measure of dream-haunted and unrefreshing sleep.

3

I was out of the inn before breakfast the next morning, scuttling off in a way I knew was a disgrace to my self-respect, restraining my inclination to keep looking over my shoulder only by stern effort. If I expected Mark Rohmer to rise up between me and the outer door, I was disappointed. Though in punishment for my foolishness I shivered enough while waiting for the reluctant arrival of the taxi.

In the daylight, the Abbey held no mystery at all. The bushes, which last night had appeared only screens to hide what writers of horror tales (who have flogged their imaginations into utter fatigue) call “the unmentionable,” were only shrubs, sadly weighted now with soft snow. When I was deposited with suitcase and flight bag at the door, my main thought was of hunger,
though to expect breakfast waiting would be too much. I could stop at the coffee shop later.

My chilled finger punched the bell button with perhaps too much vigor. But I was eager to get under cover, and I begrudged the moments there on the doorstep, as a chill wind curled around me. At last the door opened with a decided creak, and I found myself facing a dried wisp of a woman. In her youth she must have been as tall as Miss Elizabeth Austin, but age, and perhaps years of labor, had bowed her forward, hunching her thin shoulders. Her hair was a frizz of gray and black, the most of it pinned up under a cap, while her black dress was covered with a bib apron. Through granny glasses (which were no affectation of the moment’s fashion but really of another time) she peered at me. And there was no welcome in her face. I found myself a little at a loss, facing that hostile stare.

“I’m Miss Jansen. Miss Elizabeth rented me a room last night—” I fought to sound not apologetic, as if I were pleading for shelter.

She made no answer save a duck of her head as she pulled the heavy door farther open to let me clump in, bags in hand. I was feeling that I must cease to drip on the carpet as soon as possible. I shed my boots with all the speed I could muster while the woman stooped and picked up, before I could stop her, my baggage. She went on to climb the stair slowly, as if the ascent tried aching joints, while I hurried to join her.

Once more we paced down the upper hall and I was finally installed in the same room Miss Elizabeth had shown me last night. As the elderly maid put down my luggage, she fumbled in the pocket of her apron and
withdrew a slip of paper which she held out to me before turning to go out the door.

I unfolded the piece, plain torn from a phone tablet, and read:

“Please call—564-2201—Theodosia.”

“Please.” I raised my voice before my guide disappeared entirely. “Where is the phone?”

She halted, did not turn, but looked back at me over one hunched shoulder.

“Back hall—miss—” Her words grated out of her as if she resented spending any of them.

Her far-from-welcoming attitude was daunting. I eyed my suitcase dubiously as she left. It seemed at that moment I had been far too hasty in coming here. Theodosia—perhaps I should have talked things over with someone better able than Preston Donner to share facts. I left my things packed, wondering how I could gracefully undo what my lack of thought had gotten me into, as I went prospecting for the phone.

It was in the back hall, right enough, and Theodosia might have been hovering about the other end of the line waiting for me, so prompt was her answer at the first ring.

“Erica?” Her voice was very hurried, a tone of—desperation? No, I was imagining things again—in it. “Are you committed to anything today or tomorrow?”

I was surprised, snapped out of my own preoccupation.

“Just to breakfast, then a prowl through my notebooks.” I tried to be light in touch, meet the standard I believed Theodosia’s intimates would use.

I heard her laugh. “Breakfast? You can have that
here, and I have a suggestion to make. Come on, right away!” Once more that faintly breathless tinge crept into her speech. And she hung up apparently with no doubt that I would indeed obey her summons.

However, I wanted to. It would give me time to think—or at least to learn from her a little more about the Austins and what I might have ignorantly stepped into. As I turned from the phone, the silence of the house closed in about me in an odd fashion. Even in daylight, these halls were dim. Through a partly open door to my right I caught sight of a half-cleared table, crumpled napkins, a stray spoon lying here and there. The light was grayish without a hint of sun. All the rest of the doors were firmly closed in what seemed a secretive fashion. At that moment the sensation of intruding was very strong. I was deeply sorry I had allowed my stupid involvement with the past to stampede me into coming here.

Pulling on my boots, I went out once more, standing under the portico to look around and make sure of my path. The snow had hidden the walk down which I had come last night, but I do have a sense of direction, and I was quite sure, in spite of the screens of high-growing bushes and trees, where it ran. Underfoot the snow was near-slush, and my tracks were the first to mark it.

Perhaps the garden had once been a formal one. There were benches, now pillowed with snow, and a statue or two to be seen. To my left, as I swung into the way leading to the carriage house, there was a far thicker growth. Still I caught sight of a roof out in that direction, or the portion of one, which was large enough to suggest it covered a building bigger than any
modern garage or perhaps even the converted carriage house towards which I was now bound.

It took me only a few minutes to get around to the scarlet door marking Theodosia’s domain. Again, she might have been waiting, for I had no more than let the knocker fall than she opened to me.

“Erica, come in!” She reached out and caught at my arm to draw me towards her. I was a little disconcerted at her action. I liked her, admired her, but I had not considered that I had any right to claim close friendship with her. My upbringing had effectively smothered my own spontaneous reaction to anyone. Aunt Otilda had had a horror of what she referred to as “indiscriminate acquaintanceships,” and had fastidiously weaned me early from casual friendships—and kept me religiously from close ones. I found it extremely difficult now to let down any barriers, even in the most fleeting of contacts.

Even inside, Theodosia did not loosen that hold on me, but I was propelled to a small breakfast room. My discarded coat, with its attached hood, was taken, to be flung over a neighboring chair, while my hostess had a mug of coffee to my hand before I had a chance to think.

“Listen.” Theodosia assembled a plate of scrambled eggs taken from a covered heating pan, inserted bread into a toaster, and then seated herself across from me, pushing salt and pepper nearer. “I’ve got myself into something.”

She did not look directly at me, but fiddled with a pot of marmalade, pushing it out and then drawing it back again. “You know, I’m working on the old Kitteridge
case. It has all the elements of the wildest melodrama. And there’s good chance of it going not only for a book, but for a TV special. God knows we need the advance and that sale, if Lottie can make it for us. She phoned yesterday, before the party, and my deadline is advanced if I want the TV chance. Two months ago I tried to get an interview with the lawyer who handles what is left of the Kitteridge property. I need to see the house, naturally—the geography of the place is a part of the general story. He has been stalling, then this morning, at the crack of dawn practically, I get a call that he is going on a trip of inspection there and will clear it for me to take a look around.

“It’s a hundred miles from here, and in this kind of weather I’m not going to try to make a round trip in????? one day. I couldn’t, anyway, and see all I want to????? Gordon is tied up, and the fact is I don’t like traveling alone. Would you be willing to tag along? It would be for two, maybe three, days, and, after all, the whole story is in your period, too. It’s a chance to see the place and I don’t think anyone has for years, unless this Johnson trots out there by himself from time to time.”

I felt as if I had been handed the trip to England I had always longed for. The Kitteridge legend of family disgrace, murder, and mystery was known to me, yes. And to see the actual site, with Theodosia who was writing about it, was a chance I could hardly believe I would ever have.

“Oh—yes—!”

I made a hurried breakfast, dashed back to cram what might be needed for a short trip into my ever-ex-pandable
flight bag, and was ready for Theodosia before an hour had passed, leaving a note for Miss Elizabeth, whom I had yet to see, enclosing the promised prepaid rent and explaining my absence.

We did have three days, exciting for both of us. It was on the way back that Theodosia spoke abruptly.

“I hate to go back. There’s something about that place which seems wrong.”

That she spoke of the carriage house, I understood. But her words also evoked for me the Abbey, and I, too, experienced a reluctance. It was now as if I returned from a vacation into bondage, the same slightly shrinking feeling I had always had before the life Aunt Otilda decreed had again closed about me after some very brief escape.

“The Austins—at least Miss Elizabeth—” I ventured, “almost seem as if they were living in another age.”

“They are. Time stopped for them at least fifty years ago!” she flashed back. “I gather that the old boy, Dr. Edward, was one of those domestic tyrants such as stud Victorian novels and give satisfaction to modern researchers. He married beneath him, according to the canons of his clan and time, when he married old Polchek’s daughter. And I gather he never let her forget it. There were four daughters, no sons.

“Elizabeth was the oldest, then there was Elinor born a good ten years later, Emma, two years younger, and finally Anne. Elinor was the black sheep. She was crossed out of the family Bible when she eloped with Harlan Blackmur.”

“Eloped?” I tried to connect such an exploit with
the grim, time-embedded luxury of the Abbey. Yes, an elopement might even figure there.

“It was because of the theater,” Theodosia continued. “Edward was completely immersed in his Austeniana research. He spent most of Tillie’s cash on that. Finally young Blackmur—he was acting as Edward’s secretary at the time—suggested a theater to give plays made from the novels. Somehow he awakened a spark in Dr. Edward, and almost overnight the carriage house was enlarged, turned into a little theater, with Blackmur in charge. He had had some stage experience, and from all I have heard he was a charmer. Perhaps he thought he could manage the old man after he got the theater. They gave just one play, made from
Pride and Prejudice.
Then Elinor and he were caught publicly in an unmistakably intimate scene of their own. There were more fireworks than the start of World War II, and Elinor and Blackmur were shown the gate—fast.

“It was made very clear that Dr. Edward did not intend to welcome any suitors. It might mean that some of Tillie’s lovely money would be diverted from his own beloved pursuit. Tillie, I gather, was thoroughly crushed by that time. Her father had brought her up in the woman-is-property-and-a-servant belief, from his European background, and she just never had a chance to exert herself.

“Emma escaped by charming Horvath—he was younger than Dr. Edward but not much. And he was rich. She saw that he was about the only escape she would ever get when she met him at her grandfather’s house. I think he fancied Tillie at one time, before the
old man thought Dr. Edward’s social connections might mean a step up for his daughter. So she had her wedding big enough to plaster all the newspapers before, during, and after. She traveled in Europe, after Horvath conveniently died, and she cut quite a swath there as one of the semi-Jet Set. Then, when she began to age she could not stand losing any sign of youth among them, and came back here to play great lady frog in the small puddle of Ladensville.

“Anne got herself a man, too. Through Emma, really—an attaché, naval—at one of the smaller embassies. She and Emma were fairly close. They had the same outlook on things. Captain Frimsbee rose in rank, due to the attrition of the war, and went down with his ship in late ’44. Now Anne pushes along on her pension and spends her life trading on naval connections for long visits. She makes herself useful to such hostesses as will give her room and board, while Emma, finding Anne’s connections no longer of any great use, has written her off. Emma did fix up the carriage house and present it to Anne’s son, who was a naval officer and a good escort now and then. But when he married and then was invalided out of the picture in Vietnam, she speedily decided that Irene and son were no longer necessary. Irene does tend to be a dreary soul, and Emma, as I hear it, dislikes any suggestion of ill health or trouble about her.

“Poor Miss Elizabeth was the one who was caught. Her mother was an invalid—real or imaginary—for a good many years. I would think that any wife of Dr. Edward might well take to her bed to escape. And during those years, she ran the house. Not only that but
she found her own fanciful retreat. Deliberately or not, she became a period piece, out of a much earlier period. I think she really picked the year of her birth—1899—and decided to stay in it as either her mother or her grandmother. She does it magnificently and has become a kind of timeless symbol of another age.”

“Why, I wonder?” Another kind of retreat? Did Miss Elizabeth feel secure only wrapped in the trappings of an era where there was a certain solidity to life which we had never known and could probably never know in the future either? We speak of that immediate past now with sneers, with stimulated horror at its narrowness. Still, those contemporary with it were the last to see life as a solid and firm thing. For the persons who abided by its rites and customs, there had been that security.

“Miss Elizabeth is probably the only one who knows. If she is happier playing that role, then she deserves to be allowed to do so. She certainly has little in the modern day to make her even passably content Dr. Edward kept his grip on Tillie’s money even from the grave. He set up a trust fund to buy future relics—if any could be found—for his proposed Austin library. Miss Elizabeth got the house—period. That she has managed to keep going at all is a tribute to her grit and drive. If she can save pennies wearing out her mother’s old frocks—such as she considers suitable—then she will do it. Every cent counts to her, nowadays. I think Emma makes her a small allowance—and expects a big return in service for it”