The Cry of the Owl (2 page)

Once Robert had heard her calling to him, “Greg! Greg!” when he was going out of the house. “I could use some butter, too! Gosh, what a memory I’ve got!” And Greg had gone off in his car to fetch the forgotten items.

Robert rested his head against his arm and took a last look at the girl. She had finished her work now, and was leaning against the counter by the stove, her ankles crossed, staring at the floor with a distant expression as if she were looking at something miles away. She held a white-and-blue dishcloth in her hands, which were relaxed, almost limp in front of her. Then abruptly she smiled and pushed herself from the counter, folded the towel, and hung it on one of the three red rods that swung out from the wall by the sink. Robert had seen her the evening she fixed the towel rack to the wall. Now the girl came directly to the window where Robert stood, and he had just time to step around the small tree.

He hated acting like a criminal, and—just then—he’d stepped on a damned twig! He heard a click at the window and knew what it was—one of her hair clips touching the pane—and he shut his eyes in shame for an instant. When he opened them, he saw the girl with her head turned sideways against the glass, looking the other way, toward the driveway. Robert glanced at the basketball rig, wondering if he should make a dash for it before she came out of the house. Then he heard the radio being turned up louder, and he smiled. She was afraid, he supposed, so she played the radio louder for company. An illogical and yet very logical and appealing thing to do. He was
sorry he had given her that moment’s uneasiness. And it hadn’t been the first, he knew. He was a very clumsy prowler. Once his foot had hit an old two-gallon can at the side of her house, and the girl, alone and doing her nails in the living room, had jumped up and opened the front door cautiously, and had called, “Who’s there? Is anybody there?” Then the door had shut and a bolt had slid. Then there was the last time, a windy evening, when a tree branch had scraped back and forth against the clapboards of the house, the girl had noticed it, come to the window, then decided to do nothing about it and had gone back to her television program. But the scraping had kept on, and at last Robert had seized the branch and bent it, with one final scrape of twigs down the side of the house. Then he had gone, leaving the branch bent but not broken. Suppose she’d seen the branch later and called her boy friend’s attention to it?

The ignominy of being caught as a prowler was too unpleasant for him to try to imagine. Prowlers usually watched women undressing. They had other unsavory habits, Robert had heard. What he felt, what he had was like a terrible thirst that had to be quenched. He had to see her, had to watch her. Admitting that, he admitted also that he was willing to run the risk of being found out some evening. He’d lose his job. His nice landlady, Mrs. Rhoads of the Camelot Apartments, would be horrified and ask him to move at once. The fellows at the office—Well, except for Jack Nielson, Robert could easily imagine them saying to one another, “Didn’t I always say there was something funny about that guy? … Never once played poker with us, did he?” The risk had to be run. Even if nobody ever understood that watching a girl go calmly about her household routine made him feel calm also, made him see that life for some people could have a
purpose and a joy, and made him almost believe he might recover that purpose and joy himself. The girl was helping him.

Robert shuddered, remembering his state of mind last September, when he’d come to Pennsylvania. He’d not only been more depressed than ever before in his life, he had actually believed that the last bit of optimism, will, even sanity he possessed was running out of him like the last grains of sand in an hourglass. He had had to do everything by schedule, as if he were in his own one-man army: eat, look for a job, sleep, bathe and shave, then all over again by schedule, otherwise he’d have gone to pieces. His psychotherapist, Dr. Krimmler, in New York, would have approved, Robert supposed. They had had some conversations on the subject. Robert: “I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn’t keep watching to see what everybody else did, we’d all go berserk. Left on their own, people wouldn’t know how to live.” Dr. Krimmler, solemnly and with conviction: “This regimentation you keep talking about isn’t regimentation. It’s the habits the human race has acquired over the centuries. We sleep by night and work by day. Three meals are better than one or seven. These habits make for mental health; you’re right.” But it wasn’t quite satisfactory.

What’s underneath, Robert wanted to know. Chaos? Nothingness? Evil? Pessimism and depression that just might be warrantable? Just plain death, a stopping, a void so frightening nobody cared to talk about it? He hadn’t been very eloquent with Krimmler, after all, though it seemed all they’d done was talk and argue, and there had been very few silences. But then Krimmler was a psychotherapist and not an analyst. And, anyway, Krimmler’s arguments had helped, because Robert had acted on his advice and lived according to the
books, and he was sure it had helped even with those telephone calls from Nickie, who’d somehow tracked him down, maybe through the telephone company, maybe through one of their friends in New York to whom he’d given his number.

Robert, without a glance around him, moved from the shelter of the little tree, around the rectangle of light thrown from the window, toward the driveway. Just then a pair of headlights came slowly from the right along the road. Robert reached the basketball goal in two leaps and was behind it by the time the car turned into the driveway. Its headlights flowed beyond Robert on either side of the six-foot-wide shelter, and remembering the chinks in the old wood planks, he felt exposed, as if his figure made a dark silhouette against the board.

The headlights went out, the car door opened, then the house door.

“Hi-i, Greg!” the girl called.

“Hi, honey. Sorry I’m late. Brought you a plant.”

“Oh-h, thank you. It’s gorgeous, Greg!”

Their voices stopped, shut off by the closing door.

Robert sighed, unwilling to leave immediately, though now was his safest time to leave, when they were fussing around the plant. He wanted a cigarette. He was also thoroughly chilled. Then he heard a window being raised.

“Where? Out here?” asked Greg.

“Right here, I guess. I didn’t
see
anything.”

“Well, tonight’s a good night for it,” Greg said cheerily. “Nice and black. Maybe something’ll happen.”

“Not if you scare whoever it is away,” said the girl, laughing, talking just as loudly as the man.

They didn’t want to find anybody, Robert thought. Who would? The man’s shoes clumped on the side porch. Greg was making a tour of the house. Robert was relieved to see that he had no flashlight. But he still might circle the basketball board. The girl was looking out of the window, which was open about ten inches. Greg returned from his circle of the house and entered by the kitchen door. The window was put down, then raised by Greg, a little less high than before, then Greg turned away. Robert walked from the basketball goal toward the house, toward the open window. He walked almost arrogantly, as if to prove to himself he had not been intimidated by having to take shelter for a few minutes. He stood exactly where he had stood before, on the other side of the tree and about three feet from the window. Bravado, he thought. Sheer bravado and foolhardiness.

“. . . the police,” Greg was saying in a bored tone. “But let me have a look around first. I’ll sleep in the living room, honey, because it’s easier to run out than if I’m upstairs. I’ll sleep in my pants and shoes, and if I catch anybody—” Grimacing, he brought his big fists up in front of his face.

“Want a nice piece of firewood as a bludgeon or something?” the girl asked in her soft voice, smiling, and it was as if the violence of his words had not penetrated her at all. Still, she was the sort of girl who would be smiling and casual when she was worried, Robert felt, and he liked that. She never looked nervous. He loved that. She said something else he couldn’t catch, but he was sure she was going into the living room to show Greg the piece of wood she meant. She had a black coal hod by the fireplace full of wood and kindling.

Greg’s laughter came from the living room, loud and bold.

Robert shrugged, smiling. Then he opened his overcoat, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and walked with his head up away from the house and down the driveway.

The girl lived on the Conarack Road, which led, after six straight but hilly miles, into Humbert Corners, where Robert supposed the girl worked. Robert went through Humbert Corners on the way to Langley, where he lived, a town very much bigger, on the Delaware River. Langley was known as a shopping center, the home of the largest used-car dealer in the district—“Red Redding’s Used Car Riots”—and also of Langley Aeronautics, which made parts for private planes and helicopters. Robert had been working there as an industrial engineer since the end of September. It was not a very interesting job, but it paid quite well, and Langley Aeronautics had been glad to get him, because he had come from a prestigious job in New York, with a firm that redesigned toasters, electric irons, radios, tape recorders, and nearly every gadget and appliance in the American home. Robert had brought an assignment with him from New York, the completion of a set of two-hundred-and-fifty-odd detailed drawings of insects and spiders, which a young man in France had begun for a Professor Gumbolowski. Robert’s friends the Campbells, Peter and Edna, had introduced him to the professor in New York and had insisted that Robert bring over his drawings of irises the evening he met him. The professor had brought some of the drawings for his book, for which he already had a contract with an American publisher. The young Frenchman who had started the drawings, and more than half finished them, had died. This in itself was enough to make Robert decline the assignment—not that he was superstitious, but the situation was vaguely depressing and he
had had enough depression. He was also not enamored of insects and spiders. But the professor was enthralled by his iris blossoms, which Robert had drawn on a whim from flowers in his and Nickie’s apartment, and was sure he could complete the Frenchman’s drawings in the style in which they had been begun. Before the evening was over, Robert had accepted the assignment. It was certainly different from anything he had ever done before, and he was trying to create for himself a “different” life. He had separated from Nickie and was living in a hotel in New York, he was about to quit his job, and he was trying to choose a city to go and live in. The insect book might lead to other such assignments; he might like it very much or he might detest it, but at least he would find out. So he had come to Rittersville, Pennsylvania, a larger town than Langley, stayed for ten days and found nothing in the way of a job, and then he had come to Langley to investigate Langley Aeronautics. The town was dull, but he was not sorry he had moved from New York. Even though one had to take one’s old self along wherever one went, a change of scene was that much change, and it helped. He was to get eight hundred dollars when he completed the drawings, and he had until the end of February to finish them. Robert set himself four drawings per week. He drew from the professor’s detailed but rough sketches and from enlarged photographs the professor had given him. Robert found that he enjoyed the work, and it helped to pass the long weekends.

Robert entered Langley from the east and drove past “Red Redding’s Used Car Riots.” Here were solid square blocks of hardtops and convertibles, illuminated in a ghostly way by street lights set in narrow paved lanes that ran among them. The cars looked like
a vast army of dead soldiers in armor, and of what battles, Robert wondered, could each car tell? Of a crash that had been repaired, but the owner killed? Of a family man gone broke, so the car had to be sold?

The Camelot Apartments, where Robert lived, was a four-story structure on the west side of Langley, only a mile from the plant where he worked. Its lobby was lighted by two table lamps that shone through philodendron boxes. A switchboard in the corner had been abandoned and never removed: Mrs. Rhoads had told him that she thought her “people,” after all, preferred private telephone lines, even if they couldn’t get messages taken for them. Mrs. Rhoads lived on the ground floor right, and she was usually in the lobby or her front sitting room, whose door was always open, when anyone went in or out. She was in the lobby when Robert came in, and she was pouring water from a lacquered-brass watering pot into a philodendron box.

“Good evening, Mr. Forester. And how are you this evening?” she asked.

“Very well, thank you,” Robert said, smiling. “And you?”

“Good enough. Working late tonight?”

“No, just driving around. I like to take a look at the countryside.”

Then she asked him if he was getting enough heat in a certain one of his radiators, and Robert assured her that he was, though he hadn’t noticed anything about the radiator. Then he went up the stairs. There were six or eight apartments in the building, and there was no elevator. Robert’s apartment was on the top floor. He had not troubled to get acquainted with any of the other people—a couple of young bachelors, a girl in her twenties, a middle-aged widow who went to work very early—but he nodded and spoke whenever
he encountered anyone. One of the young men, Tom Shive, had asked him to go bowling once, and Robert had gone. Mrs. Rhoads had the curiosity of the classic concierge as to who came and went, Robert felt, but she was good-natured, and he actually liked to feel there was someone in the house who cared, or who at least formed some opinion about his being alone or with someone, and whether he came in at five or seven-thirty
P.M
. or one in the morning. For about the same amount of money, ninety dollars per month, Robert might have found a medium-sized house to rent somewhere in the environs of Langley, but he had not wanted to be alone. Even the mediocre furniture of his two rooms was a comfort somehow: other people had lived here before him, had managed not to set the sofa on fire, had done no more damage than burning a cigarette streak in the bureau top, had paced the same dark-green carpet, and perhaps taken the trouble to notice, Wednesdays and Saturdays, that it had been vacuumed. Other people had lived here before him and gone on somewhere else, to lead perfectly ordinary and perhaps happier lives. He had a month-to-month arrangement with Mrs. Rhoads. He would not want to stay here more than a month or two more, he thought. Either he would take a house in the country or move to Philadelphia, where Langley Aeronautics had their main plant and did their assembling. He had six thousand in the bank, and his expenses were less here than in New York. He hadn’t yet received the bill for the divorce, but Nickie was handling that through her lawyers in New York. She was getting married again and had not wanted any alimony from him.