The Cry of the Owl (3 page)

Robert turned on the electric oven in his kitchenette, looked over the directions on a couple of packages of frozen food, then
opened them and slid them into the oven without bothering with the preheating. He looked at his watch, then settled himself in his armchair with a pocket book on American trees. He read about “The Winged and Slippery Elms.” The flat, factual prose was refreshing.

The inner bark of Slippery Elm twigs was formerly chewed for relief of throat ailments. The twigs are hairy but not corky. … Coarse, hard and heavy, it makes fence posts.

He turned the pages with pleasure, and read on until a smell of scorching food made him jump up from his chair.

Ten days later, around the middle of December, Jennifer Thierolf and Gregory Wyncoop were having coffee in the living room of her house and watching a television program. It was a Sunday night. They sat on the secondhand Victorian sofa, which she had bought at an auction and spruced up with linseed oil and upholstery cleaner, and they were holding hands. It was a murder mystery, but not so interesting as most of the others they had watched in the same series.

Jenny stared unseeing into the screen. She was thinking of a book she was reading, Dostoevski’s
The Possessed
. She did not understand Kirilov, at least not his last speech, a long one, but there was no use asking Greg about it. Greg had read the book, he said, but the question she might have asked him, though clear before dinner, now seemed nebulous to her. But she had no doubt that when she finished the book, or maybe a few days after she had finished it, she would be sitting in the bathtub or washing dishes one evening, and it would all become clear and inevitable.

“What’re you thinking about?” Greg asked.

Jenny, embarrassed, sat back and smiled. “Do I always have to be thinking about something? You’re always asking me that.”

“As long as you’re not thinking about this g.-d. house again, or worrying about it—”

“Don’t say ‘g.-d. house.’”

“All right.” Greg leaned toward her, closed his eyes, and pressed his nose in her neck. A booming chord made him sit up and look at the screen again, but nothing was happening. “Anyway, it’s an old house and all old houses have funny noises in them. The attic creaks because the whole top part of the house moves in the wind, in my opinion.”

“I’m not worried. You’re usually more worried about the house than I am,” Jenny said with sudden defensiveness.

“About the noises? The outside ones, sure. I think there’s a prowler. Did you ask Susie if she’s seen anybody, like I told you to?”

Susie Escham was a girl who lived with her parents in the next house from Jenny’s.

“No, I forgot,” Jenny said.

“Well, ask her. Nobody but a romantic like you would move into an isolated house like this, anyway. Come a real big snow, wires coming down and all that, you’ll be sorry.”

“You think I didn’t see a few winters in Scranton?”

“I think you didn’t live in a house like this in Scranton. I know you didn’t, because I’ve seen the house.”

Jenny sighed, thinking of her parents’ snug, well-cared-for two-story house—all of brick and absolutely rigid in the wind, of
course—in Scranton. She was twenty-three. She had quit college in her third year, and worked as a bookkeeper-secretary in a Scranton office and lived at home, until the end of last summer. Then she had wanted to do something all by herself, and she had debated going to Europe on the money she had saved versus going to San Francisco to live, and then she had decided to move to a small town, so she chose Humbert Corners. She had wanted a house all her own, an interesting house that she could decorate herself, a house that wasn’t fifty feet from someone else’s house, as her parents’ house was. This house she liked, in spite of its funny noises, which sometimes woke her up at night and frightened her.

“The only thing to do with this house is get used to it,” Jenny said solemnly. “There’s nothing the matter with this house.”

“O.K., Jenny, but you needn’t think I’m going to live here or in any house like this once we’re married. And I hope that’s before June.”

“All right, I didn’t say you had to, but meanwhile I enjoy this house.”

“I know you do, honey.” He kissed her cheek. “God, you’re such a kid.”

She didn’t like that much. He was only five years older, anyway. “Here’s the news,” she said.

In the middle of the news, there was a sound outside like a human cough. Jenny jumped, and Greg was instantly on his feet, his lanky figure racing to the kitchen for the flashlight that stood upright on the table. He recrossed the living room with it and opened the front door.

“Who’s there?” he called loudly, flashing the light around the leafless forsythia, the six-foot-high spruce, along the driveway, down to
the road. He turned the light in the other direction, finding nothing but the collapsed white fence and a bleak wooden lightpost with a broken-paned lantern crookedly atop it.

“See anything?” Jenny asked, standing close behind him.

“No, but I’m going to look.” He leaped down the front steps and went to the corner of the house, shone the light toward the back, then advanced more slowly, careful to look behind the tall hedge clumps that could easily have hidden a man. He moved in a line with the basketball board, so he could see if someone were standing behind it. He turned the light on the tool house and walked around it, even looked into it. Then he flashed the light suddenly down the drive and to either side.

“Nothing. Not a thing,” Greg said as he came back into the house. The television was off now. A lock of his curly black hair hung over his forehead. “It did sound like a cough, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, but without emotion.

He smiled at her seriousness and her unconcern, and it crossed his mind to spend the night here again. If they could only lie on the sofa together in pajamas—but he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he made love to her, and they’d been over all that. They’d done it twice, and the agreement was to wait until they were married before they did it again. An informal, Jenny-like agreement that he might manage to break. But not tonight. Not with someone perhaps looking in on them, or trying to, through the living-room curtains. “I’ve got an idea!” he said suddenly. “Get a dog. I’ll get you a dog. A Doberman’s the best thing. A watchdog.”

She leaned back against a sofa pillow. “I’m not home enough. I couldn’t bear to leave an animal alone here eight hours a day.”

He knew it was hopeless. She could be persuaded about nearly everything, but he wouldn’t be able to persuade her about an animal, something she thought might suffer because of her. “There might be a dog at the pound that’d be damned glad of any home—rather than being put to death.”

“Oh, let’s not talk about it.” She got up and went into the kitchen.

He looked after her, puzzled, wondering if he’d thrown her into a bad mood. Her kid brother had died three years ago of spinal meningitis. Jenny had spent a lot of time at the hospital with him. It had impressed her strongly, too strongly. He ought never to say the word “death” to her.

“Know what I feel like?” she called from the kitchen. “Some hot chocolate. Would you like some?”

He smiled, all the worry gone from his face. “Sure, if you would.” He heard the milk splash into a saucepan, the click of the electric stove—which was the only modern thing about the house. He lit a cigarette and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her.

She was slowly stirring the milk. “You know what’s the worst crime a person can commit?
I
think.”

Murder came to his mind, but he smiled and said, “What?”

“To accuse somebody falsely of rape.”

“Ha!” He laughed and struck his forehead. “What made you think of that?”

“Something I read in the paper. Some girl accused somebody. They haven’t proved it yet.”

He watched her, concentrating on the milk, looked at her young and solid body down to her flat black suede shoes that were neither quite childlike nor quite chic on Jenny, but something in between.
He thought, if anybody ever raped her, he’d murder him, throttle him with pleasure. “Say, Jenny, you haven’t
seen
anybody around here, have you? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I’d tell you. Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. You have so many secrets, little one. That’s what makes you such an exciting woman.” He put his arms around her from behind, and kissed the back of her head.

She laughed, a slow, shy laugh, turned quickly and put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

They had the chocolate in the kitchen with some brown-edged cookies that they ate out of the box. Greg looked at his wristwatch and saw it was nearly midnight. He had to be up at six-thirty in order to get to Philadelphia by nine. He was a salesman of pharmaceuticals, and he had to use his car every day. His new Plymouth had twenty-one thousand miles on it already. He had an apartment over a garage on Mrs. Van Vleet’s property in Humbert Corners, only five miles from Jenny’s house, and the five miles seemed no distance at all when he came to see her in the evening, a positive pleasure after a day of a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles’ driving. Like Jenny herself—such a funny contrast to the stuff he sold all day, sleeping pills, wake-you-up pills, pills to get you off drinking, smoking, eating too much, pills to knock out certain nerves and stimulate others. The world was absolutely full of sick people, one would think; otherwise he’d be out of a job. “Holy
smoke!
” Jenny had said the first time he had opened his suitcase and showed her the stuff he peddled. Hundreds of bottles of pills of different colors and shapes, all labeled with made-up names, their unpronounceable ingredients listed. The only pills Jenny had in her medicine cabinet were aspirins, and she said she
took those about twice a year, if she felt a cold coming on. That was what he liked about her, one of the things he liked about her—she was so healthy. It was unromantic, maybe, to like a girl because she was healthy, but it made Jenny beautiful and glowing. It gave her a tremendous edge over any girl he’d ever gone with or been in love with before. There’d been only two before, two girls in Philadelphia, and they’d both given him slow no’s when he proposed. Jenny made them both look sick by comparison. Jenny wanted children. They were going to start a family as soon as they got married.
The mother of my children
, Greg thought quite often when he looked at her. He could see her with their child of two or three or four, talking to it, treating it as if it were a real person even if it were doing something silly, laughing with it, above all being patient and good-natured, never getting angry. She’d make the world’s best mother, Greg thought.

He listened, somewhat irritated, to her story of Rita at the bank. Rita was a teller who was always late coming back from lunch, which meant that Jenny had to stand duty for her and consequently lose time on her own lunch hour, which came afterward. Jenny didn’t complain. On the contrary she always laughed about it, and now she was laughing because the boss, Mr. Stoddard, had asked her to lunch with him yesterday, and she hadn’t been able to go out until Rita got back, which had annoyed Mr. Stoddard, and he had spoken to Rita when she finally came back, loaded with shopping bags, about taking more than an hour for lunch.

Greg folded his arms. Jenny’s silly job wasn’t going to last much longer, anyway. Maybe until February, maybe until March, when they got married. “How come Mr. Stoddard asked you out to lunch? I’m not sure I like that.”

“Oh, come on-n. He’s forty-two!”

“Married?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know, because I don’t care.”

“Was it the first time he asked you?”

Greg didn’t know what else to say about it, so he said nothing. After a moment, he got up to leave. He kissed her tenderly, standing by the kitchen door. “Don’t forget to lock this door. I locked the front one.”

“I will.”

“It won’t be long till Christmas.” They were going to his family in Philadelphia Christmas Eve and to hers in Scranton for Christmas Day.

“Another Christmas,” she said, smiling and sighing, and in a tone that might have meant anything.

“You’re tired. Sleep well. G’night, honey.” He dashed out the door, nearly fell on the dark steps, groped and found the handle of his car door.

Jenny did not go to bed for nearly an hour. She straightened up the kitchen very slowly, putting all the dishes back after she had washed them. She was not thinking about anything. Sometimes the most interesting thoughts, the most pleasurable thoughts, came when she was not trying to think about anything. Tonight she felt tired and very content. The only pleasurable thought that came to her was like a vision or a picture: brilliantly colored fish like goldfish, only larger and more red, swam through a most beautiful underwater
forest of herblike plants. The sand was golden yellow as if the sun struck through the water all the way to the bottom of the sea. It was a gentle and noiseless picture, good to fall asleep by. She saw it again when she closed her eyes in bed.

Robert had hoped for a letter Saturday from Nickie or from her lawyer, but nothing at all came Saturday. He took his shirts and sheets to the laundry, picked up a suit at the cleaner’s, sat in the antiquated Langley library reading for an hour or so, and walked back to his apartment with a novel of John O’Hara’s and a biography of Franz Schubert, whom for some odd reason he had been thinking about that morning. From two until after four, he drew
Collembola
, members of the springtail family. One of Professor Gumbolowski’s sketches of
Collembola protura
was quite entertaining, no doubt unintentionally. The two front legs of the insect were drawn up in the manner of a dancing bullfighter about to plunge his banderillas into a bull. Robert amused himself by making a separate drawing on a postcard of the
protura
with bullfighting knee pants on its stocky legs, a triangular cap, and gaily tasseled darts in its hands. He sent it off to Edna and Peter Campbell with a note: “Making fine progress! Love to you both, Bob.”