The Cry of the Owl (7 page)

“Let’s have a fire,” Jenny said.

The house was warm enough, though Jenny said it leaked badly, and she was still finding places to stop up with insulation wool and weatherstripping. They made a fire in the living-room fireplace, and Robert went out to gather more wood. Jenny was making stewed chicken with dumplings. They had bourbon Manhattans in the living room, and looked through Jenny’s photograph album. Most of the pictures were of her family, though there were five or six “boy friends.”

“That’s the fellow I liked so much,” Jenny said, pointing to a husky blond young man in a tuxedo.

He did not look at all remarkable or interesting to Robert. “The one your family didn’t like?”

“Yes. Now I’m glad they didn’t. He married some dope of a girl last year. I think I was just infatuated.”

More pictures. Jenny and her teen-age brother in bathing suits at her family’s summer camp near Scranton. Jenny’s brother Eddie, who died at twelve.

“Eddie was very good at drawing. I think he might have been a painter,” Jenny said. “I still have some of his drawings.”

Robert glanced at her. Her face was sad, but there were no tears in her eyes. “That man you mentioned, visiting in your house before your brother got sick—what did he look like?”

“Oh—” Jenny looked off into space. “Like an ordinary man,” she said. “Brown hair, brown eyes. About forty-five. A little bit heavy. He had false teeth.”

Robert smiled, with a funny relief. He wasn’t in the least like Brother Death in his dream. Robert had been afraid he would be.

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“Well—I have a strange dream now and then. I go up to a man sitting at a table by himself, a man in a priest’s clothes. I say, ‘Are you Brother Green?’ or sometimes it’s ‘Brother Smith’ or ‘Brother Jones’ or almost anything. Then he looks up at me with a smile and says, ‘No. Brother Death.’”

“And then what?”

“Then I wake up.”

“And what does he look like?”

“He has black straight hair with a little gray at the temples. He’s got some gold in one tooth on the side. Black-rimmed glasses.” Robert shrugged. He could have said more, could have drawn an accurate picture of Brother Death on paper. He looked away from Jenny’s attentive face.

“And then you’re depressed,” she said.

“Oh, not for long. Maybe two minutes,” Robert said, smiling. He stood up. “Can’t I do something to help you in the kitchen?”

“No, thanks. I think death will come like that, in the form of a person. When you meet that person or see him or her, I think you’ll know it, because it’ll have something very close to do with you.”

Robert started to say, “That’s a lot of nonsense,” but he didn’t. Jenny took her ideas very seriously, that was plain. “I haven’t seen the upstairs of your house yet. Want to take me on a tour?”

There were four square rooms upstairs going off the hall, plus a bathroom. The rooms were sparsely but pleasantly furnished, and there were flowerpots everywhere, not too many but just enough, some set on Victorian flower stands four feet high.

“Have you got a screwdriver?” Robert asked.

“Sure. For what?”

He nodded toward a closet door that stood ajar, one that he had tried to close. “I can fix that in a minute. Also the window in your bedroom. If I reset that latch, you won’t have to prop it up with a book.”

She went down to the kitchen for a screwdriver, and came back with a hammer and a box of screws also.

Forty-five minutes later, when Robert came downstairs, he had reset two door latches, the window latch, and had taken down a precariously sagging glass shelf in the bathroom and fixed it to the wooden panel below the medicine cabinet. Jenny had to go up to see what he had done.

“Gee, it’d take me a week to do all that!” she said.

Robert noticed that she had put on perfume. “I brought some wine,” he said, suddenly remembering. He put on his overshoes and went out to the car for it. It was a bottle of white wine, which luckily went with chicken.

They had been sitting at the table only five minutes when a car came up the driveway.

“Gosh, a dropper-inner,” Jenny said, going to the door.

Brakes squeaked, and a door slammed.

“Greg, you pro-omised,” Jenny said, and Robert got to his feet.

Greg came in the door unsmiling.

“Greg, this is—this is—”

“Robert Forester,” Robert said. “How do you do?”

“How do you do?” Greg glanced at the table, at Jenny, then looked at Robert. “I thought I ought to meet you.”

“Well, now you have. We’re in the middle of dinner, Greg.” Jenny looked miserable. “Can’t you go? Just for now?”

Absolutely the wrong thing to say, Robert saw, because Greg’s eyes flashed with anger.

“I didn’t mean to crash in in the middle of dinner, but I don’t see why I should go, either. Why don’t I wait in the living room?”

Jenny made a hopeless gesture and turned toward Robert.

Greg stomped into the living room in his stocking feet, his shoes evidently having come off in his rubber boots.

“Greg, would you please wait upstairs?” Jenny said from the kitchen doorway.

Robert smiled nervously. Her tone was one a sister might use to a brother she wanted a favor from. Greg was a big fellow, over six feet. Robert did not relish the thought of a fight with him.

“No,” said Greg, and Robert heard the crackle of papers as he sat down on the sofa.

At least Greg could not see them in the kitchen. Jenny sat down, and then Robert did. There were tears in her eyes. Robert shrugged
and smiled at Jenny, picked up his fork and gestured for her to do the same. She lifted her fork, then put it down again. Then she went into the living room and put a record on the phonograph. Robert stood up as she came back to the table.

“Would you like me to leave?” he whispered.

“No. I wouldn’t like you to leave.”

They ate in small bites but with determination. The
Swan Lake
ballet played on. The melodrama of the situation made it absurd to Robert, but Jenny was taking it so hard he couldn’t smile. He handed her the handkerchief from his breast pocket.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said softly. “I’ll leave right away. You’ll never have to see me again.” He reached for her left wrist, gave it a comforting press and released it, but she grabbed his hand.

“It’s so rude and unfair. Susie did it. I know she did. Damn her.”

“But there’s nothing so tragic about it.” He pulled his hand free from hers, had to pull twice to free it. The coffee looked done, so he got up and turned it off. Jenny was bent over her plate. He touched her shoulder. “I’ll be going,” he said, then realized Greg was standing in the doorway. He had turned the music off.

“Mr.—Mr.—”

“Forester,” said Robert.

“I’m not used to crashing in on people, but under these circumstances—You see, I happen to be engaged to Jenny.”

“Yes, I know,” Robert said.

Jenny turned around suddenly and said, “Greg, will you not make a scene?”

“No. All right. I won’t,” said Greg, breathing hard with anger, “but I think I deserve an explanation.”

“An explanation of what?”

“Well—is
he
why you don’t want to see me? Don’t want to marry me?”

“Greg, you just make it embarrassing!” Jenny said. “This is my house and you’ve no right—”

“I have a right to an explanation!”

“Greg, I have no intentions with Jenny,” Robert put in.

“No?” from Greg.

“I’m sure she has none with me,” Robert said. “I don’t know what you’ve heard.”

Greg’s Adam’s apple moved up and down. “How long have you known him, Jenny?”

Jenny looked straight at Greg and said, “I don’t think I care to answer that.”

“Susie gave me an earful,” Greg said.

“I can’t help that. I haven’t said anything to Susie. I don’t know where she got it from, but I think she ought to mind her own business.” Jenny was still sitting in her chair. Her hand gripped the chair back.

“Well, that’s what I’m doing, minding mine,” Greg said. “I don’t think a girl who’s engaged has secret dates with another guy she’s stuck on, said to be stuck on, at least without telling me about it.”

“Who said that? Susie? I haven’t said a thing to Susie.”

“I guess Susie can tell.”

Robert passed a hand across his forehead. “Greg, what Susie said is wrong, and I’ll also promise you I won’t see Jenny again if it’s going to cause all this trouble.”

“
If
it’s going to cause!”

Robert got his coat from the closet.

“Where’re you from, Mr. Forester? Where’d you come from?”

“I live in Langley,” Robert said.

“You’re quite a ways from home.”

“Greg, I don’t like the way you’re talking,” Jenny said. “You’re being insulting to a guest of mine.”

“I’ve got a right to know why a girl I’m engaged to refuses to see me for weeks and weeks and wants to break off the engagement,” Greg answered.

“I’m not the cause,” Robert said tersely as he pulled on his rubbers. “Goodbye, Jenny. And thank you. Goodbye,” he said to Greg.

Jenny had gotten up. “My apologies—for my rude friend. I’m awfully sorry, Robert.”

“That’s O.K.,” Robert said, smiling, and went out. He heard Greg’s voice behind him, through the closed door: “All right,
who
is he?”

One more blunder, Robert thought as he drove off. But perhaps it was all to the good. Greg would lay down the law to Jenny now, and she wouldn’t be able to see him or call him. Robert reproached himself for seeing the girl at all today. He should have said a firm “No, thanks” when she proposed the ski outing. Greg’s face was young but rugged—a lumpy, strong nose; thick black brows; big, knuckly hands. He had been wearing the gray Glen plaid suit Robert had seen him in before—a grease spot on one lapel, Robert had noticed today—and his shirt had been pulled out in a fold between vest bottom and trousers waist. He might have had a lot of Irish blood.

Robert’s telephone rang when he had been home a quarter of an hour.

“Hello, Robert, this is Jenny. Greg’s gone. Oh, gosh, Robert, I’m sorry about today.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m sorry it spoiled your good dinner.”

“Oh, we can do that again some time. Listen, Robert, I’d like to see you. It’s early. Only seven-thirty. Can I come to your place? I just talked to Greg. He knows I’m not going to marry him, so he has no right to interfere with what I do or who I see. I think he finally realized I meant it.”

And Greg would probably be checking on her to see if she went out this evening, Robert thought. Or even watching her house so he could follow her car if she went out. “Jenny, you still sound upset, so why don’t you stay in this evening?”

She groaned. “Please let me see you. Can’t I come to your place?” She was determined.

Well, there was one way of ending it, he thought, and he would do it. He said yes, she could come, and he told her the two streets the Camelot Apartments were on in Langley. She said she would leave right away.

Five minutes later, the telephone rang again, and he hoped it was Jenny, changing her mind.

This time it was Nickie. She was at a cocktail party and she was a little drunk, she said, and she was with Ralph, but she wanted to wish him a happy marriage anniversary No. 3, which she knew had passed weeks ago, but better late than never.

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Nickie.”

“Remember our second?” she asked.

He remembered the second all right. “I prefer to remember the first.”

“Sen-ti-men-tal. Want to talk to Ralph?
Ralph!
”

Robert wanted to hang up. But wouldn’t that be petulant? Cowardly? He hung on, looked up at the ceiling, and waited. Distant voices murmured and bubbled, like a seething pot, somewhere in Manhattan. Then there was a
click-buzz
. She had hung up, or someone had hung up for her.

Robert fixed a Scotch and water. Yes, he remembered the second anniversary. They had asked eight or ten friends over, and Robert had brought home a lot of red roses and peonies for the house, and he’d had a slim gold bracelet for Nickie. And then nobody turned up. People had been due at eight for cocktails and a buffet, but at a quarter past nine nobody had arrived, and Robert had said, “Holy cow, do you think we asked people for the wrong date?” Then Nickie, her hands on her hips, had said, “Nobody’s turning up, dearie, this is a party just for you and me. So sit down at the other end of this
beautiful table and let me tell you a thing or two.” She hadn’t even had a drink before the first ones she made after he arrived. Robert could always tell which drink was her first and her second and her third. And she hadn’t been drunk when she planned the evening ten days before—or at least in between she’d been sober. The invitations were her responsibility. That evening she had talked steadily for at least an hour, drowning out his interruptions by simply raising her voice. She laid every smallest fault of his before him, down to his sometimes leaving his razor on the rim of the basin instead of putting it back into the medicine cabinet; down to the fact he’d forgotten, weeks before, to pick up a dress of hers at the cleaner’s; down to the mole on his cheek, the celebrated mole that was not quite an eighth of an inch in diameter (he had measured it once in the bathroom with his little steel ruler), that Nickie had first called distinguished, then ugly, and finally cancerous, and why didn’t he have it removed? Robert remembered that he had made himself a second drink during her harangue, a good stiff one, since the wisest thing to show under the circumstances was patience, and the liquor acted as a sedative. His patience that evening had so infuriated her, in fact, that she later lurched against him, bumped herself into him in the bedroom when he was undressing for the night, saying, “Don’t you want to hit me, darling? Come on, hit me, Bobbie!” Curiously, that was one of the times he’d felt least like hitting her, so he’d been able to give a quiet “No” in answer. Then she called him abnormal. “You’ll do something violent one day. Mark my words.” And a little later that night, “Wasn’t it a good joke, Bobbie?” when they were lying in bed, pressing his cheek with her hand, not affectionately but to anger him and keep him from sleeping. “Wasn’t it a funny
joke, darling?” She had followed him into the living room when he tried to sleep on the sofa there. At last, she had fallen asleep in the bedroom about five in the morning and had waked up when Robert got up to go to work. She had a bad hangover, and as always with a hangover she was remorseful, took his hands and kissed them and said she’d been awful, and would he forgive her, and she promised never, never to act like that again, and he’d been an angel, and she didn’t mean anything she’d said about his faults, which were such little faults, after all.