The Dark Closet (3 page)

“Fine,
thanks. Just tired of the basement.”

“I suppose it’s
boring for her.”

“Not so
bad. She reads a lot anyway, so now she’s reading even more. The only danger is running out of books before the roads are clear again. How’s Maragret?”

“H
appy as long as the children are around. She’s probably bored to death now because they’re out here with me. There just isn’t much to do with the  current and telephone off.” Twynne paused. “You don’t look very well. Are you all right?”

Crossett looked up from toe
ing his cigarette butt into the snow, leaving a charcoal smudge in the white, and smiled wanly. “I’m just tired, I think. I haven’t slept well since the storm began. It’s not very restful trying to sleep in a coat and I’m cold no matter what. I wake up at the slightest sound. We all must be having the same problem, because I wake up and hear talking. I think the children keep each other awake—we have them all sleeping in Maude’s room, you know, for warmth, in the two double beds with their snow suits on.”

“They must be put
ting up a real racket, Crossett, because Maude’s room is at the other end of the house.”

“Yes, well, you know children.”

“Well,” sighed Twynne, “you know we can get to a doctor if we have to.”

“I’m fine, Twynne. I don’t need a doctor.” Then he
motioned to the children. “ We’d better follow them. They’re headed for the barn.”

Twynne,
a tall, lithe man, slipped through the fence and covered more distance with his long legs than Crossett, helping to brush away the snow as the children drew up the wooden rail that bolted the door. Inside, it was dusky. The snow lay heavily upon the roof, whose peeping holes were now solidly covered. Along one side the snow had drifted almost half the height of the barn, barring the light and leaving it quiet and dark within. The children ran into the stripping room, always a thrill in winter since they were forbidden entrance during the summer and fall months when the sharecroppers were at work there. A flap of tarp hung languidly over the small glass window in the stripping room, blown slightly now and then as the air moved through a shattered pane. The room smelled thickly and heavily of tobacco and kerosene from the crooked stove in one corner and the fine powder of dried tobacco that had mingled long ago with the hay covering the floor. A few empty pint bottles were strewn through the hay, their greasy labels unintelligible now to literate and illiterate alike.

“What’s this
, Daddy?” asked Sophie, picking up one of the smeary, resin-dabbled bottles.

“Put that down
right now,” Crossett ordered. “It’s filthy.”

The boys wer
e in the barn proper playing Robin Hood with tobacco sticks, busily ostracizing the girls. They ran about jumping up to hang from the blackened hand-hewn beams that lodged the tiers of poles from which the tobacco hung through fall to early winter. A wind picked up outside, and the roof made an odd noise, as if laboring under its load of snow.

“Time to go,”
yelled Crossett, the alarm in his voice. It would not be the first time a barn roof caved in from too much snow. Outside the wind was blowing at a steady pace, its fifteen degrees stiffening lips and cheeks.

“I
think we’d better all get back, Twynne. I don’t know what this wind means, but I hope it’s not more snow.”

“If it is, we’ll meet
again after it stops. You really ought to get a transistor radio, Crossett,” he called as he turned to go. “It’d be some connection with the outside world.”

Crossett
waved his hand behind him as he headed across the fields toward the house. By the time they arrived at the stone steps leading down to the basement door, the snow was falling heavily—fine, icy flakes so numerous and plentiful it was difficult to see very far. Crossett pounded on the door until Anne opened it: The key to this door had been lost long ago, not by Crossett but by some ancestor so obscured by anonymity his guilt could not be ascertained. The heavy bolt that kept it securely locked had to be slid open from the inside.

“Take your boots off here,
children,” Anne said as she began taking scarves already turning damp as the heat from the oil stove melted the snow on them. “Leave your boots right here by the door. I don’t want the floor wet down here. It’s chilly enough as it is.” Indeed, even though the oil andiron stoves were belching forth all the flames they cold, the subterranean cellar remained chilly and damp, albeit warmer than the floors above, because it stretched well beyond and before the locations of the two stoves. It ran the length and breadth of the whole house in four gaping brick sections whose arched accesses consisted also of brick baked in kilns on the expansive 1765 Winterhurst tobacco and corn plantation of 2,567 acres. Its deepest recess was an old wine cellar whose contents had regaled the likes of Washington and Jefferson stopping in their travels at the way-station of Barrow, known in those days, and now, for its social
joie de vivre
.
In those remote days slaves had scurried from the bricked cellars and kitchens of Winterhurst to serve the coifed and gowned political figures of the moment as they toasted their good fortune in the dining rooms above. And when the first wave of guests had been surfeited with baked chicken and spoon bread, okra, freshly stewed tomatoes, summer squash, and cake, they cleared away the remnants to make ready for the next wave, who had been waiting patiently in the parlors and library, sipping Winterhurst’s best wines.

There was
no way at hand to close off one section from another, but Anne had discovered Braden’s chin-up bar made a perfect curtain rod for at least one archway. She had draped an old India print over it and thus blocked off one section, sure that it did actually help but knowing the two stoves still had to battle the cold, uneven brick of the walls and floor. She buttoned the top button of her coat, a wool one given to her by one of Crossett’s sisters, so heavy she could wear it only in the bitterest of winter weather.

“Here, Crossett, g
ive me your coat. I’ll put it over here near the stove. You’ll just have to wear sweaters until it’s dry. Children, hang your snowsuits on the line and go upstairs and get your sweaters. Hopefully by bedtime your suits will be dry.”

A white plastic clothesline was strung beneath the criss-cross of dark metal pipes that hung beneath the wooden rafters of the basement ceiling.
Here and there the webs spiders had spun with powdery accuracy billowed out and breathed in with the air currents caused by movement below. Brown papery sacks of eggs hung in clusters throughout the webs, some so weighty the cottony webs sagged with the burden of them. The spiders themselves folded heir numerous legs in upon themselves to play possum, a position they found themselves in often of late. Crossett looked up into the shadowy rafters as he shook off a chill. Thank goodness, he thought, the pipes were here beneath the floors of the rooms above; there was no danger of their freezing.

At one end of the
clothes line, the Whirlpool washer and dryer stood against one wall with a large kitchen clock suspended above them of little use now. Anne’s watch told her it was one-thirty. Time for peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches. Thank goodness, Anne thought, Cousin Martha had given them all those jars of homemade strawberry jam at Christmas, not a welcome sight then but a lifesaver now. At the time she had wondered who could eat so much jam.

The children scoo
ted their wagons throughout the basement for their afternoon’s activity, sometimes giving each other rides as well as numerous stuffed animals and favorite dolls—Baby, Be-Be, and Donald Duck. Just before dinner as their parents sipped highballs at the cocktail hour, they decided to play Bettys; that is, Sophie and Maude were each named Betty, Braden Father, and Warenne Son. Despite Warenne’s exalted position as Son, however, his role was not as important as those of Baby and Be-Be, who lived in the lap of luxury in the Betty arrangement. They were pulled in the wagons, given tea and cakes with china tea sets, dressed and redressed as whim dictated, piloted by Father through walks in the woods (the darkest recesses of the basement). Generally, however, Father had a limited if not somewhat vague role, which suited Braden fine, who as the eldest was satisfied that the sparse requirements of this role enabled him to spend most of his time with his World War II plastic soldiers, bridge, and ammo set. Crossett had forbidden him to play any longer with his fleet of multi-colored marbles as long as they were confined to the basement where there were no rugs and the hundred rolling and colliding marbles made the most nerve-racking sound on the brick floor.

The
y ate dinner around the glass table stored in the basement. It was really a garden piece, but Crossett had been able to find no suitable place for it on his expansive lawn. In the basement it had collected all kinds of junk and so served a purpose there, even if it was just as a catch-all. Dinner was Campbell’s tomato soup and more peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Crossett was relieved when it was over.

J
ust before it grew dark, Anne put the children back in their snow suits and took them upstairs to Maude’s room where she tucked them all into bed. They giggled there until they finally fell asleep. Crossett joined her then, bundled in his overcoat, as she sat down to read in the old overstuffed sofa stored there in the cellar. He shifted to first one side, then the other as he tried to read. The dreary darkness of the basement in the insufficient glow of the two brass kerosene lamps was only adding to his restlessness at being cooped up at Winterhurst for four days.

“I’m going upstairs to check the children,” he told the barely nodding Anne.

“Aren’t you going to take a lamp with you?” she called after him, having looked up from her book.

“No, you need them to read more than I do.”

“Don’t trip over anything.”

“I couldn’t trip if I tried. I know thi
s house like the back of my hand,” he grumbled. “You forget, I grew up here.”

“In the
dark?”

Crossett was almost at the
top of the stairs now.

“Nearly! We used
to sneak around in the dark all the time while Mother and Father were asleep.”

He followed
the  cramped wooden stairs up from the cellar to the door at the top, so narrow it seemed an afterthought. It brought him out into the country kitchen, a large room whose walls were lined with counters, cabinets, and the sink. In the middle was a white metal oblong table at which the family ate breakfast and lunch. Where its enamel was wearing off, black metal showed beneath, here and there in spots as if its deterioration may be considering some design. Crossett did not see its imperfections because he had seen it so many times, through so many years. His mother had demanded this table of his father when she pointed out that feeding five children three meals a day in the formal dining room was just asking for trouble. Too many valuable objects around, too many old family silver pieces, too many expensive decorative china cups and saucers, teapots, punch bowls. Too beautiful an Oriental rug. Just an accident waiting to happen. And so he gave her the metal table unearthed from the pile of laundry in the basement and informed her that she could take her choice of a kitchen table or a laundry table. She made her choice, and thereafter folded the laundry on the dining room table, a practice that turned his father livid. When he approached his wife on the subject, she asked if he thought the Mainwaring valuables were safer with her and the laundry or with five restless, mischievous children—he could make his choice. And so the matter was settled.

Crossett’s eyes scoured the shad
ows of the kitchen, looking for nothing more than the familiarity of it. Then he left to turn down the wide main hall that ran the length of the house from the front door to the winding staircase that led upstairs to the five bedrooms. His weight creaked and his shoes scuffed roughly on the wooden steps, well-worn, a little rutted in the middle with the passage of so many feet, as he went by the massive gilded frames of  his ancestors, who hung in a general frown all along the great staircase, casting perennially disapproving gazes at the scampering children of one generation after another, the vibrations of whose feet on the stairs made less tenable their hold on the plaster walls. Often nails sank to such an angle the wires of these portraits hung by the most tenuous of holds, usually discovered just a breath away from sliding down the wall to bump to ruination down the bare wooden steps. Crossett could only imagine the myriad fragments of gilt glittering from stair top to stair bottom. Just as humiliating to this gallery of Mainwaring ancestors was the disenchanting cock-eyed slanting of these portraits caused by the vibrations of four sets of running (even though strictly forbidden in the house) feet up and down the staircase. Periodically, Crossett would tenderly straighten the pictures in their broad, enleaved, and foliaged gilded frames to set his ancestors aright much as one might straighten a grave, brushing away debris blown there by the wind.

He followed the
hallway at the top to the farthest bedroom, where he found his four children in the abandon of sleep, with arms sprawled carelessly across each other or draping over the sides of the beds. The room was populated with the phantoms of shadows, huddled in the corners, stooped among the dim contours of the furniture, pressed against the uncertain line of the walls. Stopping at the cold radiator beneath one of the iced windows, he saw it was no longer snowing, that the thick, white clouds were breaking enough to let escape intermittent rays of moonshine, rays that all but lit the house as the hit the snow beneath, elongating shadows into grotesque reflections of the objects they mirrored. The snow itself was lending a kind of light to the currentless night, brightening the dark window frames and feigning illumination on the rugs beneath them.