The House of Velvet and Glass (7 page)

“Your afternoon was satisfying, I trust?” he asked. His tone was gruff, but Sibyl could tell by the set of his eyebrows that he was interested in her answer.

Sibyl hesitated. She should tell him. She must tell him, of course. She still felt buoyed by the sight of her mother’s hand, and she wanted to share her excitement with someone.

But as she leveled her eyes at her father, she could see that his face was closed.

“I always found that one impossible to read, even when it was working,” Sibyl remarked, indicating the clock.

Her father moved away from the mantel, digging a finger into his other vest pocket. The finger withdrew a whole peanut, in shell, and he rolled it between finger and thumb as he crossed to the other side of the room.

“Have you seen him yet?” Allston inquired, each word separated from the last. The chill in her father’s voice stopped Sibyl. She could barely see his form moving about in the shadows.

“I felt I should see about dinner first,” Sibyl replied, lamely.

“Hm,” her father said. Then, more softly, “There, now. Hello. You’d like this, wouldn’t you?”

This incongruous last comment was aimed not at herself, Sibyl knew, and so she edged nearer, creeping toward the most unorthodox piece of drawing room furniture. This was a kind of hat rack, or she supposed it had once been a hat rack, fashioned from polished mahogany to simulate a blooming hazelnut tree, with knotty branches twisting this way and that. Her father stood next to it, addressing himself, peanut in hand, to a creature sitting in silent majesty atop the thickest of the carved branches.

“There, Baiji,” her father whispered. “Take the peanut, won’t you?”

Sibyl frowned. “And you?” she asked. “You’ve seen him, then?

Her father leaned nearer the creature, murmuring enticements, until it gingerly accepted the proffered tidbit. Then Allston spoke, without looking around.

“Seen, but only in the most cursory sense. Saw his trunk, at any rate. Paid his cab, too. The boy himself ?”

He trailed off, as though uncertain which was more offensive: arriving home without telephoning, arriving home without money for the cab, arriving home without having a proper audience with his father, or just arriving home, period. As Allston weighed Harlan’s various offenses according to the mental calculus by which fathers are accustomed to judging sons, he reached a delicate fingertip to rub beneath the chin of the animal in the former hat rack.

Baiji, the creature himself, was a macaw. He cast one black, intelligent eye at Sibyl as his beak worked on the peanut meat, withdrawn with uncanny dexterity from the open shell clutched in one claw. The animal was iridescent blue, a compact-bodied thing with a beak curved in a knowing smile and a long, intoxicating tail.

Sibyl recalled one evening, when she was a girl, overhearing her mother joke that she should dearly like to have a few of Baiji’s tail feathers to dress her newest hat. Her father had exploded with a rage rarely seen in the Allston family, at least not in the public rooms, where the staff were likely to overhear.

“Lannie, my darling, a joke only!” Sibyl heard Helen protest, her voice muffled through the crack in the pocket door where Sibyl sat, ear pressed, listening. It was some hours before the fracas subsided, with the macaw’s tail left intact, as Sibyl knew it would be. Eulah had laughed when Sibyl recounted this argument, saying that of course his tail feathers would just grow back, but Sibyl knew their father would never permit the macaw to be touched.

The macaw was, like the chronometer, like the speaking tube on the library shelf, and like the cracked blue and white porcelain basket on the mantel, a relic of Allston’s years at sea. Though a South American bird—Sibyl had no idea which part of South America—he had come into her father’s possession in China, another castoff from some long-forgotten sailor. He blinked slowly at her, feathers ruffling under the affectionate finger at his chin. She recoiled, from the strange humanlike expression on Baiji’s parrot face, and from his knowing gaze.

“Then you don’t know what can have happened,” Sibyl stated.

In the years since the sinking Sibyl had assumed the running of the household, complete with the assumption that, should something disagreeable in Allston family affairs arise, it would be delegated to Sibyl to solve. Usually disagreeableness was limited to the firing of a thieving kitchen girl (one silver spoon, since replaced), or to the settling of accounts with a doctor who failed to treat her father’s dyspepsia to his satisfaction. In that vein, Sibyl had expected Harlan’s return for the summer to require her management. His abrupt reappearance, however, hinted that simple management might not be sufficient.

“I’ve a pretty good idea. But he’d best hope I’m mistaken,” her father said, his voice neutral, in contrast to the dark clouds gathering in his pale eyes. Baiji opened his mouth wide, stretching his eerily human tongue out without a sound, and closed it again.

Sibyl, too, opened her mouth as if to speak, but closed it again without saying anything. Instead her eyes traveled up to the wooden crown work pattern on the ceiling, gazing toward the situation that was her brother.

Chapter Four

Upstairs, in a room whose finer architectural points were obscured by an explosion of books and clothing, a young man stood staring at himself in the mirror over his highboy. The highboy was a tall object, a Boston drawer set of strength and gravitas, whose only biomorphic properties were its curving legs and slipper feet, and so it had been banished by the young man’s mother into the rooms beyond her reach above stairs. The mirror atop this tall chest of drawers angled downward, for the tying of ties and other details of men’s dress. A silver brush and comb rested next to the mirror, together with a half dozen crumpled handkerchiefs and several small glass bottles. The mirror’s angle caused the young man to view himself from above, creating the unwelcome sensation of witnessing himself seen as a boy, observed from a superior vantage point.

Harlan Plummer Allston III peered up with disdain at his reflection, propping himself on one leaning arm. The reflection was a near perfect replica of Harlan himself: similar in age, twenty-one, also with his tie loosened and his shirt collar open. His reflection parted his straight brown hair on the left, rather than on the right, and had a black mole in the wrong eyebrow. But the brows themselves were straight and dark, like Harlan’s, the smile as rakish. Lips a little fuller than Harlan would have liked, almost like a woman’s. Beard could stand to fill in a bit more, too, though the mustache was coming along nicely. Harlan’s reflection half-smiled at him, an attempt at reassurance, and tipped a long swallow of amber liquid down his throat. Warmth suffused his tongue, and when he wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, Harlan’s reflection did the same. He held the tumbler to the corner of his eye, pressing it there, savoring the cool glass on his skin.

A soft scratch at his door caused the young man to start and put the tumbler down.

“Jus’ second,” he said, swaying, then steadying himself with one hand on the highboy and the other gripping the post at the foot of his bed. Another refugee from Helen’s rampant aesthetics, the bed was even older than the highboy. Its mattress was a lumpy horsehair sack still suspended on a lattice of ropes wound through holes in the bedstead.

“Good night, sleep tight,” his nurse had sung, putting him to sleep in this bed. When he was a boy it felt huge, an open expanse of starched linens extending around him into an infinity of night. Now, at over six feet, his lanky frame could barely fit within its confines. He had to sleep at an angle, pillows bunched under his head, one foot thrust into space, away from the security of the covers. The mattress sagged, with no nurse there to tighten the ropes. He didn’t fit there, anymore, either.

The scratch came at the door again, more insistent.

“Coming,” he said, more clearly, releasing his grip on the furniture. He shook his head, trying to snap himself into readiness. After a moment spent balancing he lurched toward the door, only to get tangled in the trunk. Harlan stumbled, and the trunk collapsed, snapping at his thumb. He cursed under his breath.

“Harley,” the voice on the other side of the door said. “It’s me. Come now, let’s open the door.”

The young man shook himself free of the scattered clothes, brushed a lock of hair off his forehead, and yanked open the door with irritation.

Harlan hadn’t seen his sister—well, his remaining sister—in . . . how long was it since he was home, anyway? Christmas, he supposed. At Easter break he and some of the fellows had run down on a jaunt to New York. To take in the new plays, they’d said. Well, that’d been the plan. And they’d seen a play—after a fashion. He laughed, thinking back to that raucous evening, before drowning the laughter in his mouth with another draft from his tumbler.

“Come in, Sibs,” he said, gesturing with a sweep of his arm to the disorder within.

He observed Sibyl cast a roving eye over his belongings, which he had thrown about with almost studied disregard. She hesitated in the doorway.

“Mrs. Doherty assures me the linens have been seen to,” Sibyl began.

Harlan groaned in anguished boredom, lolling his head back on his shoulders. “Oh, God!” he cried. “The linens! Whatever are we going to do about the linens?”

He turned away, laughing, from her reproachful gaze, but his smile vanished as soon as his back was to her. Harlan leaned a heavy elbow on the highboy, fumbling with a crystal decanter among the handkerchiefs, and sloshed a finger’s width more amber liquid into his glass. Then he flopped into a leather armchair by the fireplace, one leg tossed over the armrest, slippered foot dangling. He glanced up at his sister and saw dismay flicker across her face. A hot explosion of shame and resentment burst in his chest.

“Well?” he snapped. “Let’s have it, then. I’ve waited long enough.”

Sibyl swallowed and picked her way into the bedroom. Harlan turned to the fire, prodding it with a poker so he didn’t have to look at her. The fire had faltered sometime in the past indistinct hour, and he stabbed at the log on the grate, letting loose a series of pops and exploding cinders until the flames picked up. When he was satisfied he tossed the poker aside and turned to find his sister standing, her hands full of shirts collected off the facing armchair, a look of befuddlement on her face. He snorted. Sibyl turned a sharp eye to him, and then dropped the shirts in a heap on the floor. She settled in the armchair, back straight, and folded her hands in her lap. Then she turned her discomfiting dark eyes on him and waited.

Harlan gazed over the edge of his glass at Sibyl, searching her face. Sibs, his older sister. He was oddly pleased to see that she looked older than he remembered. Girlishness had never been a part of Sibyl, so to have the girlishness carved away from her face, leaving it paler, the cheekbones higher, the nose sharper, made her look more like herself. Beautiful, almost, though he had trouble thinking of his sister as beautiful. Sibyl as a girl had looked ill planned. Now, Eulah had banked on girlishness. Foppy, always talking about hats, dances, boys, hats again. Momentary pleasures, passing fancies. Harlan had never cared for a thing that came out of Eulah’s mouth. Yet she’d been petted and coddled to beat the band. What would she have done when time carved her girlishness away? Nothing, that’s what. But she’d have been married by then. So perhaps it didn’t matter.

Of course, none of it mattered. He frowned into his glass.

“Harley,” Sibyl began, leaning forward, reaching out with one hand toward his knee. She withdrew it without touching him. Harlan glanced up at her.

Why wasn’t Sibyl married? It looked like it would be all set for a while there. But she seemed all right, didn’t she? Tall. Well made. And funny. As a boy he’d cherished the dinner table moments when one of their parents would say something hopelessly Allstony, and Sibyl would catch his gaze to share a fleeting eye roll, as if they alone could appreciate the ludicrous elements of their family life. Sibyl made him feel like he was in on a secret joke. When they were small she often sneaked out of the nursery to go exploring in the forbidden corners of the house, and sometimes he would track behind her in secret, wishing she’d invite him along. He didn’t quite understand how that adventurous girl had turned into the stolid spinster sitting in front of him now.

Eulah had been fun, but she’d never been funny. Oh, she’d been able to fool enough fellows into thinking that she was. Plenty of Harlan’s friends let slip that they had their eyes on Eulah Allston, even before she came out. Never anything beyond what they knew he’d allow, of course. A man doesn’t go around making remarks about another man’s sister. Not in decent society.

He smiled ruefully.

“Sibsie,” he replied. He chewed the inside of his cheek, waiting for her to say something. The fire spat out another spark, which hit the screen and fell harmless into the ashes below the grate.

“It’s just for the weekend, then? You’ll be going back to sit for your exams?” she suggested. Her eyes were gentle.