Doppelgänger (15 page)

“A long time later—many years after the war was over—the French officer, who joined the foreign service of the July Monarchy, visited Moscow again on a diplomatic mission. While there he passed the building containing the count's apartments, which was still standing. He said something compelled him to go inside. He found that the count's family was moving and selling off the furnishings. The count himself had just died. The Frenchman saw two workmen carrying out of the house a large portrait of the Russian count which had hung in one of the parlors. It was the same man the Frenchman had seen in 1812, though obviously many years older. In shock the Frenchman realized that the Russian count whose house he'd appropriated had still been alive—and that it was the ghost of this living person, the count's doppelgänger, that haunted his house during the French occupation—a sort of spectral sentinel who watched over the place during the family's absence.
That
was the ghost he'd seen, and the doppelgänger, deliberately seeking to drive the Frenchman to commit suicide, assumed the form of his dead wife to shame him into doing it. The Frenchman confessed all of this in a series of letters only on his own deathbed, having been so horrified by the experience that he dared not speak it to anyone during his lifetime.”

Dorr left this heavy story hanging in the air as he returned to the chair behind his desk. He tapped out the pipe into a bowl and began re-filling it, saying nothing, as if waiting for Julian or Anine to comment.

Could it possibly be true?
Anine thought.
Could that be the spirit of Mrs. Quain tormenting us in punishment for living in her house?
She had to admit to herself that it made a kind of intuitive sense, but Dorr's story about the French officer was still so fantastic that she had a hard time getting her head around it, much less applying its dubious lessons to their own situation.

“You believe this story?” Julian finally said.

“I'm not sure,” Dorr replied. “It's not the kind of thing that lends itself to easy verification, like a science experiment in a laboratory. It
could
be true. Or it could be utter rubbish. I mention it to you because it serves as a possible precedent for what might be occurring in your house. The ghost theory, after all, requires two deaths in the house that we do not know have occurred—Mrs. Quain and the child seen by Bradbury—and offers no explanation for the man from the West, or the cat for that matter, unless there's some sordid history of the house that is totally unknown to anyone. The doppelgänger theory, though speculative, could account for everything you've seen, presuming that doppelgänger are capable of changing form.”

“How do we test this theory?” said Anine. “There must be a way to verify it.”

Dorr smoked. “For openers I would need to visit the house for myself and see if I can make contact with the spirit. It's possible we may be able to learn something useful. As a threshold matter I would be very curious to know whether Mrs. Quain is still alive. Nothing less than seeing and speaking with her face-to-face would be sufficient to establish that.”

“That's unlikely,” said Anine. “Our relations with her family are—” she searched for a delicate way to put it “—
strained
.”

If this bit of information mattered to Dorr he gave no indication of it. He put the end of the pipe in his mouth. Glancing at Julian he said, “Do as you will, Mr. Atherton. Perhaps you need some time to think it over. I'll be here in Ossining through the end of October.” With a puff of bluish smoke rising from his pipe he motioned to the office door and Anine understood that the interview was over.

They had taken a boat, a day steamer, up the Hudson to Ossining, and as it chugged resolutely back toward New York City in the late afternoon Julian stood at the railing on the stern of the ship, staring into the water. Anine accompanied him for a turn on the deck, carrying her parasol although it was still gloomy overcast. They said nothing. She'd turned the problem over and over in her mind and still could not quite accept the doctor's hypothesis, but she dared to hope that it might push her husband toward recognizing what needed to be done, if it could still
be
done.

She joined Julian at the rail. The waters churning beneath the boat were grayish-black. They matched her mood.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“I don't know what to think,” he shrugged. “The whole thing is so—
strange
.”

“Yes, it is.” A cold breeze ruffled a ringlet of Anine's blonde hair against her cheek, causing her to shudder. “Whether it's true or not, this affair of the doppelgänger—or even if by some fluke we've both imagined what we believe we've seen—I think it's clear that we can never be happy in that house, and are never meant to be.”

Julian did not look at her but his gaze became glassy and cold. “I will
not
sell the house back to the Minthorns. That decision has been made, and it's final.”

“Then sell it to someone else. Let's move, Julian. We haven't had a moment's peace, either with the house or with each other, since we've been there. Let's start over. We'll give our marriage another chance. Things will be different. I know they will.”

Anine was going out on a limb by saying this because in her own mind she wasn't convinced it was true; yet it seemed a moral imperative to at least exhaust all reasonable opportunities to salvage their relationship before giving up completely on their marriage.
I do still love him
, she admitted to herself,
or at least I love the charming, awkward boy he was back in Sweden while he was courting me.
There was something else lurking behind this thought too: the supposition that, if Dorr was right about the doppelgänger, it might ultimately be responsible for Julian's transformation into the monster he'd become since they came to New York. If they left the house, would the kind, charming, awkward Julian return? Would his rages, his intransigence, his rapes be in the past? She dared to hope, but it was nothing more than a hope.

Perhaps predictably, he spurned it. “There's one thing that would give our marriage a chance,” he said coldly, “and that's a baby. But you don't want to do that, and frankly I no longer want to give you one. You've utterly killed my manhood. You disgust me now.”

She was exasperated. “If the only pleasure left for you in our marriage is to say things that hurt me, then go right ahead. I assure you they won't trouble me any longer.” She put up her parasol, turned and walked down the promenade deck away from him, not even bothering to look back. Right now she felt totally capable of pushing him right over the railing into the Hudson River.

Or jumping into the water myself
, she thought,
and swimming all the way back to Sweden
.

As if in answer to their new understanding of what was happening in the house, the
spöke
served up, the very next day, a new torment for Anine: claustrophobia.

She felt it first in the breakfast room. The room was large, the windows broad and tall, and it was a sunny day outside; yet as she ate her bread and cheese she felt like the walls were closing in. Julian had already left for his office. Her own routine—go to the Green Parlor, read a book or play solitaire or find some way to pass the time—seemed like a straitjacket strangling the life out of her, and yet she had the most dreadful feeling that if she did
not
do that, if she chose to go out or sit in a different room or do anything else, something terrible and catastrophic would happen to her.

So she went to the Green Parlor.
I must tell Clea about the doppelgänger
, she thought, dealing out the cards on her small table. She noticed her hands were quivering. A pit of dread sat uncomfortably at the bottom of her stomach. A few cards into the game it turned into prickly panic creeping up the back of her neck.

Then she saw something move at the foot of the fireplace, just a quick flash of motion. She looked up and for a split-second saw the Abyssinian cat, which jumped up onto one of the wing chairs, peering out at her. In the next instant it receded, the cat vanished and the feeling of claustrophobia suddenly trebled. Anine felt like her corset was suddenly crushing her. Gasping for breath she threw down the cards, stood up and staggered toward the wall for the bell cord to summon Miss Wicks.

“Stop it!” she hissed to the cat, now disappeared. She was speaking Swedish. “Why are you doing this to me? What have I ever done to you?”

The pocket doors slid open. Clea stood in the doorway, looking as calm and stoic as ever. “You want something, Miss Anine?”

With her words the feeling of claustrophobia instantly evaporated but the pit of dread in Anine's stomach did not. She straightened up, hand still on her stomach, and looked over at the maid.

I have to get out of here
, she resolved.
Right now
.

“I need to get some air,” she said. “Let's go to the Central Park. Get your coat and gloves and summon a carriage.”

Clea looked surprised. “You want…
me
to come with you?”

“Yes, right away. I
must
get out of this house.”

“Let me must change my dress.”

“Do it, then. Quickly.”

Anine grabbed a dolman and a pair of gloves and waited for Clea in the entryway. Above her she heard Bryan Shoop whistling as he worked in Julian's bedroom, shining his shoes. Through her disgust for the young man, which had been growing steadily since what she referred to in her mind as
the frigid incident
, she felt something else: a sense of frustration, that an expectation had been confounded. But the frustration was not hers. She wondered if it was the
spöke
's. Her decision to go out and to take Miss Wicks with her had spoiled some plan that the house had for her. This was the strong intangible sense Anine felt.

If true it was an interesting revelation: the doppelgänger was not all-powerful. It could be frustrated, hampered. If that was true perhaps it could be defeated, or driven out of the house entirely.

For nearly two hours Anine and Clea rode together in a hired carriage through the tree-lined paths of the Central Park. As it was sunny and the weather mild, many other rich Manhattanites had the same idea; it was likely to be one of the last mild-weather days of the year and they had come out in even greater force than usual. There was a virtual traffic jam of surreys and phaetons and the place looked more like a racetrack than the quiet refuge from the bustling city that it was intended to be.

As they rode Anine told Clea everything about the strange meeting with Dr. Dorr. The maid absorbed it without skepticism and, characteristically, almost without comment. When Anine was finished Clea said softly, “
Doppelgänger.
That's a word I never heard before.”

“It's German. In Swedish we have a similar word for it,
dubbelgångare
.”

“What do you know about this Mrs. Quain? She a bad woman?”

That's an odd question.
“What do you mean by that, Clea?”

“It sounds to me, Miss Anine, that the spirit in the house is angry. The things you describe are bad things. Dark things. Is that who she is? Did Mrs. Quain do bad things when she lived in the house? She beat her kids? Was she angry? Did she hate?” Clea glanced out the side window of the carriage, which was moving very slowly. “That's what I'd like to know.”

I'd never thought of that before
. “I don't know,” Anine shrugged. “Everything I've heard about her suggests she was a fine person.”

“You've got to talk to her, Miss Anine. If this doctor's right and the ghost is hers, maybe she can stop it.”

“I don't think that's very likely. Given the lengths we had to go to just to see Mrs. Minthorn I can't imagine them letting us near Mrs. Quain.”

“You don't need to talk to the Mrs. Quain in Newport,” said Miss Wicks. “You need to talk to the one in the house.”

Suddenly it clicked.
Yes—of course! Why did I not think of that?
Perhaps the doppelgänger could be reasoned with. In any event it seemed obligatory to try, before something more drastic—whatever that might be—was attempted.

The carriage rattled to a halt. Ahead of them Anine could see several other carriages, their horses pawing and scratching at the ground. Sticking her head out the window she said to the driver, “What's wrong? Why have we stopped?”

“Too many coaches,” grumbled the driver. “Every rich person in New York picked today to visit the park.”

Muttering something in Swedish under her breath, Anine snatched up her parasol and began opening the carriage door. “This is preposterous. Come, Clea, let's walk. Driver, return to the park entrance and wait and then you can take us back.”

She and Clea strolled along the edge of one of the park's serene lakes. Its surface was eerily still, almost glassy, reflecting the trees at its far end in perfect mirror image. Down here by the path the ruckus of the carriages and the horses was much less audible. Being in the sunlight was almost thrilling; Anine had become so used to the gloomy dimness of the house.

As they began walking a thought burgeoned in Anine's mind. “You said the doppelgänger was angry. But it doesn't seem angry with you. You saw it that one time, but it hasn't…done things to you the way it has to Julian and me. It doesn't seem to hate you. It seems to ignore you.”

“Yes, that's right, I guess. I don't think the ghost cares too much about me one way or the other.”

“And clearly Mrs. Hennessey and Mr. Shoop haven't seen it, or if they have, we don't know anything about it.”

“No, I don't think they've seen anything.”