Fever (17 page)

The crickets chirped, Rhonda stirred and brushed her tangled
hair from her face. My aunt was leaning back in her chair in her dramatic gown, her eyes closed, although I could tell she wasn’t sleeping. Tonio was in the big chair in the corner where my uncle usually sat, sitting very straight, his hands clasped between his knees, his pale skin paler even than usual. He kept moistening his lips, staring ahead at nothing, and once or twice he rocked his body back and forth and then stopped. He was in a state of extreme tension, though that was not unusual for him.

Tonio saw things that weren’t there and voices that none of the rest of us could hear sometimes spoke to him. Still, occasionally, he would seem perfectly normal. He would make his own toast in the morning, he even made toast for me when he was having a good day. He asked me if I’d slept well, and once he asked me what grade I was in, and what I was going to be when I grew up. A writer, I think, I had replied, and he had stopped what he was doing and given me such a strange look that I wished I hadn’t told him.

“Really?” he said finally, then cocked his head as if he were listening. “Maybe,” he said, his voice rising at the end of the word as if he had just heard that it would be so. And he smiled at me, a real smile, as if he were seeing me as I was, and not as if I had sprouted horns or fangs or like Alice, had grown so large I was in danger of not fitting into the kitchen. It was the only moment of meeting I ever had with Tonio, and that strange, tentative, then accepting, ‘maybe’ of his stayed with me whenever I faltered in my resolve to be a writer, a resolve I had never dared to tell my parents about, and it gave me the determination so that I didn’t give up.

“Dorcas is in movies,” Rhonda said to me, suddenly opening her eyes and bouncing to her knees. I thought she was asleep and was startled. “And I’m going to be in movies too.”

Morgan strode into the room again and then out. She was built
like my aunt, tall, with olive skin and a lot of thick, curly hair that she made no attempt to tame so that it hung down her back in a tangled, thick mass and frizzed around her face like a halo. She seemed angry, her strides made the living room floor shake so that Rhonda and I could feel the vibrations in our stomachs. Her anger seemed so real and threatening to me that night that I drew in my feet and sat up, a little afraid she might kick me on one of her passes down the room.

Just then there were a couple of thumps at the front door and then it opened. We jumped up, my aunt’s eyes suddenly opened wide as if she had been dreaming and was startled to find herself here in her own house. Tonio turned his head to the door as if he were underwater, a slow-motion movement, and I thought, at some level below the conscious, that his movement was filled with dread. Morgan stomped back into the front room and went toward the door.

My uncle entered first carrying two heavy-looking, shabby canvas suitcases. He was concentrating on the suitcases and didn’t look up at us. When he was safely inside and had set the cases down, there was a dramatic pause, the door open to the cool, late summer night, dark because the moon had not yet risen, and Dorcas appeared in the doorway.

She was a small, slender, fair woman, seeming too tiny for the space in which she stood with all the night behind her, and not nearly big enough for my imaginings. Her blondeness was another surprise, I had pictured someone dark and glamorous-looking like my aunt with a lot of blusher on her cheeks and much dark lipstick. But Dorcas was fair-skinned and had short, pale blonde hair and grey eyes. She paused, evidently waiting for her eyes to adjust to the light. Nobody spoke, she began to smile and took a few steps toward us all standing in the centre of the room to receive her. She looked around at everyone, seemed
about to move toward my aunt, she had already begun to lift her arms, when she stopped, a shiver ran through her, we could actually see her body contract, and the look on her face was as though someone had just given her news that was so horrible it appalled her.

I thought we all felt it; the sudden, soul-shaking horror that struck her. It was to me as though the lights had failed and the room momentarily darkened, or the house had been set spinning through space, and outside that open door was only endless darkness. I swear the room turned cold.

For an instant, perhaps it was longer, nobody moved; then my aunt gave a little jerk and went to Dorcas and, in one of the few gestures of tenderness I ever saw her make, she took her cousin in her arms and kissed her gently on each cheek. She released her and, still trembling faintly, Dorcas went to each of my cousins, took their hands, looked into their eyes, it was a marvel how each of them acquiesced to this, and finally reached Tonio.

Tonio had risen to his feet, but he wouldn’t look at her and she had to reach for his hands that hung in fists by his sides. She took them in hers, pressed them to her cheeks and they opened slowly, like flowers, while Tonio looked at the floor, then she let them go and he sat down again, pressing them once more between his thighs.

Then voices broke out, two or three at once, and there were shrieks and laughter, and everybody was moving around, finding places to sit, settling in.

“You’ve forgotten to introduce someone,” Dorcas said. Her voice was light and high-pitched, childish-sounding. My aunt said carelessly, not looking at me, “That’s Charlotte, Richard’s daughter.”

“She comes every single summer,” Rhonda said, and everybody looked at me. I could feel myself blushing.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Charlotte,” she said, giving my name the French pronunciation, so that it sounded beautiful and strange.

“How do you do,” I stammered, and everybody laughed and then ignored me. They began to pepper Dorcas with questions about her life, about what she had been doing and where and if it had been exciting or not, and if peculiar things had happened and what they were like. After a while Morgan got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a tray that held many different kinds of fruit all peeled and sliced and arranged so beautifully it was breathtaking. Then we drank tea and after that, brandy, even me, and more brandy, while the long evening turned hazy and warm and the corners of the room filled up with velvety shadows. Then I was being wakened by my uncle and led stumbling to my bed in the sitting room. He left me there and I did not even undress, but fell asleep with my head on the folded sheets I had been meant to put on the couch.

When I woke it was just beginning to be light and the birds were singing madly in the lilac and honeysuckle bushes right outside the open sitting room window. My head was throbbing and my mouth parched. I sat up trying to remember where I was and why. Gradually it all came back to me and in that grim awakening, the first of my life like that, an adult awakening, I remembered not the gaiety of the night before, but the strange thing that had happened when Dorcas had walked into the house.

I got up, still in my clothes from the day before, and went toward the kitchen to get a drink of water. The house was shrouded in silence and shadows and the noise of the birds faded as I moved into the kitchen.

Someone was sitting at the table against the far wall, the face a pale oval floating in the grey light. I stopped, frightened at this apparition, not even surprising in this house of mute voices, of
veiled forces. The house was foreign this morning, it was as if my visits to this place had changed irrevocably, as if I had been on my last visit and had not even known it; perhaps it was over already. I paused, frightened, and rubbed at my eyes.

“Charlotte,” the apparition said, and I recognized Dorcas. I wanted to speak but my throat and mouth were so dry I could only make a croaking sound. “Come and sit here,” she said. Obediently I crossed the room and sat beside her. I shivered a little, perhaps I was still afraid, and she took my aunt’s shawl that was hanging over the back of a chair and put it around my shoulders. It was a delicate grey, fringed, and made of wonderfully soft wool.

“I sent her this from Peru,” she said, her voice distant, yet fond.

“Peru?” I croaked, hardly knowing what I was saying. She lifted a teapot and then I noticed that she had been drinking tea. She poured me a cup, it was pale and hot, and I took a slow sip, barely lifting the cup from the saucer.

“I thought I might have company,” she said.

“Is it time to get up?” I asked, the tea having loosened my throat. I squinted, trying to read the clock on the stove across the room.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t been to bed,” and she gave a little, conspiratorial laugh. “Why not?” I asked, astonished.

“I had things to work out,” Dorcas said, “and I knew I wouldn’t sleep.”

“I always think that,” I told her, “but the next thing I know, I’m asleep.” I was rueful, remembering the times I had tried to stay up with my cousins, who thought nothing of staying up all night and sleeping all day. I noticed that when I tried to lift the cup my hands were trembling. I looked at them, puzzled.

“It’s the brandy,” Dorcas explained. “It’ll pass when you sleep
some more.” Even though the light coming through the window was turning golden as the sun rose, it seemed to me that everything was grey. There was a heaviness in the air, it was as though if I tried to rise from my chair I would not be able to, and I could not shake the feeling that something was over, that something had ended, although I didn’t know what.

After a while Dorcas asked me in a gentle voice, “Do you like coming here?”

“Yes!” I said at once, with a passion that surprised even me, and then, softly, shaking my head, near tears, “no.” Dorcas smiled.

“I know,” she said.

We sat without speaking for a minute while I gratefully sipped the hot tea and tried to shake my feeling of the inexorable sadness of things.

Gradually I began to feel calmer, my hands stopped shaking and my thirst was quenched. But the strong emotion that had me in its grip remained. When I think about it now, I realize that something emanated from Dorcas. It was that she was more of a person than her small body had room for and so the force of her character, or its aura or something, existed for a radius of several feet around her, and if you sat near her as I was, you found yourself inside her. That’s how it was that morning, I think. It was as though I was inside Dorcas, and everything I saw or felt was coloured by what she was seeing and feeling.

“You are much like I was when I was twelve years old,” she said to me. I turned to her, doubting what I had heard.

“What?” I asked, faltering.

“I too, had a childhood without delight,” she said, and smiled at me. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but I was confused and dizzy from being told that I was like her, which I wanted to believe, but could not.

“Do spirits really talk to you?” I asked, then ducked my head, embarrassed.

“Yes, they do,” she said, gravely. “Ever since I was a child.”

“Like Tonio’s voices?” I asked, gaining courage.

“No,” she said, “at least I don’t think so. Tonio’s voices are cruel.” She hesitated, turning her head away, blinking, then steadily, back to me. “But they tell me things, and I have dreams, too. I dream things.”

“What things?” I asked, breathless with apprehension. I had dreams too, many of them, that I told no one about. I didn’t like them, they were too frightening.

“Oh,” she said, careless now, “you probably don’t remember this, but not long ago a plane crashed with an important British diplomat on board. And as it was happening in Japan, I was at home dreaming about it.” She paused, then went on, her voice livelier, as if this interested her. “Or I find lost things in my dreams. This ring.” She lifted her hand, the one on the side away from me, and I saw again the elaborate silver ring with the large, lustreless green stone in it that I had seen the night before. “I lost this once during a trip I took with a friend. I wrote letters to the hotels where I had stayed, I searched my friend’s car, but it was nowhere to be found. Then in a dream I saw it in the tall grass against the old stone wall in a churchyard we had walked through looking at the graves. I went back, and there it was, exactly as I’d dreamt.”

A moaning cry came floating up the stairs from the basement, followed by another, fainter.

“It’s only Tonio,” I said, anxious to reassure her. “He doesn’t sleep very well. He has dreams too.”

“Yes, Tonio,” she said softly, but the feeling I was getting from her, that feeling of something being very wrong and changed forever grew so strong that I almost cried out to her to stop. She
looked at the tabletop still dusted with crumbs from our evening meal the day before, and said, “Charlotte,” again the French pronunciation that sounded so beautiful to me, “Charlotte, what you feel in this house is really there. You must go home, and don’t come here anymore.” I thought about this for a moment, but I was not surprised. I had known she would say that, sometimes I think I had wakened that morning, lying on that hard couch, knowing this very thing, and that she would say it.

She put her hand on mine, the one that had trembled when I lifted the teacup. Her hand wasn’t much bigger than my child’s hand, but more delicate than mine and fine-boned, and I felt now an overwhelming warmth coming from her that comforted and soothed me, from the pain that I suddenly understood I had always been in, because of the mystery of the world and all the things I didn’t know or understand.

“Go back to bed and sleep,” she said, and she leaned toward me and kissed me with formality on each cheek. I can still feel the kisses, it seems to me that the love they expressed lingers, cannot be erased.

I was about to tell her that I couldn’t move, when I found myself rising, as if on the air, moving away from the table, across the room, going into the sitting room where I pulled the blanket someone had tossed onto the couch up over me and went at once to sleep.

I have said that my uncle spoke very little, except occasionally to correct my aunt who was given to lying, in a mild, passionless, yet incontrovertible manner. Yet sometimes, very rarely, he would begin to speak, and when he did, everyone would stop whatever they were doing—Morgan’s sulk would melt, Rhonda’s inattentiveness and nervousness would dissolve, Tonio would close his eyes and slowly relax, and even Aunt Jacqueline
would look right at him as if she couldn’t have looked away if she tried—and everyone would listen.