Thirteen Phantasms (19 page)

He listened at the bedroom door and allowed himself to imagine that even now she sat inside, reading in the chair by the window, that he could push the door open and simply tell her he was sorry, straighten things out once and for all. If only he had a chance to
explain
himself! He reached for the doorknob, hesitated, dizzy for a moment with the uncanny certainty that all the emptiness in the house was drifting out from within that single room, wafting under the door, settling on the furniture, on the carpets, on the lampshades and books like soot in a train yard.

Setting his teeth, he turned the knob and pushed open the door, peering carefully inside. Very nearly everything was as he remembered: the chairs by the window, the long bookcase on the wall, their bird’s-eye maple chests, the cedar trunk at the foot of the bed. He walked in, crossing the floor to the bedside table. On top of it lay a glass paperweight, a silver spoon, and a faded postcard with a picture of a boardwalk on it—Atlantic City? Jimmerson almost recognized it. He had been there before, he and Edna had. He picked up the paperweight and looked into its translucent glass, clouded by milky swirls. He could almost see a face in the swirls, but when it occurred to him that it was Edna’s face, he set it down again and turned to the bottom shelf of the table. A liqueur glass sat there. There was a greenish residue in the bottom, an oily smear, which smelled vaguely of camphor and juniper and weeds. He set the glass down and forced himself to look at the bed.

It was a single bed now, and although it wasn’t a hospital bed, there were cloth and Velcro restraints affixed to the frame—wrist and ankle restraints both.

•

He rang Mrs. Crandle’s doorbell, then stood back a couple of steps so as not to push her. She opened the door wide—no peering through the crack—and the look on her face held loathing and indifference both. “So you’ve come back,” she said flatly. Her white hair hung over her forehead in a wisp, and her house smelled of cabbage and ironing.

“I’ve come back.”

“Now that Edna’s dead you’ve come back to take her things.” She nodded when she said this, as if it stood to reason.

“
Our
things, Mrs. Crandle,” he said unwisely.

“You have
no
claim,” she said, cutting him off. “You walked out on that poor woman and left her to that … parlor rat. You might as well have killed her yourself. You
did
kill her. As sure as you’re standing here now, Doyle Jimmerson, you took the breath of life right out of that poor woman.” She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to slam the door in his face.

“I didn’t kill her, Mrs. Crandle. After forty years of marriage she chose another man, and I …”

“She chose nothing,” Mrs. Crandle said. “She met a man who was a conversationalist, unlike some men I could name, a man of culture and breeding, and you flew off the handle. What did she want for herself but some of the finer things in life?—a nice dinner now and then at the French Café instead of once a month at the Steer Inn. You’re beer and skittles, Doyle Jimmerson, but a little bit of Edna wanted a glass of champagne. That’s all she wanted, Mr. Jimmerson, if you’re capable of taking my meaning. And when she stood up for herself, you walked out, as if she was having some kind of affair.”

“A conversationalist?
That’s
what he was? I can think of a couple of other terms that aren’t half as polite. Even you called him a parlor rat. Him and his stinking chin whiskers, his damned champagne. I couldn’t stand it. I told her what I’d do before I’d stand it.” But even when he said it he knew it was false. Anyone can stand anger. He could simply have thrown his anger out with the bath water. Loneliness and betrayal were another matter, not so easy to throw out. What had Edna suffered? The question silenced him.

“Yes, I did call him a rat,” Mrs. Crandle said evenly. “And I’ll just remind you that you abandoned your wife to that creature, even though you knew what he was. You couldn’t take him, so you left Edna to take him. And
she
found out too late, didn’t she? All of us did. Now she’s dead and you’ve come down here to gloat. You won the war. To the victor go the spoils, eh?”

“I’m not the victor, Mrs. Crandle. I didn’t win.”

“No, you didn’t, Mr. Jimmerson. You lost something more than you know.”

He nodded his agreement. He couldn’t argue with that. “What do you mean she found out ‘too late’? Did the Frenchman have anything to do with … ”

“Nothing and everything, I guess you could say. No more nor less than you had.”

“Help me out here, Mrs. Crandle. Edna … she wouldn’t tell me much.”

“Well I’ll tell you a thing or two. You went inside that house just now, that house where you yourself should have been living this last long year. And so maybe you’ve seen the room where she died. I was with her there in the last couple of weeks. I stayed by her.”

“I thank you for that.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment, as if she were tired of him. “You saw the bed?”

“I saw the bed, Mrs. Crandle. I saw the restraints.”

“There was almost nothing left of her there at the end. That’s all I can tell you. And I mean
nothing
. She was empty, Mr. Jimmerson, like something made out of sea foam. Any gust of wind might have blown her into the sky. At night, when the moon was overhead, she … she would start drifting away, poor thing.”

“The moon … ” he said, not quite comprehending. The word “lunacy” crept into his mind. He pictured that lonely bed again, Mrs. Crandle sitting in Edna’s seat by the window, knitting and knitting while Edna drifted away, strapped to the bed frame, their old double bed out in the driveway going to bits in the weather. “She … When she called the last couple of times she sounded a little confused. Like she had lost track of things, you know. She even forgot who I was, who she had called. I guess I just didn’t didn’t grasp that.”

“That’s a crying shame.”

“Worse than that. I was pretty sure of myself, Mrs. Crandle—sure that I was in the right. What I mean is that I was so damned self-righteous that I put top spin on everything she said. Heaven help me I even twisted what she didn’t say. She can tell me all about the Frenchman, was what I thought at the time, but she doesn’t know her own damned husband of forty years. Hell,” he said, and he rubbed his face tiredly, conscious now that rain was starting to fall again, pattering against the porch roof. “I guess I thought she was trying to get my goat.”

“And so you got mad again. You hung up the phone.”

“I did. I got mad. I was a damned fool, Mrs. Crandle, but there’s not a thing that I can do about it now.”

“Well you’re right about that, anyway, if it’s any consolation to you.”

“Tell me about it, then. Was it Alzheimer’s?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I’m not certain it was in the medical books at all. It was a wasting disease. That’s all I can tell you. Sorrow did it. Sorrow and abandonment. Gravity weighed too heavily upon her, Mr. Jimmerson, and when it looked like it would crush her, she did what she had to do.
She made herself light
. That’s the only truth you’ll find down here. I can’t tell you anything more than that.” Mrs. Crandle swung the door nearly shut now, and he shoved his foot against the jamb to block it.

“Where is she, Mrs. Crandle? You can tell me that much.”

“Over at Angel’s Flight,” she said through the nearly closed door. “They buried her last week. No service of course, except for the Father from up at the Holy Childhood. He said a few words alongside the grave, but it was just me and a couple of the others from the old bridge club. I suppose you can get over there tonight and make your peace if you want to. Or leastwise you can
try
to make your peace. I hope you can find the words.” She shut the door firmly now, against his shoe, and then opened it long enough for him to jerk his foot out before slamming it shut again.

He hadn’t gotten anything out of her except bitterness, which was as much as he deserved. He headed down the porch steps, realizing that he hadn’t really wanted to know about the bed restraints. What he wanted to know was what had gone through her mind while he was sitting full of self-pity up in Seattle. What she had thought about
him
, about the long years that they were married, what her loneliness
felt
like. He had lost her for a year, and he wanted that year back, along with all the rest that he hadn’t paid any attention to. No matter that it was bound to be a Pandora’s box, full of sorrow and demons, and perhaps without Hope at the bottom, either.

•

Evening had fallen, with big clouds scudding across the sky in a wild race, the rain falling steadily now. He headed up Lemon Street through the downpour. The street lamps were on, haloed by the misty rain, and the gutters already ran with water. Living rooms and front porches were lighted, and he saw a man and a woman looking out through a big picture window at the front of one of the houses, watching the rain the way people sit and watch a fire in a fireplace. He thought of where he would sleep tonight and knew that it wouldn’t be among the dusty ghosts in the house; the back of the Mercury would be good enough for him, parked in the driveway, despite what Mrs. Crandle would think and what it would do to his back.

Where Lemon dead-ended into Marigold, he turned up through the big wrought iron gates of the cemetery, and drove slowly toward the stone building nearly hidden in the shade of a cluster of vast trees. Vines climbed the walls of the three-story granite mausoleum, and light shone out from within a deep lamp-lit portico in the tower that served as an entry. There was a second high tower at the rear of the building, lit by lamps hidden on the mausoleum roof. This second tower was clearly a columbarium, the hundreds of wall niches set with tiny doors. A stone stairway spiraled upward around it, and rainwater washed down the stairs now as if it were a mountain cataract. Beyond the tower lay a hundred feet of lawn strewn with headstones, and beyond that a walnut grove stretched away into the darkness, the big white-trunked walnut trees mostly empty of leaves. Above the shadowy grove the moon shone past the edge of a cloud. Jimmerson angled the Mercury into a parking stall, cut the engine, and sat watching for another moment as an owl flew out of the grove and disappeared beneath the eaves of the tower. He got out of the car, slammed the door, and hunched through the rain, ducking in under the portico roof where he rang the bell.

He heard footsteps inside, and the arched door opened slowly to reveal a high-ceilinged room with stone floors and dark wood paneling. The man in the doorway was tall and thin, with a stretched, Lincolnesque face and a rumpled black suit. Jimmerson stepped into the room, which smelled of gardenias, and the man swung the door shut against the rain.

“It’s a hellish night,” he said, and he nodded at Jimmerson. “I’m George Gladstone.”

“Doyle Jimmerson, Mr. Gladstone. I’m glad to meet you.”

“I see. You must be Edna Jimmerson’s … ?”

“Husband.” He felt like a fraud. “I was in Seattle when I heard. On business. I drove straight down.”

“I’m certain you got here as quickly as you could, Mr. Jimmerson, and welcome to Angel’s Flight.” A long sideboard stood against the far wall of the room, and on top of the sideboard was a bowl of floating gardenia blossoms and an iron clock. The sound of the ticking clock filled the mausoleum. A gilt-framed painting hung above the sideboard depicting a man and a woman dressed in robes, ascending into heaven in defiance of gravity. An arched door stood open in the clouds, and the Earth lay far below. Here and there above it more people were ascending, tiny wingless angels rising into the sky against the blue of the ocean.

“Very nice picture,” Jimmerson said. And he peered more closely at the door in the clouds, at the light that shone from beyond it. There was something in the spiral brush strokes that looked like eyes, hundreds of them, staring out from heaven at the world of the living.

“We like to think of ourselves as a celestial depot, Mr. Jimmerson.”

“That’s a comforting thought.” He turned his back on the painting. “I ‘ wonder if I could see … Edna’s grave. My wife. I realize it’s late, and the weather and all …”

“Yes, of course you can.”

“You don’t have to take any trouble. If you’ll just show me the way …”

“No trouble at all, Mr. Jimmerson. Give me a moment and I’ll see to the equipage.” Jimmerson followed him into an adjacent room, where a display of coffins was laid out, the coffins set into niches along a stone wall, all of them tilted up at the head end to better show them off. Light shone down on them from candle-flame bulbs in iron chandeliers high above in the ceiling, but the light was dim and the room full of shadows cast by the coffins and by the complex framework of iron that supported them. Jimmerson looked them over, vaguely and shamefully wondering which sort Edna had been buried in—nothing expensive, probably.

They were apparently arranged in order of extravagance. A simple coffin-shaped pine box lay nearest the door, the two-piece lid nailed tight on the bottom and hinged open at the top to reveal a quilted satin lining within. There was a fancier box next to it some sort of exotic veneer with chrome hardware, and next to that a white-lacquered box with gold handles and a round glass viewing window. Jimmerson stepped across to it and looked in through the porthole, then gasped and trod back when he saw that there was someone inside—a man, pale and thin and with his coat collar too high on his neck.