House Next Door Page 9

  “What do you mean?” said Walter, looking at him.

  “I’m not really sure what I mean. It’s just a feeling. I had it the night of that Christ-awful party. You remember, Col, I told you—and it’s been getting stronger and stronger. If I can lick that house, I’ll get the juice back. That simple. It sounds crazy as hell, but I think that’s it.”

  We were silent, and then Walter said, “Kim, it’s just a house. Just a pile of boards and stone. You know that. You built it. What’s to lick about it? You sound like you’ve declared war on it.”

  “I have. I’m going to break it. It’s not going to break me, not like it did those poor, miserable kids and her daddy. Not like it did Abbott. Uh-uh. No way.”

  We stared at him.

  “Kim,” I said, “you can’t ascribe that—that awful business over there to the house. That’s just…lunacy. People have strokes all the time. You know what her father was like; you know that eerie, funny little thing she had going with her daddy; you know he never liked poor Buddy. And some of the most unlikely people in the world turn out to be homosexual; it’s not all that unusual, tragic as it turned out for them. We might have seen that coming—I mean, it wasn’t exactly a healthy relationship he had with his mother, and his father dying so young. God knows what Luke Abbott represented to him. He wouldn’t even have been aware of it until he was so mad and desperate, and he’d been drinking—and Luke. Now that I remember, Eloise Jennings told me when he first came down here that she’d heard there’d been something funny with a law clerk back in Connecticut. I thought she was just being Eloise, and I assumed she meant a girl when I thought about it, which wasn’t much, but law clerks are usually young men, aren’t they? It was just horrible, just awful, but at least you can sort of understand.”

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars those guys weren’t gay,” Kim said. “I’d stake my life on it. I’m absolutely certain nothing like that had ever happened to those guys before that night. Did you see their faces? They didn’t even know where they were.”

  “They’d both been drinking.”

  “No.”

  “You upset me badly when you talk like this, Kim,” I said, my voice trembling. “It isn’t you. It’s all been horrible enough without this kind of stuff. Please, please, let’s don’t talk about it anymore. You’re going to…make yourself sick. I can’t listen to any more of this.”

  He studied my face, and then Walter’s.

  “I’m sorry, both of you,” he said heavily. “I have let it get to me. I didn’t realize how much until I heard myself talking. Christ, I sound practically certifiable. Forget it, if you can. I really ought to knock off at the Douglas site for a few days and go somewhere—the beach or the mountains or something. I really am tireder than hell.”

  The talk turned to other things, and presently he heaved himself up off his chair and walked out to his car. Walter walked with him. I carried our glasses back into the kitchen and started a salad, tearing up lettuce and slicing tomatoes blindly and mechanically. Walter came back into the kitchen.

  “Walter, I’m worried sick about him,” I said. “He sounds obsessed. Almost not normal. Not at all like himself. I almost wish he had gone to Europe back when he first started talking about it. I’d miss him, but it would be better than seeing him doing this to himself.”

  “He’ll be all right, Col,” he said, leaning his chin on the top of my head. “He’s just lost his perspective. And he’s probably right about working too hard. I think a few days out of town will fix him up. Want to offer him the beach house?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “I think he’d rather find a place on his own. I don’t want to seem like I’m hovering over him. You know how he hates that.”

  “Well, you know the gentleman better than I,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’ll let him be and see what happens. If he’s determined to engage in some sort of spiritual wrestling match with that pile of rocks over there, he’s going to do it whether or not we think he’s nuttier than a fruitcake. Personally, I think he just may be enjoying the drama of the whole thing a tiny trifle.”

  “Whatever it is, he’s not enjoying it,” I began, but I could see from his face that he did not want to talk about Kim Dougherty anymore, and so I dropped it.

  A week later the “For Sale” sign came down and Buck and Anita Sheehan moved into the house next door.

  PART TWO

  The Sheehans

  9

  THE FIRST THING we noticed about Anita Sheehan was a nervous, vivid luminosity, a hectic radiance that seemed to flicker like a candle in the wind. The second thing was her shyness. It was painful, almost palpable, so that you hated to intrude upon it with even a smile or a wave. I had never seen anyone so eager to go unnoticed. There was nothing in it of unfriendliness or unnatural modesty or exclusivity. It was the pure, shining agony of a lonely and unlovely child.

  But Anita Sheehan was not unlovely. She was beautiful, almost as beautiful as Virginia Guthrie in an exotic, strangely Eurasian way—high cheekbones, too sharply shadowing her face, as though she had been ill recently; long winglike brows repeating the arch of her cheekbones over dark, lash-shuttered eyes; a tremulous child’s mouth and small pointed chin. Her hair was a heavy mass of pure black, without luster but also without the hard chalkiness that spoke of dye. Her tall body was fragile and far too thin. You could almost see through the white skin of her hands.

  Yet for all her physical magnificence—“My God, it’s Tondelayo,” Walter said reverently when we first saw the Sheehans from the window of the den the morning the moving van arrived—there was something bleached, faded, scrimmed, as though with gauze, about her. I thought then that she probably had been very ill.

  “She looks like a Persian cat,” Walter said. “One that somebody’s starved and beaten. She looks like she’d bolt if you clapped your hands. Christ, I wonder if they know about what happened over there.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, looking at the well-cut slacks and shirt that hung too loosely on the woman’s slender figure but still said money. “Margaret Matthieson said she didn’t tell them when they bought the house. They’d looked for so long, he said, and she apparently just fell in love with the house when she saw it and seemed so grateful to find it and so anxious to move in. Margaret said she just didn’t have the heart. Besides, she said some sixth sense told her not to. She says there are some people you can tell about any trouble there’s been in a house and they won’t turn a hair, and there are some you can’t. Apparently she’s one of the can’ts. Margaret said she seemed very frail and nervous, and he was terribly protective and solicitous toward her, so she figured she’d been sick or something.”

  “Sheehan, you said,” Walter said.

  “Yes. Buck and Anita Sheehan. From somewhere in New Jersey. He’s taken over the Computer Tech branch, but that’s all I know about them. Margaret said he saw the house last week and bought it the next day, and she came down yesterday, and that’s it. I don’t think they know a soul in town, so they probably wouldn’t have heard. I hope nobody finds it necessary to blurt it out. She does look like a breeze would blow her away, doesn’t she? Well, what do you think? Shall we go over and introduce ourselves?”

  “I guess so,” Walter said without enthusiasm. I knew what he was thinking. The Sheehans seemed, from our window, at least, attractive people, but somehow I did not yet want to get close to the people who would live in that house. Some portent of pain and madness lay around the frail woman’s shoulders like smoke. There was a small, leaden clot of dread deep behind my ribs, too, whenever I looked across at the Harralson house. Too soon, it was too soon.

  But we did go, late that afternoon, after the moving van had ground and lumbered out of the driveway and down the street. I do not lean to popping in on new neighbors with casseroles and hearty smiles; indeed, the Harralsons had been my first experience with new neighbors, and Pie’s gregariousness had solved that problem for us early on. But soon after we had moved into our own hous
e Claire and Roger had walked over just to say hello and welcome to the neighborhood, and Charles and Virginia Guthrie had stopped in briefly the next day, and it was simply what one did on our street. Now it was our turn, and we could not, of course, ignore the Sheehans. I knew they had seen us; Buck Sheehan had given us a cheerful grin as we’d left for work that morning, and we’d waved back, and Anita had come face to face with Walter when he drove in from work that afternoon, her arms piled high with books, and had given him a startled, frozen little smile, and averted her face and hurried into the house.

  So I cut a hasty armful of purple iris and we walked across the driveway and up the bank to the house next door, following the natural pathway that broke through the towering rhododendrons that marked our property line. My feet seemed reluctant to climb the small rise that I had climbed so often before when the Harralsons had lived there. I had not been over to the house since that terrible last night, had not even looked often at the house, waiting quiet and empty and beautiful among the still trees in the pure, early summer sun. Razz went with us as far as the edge of our driveway, then stopped and sat down and watched us out of sight through the foliage. At the place in the side yard where I had stumbled over the puppy Walter took my hand, and I squeezed his gratefully but said nothing. For some reason my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry.

  Anita Sheehan answered the doorbell. For a moment she stared out at us blindly, as though the sun were shining in her eyes, though it was setting behind the trees across the street now, and the front door lay in green shadow. Seen closely, her face was years older than I had thought when I first saw her from our window. The translucent white skin was webbed about the eyes and mouth with fine lines, like cobwebs. Deeper lines bracketed her child’s vulnerable mouth and cut across her high forehead. Her eyes were wide and had an unfocused look. At first I thought her gaze was riveted in dread at something over our heads, but then I realized that we had taken her by surprise and she was frightened. I did not know what to say and so said nothing, feeling for a long moment large and awkward and deeply embarrassed.

  Then her eyes seemed to register us, and the wide whiteness in them dwindled, and she smiled a convulsive little smile. “Hello. I’m Colquitt Kennedy from next door” and “You must be Mrs. Kennedy from next door” we said together, in a rush, and then stopped. I laughed, and she did too, and her face was younger and sweeter and almost gay for a moment. Then it closed again.

  “Let’s start over,” I said. “I’m Colquitt Kennedy from next door, and this is my husband, Walter, and we just wanted to give you these and say welcome to the neighborhood.”

  She reached out with thin arms and took the iris, looking down at them as if she had never seen iris before, and back at me. Her smile trembled.

  “I’m Anita Sheehan,” she said. “This is really lovely of you, they’re perfectly beautiful—the house is such a mess, I—let me go put them in some water, and then—you must meet my husband, Buck—” She was gone from the doorway before either of us could speak. We stood in the open door uncertain whether she intended us to come in, to wait, or to go away. I wanted desperately to slip back across the driveway, not to intrude on her any longer, not to feel the physical force of her terror—if that’s what it was—under my impaling gaze. I could not move.

  Beside me, Walter started to say something, and then a man’s large bulk filled the doorway, and a man’s voice, genial and overbright, swam out to meet us. I got a confused impression of enormous hands, furred on their backs with dark hair, and a heavy, tanned face starred with startlingly beautiful black-lashed blue eyes. The man’s voice was distinctly southern New Jersey, but his face, as the cliché goes, was the very map of Ireland. His dark hair was thick and rough and would have curled if it had been longer, and his jaw was square and only slightly slackened underneath with age and weight, and his smile was wide and white and sweet. You knew instantly that it was as genuine as it was ingenuous. He wore faded running trunks and a tee shirt with the ubiquitous Lacoste alligator on the breast, and his feet were bare.

  “Hi, neighbors,” he boomed, but somehow it was not an offensive, intruding boom. “I’m Buck Sheehan. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We’ve been enjoying your garden all day, and those sure are pretty flowers you brought. Anita’s putting them in water now.” He came out onto the doorstep and pulled the door closed behind him gently.

  “Walter Kennedy,” said Walter. “And this is my wife, Colquitt.”

  I put out my hand, and he pressed it warmly. “We’re happy that you’re here,” I said. “I know how it is on the first day in a new house, and we’re certainly not going to keep you. I just thought you might need something, or maybe want to use our telephone, or something…”

  “Thanks. Ours is in and working,” he said. “It’s just a matter of raking through the debris now. I didn’t realize how much you can accumulate in twenty years in the same place. This house is a good bit bigger than our old one, but somehow we’ve managed to clutter up every corner of it, and one reason we liked it was all the space. Well. It’ll just take a few days. I’d ask you in, but I’m afraid Anita’s pretty whipped. I didn’t give her much notice when I made this move, and she’s worked herself almost to death. Please forgive her if she doesn’t come out. Anita’s the kind of woman who wants everything just so before anybody sees it. And she hasn’t been very well…”

  He looked at us anxiously, as if silently imploring us to understand something that he could not or would not put into words. I realized that he did not want us to think him unfriendly or his wife’s behavior odd. I liked him suddenly and finally, in a way I seldom do people I have just met. The way I had liked Kim Dougherty. I knew Walter liked him too, because he settled himself loosely and comfortably against the porch railing and began to tell Buck about the day we had moved into our house.

  It had been a typical harried suburban moving day, complete with a moving van gone astray, burst cartons leaking excelsior and canned goods, and Walter and I, hideously begrimed, trapped like animals in our barren burrow by the gloved, hatted and calling-carded Misses Fortenberry from down the street. By the time Walter was through the story Buck was laughing aloud, a great tasting, relishing laugh, and Walter and I were grinning with pleasure at his enjoyment. “They’ll undoubtedly call on you too, along with everybody else,” I said.

  His face sobered and closed; he looked alert and nearly alarmed.

  “But not for a while, not until you get settled in,” I added quickly.

  “I don’t think Anita will be ready for company for a little while,” he said apologetically but quite definitely. And somehow I knew that I was meant to spread the word quietly on the street: Let the Sheehans be for now. Well, I thought, I’ll warn off Claire and Virginia, but I’m not going up and down the street to plead for Anita Sheehan’s precious privacy. If she wants to be alone she should have picked a house in the country with no neighbors on either side for ten miles. I was obscurely annoyed at having to assume any responsibility at all for yet another woman in that house. But then my sense of fairness raised its head; I treasure my privacy too. But I manage to insure my own, somehow. Walter does not run interference for me. Buck Sheehan obviously did for Anita.

  As though he sensed my slight drawing away, he turned to face us, and his face was very quiet and somehow pleading and tender at the same time.

  “Anita has been sick,” he said. “She was in the hospital for more than eight months. She’s only been out three weeks. We thought—the doctors said—they said that a complete change would be good for her. This new job came up about a month ago, and since the timing was right and we’ve never been anywhere near the South, I took it almost on the spur of the moment. And so far it has been good for her. She likes the slower pace and the peace—we had a pretty hectic life in Jersey. I traveled a lot. She was by herself too much. I won’t be traveling much now, and this seems to be a quiet neighborhood, and she truly loves the house. She’ll like you too. She’s a f
riendly, sweet gal when she isn’t…before she got sick. She’s just got to take it very, very easy and slow. She’s going to be completely fine. But I hope you’ll forgive her if she seems nervous. It’s hard to get back in the world when you’ve been out of it so long.”

  He stopped. He looked down at his big hands.

  “Well, of course,” I said. “I’m sorry she’s been sick, but I’m glad she’s going to be okay. You tell her for me that I understand perfectly, and so will everybody on the street. Tell her to take her time, and by all means call or come over if she needs anything at all. I’ll give you all about a week, and then I’ll have you to supper with the Swansons up the street and the Guthries on your left, maybe. Just quiet, and slacks or shorts and hamburgers or something. And meanwhile you come over for a drink whenever you like. We get home from work around six, and we’re in and out on weekends.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy,” said Buck Sheehan. “Thank you very much. We’d like to have dinner with you. She’ll be settled in and rested by then. It’ll be just the thing for her. She’s just overdone it for today.”

  We said goodbye and turned to go. He did not go back into the house. We half-paused, the way you do when you know someone is looking at your back, as if there were something unfinished hanging in the air.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said. We turned.

  “Have you folks got any children?”

  It was not so much a peculiar question as a peculiar time to ask it. These small ritual sniffings—the finding of slots and niches for each other—are usually accomplished in the first few moments of conversation, pontoons laid down, one by one, in the bridge that will lead to friendship, or away from it. The lapse of time and space around his question gave it an odd portent. Did the Sheehans have children, then, and hope for suitable companions for them? I had not noticed, in the subliminal summing-up sweep I had made of the Sheehans and their worldly goods during the day, any evidence of children. Or did they dislike children, hope that there would be none near?