When he turned around again he met Mrs. Klapper's eyes and knew that he had made a tactical error. There was speculation in her stare, compounded with wonder and a certain amount of awe. She had never looked at him like that before, and the fear that is never far from the hearts of affectionate people returned to his own. He had not considered the effect his casual knowledge of the cemetery might have on her, because he had not even thought of it as knowledge. Someone had asked him for directions, as they had occasionally over nineteen years, and he had known the way. Now, at best, she would mark him as unusual, a freak perhaps, at all events a man with a gimmick memory. She would be amused—she seemed easily amused—but from that time on, she would think of him as a little less than human. That would be the best that could happen. At worst, she would not be amused. She would ask questions, and he would have to lie to her, as he had once before. This depressed him; he did not want to lie to her again, and he knew how poor a liar he was.
He turned away before the couple were out of sight and looked at the mausoleum with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped back. "Well," he said with what he hoped was a calculating but quite unprofessional air. "Well, this certainly is a big house." That was safe. That wouldn't take nineteen years of living in a cemetery to figure out. A man could just look at it and see how big it was. "It certainly is," he said again.
Behind him, Mrs. Klapper said, "I hope they find the place they were looking for."
"Me too," said Mr. Rebeck. "I may very easily have given them the wrong directions. I wasn't at all sure."
"Oh?" Mrs. Klapper was standing at his side now. "You seemed pretty sure."
"Well, you know how it is." Mr. Rebeck smiled hopefully at her. "A man hates to have people think he doesn't know his way around."
Mrs. Klapper smiled back. "Believe me, I understand."
There was a long silence, during which Mr. Rebeck looked at the Klapper mausoleum with frantic admiration and Mrs. Klapper rummaged for a handkerchief in her purse. It took her a while to find it because she was looking at Mr. Rebeck, and when she did find it she held it in her hand for some time and then stuffed it back into her purse.
"One headstone," she said quietly. "That's what gets me. A mausoleum, all right, a mausoleum I could see. But one headstone out of a thousand, five thousand, this takes a very good memory."
"I've got a very good memory," Mr. Rebeck said. It was to be the living-room sorcery then. "I can take a deck of cards and—"
"I know you've got a good memory," Mrs. Klapper said absently. "This must be a real blessing. Me, I'm always forgetting things. Did you ever find your watch?"
The question was asked in such an expressionless tone of voice that it took Mr. Rebeck a moment to realize that it was a question at all. When he did realize it, he answered hastily, without looking at his forearm.
"Yes," he said. "I found it right along Fairview, about a mile from the gate. It must have dropped off while I was talking to you and I didn't even notice it."
As he spoke he looked down at his wrist. It was brown, like the rest of his arm, and covered with fine black hairs. He did not look up immediately.
"I left it home today," he said softly. "It had to be fixed." He raised his eyes very gradually and looked at Mrs. Klapper. "Something was wrong with it."
Mrs. Klapper looked at him for a long time, and he looked back at her. There is nothing marvelous about meeting a person's eyes, he thought. Your eyes may start to water after a bit and you may get a kink in your neck, but the soul is far behind the eyes and doesn't even know what's going on up front. So he stared back at Mrs. Klapper, directly and with dignity, until she began to blur and go out of focus.
It was Mrs. Klapper who looked away at last. She walked to the steps of the mausoleum and sat down. "All right," she said. "Forget it. Forget I asked anything. A woman shouldn't play detective. It makes people lie to her, and then she catches them lying and feels proud of herself. Forget I asked. I'm a nosy old woman and I want to know too much. Don't tell me anything."
Mr. Rebeck rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and felt the sweat there. "Mrs. Klapper—" he began.
"Don't tell me anything." Mrs. Klapper made a cutting motion with the edge of her hand. "It's better I shouldn't know. I got a very bad habit."
Mr. Rebeck rubbed his neck again and looked down at her. Quite suddenly he grinned. "Move over," he said.
Mrs. Klapper blinked at him a little bewilderedly. She moved over slightly on the mausoleum step.
"I have to think for a moment." He sat down beside her and looked at the ground. He could feel her eyes on him, but he did not turn his head.
Rebeck, he thought, you have reached one of those Crossroads people write about. As it is your first Crossroad in a good while, I think you ought to take very good care of it and examine it carefully. Not too long, though, please. There is a hypnotizing quality about Crossroads. You can stand and look at them long and long, as Whitman insisted on putting it, and forget the Cross.
He looked down at his wrist and thought, If you had been wearing a wrist watch for any length of time, there would be a white band around your wrist where the sun could not reach. Hurray for you, Jonathan. You and Mrs. Klapper ought to form a detective society.
Should I tell her now? he wondered. Why not? I've been telling everybody lately. Don't exaggerate, Rebeck. Who is everybody? Michael and Laura. Michael and Laura hardly count. They're ghosts. They know what's possible and what isn't. This woman is alive. Make no mistake about that. She is alive, and that means she can hear the truth. It does not mean that she will know it when she hears it.
You'll have to tell her sooner or later. She'll be just as incredulous whenever you do. At worst, she'll run screaming out of here, which might be very interesting to watch, but lonesome later on. At best—what would she do at best? Probably say something like "Okay, but isn't it a little silly?" What will you do then? Maybe it is a little silly.
Get off the Crossroads, Rebeck. You are beginning to turn around in small, neat circles. A car might hit you.
Maybe it is silly, he thought again. That has nothing to do with it. A lot of serious things are silly, even to the people who do them. That's no way out.
Look at it another way. If you don't tell her, she won't ask you again, but she won't like you very much because you've made her feel nosy. Oh, she will be friendly and cheerful and all that because she is friendly and cheerful. She'll simply stop coming. Even to see her husband, if it means running into you. On the occasions you do meet, you'll smile and wave furiously at each other, the furious-ness increasing in direct proportion to the distance between you. Right there you have the nucleus of one of those fifty-year friendships.
Is she that important to you? Privacy is important too, and there is less of it.
No. She is not that important. Not yet. I barely know her. She is not important as an individual. She is a Symbol.
Oh, that's fine. A Symbol of what?
How should I know? As Symbols go, though, she's very nice.
Mrs. Klapper shifted impatiently beside him. "Rebeck, pardon an old woman, but are you laying an egg?"
Whenever Mr. Rebeck thought about it later on, he was always sure that the scales were kicked over when she called him by his name. She never had before. Laura always called him Mr. Rebeck.
He got up and stretched, thumping his chest as if he were taking a shower. Then he looked down at Mrs. Klapper.
"Come on," he said. "Let's walk."
Chapter 8
Hills had no meaning for Laura any more. She remembered them; in the cemetery there were roads that arched up suddenly, curved and hung, and then dipped to rise again, coiling on themselves like toads' tongues, and these she accepted as hills. Even now, if she thought hard, she could remember what it had been like to climb hills. But the actual rise and fall of land under her feet as she walked did not reach her. Roads and walking she remembered; so under her feet there were pavement and gravel and yellow-brown dirt, pebbles, weeds, grass, even the stunted star that she had been told lived at the center of the earth. Where Laura walked there existed only what Laura remembered, and Laura had forgotten about up and down. So there was no up and down now, exactly as there is no up and down in space, and Laura walked a flat, submissive road that her feet never quite touched.