He turned north on Avenue Road and west on Grant, and about two miles from the intersection he came to what Dorothy’s mother called her town house.
The neighborhood was beginning to crumble around it but the house itself remained intact, as impervious as a stone fortress with its three-storied turrets and barred windows. A medieval castle, Harry thought as he parked his car in the driveway. And inside the castle awaits the princess in her tower of ivory. Not the sleeping beauty, however. Poor Dorothy has insomnia.
He could laugh at the house, make fun of Dorothy, and even feel pity and contempt for her, but at the same time he was a little awed and uneasy and resentful in the presence of wealth, like a dwarf who has been denied some secret hormone that stimulated growth, suddenly finding himself among giants.
He pressed the door chime and waited, bracing himself as if for attack the instant the huge mahogany door opened. When the door finally opened he almost laughed out loud at the sight of a little old woman in a black uniform, no bigger or braver than Harry’s dwarf-image of himself. She stared up at him, round-eyed, as if male visitors to the household were scarce, and objects of suspicion.
“Mrs. Galloway wanted to see me,” he said. “I’m Harry Bream.”
She didn’t speak, and only the slightest nod of her head indicated that she had heard him. But she opened the door wider and Harry took it as an invitation to enter. Then she closed the door, gave a little curtsy in Harry’s general direction and darted off down the hall and up the stairs with several backward glances as if she perhaps feared pursuit.
The hall was like a museum, with a domed ceiling and marble floors and massive pieces of statuary. Harry would have liked a cigarette but there were no ash trays in sight and the walls seemed to be posted with invisible No Smoking signs. The only evidence of life in the room was a pair of battered roller skates abandoned at the bottom of the staircase. The skates struck a note of sad surprise in Harry: he was always forgetting that Dorothy had borne a child and that the child still lived here in this house. Harry hadn’t seen her for years. She was kept, or chose to remain, out of sight.
He put his hands in his pockets and waited, and in a few minutes the little old woman came darting back down the steps, her white cap bobbing up and down on her head like a captive bird.
“Mrs. Galloway will see you in her room.” She spoke very slowly and not too clearly, as if at some time in the past, through illness or injury, she had lost the ability to speak and had had to learn the use of words all over again.
Harry followed her upstairs. The pace she set was so brisk that Harry was breathing hard by the time he reached the first landing, and openly puffing when he came to the top.
Dorothy’s suite was in the south turret and the door was open.
Dorothy was stretched out on a chaise longue in a tangle of satin pillows, wearing a white lace negligee like a bride still dressed and waiting for a bridegroom long overdue. She was almost forty now, but she resembled a frail and fretful child. Extreme emaciation and years of discontent had ruined her good looks without aging her. It was as if she had been kept inaccessible to the weather in the streets. Neither sun nor wind nor rain had ever penetrated her high window.
Her mother sat in a slipper chair at Dorothy’s right, and between the two women was a long low table holding a Scrabble board with a half-finished game laid out on it.
“Harry, dear, how nice of you to come.” Dorothy extended her hand and Harry took it and pressed it for a moment, disliking the feel of the long fleshless fingers that were like claws. He noticed what an unusually high color Dorothy had and the extreme brightness of her eyes and he thought at first that she was in the throes of a fever. But her hand felt cool and her voice was alert and Harry was forced to change his opinion. Dorothy was suffering not from fever but from fury. She was, in fact, as sore as a boil.
“Harry, you remember Mother, of course?”
“Certainly. Good evening, Mrs. Reynold.”
“Good evening, Harry. So good of you to come.”
“Not at all,” Harry said politely. “I hope I’m not interrupting your game?”
“Game,” Dorothy repeated with a twist of her mouth. “It’s not much of a game. I’m miles behind as usual.”
Mrs. Reynold flushed with embarrassment. “Now, Dorothy dear, that’s not true and you know...”
“It is true. Besides, I loathe Scrabble. It gives me a headache.”
“I can’t help winning once in a while if I happen to get the right letters.”
“It’s not that I mind losing, not in the least. I’ve always been a good sport, I’ve made it a point to be a good sport, in spite of everything. Losing means nothing at all to me. It’s just that you have all the luck.”
“Now, dear, remember last night, you got the Q and the Z right at the beginning and made QUARTZ.”
Dorothy couldn’t decide between signalizing last night’s triumph and losing the argument about luck, so she turned away deliberately and said to Harry, “You must forgive us. Mother takes her Scrabble very seriously.”
“I’ve never played it,” Harry said.
“Don’t. It’s a tiresome thing. It always gives me a headache, especially when other people have all the luck. Sit down, won’t you? I’ll ring for tea.”
“Don’t bother.”
“It’s time for my medicine anyway and I can’t take it without tea. It’s the foulest stuff.”
“I’ll get the tea,” Mrs. Reynold said, rising. “I hate to bother Miss Parks when I can just as easily do it myself.”
“It’s her job to be bothered.”
“Even so, dear. I’d rather do it myself. Sometimes she forgets to scald the pot.”
Mrs. Reynold seemed both grateful for an excuse to leave and guilty about using it. As she passed Harry she gave him an anxious little look. It seemed to ask him to be kind to Dorothy, or at least tolerant.
When she had gone Dorothy said, “Mother’s bored with all this hospital routine. I am, too, only I have to stand it. I wouldn’t last a week without expert care.”
“You’re looking better, Dorothy.”
Harry knew right away that this remark was a mistake. Dorothy frowned with displeasure and her fingers plucked at one of the satin pillows. “I don’t see how I can be. I was so upset this morning Miss Parks had to call the doctor. I’ve got a new doctor, the last one was hopelessly out of date. Nothing but psychology, psychology. What good is psychology when your heart is beating like a triphammer, and the least excitement makes you feel faint?”
“What was the cause of the excitement?”
“Ron’s call. I thought your wife might have told you.”
“She didn’t.”
“I’m much calmer tonight, my pulse is just a shade under ninety — the doctor gave me an injection. Honestly, the way I’ve been prodded and poked with needles!”
“What about Ron?”
“He called here last night and told Mother he wanted to talk to me, and Mother, for some obscure reason, put him on to me. Mother means to do the right thing.” Dorothy paused and let the implication go on without her, like a riderless horse: but she never does, of course. “I wasn’t feeling very well anyway and it was after nine o’clock, past my bedtime, and I’d had a nagging pain in my left kidney all day.”
“How long after nine o’clock?”
“A few minutes. I remember taking my pulse after the call. It was,” she added with an air of satisfaction, “nearly a hundred and twenty.”
“Why did the call upset you to such an extent?”