“Why not?” I asked a little sharply.
“Ice. Never make it.”
I studied him, perhaps making sure he wasn’t hiding some darker reason, and just that instant his match flared, lighting up the stripped-down, shabby interior of the cab. He leaned close, cocking the cigarette toward the flame with his stubbly lips and squinting like a man with one eye. “Eight dollars,” he said.
It was an outrage, heaven knew; but the driver so obviously knew it himself, even giving me a squint-eyed, stub-toothed smile, that I accepted my luck as if Providence had sent it — I was on expenses anyway — paid him, got out (there were no dogs in sight, though those we’d passed on the road were still barking), and, carrying my bag, made my way through the needle-fine, blowing snow up the hill. Behind and below me, I heard the cab pull away, heading back down toward the lights of the city, leaving me in heavier darkness.
It was a gloomy old place, chilling as a barrow — not at all my kind of thing — and the closer I got to it, the gloomier it became, also the quieter. I arrived at a kind of graveyard gate, writing over the top, formed of rusty iron letters, too many of them missing for the name of the place to be readable. I thought, inevitably, of creaky old allegories, demented gothic tales — a thought that began in amused detachment but ended somewhere else, so that a shiver went up my spine. The place really did give off the smell, or rather the idea, of death.Who would have chosen such a house, coming to Madison as a young professor, except for the reason that once it had been a splendid residence — wide porches, sunken gardens — and even now might be brought back, as he must have thought, might be made a grand place in which to raise a large family, give parties? It hardly took second sight to make out that the young woman who’d dreamed of playing hostess here was no longer among the living, or that the young professor who had proudly, somewhat fearfully taken the deed and mortgage had been changed, by various accidents, to another man entirely.
The gate stood partway open, just a narrow gap. I held my bag in front of me and, pushing against wind, went through. I was in among the pines now. It was as if I’d all at once lost my hearing.
Before I had my glove off to grope for and ring the bell, Professor Agaard was at the door. “Come in!” he shouted. His voice cracked out like a trumpet, belligerent and fearful. The door he held open, just a foot or so, was huge; he clutched the edge with both hands. It had heavy locks on it. He was smiling as if in panic, dressed as he’d been last night, rumpled suit, dark, frayed silk tie. “Terrible out,” he said loudly, somewhat accusingly, “I’m surprised you bothered.”
“It’s not as bad, down in the city,” I said.
“No, I don’t suppose so. It never is.”
After I’d stepped in, slipping my hat off and stamping to knock off snow, he pushed the door shut, leaning against it with his back like a child — and no wonder: the man was even smaller, more doll-like than I’d remembered; the top of his head came no higher than the middle of my chest. He drew off his spectacles to wipe away steam and grinned, looking at me up-from-under like a ram, his pupils almost hidden by his eyebrows. His dentures were overlarge and gray.
“Come in and have a nice cup of tea,” he said. He half turned, then turned back for a moment and shot me a look, his eyes frankly boring into me like a child’s, then put the glasses back on; also the grin. “I see you came by taxi.” He seemed to disapprove, maybe thinking it would be hard to get rid of me.
I shrugged, apologetic. It wasn’t easy to tell what emotion I ought to feel. The old man was at once deferential and, it seemed to me, crabby; perhaps he himself wasn’t certain what he felt. He was avoiding my eyes now, that much was clear; but whether from shyness or from a wish to hide his dislike for me I couldn’t make out.
“I hope you weren’t too badly cheated,” he said. His expression suddenly became prissy, struggling to be a smile. It was a look I’d see on him again and again, as if, though he tried to see the humor in things, all this world were distasteful to him, sadly disappointing to a spirit of his antique refinement and sensibility. He shot me another little look, eyebrows sharply draw inward, at once stern and baffled. What I’d wrung my fingers over now seemed obvious: he’d been hoping I’d turn him down.
Since I’d come, however, he decided to make the best of it. He seized my elbow and began to steer me through the gloom of the hallway toward the tall, closed door at the farther end. The hallway was like an ice-box, the air was cold in here as outside and not much less drafty, stirred as if by cave winds. When he opened the inner door, heat poured over us as from a furnace. “These old houses!” he said, with a bark-like laugh, waving me through the door, wincing as if the house were a punishment he’d been sent — unjustly — for the crimes of someone else.
We were in a cavernous livingroom with a threadbare Persian rug, an unlighted chandelier, here and there a lamp among the frail, spindly pieces of furniture. Most of the light in the room was thrown by a great, rolling fire in the fireplace. It glowed dully on the wainscoting, the backs of books. (Surely he’d made the fire for my visit, I thought, and for the same reason moved the two chairs up close to it, between them a low antique table with brass-ball clawfeet and a black-glass top. Perhaps the old man was even now of two minds.) His books were everywhere, shelved crammed, stacked on all sides of us, some in English, others in foreign languages, mainly German and Scandinavian. Here and there one could make out dark paintings, framed documents. I’d been looking around for several seconds, giving up my hat, coat, scarf, and gloves, and nodding absently to his stream of complaints — irritable little shouts — when I noticed, with a start, an enormous black cat sitting prim and motionless near the fireplace, watching me with round yellow eyes. I must have jumped.
“Oh,” said the professor, his face falling as if the day were now spoiled, “that’s Posey.”
I bowed to the cat, then after an instants hesitation — still carrying my bag, which the professor had neglected to take from me — moved nearer, rather formally, as if to show them both that I’m a lover of cats, as usually I am. (My wife keeps four of them.) The cat remained motionless; not a whisker stirred. The odd thought struck me — strictly a passing fancy, but for a split-second one that made my neck hairs tingle — that perhaps this was the professor’s son. The ridiculous thought came and went almost too fast to register. One knew by her name and could see by the grace of her neck and shoulders that the cat was female; and anyway, of course … I glanced at the professor. He stood bent forward, as still as the cat, his fingertips together, just touching his chin, his loose, webbed eyes looking up at me through slightly fogged lenses.
“What a beautiful cat!” I said. She was, in fact, with firelight edging her like a halo.
He seemed to consider it, his white lips stretched toward a tentative smile, as if he’d like to think it true; then he jerked his head, clenching his jaw so that his dentures clicked. “Eats us out of house and home,” he said, and, turning to the cat, pretending to speak fondly but in fact showing something more like hatred, I thought, or anyway fiercely controlled impatience—“Isn’t that true now, Posey?”
The cat looked coolly from the professor to me, then stirred, stretching, and moved away, over toward the side of the fireplace.
While the old man polished and inspected his glasses, stiffly holding them up and looking through them at the fire, then giving them another clumsy wipe with his hankie, I listened to the creaks and groans of the house, the crackling of firelogs and ticking of distant clocks, wondering where — above me or in some grim chamber farther in — Professor Agaard kept his son.