Samuel’s dream. In an upstairs bedroom Samuel Ross, age fifty-seven, wakes from a troubling dream. He has not been sleeping well lately. Martha lies in her separate bed beside him, facing him, asleep. In the dream he was back in his childhood apartment on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. His father, Solomon Ross, né Rostholder, wearing a brown vest with a pocket watch, was seated at the kitchen table, bent over his account books. Suddenly his father’s face had a stricken look, the pen dropped from his fingers, he stood up holding his chest; and a stream of bright blood burst from his mouth onto his vest. Samuel shakes his head once and sits up in bed. His father died at the age of sixty-four, when Samuel was twenty-one. In six years David will be twenty-one and Samuel will be sixty-three. Samuel thinks: I have seven years left. From the porch he hears the sound of voices, laughter. He thinks: it is David’s birthday. He thinks: my children are home, the family is together. I am happy now. He thinks: forgive me, Father.
Borders. The nine rooms are surrounded by a green border, which itself is surrounded by a narrow black border that forms the outermost edge of the playing board. Unlike the smooth green border, the black border is grainy in texture; it forms part of the black paper used for the back of the Clue board and has been carefully folded over each of the four sides. The colorful playing surface is a square sheet of smooth paper pasted over a slightly larger square of cardboard. Under the green border you can see the slight elevation caused by the black paper, which extends nearly half an inch beneath the smooth surface.
Of course! Mrs. White — the widow White — stands in the KITCHEN staring at an object in her hand. It is smooth and heavyish, with a gleam or shine; through it she can see her hand. She runs her long thumb along the side, over and over, watching the play of the tendon. Of course: it is a glass. It is a glass of water. I am standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand. A glass. Of water. In my. She is standing, in the kitchen, with a glass of, and it is all strange, so utterly strange. Is it perhaps a dream? Fifteen years of making the best of it (how well she has adjusted!), fifteen years of long dreary afternoons (how well she looks!), and then last night, was it only last night, the earth-shattering proposal, flames of happiness, and next morning the cold corpse at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. White stares at the mysterious glass in her hand: how did it get there? She hears a noise and turns to see Mrs. Peacock — dear, dear Evelyn — enter the room.
From the window seat Miss Scarlet. From the window seat Miss Scarlet watches Mr. Green retreat awkwardly from the BALLROOM, shutting the door behind him a little too loudly and enclosing her with the Colonel, who strides to Mr. Green’s corner, picks something up, and begins to walk toward her across the long, polished floor. She feels that she is watching her doom approach, as if the intensity of her detestation no longer mattered. Men are of two kinds: the coarse, sensual, and indifferent tribe, who wish to enact their curious little rituals upon her arranged, convenient flesh, and the gentle tribe, with their pale hands, wry phrases, and alarmed eyes. If she were an empress, she would choose for her lover a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy with small round buttocks and strong white teeth: she would instruct him slowly in the art of love, she would be mistress and mother to him, goddess and tender sister. Miss Scarlet feels there is something shameful in this fantasy, which she has revealed to no one. As the Colonel approaches she feels his gaze lapping at her, rising insolently along her legs, sliding along her hips like thumbs. Miss Scarlet feels arranged by his gaze, emptied of interest, rendered desirable and trite: he confers upon her a sensation of absence. He unsees her: makes her invisible. “A pleasant evening,” the Colonel remarks, flawlessly banal, placing something, a book perhaps, on the window ledge and glancing incuriously at the romantic twilight dying over the black yews. “Is it,” he continues, turning upon her silken throat his melancholy gaze, “not?”
Ballrooms. For Jacob, the BALLROOM is the salle de bal in the château de Fontainebleau, dimly remembered from a day trip during his summer in Paris, when he turned seventeen: the glossy floor stretching away, the sunken octagons in the ceiling, the chandeliers plunging from the great arcades, the tightly clutched copy of the Oeuvres Complètes of Rimbaud purchased at a bookstall on the Seine and carefully cut with his Swiss Army knife, the tormenting breasts of a tour guide called Monique. He can still see her coppery braided hair and the white, loose blouse, suddenly heavy with breasts from a twist of the shoulders. His seventeenth birthday: two years older than David. Jacob is glad to be rid of adolescence; he worries about David, but doesn’t know how to protect him. For Marian, the BALLROOM is a nearly forgotten black-and-white movie in which a bride, abandoned by her groom, dances a waltz alone, round and round, one two three one two three, as the members of the hired orchestra exchange nervous glances and continue playing. For David, the BALLROOM is the high school gym, festooned with pink and green crepe paper for the spring dance. He tries to see another, more plausible ballroom, but the images are vague — a British officer with neat mustache and slicked-back hair gazing across a room at a girl with masses of blond ringlets overflowing with ribbons — and keep turning into the high school gym. For Susan, the BALLROOM remains unimagined: a gray rectangle on a board.
Other rooms. The board does not mention the other rooms of the mansion, rooms that are nevertheless implied by the board and have their own life apart from the game: the three wine cellars with their tiers of bottles in slanting rows, the two beer cellars, the servants’ bedrooms in the cramped upper story, the gun room, the scullery, the butler’s pantry, the serving lobby, the breakfast room, the day nursery, the summer smoking room, the winter smoking room, the glass pantry, the governess’s rooms, the night nursery, the larders, the maids’ sitting room, the maids’ lavatory, the housekeeper’s room, the servants’ dining room, the five bathrooms, the six bedrooms in the family wing, the eight guest bedrooms, the dressing rooms, the anterooms, the refrigerated cold store, the garage with its motorcar (a Daimler). And let us not forget the entrance court, the rose garden, the park, the pleached avenues, the summer pavilion, the ruined rotunda in the lake, the hunting lodge, the carp pool glistening in the sun…
Martha. Martha Altgeld Ross lies dreaming of summer at Blue Point. She is cutting beans into a pot on the unrailed back porch. Jacob is swinging on the wooden swing that hangs from the twisted apple tree. Under him his shadow is swinging through the tree-shadow onto the sunny unmown grass. Sun streams onto her hands, onto the apple leaves, onto the beanstalks on their rickety poles, onto Jacob’s plump strong legs stretching, stretching into the blue air. Suddenly she puts down the knife, runs down the unpainted steps into the yard, seizes the ropes of the swing. Jacob is startled and looks up at her with his dark, earnest eyes. She snatches him from the swing and kisses his stomach, his neck, his long-lashed eyelids. O my handsome boy, my son. She feels crazed with love. Martha is sitting on the swing, with Jacob on her lap. Higher and higher they go, she is laughing, she is happy, sun and shade ripple over her outstretched legs. Jacob is laughing. O how do you like to go up in a swing, up in the sky so blue? O I do think it the pleasantest thing. Sunlight glints on the pot of beans on the porch. O my handsome baby boy. Tears burn in her eyes, she is heavy with love. She is calm now.