“Evelyn...”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Wait just a minute. You’re not actually jealous of her anymore, now that we’ve talked the matter over. Are you?”
“Oh, Lord. You and your simple faith in words. It’s touching. Why shouldn’t I be jealous of her?”
“Because I’ve told you you have no reason to be.”
“All right then. I’m not jealous. Does that ease your mind any?”
“Not a damn bit, thanks.”
“You know, I’m such a simple-minded creature that things look simple to me. Like this, for instance. I love you and you don’t love me, and Jessie is caught in the middle, somewhere in the middle where she hasn’t anything to hang on to. We’re not a family — you know what I mean? — and sometimes I think, I can’t help thinking, that Jessie knows that, and that she hates us both.” She rubbed her eyes. They were a little pink, a little too bright. “Good night, Mark. You might think it over.”
“I’ll try. Good night.”
While he was getting ready for bed he thought about Evelyn and Jessie for a little while but he couldn’t keep his mind on them. Mrs. Wakefield’s image kept looming up, and he found himself remembering, and puzzling over, some of her odd, half- restrained gestures — like those of an actress, he thought, whose freedom of movement and expression was being constantly controlled by an unseen director.
Yet he realized that it was unfair to judge her by normal standards. She had recently lost a child, and to make it worse, the child had been her only son. My son was very fond of music... Billy and I were traveling here and there... Billy was usually very patient... He was drowned.
In fact, Mark thought, she talked quite freely about Billy, but the more she said the more elusive he became, like an old photograph, faded and faceless.
He switched off the light and groped his way to the bed.
It was nearly morning when he was awakened by the sharp yelping of a sea lion. The sound was like one of Jessie’s wild cries of excitement, but there was a note of hysteria in it, a wild regret.
After a minute the sea lion stopped abruptly and Mark went back to sleep. But the noise crept into his dreams, changing identity — it was Jessie shouting, a dog howling, a woman sobbing; it was a faceless little boy barking from a rock in the sea, half-hidden in the slimy eel grass.
Later in the morning, after breakfast, Mark remembered the sea lion and asked Mr. Roma if he had heard it.
“Sea lion?” Mr. Roma said. “Oh, no, we don’t have sea lions along here. Over at the island, yes, there are hundreds of them.”
“I heard one.”
Mr. Roma shrugged. “If you heard one, then that is very unusual.”
He went off down the path, lurching slightly under the weight of the pails of chicken mash.
8
Slowly the pages were being covered with Mrs. Wakefield’s untidy printing.
Contents of Dining Room: one bleached- mahogany dining set, table, buffet, eight chairs, value about $800? Two pairs damask drapes and rods — value perhaps $200, but this may be too high. One 12x18 Sultana-land rug, value, I’ve had it for years and it’s worn in spots. Couldn’t be worth more than $400, not that perhaps...
She couldn’t write down even the contents of a room without stamping each article with her personality.
“For the rug, five hundred,” Mr. Roma said. “And you must not write little notes like that. It isn’t businesslike.”
“How else can I show that I don’t know the actual value?”
“Put little question marks. For example, if you are quite uncertain put one question mark, and if you are very uncertain put two or three question marks.”
“That doesn’t sound so businesslike either.”
“Still, it is more so, eh?”
“I guess.”
“Now. Six pictures.”
“They’re only reproductions, forty dollars at the most.”
“Fifty,” he said briskly. “Consider the frames. Myself, I would demand a hundred, considering the frames.”
Mrs. Wakefield pushed her hair back off her forehead and printed: $50???
“Two silver candelabra,” Mr. Roma said. “You had a bad dream last night?”
“Yes.”
“Like in the old days.”
“Did I... make a noise?”
“Mr. Banner heard you. He thought it was a sea lion.”
“A sea lion.” She looked up at him with a queer little laugh. “That’s rather funny. I hope I didn’t disturb anyone else.”
“I didn’t hear you myself, but I remembered your old nightmares.”
“I woke up crying. It’s a strange thing to wake up, thinking you’ve been sleeping soundly, and find tears still wet on your cheeks and your throat aching... They aren’t nightmares,” she added quietly. “They are things that really happened. I live them over again.”
“They are not out of focus?”
“Sometimes the faces are distorted, and the house, when I see it in a dream, looks different, very high and narrow like a witch’s castle; but the things that happen are real. They are worse than nightmares, more lasting and terrifying.”
She picked up the pencil again and printed: two silver candelabra. “They were a wedding present, I haven’t any idea how much they’re worth, or even whether they’re solid silver.”
He tested their weight, frowning in concentration. “They must be solid silver. Three hundred dollars at least, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
“One silver coffee set and tray. You didn’t tell me that Billy was drowned.”
“Didn’t I? I thought I had.”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
“It’s no secret. It was in some of the papers.”
“How did he drown?”
“It was when we were coming back from Manzanilla. He fell off the — over the railing. There’s no use talking about it. It’s finished.”
“But you...”
“I won’t talk about it.”
“You talk about things to yourself when you’re dreaming,” Mr. Roma said. “That is worse.”
She said bitterly, “At least if I talk to myself it won’t go any further.”
“But it does. You cry in the night, and people will ask, why? What has this woman got on her mind? What are her sad secrets?”
“Oh, stop it!” She flung the pencil across the table. He stooped immediately and picked it up; the gesture seemed deliberately and cynically servile.
“No secrets,” she said. “There’s simply nothing more to tell you. He was playing on deck. It was very hot, and I left him for a minute to get him a glass of water from the cooler. When I came back he had fallen overboard. No one saw it happen, no one heard him cry out, nothing. It was as if he never existed.”
“I am sorry,” Mr. Roma said. He felt questions stirring in the back of his mind, but they weren’t ready yet to be put into words.
“I looked for him all over the ship before I could bring myself to believe he’d fallen overboard. By the time the ship had turned and made a search it was too late.”
“You should have told me this yesterday.”
“Why? What difference does it make now?”
“It makes me think you were planning not to tell me at all.”