“My liver is a very personal thing. I may never return to this house.”
“We shall miss you, Charles.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry to miss me. I haven’t left yet. I might change my mind and take that nightcap you offered me.”
“I didn’t offer you one.”
“Why not?”
“Iris told me not to.”
“But she’s gone to bed. This is between you and me.”
“I’m afraid not,” the Admiral said. “Now do you think you’ll be able to get home all right? If there’s any doubt, I can drive you or call a cab.”
“Don’t worry about me, old boy. Just take care of yourself.”
“What do you mean, Charles?”
“She’s a sleek little filly, that Miranda, with plenty of mileage left in her. And don’t tell me you didn’t notice. I saw you staring at her.”
“I don’t believe we should refer to a lady in terms of horseflesh.”
“You didn’t stare at her as if she was a lady,” Van Eyck said. “You old Navy men never change. Girl in every port, that sort of thing.”
“I never had a girl in every port. Hardly any port, as a matter of fact.”
“Why not? I understand the military feel that it’s their prerogative to—”
“Go home, Charles.”
“That’s damned rude.”
“Yes.”
“I’m a taxpayer.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll rue the day.”
“I’ve lost count of the days I’m going to rue,” the Admiral said, opening the door. “Probably up in the thousands by this time... Goodnight, Charles. Drive carefully. The Pentagon can’t afford to lose a taxpayer.”
The girls listened at the door of Iris’s room on the second floor. They could hear her talking to Miranda in the loud firm voice that was stronger than the rest of her and needed no support from cane or crutches. The words were too fast to be intelligible. They crashed into each other and splintered into sharp angry syllables.
“She’s mad,” Cordelia said. “Well, for once we didn’t do anything.”
Juliet wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we did, unbeknownst.”
“We never do anything unbeknownst. It’s always spelled right out. She’s probably mad at her.”
“I wonder why.”
“Maybe it was those questions for a summer night. The whole thing’s pretty silly when you think of it. Why not a winter night? Or autumn?”
“Summer sounds better.”
“But it’s not sensible. On summer nights people are outside barbecuing steaks or playing tennis. It’s on winter nights they have nothing to do but sit around making up dumb questions.”
“I hate those questions,” Juliet said. “I just hate them. They give me the glooms.”
“Don’t be an ass. They’re only words.”
“No. She means them. ‘Have I earned something today?’ How can I earn something when I don’t have a job? Maybe we should run away and get jobs, Cordelia. Do you think we could?”
“No.”
“Not even a lowly type like washing dishes in a restaurant?”
“They don’t wash dishes in restaurants. They toss them into a machine.”
“Someone has to toss them. We could be tossers.”
“I don’t want to be a tosser,” Cordelia said. “Now wake up and smell the coffee. We’re not good for anything, so we might as well enjoy it.”
The heavy oak door of Iris’s room opened and Miranda came into the hall with the poodle, Alouette, on a leash beside her. The girls hid behind a bookcase and watched her go down the stairs. She moved very slowly, as if she was tired, while the little dog strained at the leash trying to pull her along.
“We never get to walk the dog anymore since she came,” Cordelia said. “It’s not fair.”
“We could walk the cat.”
“No, we can’t. We tried that once and Snowball just sat down and wouldn’t budge. We had to drag him around the block and someone reported us to the Humane Society and they sent a man out to investigate.”
Juliet’s memory was soft and warm as a pillow. She remembered the Humane Society incident as a nice young man stopping his truck to make complimentary remarks about the cat; and the Singapore incident, which Cordelia frequently referred to in a sinister manner, Juliet couldn’t remember at all. She took her sister’s word that it had happened (whatever it was) because Cordelia had more sophistication and experience than she did, being two years older. By virtue of this age gap, and the phenomenal number of things that must have occurred during it, Cordelia had become an authority who dispensed information and advice like a vending machine.
“In fact,” Cordelia said, “we’re not allowed to do practically anything since she came. We may have to get rid of her. It shouldn’t be too hard if we plan ahead.”
“I’m sick of always talking about her. I want to talk about us for a change. You and me.”
“What about us.”
“Do you think we’ll ever get a second chance?”
“To do what?”
“Be born. Will we ever be born again?”
“I hope to Christ not,” Cordelia said. “Once was bad enough.”
“But it might be different if we had a second chance. We might be good for something. We might even be pretty. And something else. This time I might be born first, two years ahead of you.”
Juliet knew immediately that she’d gone too far. She turned and ran down the hall to her room, locking the door behind her and barricading it with a bureau in case Cordelia decided to pick the lock with one of her credit cards.
She took a shower and before putting on her pajamas she counted her fleabites. Twenty-eight. A record. She scratched them all until they bled. If she bled to death, right then and there, she would speed up her chances of being born again, brilliant, beautiful and two years ahead of Cordelia.
At ten thirty the Admiral began closing up the house for the night, checking each room for security purposes, making sure that windows were locked and no intruders lurked in closets or behind doors. The job took a long time partly because he enjoyed it and partly because there were so many rooms, some of them never or hardly ever used.
The drawing room, off the foyer, was opened only for formal entertaining. Its elegant little gold chairs looked too fragile to hold a sitter and its Aubusson rugs too exquisite to be stepped on. The walls were hung with gilt-framed family portraits which had, like most of the furniture, been included in the purchase price of the house. For reasons of her own, Iris allowed visitors to think the pictures were of her ancestors, but in fact the amply proportioned ladies and the men with their muttonchop whiskers were as unknown as the artists who painted them. The thrifty Dutchmen who were Iris’s real ancestors would have considered such portraits a sinful extravagance.
Next to the living room was the conservatory, which contained an old rosewood grand piano with a broken pedal and ivory keys yellow as saffron. Now and then the Admiral would sit down at the piano and try to pick out melodies he’d learned in his youth: “Shenandoah,” “The Blue Bells of Scotland,” “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” But no matter how softly he played, how tightly the doors and windows were closed, Iris always heard and thumped with her cane or sent the housekeeper or the girls to tell him to stop. He opened the lid of the piano, played the first few bars of Brahms’ “Lullaby” and replaced the lid almost before any of the notes had a chance to climb the stairs. Then he went on with his job of checking the house.
The solarium, facing south, had an inside wall faucet and a tile floor that slanted down to a screened hole in the middle in order to allow the draining of plants after they were watered. There was only one plant left in the place, a weeping fig which had grown too large to move. The Admiral watered it every night, knowing that at some time, perhaps quite soon, the fig would break out of its clay prison. He usually stayed in this room longer than in any of the others, as though he wanted to be a witness to the plant’s exact moment of escape, to hear the noise (big or small? he had no idea) and see a crack in the clay (perhaps a series of cracks, a shattering, an explosion, a room full of shards).