Legend has it that back in 1911, when Henry Craxton Senior offered to buy the neighboring Gill farm for a premium price, Wincott Gill chased him away with a shotgun. Whether or not the gun was ever really brandished remains uncertain, but the Gills did keep their land. For years afterward they were decent neighbors—they would send bushels of corn and greens over to the Manikin, and in return, Lore and Red Vic would drive the Gills’ apples, along with the Craxton harvest, up to wholesalers in Rochester. But ever since the summer of ’24, when the older Gill boy knocked his younger brother down the stairs during an argument, the Gills have kept to themselves. Apparently the older son couldn’t stand the shame and left home for good. The younger boy, an invalid, hasn’t been seen outside his house for three years. And the parents have neglected their land and orchards—last year they even sold their team of horses, harness and all.
Their request for help came as a surprise to Lore. “Seems it costs just as much to rot as it does to prosper,” he’d observed to Junket when he’d read their letter through. After two years, the Gills were looking to scrape an income from their farm again. They’d collected twenty gallons of maple syrup to sell at the city market, and they were hoping Lore would make the delivery.
So now Lore and Junket are slopping along the muddy road in the Craxton truck, which had been sitting at a mechanic’s through most of the winter. The truck was returned at the beginning of March with a new radiator and a copper-colored hood that couldn’t be latched properly to the chassis. The mechanic had tied down the hood with wire to keep it from popping open, but along this uneven road leading to the Gill place the hood rattles so loudly that any conversation between Lore and Junket is impossible.
Lore takes his eyes off the road just long enough to give the boy a glance. What next? he wonders. Like Ellen, he’s trying to prepare himself for the notice that’s sure to come within the month. He’d rather it came sooner than later, so he can know where he stands. The trouble is, he doesn’t know where he’ll go. He’s been a groundskeeper for a decade. Who needs a groundskeeper anymore? Seems the most promising direction for him would be back in time, back to the age when landowners like Hal Craxton still had money to spare. These days, bull market and all, even the richest folks aren’t hiring—at least that’s the news coming from Red Vic and Sid Cheney, who after two months are still looking for work. How long does it take before a man in search of a job becomes a drifter? How long before the drifter becomes a drunkard, and the drunkard becomes the body buried without a name in the nearest potter’s field?
Whatever the chances for Lore, Junket has even fewer. He’ll go out into the world with little more than a sixth-grade education and the clothes on his back. That’s Lore’s fault. He had convinced himself that the huge spread of land in his charge was education enough. So Junket can neatly tuck a bullet beneath the hide of a buck. So what? The best Lore can do is get his son through the remaining years until he’s old enough to join the military.
Getting through is the order of the day. The slimy muck of the road clutches at the truck tires, the hood clatters, wet dollops of snow fall from overhanging branches and splatter across the windshield. Used to be Lore wasn’t daunted by the weather. But he’s grown skittish over the last few months, more easily shaken, ever since the day old Mary Craxton died. Christmas Day. A vexed holiday, to be sure. It had begun with a slashed horse and ended with the disappearance of Peg Griswood. Well, Peg has done all right for herself down there in the city—Lore should have known she would. The mare is nothing but soggy cinders in a pit, and Mrs. Craxton is dead and buried. The disruptions behind, Lore has folded quietly back into his routines. Yet he still feels exhausted by the events of Christmas Day. Or maybe the exhaustion set in before that, maybe he has never fully recovered from his plunge into the frigid lake, in pursuit of Junket’s Maynard. Or maybe it began long ago, and maybe he’s been sliding and spinning like the wheels of the truck ever since he lost his wife.
Oh, he doesn’t mind being a widower. Ten years, and a man can’t help but become used to his solitude. There have been other women, of course: one of the summer migrants, a Danish woman named Ida, herself a young widow. And Jessie, a half-breed girl who worked at the Manikin as a laundress for six months. No serious involvement, though. No one he wanted for better or for worse, including Ellen Griswood. That Ellen would make a good wife and a watchful mother to his son—yes, this has crossed his mind. Crossed and crisscrossed. But he can’t entertain thoughts of their intimacy. He has to be able to imagine it. Her. Ellen Griswood in his arms. Impossible! Even the words embarrass him, and he glances at Junket to make sure the boy hasn’t read his mind. But Junket apparently has no interest other than in the precarious road—he stares ahead, his worry just short of terror. Now Lore can’t hold back a grin. What Junk’s expression means is that he wants more than ever to remain in the world. He wants to live, no matter how peripheral he is to the girl of his dreams. And now that she’s been relegated entirely to his dreams, now that Peg Griswood isn’t around to remind Junket of his hopeless infatuation, he’s his chipper self again, not quite a man but trying to act like one. And failing at every nerve-racking bump in the road.
He will be stoical soon enough. He’ll have to be, once his father is unemployed. There are hungry days ahead, soup kitchen days, if Red Vic and Sid are accurate indicators of the times. And over there are other indicators—the Gills, Wincott and Nancy, standing on their porch, both wearing high rubber boots and denim overalls. Sure, they’ll tell you which way the wind is blowing, just as soon as Lore can put on the brake and say hello.
“Thank heavens it’s the both of you and not some shark threatening foreclosure, always a different man, who knows how many bandits they got working for them at that bank, and we’re just poor folks tending to our sickly boy. I’ll tell you, Lore, things get worse and worse, seems the good Lord doesn’t think we’ve suffered enough.” Nancy’s complaints sail past too quickly for Lore to figure out the right thing to say in response. So he steps down from the cab with a nod, frowning as he takes Win’s extended hand. In two years the rough, plump, farmer’s hand has withered to a shrunken replica of itself, bones covered with onionskin. He’s wearing a motor-oil cap and a buttonless jacket that seems to be nothing more than pieces of flannel and felt sewn together, with pale, insectlike shapes sprayed across his shoulders—winter buds from a horse chestnut tree, Lore sees on closer inspection.
Win picks up from Nancy, voices the anger that is too spiteful to be honorable. As they lead the way toward the barn, neither mentions their older son, only their younger child, the invalid Derrick, beloved Derrick, who must be brooding in the dark interior of the house. There’s no sign of him—all the shades have been pulled and the farm-house stands in the center of the haggard yard looking as mean and unforgiving as its owners.
The smoky sweetness of boiling sap fills the air around the huge stone fireplace behind the barn. Lore stops listening to the account of financial troubles and concentrates on the pleasures of this crop. Steal the blood from a sugar maple, boil it down, and this is what you get. He squats beside a full pail left out to cool, flattens his hand above the surface, then swirls a finger into the thick, gold syrup and brings it to his mouth. The syrup is still warm and runs from his finger in a thin stream, which he catches on his tongue. The sweetness makes him shudder. The season’s first syrup: It tastes of spring and of the pinewood fire that has been burning below the huge pans of sap from dawn to dusk. It tastes of the rain that feeds the trees. It tastes of the candy that the Seneca tribe made not far from here three hundred years ago.
But even more magnificent than the syrup is the sweet water that Nancy offers to Junket—a tin cup filled to the brim with clear, un-boiled sap. Lore watches his son drink, smiles at his smile, and laughs aloud as Junk tips the cup again and guzzles it. They are all laughing now, and Nancy puts her lanky arm around the boy, and Win offers another cup to Lore. Water drawn from the trees—this is the wine of the forest, potent, invigorating. It is enough to wash the rage from fury, leaving only laughter. Hearty, three-hundred-year-old laughter.
Their good mood lasts almost as long as it takes to load the boxes of syrup onto the back of the truck. Almost. Junket is carrying the last pint bottle by its neck when something causes him to trip up, and he stumbles, manages to catch himself before he falls, but sends the bottle crashing upon the flat surface of a rock. The Gills and Lore have been talking with happy urgency about the going price of maple syrup—they are interrupted by the sound of shattering glass, and they watch wordlessly for a minute while Junket tries to gather up shards.
“Leave it,” shouts Wincott Gill, and since Junket doesn’t hear him he has to repeat it. “Leave it, I said!” The anger is back in his voice again. Anger—and contempt as well, which Lore counters with his own powerful, protective shout.
“Junk, come on!” The boy finally looks up, abandons his effort, and trudges toward the adults, his eyes downcast until Lore grabs his elbow and gives him a reassuring tug. Then Junket’s eyes rise and flash back Win’s anger, and with a disdainful shrug he climbs into the truck.
Win hands Lore two dollars for gas, and after a stiff good-bye he heads back to the broken bottle. Nancy disappears into the house. Lore cranks the starter and puts the car in gear. Unfortunate that the hour had to end so badly. Lore takes away with him not the taste of the syrup but this last scene in his side-view mirror: the farmhouse with its warped, peeling shingles and its blinds hiding the sadness inside, and Mr. Wincott Gill bending down to collect broken glass in his hands.
“Didn’t mean to,” Junk mumbles.
“Course you didn’t.” And that is all they say for the next two and a half hours, their meditative silence filled with the clatter of the truck. On the way to the city and back again in the late afternoon, Lore thinks about the Gills and their misfortunes. He should pity them; instead, he resents them and all that they stand for. But even more than that he fears them. Their bitterness is like a dog scratching at the crate where a convict hides—inside Lore is a dangerous, explosive emotion, his own secret rage, which he doesn’t dare let out.
* * *
Junket has his own secrets, one of which is contained inside his clenched fist. Course he hadn’t meant to drop the bottle of syrup, no more than he’d meant to slash his hand. It’s a half-inch, shallow cut but ragged enough so the blood keeps oozing. He sneaks the handkerchief from his pocket and wads it in his palm.
And he hadn’t meant to stumble. But he wouldn’t have stumbled if he hadn’t looked toward the house, and he wouldn’t have felt compelled to look toward the house if he hadn’t been wondering about the two Gill boys: Derrick, a year younger than Junket but with such a round, cherubic face that he looked far younger than that, and John, three years older and nobody’s fool, the toughest boy in Millworth’s two-room cobblestone school, and if you didn’t believe it he’d rub your face in the dirt to prove it. No, Junket wouldn’t have been trying to catch a glimpse of Derrick if he hadn’t known the Gill boys. Knowing the little bit he did he wanted to know what was left of Derrick after his brother had finished with him. A broken back, people said. As Junket transported the bottles between the barn and the truck, he’d tried to see inside the windows, and it wasn’t until the final trip that his gaze slid to the right of the house and then beyond, to the huge horse chestnut tree, and he saw the ladder propped against the trunk and there, tucked into the branches, an elaborate two-story playhouse. The boards looked freshly cut. Lace curtains hung in the windows, a split-rail fence enclosed a little porch, and two-foot-high pine-log colonnades stood on either side of the miniature front door. No, Junket wouldn’t have stumbled if he hadn’t been staring at this marvelous playhouse, and he wouldn’t have dropped the syrup if he hadn’t suddenly imagined the father carrying his son up the ladder.
For the rest of the long drive Junket can think of nothing else but this: Derrick clinging like a bear cub to his father, Mr. Gill carefully climbing rung by rung up the ladder. How many months did the father spend building that treehouse, and for what? For play. Merely for play.
Only much later, long after the wound in Junket’s hand has crusted shut and he is back at the Craxton estate lying in his own bed, will it occur to him that for the first time since she left home, Peg Griswood hadn’t entered his mind all day. Not once.
* * *
Each day warmer than the last. The tide of snow recedes, leaving behind scattered papier-mâché mounds filthy with the mud splattered by wind and rain. Mud everywhere. Mud in the crevices of rotting logs, mud coating the shrubs and weeds, mud clinging to the tiny cones of the evergreen twenty feet above the ground.
Look at the muddy ground. Look carefully, with a crow’s sharp black eyes. Spring is the season of mud, and mud provides a velvety carpet for trinkets. In spring the earth gives up its hoard—broken bits of china, ginger-ale caps, pieces of ribbon, painted blocks of wood. Swoop down, bounce with rubbery feet upon the soft earth. Circle the trinket, calculate its value and weight, and then snatch it up and fly back to the roost. But what if one crow steals what another has found? Then a crow tribunal is called to settle the dispute. That’s when the air is filled with their weird cries, hundreds of angry, opinionated voices pitched in varied keys.
The little treasures can have no real value to a tribe without a system of exchange. Crows build their nests with duller stuff: twigs, ragged canvas, clumps of fur, strips of hide, shredded bark. Oftentimes a trinket doesn’t even make it back to the nest but is dropped in flight, forsaken in favor of some brighter object.
Still, until the May beetles and grubs appear in the newly plowed fields, the crows search for the glittering treasures as though their lives were at stake. Day in, day out, they hunt for the inedible refuse that the mud spits out. And if in their court of law they decide that one crow is guilty of stealing from another, they will close in on the guilty fellow and strike at his neck and head, peck-peck-peck-peck, until he falls from his perch, bounds heavily from branch to branch, and plummets like a stone to the ground.
* * *
All week long Hal Craxton is occupied with lengthy telegrams and letters to and from his lawyer, Mr. John George, and on the following Wednesday Mr. George arrives at the Manikin with his assistant to interview Boggio. Amazingly, Boggio sticks to the story Hal concocted for him, and afterward Mr. George declares that the testimony does indeed give strength to his client’s petition. Another factor in Hal’s favor is that the original will remains extant. The trick, then, is to persuade the court to declare the revised will invalid.
After lunch, while the assistant is going over the testimony again with Boggio, Mr. George and Hal retire to the library to discuss in a more casual fashion the intricacies of this unusual will and the state of mind of the testatrix. Craxton spent the morning arranging family photographs across the mantel and desk, along the windowsills and walls, so the function of the room has come to seem solely memorial. He offers Mr. George a cigar and light. The lawyer puffs to spread the spark of the flame, settles his wide-waisted body into the depths of the chair, and says, “Quite a story you’ve coerced from that Boggio.”
Hal wonders whether Mr. Watts and Mr. George are in cahoots, then decides against it and tells himself that his lawyer’s suspicion is deserved. He waits a long minute before replying. “There was no coercion,” he says quietly, occupying himself with the family photographs, turning the frames this way and that. “My mother was mentally unstable.”
“You do realize that your petition could take months, Mr. Craxton. Even years.”
“I understand, Mr. George.”
“And the costs?”
“I understand, Mr. George.”
“It is unfortunate,” sighs the lawyer elusively, taking out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from the beefy folds of his neck. Hal adjusts two framed pictures on the mantel—one a daguerreotype of his young mother, the other a photograph of his father near the end of his life—so they are facing each other. To make small talk, he says, “Boggio was the preeminent taxidermist at Craxton’s Scientific for over forty years. My father trusted him with the most important projects. Maybe it’s hard to see it, but that man is a genius.”
“It’s true, his intelligence isn’t immediately apparent,” says Mr. George.
“My mother never had her portrait painted. You can’t blame her for commissioning a likeness late in her life. A peculiar sort of likeness, to be sure.”
“Your mother was not of sound mind, was she, Mr. Craxton?”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?”
“It would be a shame to lose this lovely house. And the collection. The animals.”
“You don’t think we’ll lose, do you?”
“I think we have a strong case, but by no means certain. Nothing in law is certain, Mr. Craxton.”
“As it should be, Mr. George.”
And so they murmur on, dancing around the subject of Mrs. Craxton’s madness without ever directly discussing it. Finally, Mr. George belches quietly into his fist and announces that he must return to the office. After fortifying the lawyer with a quick scotch, Hal sends him and the assistant on their way. As he stands on the porch and watches the two men slop across the muddy drive to their automobile, he breaks out laughing—at what, he’s not sure himself, but he laughs so loudly, with such a strangled, rough guffaw, that both men look up at the same time, not at Hal Craxton but at the sky, as though they expected to find some huge carrion bird circling overhead.
* * *
“We live in a matriarchy, my dear Mrs. Griswood. Whether we like it or not, the American woman rules. As well she should. Think of the American man as a driver and civilization as his motor. The man who drinks too much of this illegal beverage will drive civilization over a cliff. So it’s up to women to prohibit excess. Women like you, Mrs. Griswood. Women of great moral courage and wisdom. But beware, because men like me will tempt you. They’ll offer you a glass of whiskey just like this glass of whiskey. They’ll invite you to sit beside them and enjoy a lavish dinner. But no matter how clever their seductions, you must refuse them. We depend upon women to refuse us. If you stop refusing, I’ll drive my motor straight over a cliff. So what do you say to an aperitif, Mrs. Griswood?”
“Thank you, Mr. Craxton.”
“The woman drinks! Corruption, sin! She drinks! We shall be turned out of paradise, waving fig leaves and weeping. All the same, it is exquisite liquor, isn’t it? You don’t have to be a connoisseur to appreciate it. Considering the concoctions that are sold these days—isopropyl laced with embalming fluid, water colored with iodine—considering these so-called whiskeys manufactured by the bootleggers, this scotch is pure gold.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
What does she know anymore? Certainly not herself! Ellen Griswood, housekeeper. Ellen Griswood standing in the dining room and sipping scotch whiskey the color of a cat’s eye in the dark. Other than the liquor that Sid sneaks into the eggnog every Christmas, Ellen hasn’t had an intoxicating beverage for years. She still associates whiskey with the only man she has known intimately, and long before that, with the bitter fragrance on her father’s breath in the evenings. So why she has let Hal Craxton provoke her into joining him, she can’t say. At most, she’ll admit a curiosity, not about him but about the possibilities. If she doesn’t refuse him, what will happen? How daring can she be? There is something about Hal Craxton that gives him a mesmeric power. His tired handsomeness? His interest in her? His sophistication? Or perhaps just his would-be claim to the Manikin—yes, that is a definite attraction. And here Ellen is in a woolen dress, plaid, with a high collar and sleeves that end in lace ruffles, not an elegant dress by most standards and not even her best dress, but her favorite—and she has put it on for him. To what end? This morning when she came out to pour his coffee, he invited her to dine with him at supper so they could talk at length about domestic matters. Now she is hardly surprised when their conversation wanders toward more charged subjects.
“You have much to learn, then.” Glasses clink together, lips part, liquid spills into mouths. The scotch peels the coating from Ellen’s tongue; another sip cools the burn. She sets down her glass on a teak coaster and inhales the dinner smells—yellow pike spitting in the griddle, wild rice bubbling down to porridge. Though in her years at the Manikin she has cleaned, polished, set, and cleared the dining-room table, she has never sat and had a meal here, as she will tonight. And tomorrow? Forget tomorrow. She’s curious about the immediate consequences of Hal Craxton’s advances. Yes, she’ll join him for dinner. Yes, she’ll have a drink. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Craxton. Sir.
They take their seats. When Nora brings in the first course, a creamed potato and turnip soup, Ellen stares at the table to keep from meeting the girl’s eyes. But she can’t escape the force of Sylva’s disgust—she feels the cook glaring from the kitchen through the closed door. Sylva will never forgive her for breaking bread with the enemy. The pretense of business does not alleviate the impact of Ellen’s treachery.
After Nora has left the room they eat their soup in silence. Hal finishes before Ellen. He folds his arms, leans back in his chair, and beams at her until she puts down her spoon.
“You didn’t believe I could do it, did you?” he says, teasing her with an enigma to draw out her confusion. But she knows what he’s referring to, even though more than a week has passed since they discussed it.
“The Manikin.”
“It’s mine. Easy as a bowknot. We’ve got old Boggio’s testimony. Oh, there will be lengthy litigation, but for now we can stay put and call this house our home.”
“This isn’t what your mother wanted.”
“Do you really believe my mother knew what she was doing when she revised her will? She was confused. And in her confusion she forgot she had a son.”
“Your mother was angry with you for neglecting her.”
“You don’t have to take her side anymore. You’ll benefit from my efforts, I assure you, Mrs. Griswood. And now you must celebrate with me, whether you like it or not.”
He’s right—she’s come too far to reverse the direction. She can’t return to the indignant beginning, when she blamed him for his greed. No, dignity won’t permit her to go back. And if Hal Craxton really believes his mother was mad, Ellen won’t try to prove otherwise. It could be that Boggio is telling the truth. In such a place as the Manikin, surrounded by dead things dressed up to look alive, an old woman might very well desire the same for herself, an afterlife in a museum, Mary Craxton as a natural history display, weird queen of the menagerie.
And how lively her son seems in contrast. Ellen appreciates him for this if for nothing else and listens with real interest as he discusses the changes he intends to make at the Manikin: electricity and proper plumbing, a new stove, a telephone.
After they’ve sipped their black coffee and finished their port and candied figs, her host falls silent. The corners of his lips twitch and then spread into that demeaning grin. If he lifted her hand and kissed the top knuckles of her fingers one by one, she wouldn’t pull away—this is the effect of his smile. Instead, he lifts a cigar from his pocket, clips off the end, and inserts it in his mouth without bothering to light it. He’s right, she admits to herself. She’ll benefit from his maneuvering. All along she’d thought his efforts useless. Now his success seems inevitable. Maybe Mary Craxton secretly intended her son to inherit the estate, after a temporary scare. Charities were never more than necessary annoyances to the old woman, and though she’d set aside a small amount of her income each year for donations, she’d inevitably find excuses to spend that money on herself, or on her son. Whenever he needed money for his travels, she’d wire him the amount he’d requested. And though she’d scold him in her letters or in person, she never deprived him of anything.
“The other day, when I thought you were my mother—”
My mother. Ellen Griswood is queen now. She has taken Mary Craxton’s place at the head of the table.
“—I saw you, Mrs. Griswood. I saw you for the first time. You are still a young and vital woman.”
His eyes—like silky hands gliding along the sharp curve of her jaw, tracing the outline of her ear, cupping her chin. They fix on her lips, as though trying to force them apart. Master’s insolence. Droit du seigneur. Ellen should feel insulted by his stare, but on the other side of the kitchen door, Sylva is feeling the burning shame for her, so Ellen is free to feel nothing but a lascivious curiosity.
It is not the same as love. She wants to find out where this will lead, even though she will refuse him, should he try to take advantage. Or so she tells herself. Yet here she is sitting with him as his guest and enduring his gaze without a word of protest. More than a week has passed since he called her “excellent,” but still the thought of his praise makes her cheeks warm. Master and housekeeper, prince and concubine, man and woman. Maybe she’ll even enjoy the debasement. Certainly she enjoys imagining his lips brushing against her work-worn hands. And his compliments please her—no denying that they please her. The evening feels as unreal as a dream, as though no permanent damage can be done. But this is not her familiar lighter-than-air dream of love, herself as a young woman floating in her husband’s arms. Make no mistake—Hal Craxton is not a body with a blank face, which she can fill in with the image of a better man. He is the wicked son of the woman Ellen served for a decade, and it is his wickedness that makes possible her interest.
“May I show you something?” he asks. Yes, he is wicked, but she is obedient, and though she knows the appropriate response would be to thank him for the meal and excuse herself, she nods and rises with some awkwardness from her chair.
“The library.” He gestures for her to lead, and for the twenty or so steps it takes to pass between the sliding doors into the library, she assumes he is watching her, measuring her from behind, comparing her to other women. For the first time in the evening she does feel a twinge of shame—not over what she’s doing but because of what she’ll never be. And then she hears the clatter of pots in the kitchen, reminding her of Sylva’s disapproval and the adventure ahead of her. Oh, how her pulse flutters when Hal Craxton pulls the heavy oak doors together! How her cheeks burn as he approaches her and without touching her glides past. He opens the top drawer of the desk—his father’s desk, a wide block of varnished mahogany resting on ball-and-claw feet—and pulls out a single picture.
“My mother, when she was in her thirties. See, I haven’t imagined a resemblance between the two of you. You could be her daughter.”
Ellen pinches the edge of the frame. She can’t be sure whether she’s seen this particular daguerreotype before, but she has seen others. Here, Mary Craxton poses alone on a porch swing, one arm hooked around the supporting chain, the other hand hidden in the lap of her dress, her head partly blurred by the sepia tint. Hal Craxton did indeed imagine a resemblance. With her round face and blond curls pasted in place, the woman in the picture looks nothing like Ellen. So why does he insist not only on making the comparison but proving it?
“Sad, isn’t it?” he murmurs. “The mind’s deterioration…”
Let’s not fool each other, she’d like to say. He didn’t invite her to dinner to mourn his mother’s sanity. They both know what they are here for. Filth. Ellen wants to perfect this unfamiliar part, to impress Hal Craxton with her sophisticated interpretation of the role. But it wouldn’t impress him, she knows. So she stands with a demure rigidity, still holding the photograph, her elbows pressed against her sides. After a minute or two he walks farther away, turns his back to face the cabinets below a bookcase, and says, “Brandy?”
“No.”
A meaningful no. A tantalizing no. Surely he understands its paradoxical implications.
“No.” He repeats it, rolls the word around in his mouth as he takes out a bottle and tumbler. “No.” He pours himself a drink but leaves it, along with his unlit cigar, sitting on the shelf as he approaches her. “No,” he repeats with a chuckle, positioning himself behind her. No. Yes. Go ahead. He will lift her hair and nuzzle the back of her neck. He will kiss her from her shoulder’s soft swoop up to her hairline. Kiss her with his long, sandy tongue, and then gently seize her earlobe in his teeth.
He is talking about liquor again, its pleasures and ill effects, but in Ellen’s mind his hands slide under her elbows from behind and follow the curves of her body to her breasts. His hands on her breasts, cupping and massaging. She imagines how it will feel, at the same time insisting to herself that she must never let it happen.
Now he stands slightly behind her and to the side, peering over her arms to study the picture, murmuring something—she can’t make out the words and doesn’t bother to ask him to repeat himself. One half step would bring him close enough so that she could feel his breath against her cheek. His hands, his tongue and teeth. Silky palms against her breasts. The hard bulge in his trousers. Even if she tried to resist he could overpower her with a quick twist of her arm.
She has no knowledge of the encounter involving her daughter that occurred in this same room a year ago, and of course she doesn’t know what was done to Peg by another man in the Kettling station. But she lets herself imagine her daughter in her place. Call it prescience, or just a coincidence—for a moment, she imagines herself as her daughter and understands why Peg would prefer to find her comfort in women. But it is too bitter an understanding to tolerate, so she turns away from it in disgust, turns, and in doing so finds herself face to face with Hal Craxton.
What is he thinking? She can’t bring herself to ask. Nor will she confess her own thoughts. But they stare at each other suspiciously, and when the mystery of their gaze becomes unbearable they close their eyes and press their mouths together. She parts her lips slightly, rests her hand in the arch of his back. How compliant his body feels. She could unbutton his shirt while they kiss, open him like an envelope and drop her hands inside to feel the downy mound of his chest.
Later, she will rehearse it over and over in her mind in an effort to experience it from his side. But for now, she is lost in the excitement and kisses him as if she really did love him. A perilous as if—she’ll come to believe it if she’s not careful. How can she be careful at such a moment? She’ll be bold and pay later. Pay with her own blood, if need be, the agony of labor, a bastard child. The danger should temper her passion—instead, it makes her dissolute. In her momentary wildness, she tells herself that she’ll do anything for this man, even bear his child, even die, yes, she wouldn’t mind if he stopped caressing and instead gripped her neck and strangled her because this is what she deserves, isn’t it? An S branded on her cheek for shame, and then death, death to the women who love beyond their station.
He leans back, lifts his hands with the abruptness of a man suddenly repulsed, and their tongues separate with a slight sucking sound. “I…” He gropes for the words. “I … Forgive me.”
“Yes.” She hears a distant cough—Sylva or Nora in the kitchen. Their disapproval seems just as distant. Ellen Griswood, housekeeper. Such a naughty old girl, kissed by the master, soon to be the Manikin’s laughingstock. She wants to laugh too, laugh at herself for her suicidal guilt. She’s a grown woman, middle-aged, Presbyterian by birth and prudish by habit—well, it’s a habit that has grown tattered from overuse, so she’ll strip and start from scratch, and if Mr. Henry Craxton Junior wants to strip too, she won’t stop him, no, just the opposite, she’ll help him along by opening the fly of his trousers button by button.
The pale cast of his face, inherited from his mother, takes on the sheen of honey in the lamplight. The two standing lamps must have been left burning during dinner, Ellen realizes, which means that Hal Craxton lit the lamps himself. The lamps, then, are part of his design, along with the dinner, the drinks, his mother’s picture. Everything has fallen in place for him, including Ellen Griswood, and now he’s going to play with her, lure and repel her until she makes herself sick with desire. Her widow’s body feels like soft clay. She moves sideways a few steps, leans against the arm of the wingback chair, and watches as Hal stoops to pick up the daguerrotype that she had unwittingly dropped. He studies it again, oblivious to Ellen now, and she squeezes her eyes shut to block the image of his indifference. Darkness floods her mind, and from within it emerges the silhouette of a face—her daughter’s face, still childishly plump and snub-nosed. Her child sitting in darkness, staring at something that Ellen can’t see.
“Mrs. Griswood, are you all right?” Hal asks with some amusement and answers himself, “But of course you’re fine. Mrs. Griswood is always fine.”
Of course.
She rises with a reassuring smile, thanks him for the evening, curtly bids him good night. She does not even offer him her hand.