In her eyes there was an articulation of terror so stark it seemed that of a very small child.
She flung the door open before I had placed my finger to the bell, and before she had said a single word, I was frozen icy numb by the look in her eyes.
She had sounded calmer on the phone:
— I knew this would happen.
— How could you have known? How could either of us know? He never goes anywhere near anyone else in that department. How could one possibly have known he would suddenly take it into his head to go to one of Spencer's infernal teas?
— Have you spoken with him since?
— No. He escaped before I had the chance.
— Escaped?
— Turned on his heel and left. He was still carrying the teacup and saucer.
That particular detail struck me as singularly ominous. She must have thought so too, for I heard her sigh into the phone, the sort of jagged sigh that comes after long crying.
— Where is he now?
— He must be on his way. Where else would he go! I'm sure he'll be home any minute.
— Oh God. Please, come. No, don't. No, do."
She hung up.
When I arrived at the home on Bagatelle Road, Mallach still had not been seen, and Dana's eyes and face had gone awful with uncertainty.
We sat side by side in the library, where Carlotta stared off into her mystic faraway. For a long time, we said nothing, only listening for his footstep on the front stair.
— Perhaps we should look for him.
Dana simply shook her head and listened.
— What exactly are you afraid of! What exactly do you think that he'll do?
Her voice was small and terrified, sounding more like a child's than ever before.
— I don't know. I wasn't with him that first time. I was with my grandparents, I wasn't with him.
— The first time?
She shook her head and listened. The clocks in the house, all the clocks in the house, were chiming the hour. Five hours had passed since I'd seen him disappear out the door of the common room with his teacup and saucer.
— My grandparents came here to take care of me. They'd moved away from here, to Arizona, but they came back to care for me. They once took me with them to visit him. That must have been when he was getting better. They let him come out and sit with me on the grass. The place had beautiful grounds, I remember that. It looked like a park. Before that I'd never been allowed to visit.
— A hospital? It was a hospital?
— Of course. Didn't you know! He was there a long time.
— How long?
— I don't know. I was just a child, nine. Maybe it wasn't really all that long, but it seemed that way to me. It was after my mother died.
She fell into silence for a short while, her lips moving slightly as if in private conversation with herself.
— He loved her so much. My father loved my mother so much. They didn't mean anything, in the end, the fights. He loved her so much.
— Your parents fought?
— Mmm. Well, really my mother. I used to hear her shouting and...
— What?
— Crying. He was always quiet, while she screamed and screamed and then cried. I never heard him answering her at all. And when she died.... And then he was gone in that place. When he came home it was terrible, too. My grandparents stayed here with us, past my thirteenth birthday. He was completely incapable of taking care of himself, much less of me. I don't know if he'd had shock treatments. I've wondered because of all the damage to his memory.
— You've never asked him?
— We never talk about that time. But I don't think he did. I don't think he ever would have submitted to shock treatments. He would have been too afraid of what harm they might do to his capacity to think, to do physics. But, of course, he was heavily medicated. He's still medicated. He has to take his pills for the rest of his life. Maybe it was all the medicines that made him the way he was when he came home.
— How was he!
— I can barely describe it. He was empty. He was absolutely empty. I would come down in the middle of the night and find him sitting here, staring with eyes that looked like a dead man's. Oh God! I couldn't bear it if I were ever to see those eyes again. Justin, I couldn't bear it!
She got up and began pacing back and forth before me.
— How could I have let you do it! It's all my fault. I'm the only one who knew the true risk involved! Oh, Justin, how could I have let you do it! What was I thinking! How did I let myself get lulled into such a state of insensibility that I didn't protect him when I could have! I'll never forgive myself, never!
Just then we heard the key in the door and Dana started up and ran to fling it open.
— Daddy!
I could hear the low murmur of their voices together, for a long time, as I sat in their library and waited, and their voices faded and I sat looking at the image of the vain and empty woman who had brought Samuel Mallach to the brink and then hurled him over, and made her daughter motherless at nine.
Which circle of hell was hers, I wondered, which circle of hell for Carlotta? I stared up at her, to try to see the truth of her. I heard their voices coming from the back room, where we did our work, and I stared up at the treacherous wife and mother.
— There was someone else with her in the car.
— Who? Was it you?
— No, not me, and not my father. Someone else. I don't know who. A man.
I saw it, quite suddenly: that long and brutal stretch of scar of the man whom she had called her uncle Dietrich.
— It's all right, Justin.
She came back into the library, her face and voice restored to her, her world and mine restored.
— It's all right now.
And she seemed almost to be laughing.
— Daddy was angry, of course, but it's just good, healthy, justifiable anger. He said he was going to give us both a serious spanking in the morning. He's taken his pills and he's gone to bed, and I think it's all going to be miraculously all right.
And she was laughing now, truly and joyfully, her world and mine instantaneously restored.
Above her head, Carlotta stared. A new suggestion of fear had crept softly into her gaze ... for I had found her out.