IT WAS EXACTLY a month after elfin Nerissa Woodvale moved into the Ultimate Apartments that she was rather unwillingly initiated (but in a deeper sense bravely initiated herself) into the small local society which unpretentiously called itself the Apartment People, the Apt People for short, or, with a further shortening, the Apt Peops, which they generally pronounced Peeps (like Pepys, a literary allusion which pleased most of them), except for fat little old Colonel Buford Hogeston, who idiosyncratically made it a dissyllable — Pelops without the L.
They were a group of variously frustrated aspiring spare-time writers, veterans of the rejection slip and creative block, who also shared a keen interest in weird and ghostly true incidents, either seemingly supernatural, or at least studded with amazing and mostly sinister synchronicities, though several of them were skeptics of both the hard-headed and cynical sorts, while only a few of them admitted to serious religious or occult beliefs of any kind. Their natural guru and doyenne was the emaciate tall semi-invalid, but telephonically hyperactive, Portia Hotchkiss, whose belated first novel Passage East had been published with considerable acclaim seven years back, though the completion of its sequel, Removal West, had been delayed by a series of mysterious temperamental and medical problems which the unkind attributed more to an oversupply of three-star brandy than to an undersupply of red corpuscles. Most of the group occupied apartments at the Ultimate.
One lunar month of 29 days, mind you, and little Nerissa had arrived on the day of a full moon, which was when the Apts Peops held their regular monthly evening storyreading or -telling soiree, generally in Portia’s spacious first-floor apartment. Portia firmly believed that her temperamental difficulties peaked on full-moon nights, when statistics appear to show that normal folk as well as lunatics and alcoholics are at their most self-destructively active, and she truly thought that at such times she was most in need of supportive human comradeship.
So anyway, the Apt Peops had a full lunar month in which to ponder Nerissa’s suitability for membership in their rather select organization, while she had a like period in which to consider whether they were the sort of folk she wanted to be associated with, and truth to tell, there were times during that month when from the hints she began to get of them, and particularly from one incident that severely shocked her, she thought they were the last sort of people she wanted anything to do with, and likewise times when some of them, at any rate, considered her the least suitable person they’d ever considered for candidacy.
The way things turned out, her candidacy had decisive majority support by month’s end, while she without knowing it devoted the same period to intensive preparation for her testing. After it was all over, old and scholarly Frank Daulby found a certain appropriateness in her having spent the month closely immured in her sixth, and top, floor apartment the smallest and most isolated in the whole building and blessed with only one window, which was circular and faced north; he’d read of African tribes which shut up their pubescent girls in small, high, lightless huts elevated on long poles preparatory to their initiation into the mystery of womanhood.
At all events, Nerissa’s arrival at the Ultimate on one of those hot autumn days that are apt to bake San Francisco after a cool fogbound summer could hardly escape attracting attention, because while with one exception all her impedimenta were contained in two suitcases, a very large portfolio, and a cardboard carton, the one exception was a harpsichord (plus stool for player) that even with its legs removed could not be fitted into the elevator, and so had to be eased up the five flights of stairs by three neatly uniformed professional movers, the thought of whose hourly wage made Rachel Casady shake her head and narrow her ungenerous pale lips still farther.
Rachel was the skinny Germanic wife of the genial apartment manager, an ex-fireman. He went off and left the movers to their business as soon as he’d observed their quality, but the two ladies followed them up the stairs floor by floor, taking note of their every movement, Nerissa standing back silent and gravely apologetic, Rachel at their elbows and frequently stage-whispering dire warnings that seemed designed to invite catastrophes rather than avert them. Twice she made hurried little side-trips to hushedly inform cronies of hers among the tenants who chanced to observe them, just what was going on.
Finally they reached their goal, a smallish room and bath (no kitchen) between the elevator shaft and adjacent ventilation shaft and carpeted stairway to the roof, and the hall and the tiled and partly unroofed patio which separated the very big multi-roomed single apartment known as “the Penthouse” from the rest of six and which, with Nerissa’s apartment, occupied the whole end of one wing of the L-shaped building on that floor. In a posher era of lower wages it had generally housed the cook-and-maid or couple-in-service tending the wants of the Penthouse occupants.
It turned out, as Nerissa had known it would, that the harpsichord could only be fitted into the room by moving out some of the furniture already there. She opted for the horse-hair sofa and its companion fancy end tables, which were set against the wall opposite the single bed, which in turn rested just below the three-foot-diameter circular window. Mrs. Casady protested that those were the handsomest pieces in the whole building, and when her seemingly timid new tenant persisted in her decision, huffily averred that Nerissa would have to see to their transportation down to the storeroom in the basement. To cut short the fussing, Nerissa arranged with the movers to do that (since the sofa would easily fit into the elevator) before they sent up the harpsichord, though she winced inwardly at the added expense that would mean.
So with further doomful shepherdings by Mrs. Casady the sofa was duly conveyed to the Ultimate’s shadowy bowels, the harpsichord deftly slipped into the room, its legs reaffixed, and it was set up against the now-empty inside wall, leaving barely enough space for the door to be opened and closed, as Nerissa also had calculated would be the case. She wrote a check and the movers swiftly departed.
Mrs. Casady lingered, even after Nerissa held the door for her, wondering ingenuously how many visitors Nerissa would have and how much noise the harpsichord would make. Nerissa answered die first question with an inscrutable “None!” and the second with a bland “About as much as a music box,” and continued to hold the door open. Mrs. Casady edged out with an injured reluctance. She heard the door shut and then double lock behind her.
Portia Hotchkiss learned about the newcomer from Roberta Roberts, who lived on the fourth floor with two Himalayan cats. Sitting on the edge of the book- and newspaper-piled bed, she enthusiastically told its gaunt occupant, “She seemed like our kind of person. Just think, not a piano, but a harpsichord! And the portfolio — more talents? And especially the predestined way her name fits with yours! When Portia disguised herself as a lawyer, didn’t Nerissa play her clerk? Why, she may even turn out to be the person you’ve been looking for to help you get your Remoual notes in order!”
Portia doubted that but was intrigued nonetheless, and after Roberta had made her a strong eggnog she got on the phone and stayed there most of the rest of the hot Saturday, asking other Peops about the newcomer or alerting them to her presence, so that by evening most of them were aware of the new arrival.
Buford Hogeston wasn’t, although he occupied a four-room apartment on the floor most concerned, the sixth. The Colonel was at the crest of one of his sober cycles, and had elected to spend this fine afternoon (he loved heat) in Golden Gate Park, mostly at the De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Garden, cultivating his mind, taming his fierce emotions, and girl-watching with a deceptive tranquillity. Returning homeward in the cool of twilight, he continued the last activity in the rear lobby of the Clift Hotel next to the Curran and Geary Theaters where he chose to take an elaborate tea in lieu of dinner. Replete, he gave his lips a final patting with the snowy napkin, drew on his white gloves, signed to the waitress to slip aside the light table, rose from the richly upholstered seat without aid of his hands (an accomplishment of which he was quite proud; there were some advantages in being short!), rewarded the attentive girl with a dazzling smile, gained the street, and sauntered the last block to the Ultimate, where he ran into Frank Daulby.
Frank was primed on Nerissa Woodvale, for he’d had a good chance to study her while the harpsichord cortege mounted past his fourth floor, been phoned by Portia, and had an inquisitive chat with Jack Casady.
“She’s simply a very beautiful girl, Bew, sweet and grave seeming,” he finished. “And she can’t be as young as she looks.”
Buford thought, it must be fate. I keep girls at a careful distance all day long, and when I get home I find one has been delivered at my doorstep.
To Frank he said, “She’s probably a hooker. The innocent schoolgirl get-up is always the biggest drawing card.” “Come on, Bew! The harpsichord?”
“Respectable cover,” the Colonel said without hesitation. “Probably carries her whips and straps and chains in it. If they rattled she could say it was the strings vibrating.” “Jokes, jokes,” the other responded impatiently. “No, Bew, you’re wrong there. Jack Casady says she’s real shy, she even blushes, last address on Crescent Street near Holly Park. What’s more, Portia Hotchkiss had the same idea you did, so she called up Dominique Eddy, and she’s never heard of her. And Dominique got a look at her too and agrees she’s no hooker or call girl.”
“Okay, Frank, have it your own way,” Buford said with feigned indifference. “Far be it from me to set my opinion up against the Ultimate’s resident maitresse. especially when I haven’t even seen this underage paragon.” “That’s right,” Frank told him, rubbing it in. “And get this, Bew, the Casadys have put her in that little sixth-floor apartment the piano teacher once had, you know, the piano teacher you spotted committing suicide and saved her life. The same room you yourself called the princess-in-the-tower room because of its circular window. You lucky dog.”
Buford thought, dazedly, it really must be fate. Not just at my doorstep, but practically in my bedroom. Suddenly he was in a hurry to get up to his apartment, but he didn’t show it. Instead he said to Frank thoughtfully and a shade sadly, “You’re an incurable romantic, old friend.” His voice grew sadder still, almost sententious, as he continued, “Ah, youth, youth! whither has it vanished? And whence have come these aching bones and thickening toenails, this short breath? Not for the likes of us, old friend, save in bittersweet reverie, are the sweet slender forms and tinkling laughter, the wildering seizures and poor bewildering minutes of love’s proofs and testings.” His voice changed, came down to earth, as he observed, “You know, Frank, I’ve always been aware I’ve got a big belly, but you’re beginning to develop quite a little pot yourself.” He lightly prodded the other just above the belt buckle, laughed softly, and trotted off toward the elevator.
Frank Daulby looked somewhat sourly and very skeptically at the retreating figure which for a moment seemed (but what fantasy was this?) not so much that of a fat little old man as a plump, mincing, French dancing master. “You’re coming to the Peops meeting tonight at Portia's?” he called after the figure. “Full moon, you know.”
“Of course, of course,” the answer came floating back, “But later, later…” as the elevator door closed.
His dark top-floor apartment held remnants of the day’s heat. The Colonel did not turn on any lights but surefootedly made his way into his bedroom, thrust his head out of the open window, and looked sideways along the wall. He breathed a “Ha!” His hand groping across his bedside table found his light-weight ten-power binoculars, and a tiny twist of finger and thumb reduced their focus from infinity to something closer.
Yes, by Zeus! the Fates were indeed busy in his interests tonight. Clotho was working for him overtime! For through the bright circular window he could see the door in the opposite blue-papered wall, part of the keyboard end of what must be the harpsichord, and facing the door, her back toward him, a figure in a softly glimmering grey dress and with blond hair swaying just above the slender shoulders.
But what was she doing? and why didn’t she turn around so he could see her face? he asked himself as he ’fined the focus of his binoculars, sparing a brief, respectful, thought for the slightness of the adjustment that had suited them from one sort of beauty to another. He noted that her shoulders were working, as though she were doing something with her hands to the front of her dress, perhaps adjusting the fit of her brassiere. But why did she keep on doing it? and in that one place and position without moving around?
She put down what looked like a screwdriver on the harpsichord and stepped aside. He sacrificed a moment’s sight of her to scan the door. Above the little brass chain like the one that graced his own entrance, a second and heavier brass chain with a lump at one end had been affixed.
Miss Woodvale surveyed her handiwork for a few moments, turned far enough around so that her neat classic profile was at last visible, and lifting her hands to her throat began thoughtfully to undo her dress, which buttoned down the front.
The binoculars trembled in Buford’s hands. This couldn’t be happening, he told himself as he steadied the instrument and ’fined down the focus still further, it was too much to hope for the first night! and yet…
As if she’d caught his thought by some defensive telepathy and quite agreed with it, the sylphlike young woman paused in her actions, re-did the three buttons she’d undone, and before Buford could curse himself for his negative thinking (it always came true!), had snatched up a small handbag and a scarf matching her dress and exited from her room into the hall, though leaving her door briefly open a crack while she did something (of course, locked!) to the heavier brass chain from the outside.
Then Buford did act, and with a decisiveness that, allowing for his years, was the equal of hers. He retracted his head out of the night, laid down his binoculars, and hurried into the hall himself…just in time to see Miss Woodvale, her blonde locks sheathed by a twinkling grey scarf, disappear into the elevator.
Of course! he told himself, she’d not had to wait for it; it was at the same floor where he’d left it hardly two minutes ago.
His resonant appealing cry of “Please hold the elevator!” coincided with the muted grinding noises of the door of the cage closing automatically, as its occupant pushed a button for another floor.
As he listened to the soft sad sound of its descent and the faint thud of its arrival at the ground floor a half minute later, he reminded himself not to give way to despair: there would surely be other opportunities to meet this wonderful and ingenious girl. Perhaps even tonight! Her impulsive manner of leaving had not been that of someone going out for the whole evening, but rather someone reminded of an errand quickly run, say some small purchase forgot and easily made at the small liquor shop and grocery across the street or the hardware and drug store next to it. Perhaps if he just waited a few minutes…
His plotty thoughts were intruded on by the purr of the ascending cage. His heart leaped a little. Could it be that this remarkable girl had returned for him, belatedly reacting in a burst of extreme conscientiousness to his cry of appeal? Stranger things had been known to happen…
The elevator indeed came all the way to the sixth floor and its door slid open, but his well-chosen expressions of gratitude died on his lips, nor did he utter the more sardonic greeting he was next minded to, but only watched with revived interest.
For without once looking in his direction, Mrs. Casady hurried off purposefully in the direction of Miss Woodvale’s apartment. He saw her disappear into the other wing, heard the sound of a door being unlocked and then a muted jangling, twice repeated, as if it were being prevented by a chain from being set more than a crack ajar. A grin of gleeful comprehension lightened the Colonel’s face. He heard a door slam, but before there was time for Mrs. Casady to reappear, he had retreated inside his own doorway, his mind vastly stimulated by the little scene he’d witnessed and once more fiendishly plotting.
Returning to the office-apartment on the ground floor, Rachel Casady unburdened herself of her grievances to her husband.
“She has no right to shut us out that way,” she protested stridently. “And on the first day! What if there’s a fire? Or she tries to commit suicide like that music teacher? I think at the least you should report it to Mr. Fang.”
Jack nodded several times with dutiful sympathy, then said at last, reflecting on it all, “That makes three tenants have chain-locks now. They don’t really bother me, you can always kick ’em open if you have to get inside. I’m more worried by the brace-lock Gene Garson’s had put on his door. If he should get trapped in his wheelchair again…” He shook his big head, then continued, “Mr. Fang knows half the tenants have special bolts or locks of one sort or another. He doesn’t care so long as the rents come in and requests for repairs don’t.” He sighed at the world’s heartlessness; then a look of genuine puzzlement crossed his honest face. “But you know,” he said, “that girl didn’t look to me like the suspicious type.”
“Hah!” his wife sneered, glad of the chance for some small retort. “You men are all alike when there’s a young and pretty face.”
Meanwhile the object of their discussion, serenely unaware of any problems but her own delightfully clear-cut though often terribly abstruse ones, was recrossing the street, just as the Colonel had predicted to himself she might, with a small brown-paper sack containing a pint of skim milk and a box of thin wheaten crackers. She unlocked the outer door of the Ultimate Apartments, surprised at her feeling of simple pleasure at being able to do so (that would vanish soon enough with repetition, she told herself), walked blithely down the long empty hall, entered the empty elevator, and with another secret smile such as had crossed her face unlocking the outer door, pressed the sixth button.
As the cage effortlessly mounted, her mind entered a gorgeous black and white world where her only concerns, blessedly logical ones, were with vast assemblages of musical notes and intricate successions of fingerings — and would have stayed there, too, as the cage stopped and its door opened and she pushed the floor door open and turned left toward her room …except that a small and discreetly apologetic cough made her glance to the right… and then pause and look and look again at the two-headed hybrid of metal and flesh shuffling toward her through the stuffy gloom, a robot-and-android Siamese being with three straight metal limbs inter-joined with four angled shorter ones and a tubular metal head with a great shining eye peering from beside the other cranium, which was straw hatted. It puffed softly as it moved.
Because Nerissa’s own head was in a strange musical world where all sorts of wonders were possible, she was not frightened by this apparition, only astonished and curious.
Rather swiftly the absurd technologic griffin resolved itself into a plump elderly man no higher than herself, wearing a pale summer suit and white gloves and carrying a grey tripod-set telescope equally tall. When they came opposite her, he paused and looked into her eyes. He had a sweet face, she thought.
He said, “M’dear, would you be so kind as to disentangle these binoculars dangling from my neck before they dash themselves against Palomar, Jr., here?”
She studied the tangle of limbs for a moment, then reached in and neatly complied. She asked solicitously, “Isn’t that terribly heavy?”
“Light as a feather,” he assured her, “but you would win my undying gratitude, m’dear, if you would precede me to the top of the stairs and hold the door open for me, whilst I shepherd little P.J. here out into his proper element, the star-emblazoned night”
“I’ll surely do that for you,” she told him and went on ahead. Then with her foot on the first step she turned and held out the binoculars toward him questioningly.
“Hang them over the post at the foot of the balustrade,” he told her carelessly. “It might wake up his wooden head if he took a look around with them.”
She laughed delightedly at the fantasy as she did what he told her and hurried on while he followed at a more deliberate pace, studying not to bump the grey instrument against the steps and low slanting ceiling.
“Are you sure we should be going up here?” Nerissa called in a different voice from the top. “There’s a sign in red that says: ‘This Door Must Be Kept Closed At All Times!’ ”
“M’dear,” Buford informed her grandly, while not ceasing his methodical ascent, though puffing a little between phrases, “you and I are tenants of the Ultimate. It is our privilege, nay, our right! to resort to the roof at any time and do there what we will, so long as we don’t frighten the pigeons or odd passing angel. If Mr. Fang or his minions should seek to bar our way, they would do so in violation of the city’s mighty codes, which denominate this as a fire exit that must be kept openable from the inside at all times!”
“Mr. Fang?” Nerissa questioned.
“The wealthy and all-powerful Celestial from Taiwan who owns this dubious tenement we inhabit,” Buford informed her as he reached her step, “though you’d never be sure of all that unless you saw him in his silver-black limousine. I take it you’ve dealt only with his agents, the amiable Casady and his Sorrow.”
While they were close crowded in the pocket of hot air at the head of the stairs, he somehow managed to reach a white-gloved hand out of his tangle and pat her affectionately on the upper arm. “And so, m’dear, press bravely on!”
Nerissa twisted the bolt and thrust open the door and followed it onto the flat roof, surprised by the rush of cool wind that washed her. As she held the door wide, almost clinging to it for security, she felt herself assaulted by the sudden space around her and the light-crowned tall buildings that marched through it. Dizzyingly high above was a patch of the telescopic night her companion had spoken of, its emblazoning reduced to two visible stars, but elsewhere beyond and between the serrated buildings the air loomed with low white clouds shouldering each other as they came padding in with outthrust flat heads from the ocean and the west, like a great horde of silent and gigantic polar bears. She was seeing the frequent end of the occasional hot day in San Francisco; the prevailing westerlies sluicing in the thick cooling fog from the great banks of it that overhung the Pacific in summer.
The sight stirred her. She began to look around at the light-crowned buildings, the Hilton Tower with its glaring white coronet, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel with its single revolving white fluorescent star.
“Where are the pigeons?” she asked her companion, who was busy setting up his telescope, extending its legs, attaching its eyepiece, as if there were a whole heavenfull of stars waiting to be seen instead of a few fog-threatened ones.
“They sleep at night,” he called back lightly, “while the angels put on their black and silver evening clothes and masks and their black wings, which makes them a good deal harder to catch sight of.”
Gaining confidence, she moved toward him. The door, released, swung to and its lock clicked shut.
“Never mind,” he went on, “your front door key will open it.”
She felt a surge of power, as when he’d told her the roof was theirs to use. The two-starred black gap was lost to the encroaching clouds, which were especially thick around the top of the next light-topped building she gazed at, a hotel of some fifteen storeys with triangular gables rising from either end of the otherwise flat roof. The one at the front was featureless, but the one at the other end, where the fog seemed thicker, had a large and perfectly round window in it from which pearly light poured. It looked far more beautiful than the Hilton’s square-gemmed coronet or the Drake’s star, and she felt unaccountably drawn to it, a sharp unexpected yearning, oh! if only she could climb directly there through the cool windy air! and as if in answer to that wish she began to see pearly faint steps or a wide-runged pearly ladder stretching a few feet from her to the strange porthole and somewhat resembling the moon’s track in rippling water.
She was about to call softly and wonderingly to her companion when his voice broke in with “M’dear, do come over here. I’ve got the Ring Nebula in Lyra in the eyepiece, it’s a marvelous sight, hurry before the fog cuts it off.”
She took a step or two toward him though her eyes were still on her own find, but as she framed her question about the magical eyrie she’d spotted among the other light-capped high rises, he ejaculated, “Oh, damn! the moon’s risen over the Clift Hotel. Her light will pale the Ring down to nothing. Do hurry!”
It was weird. At his words the triangular gable vanished and the large pearly porthole window it had held (perhaps the fog thinned there, too, just then) showed forth the familiar mottlings of the full moon. It was as if a minor chord should become a major without proper modulation. It jarred. She was still asking herself what had happened to her mind when she obediently bent down at the small end of her companion’s instrument and tried to see something besides darkness in the fantastically tiny eyepiece, while he stood behind her instructing her to hold her eye just so, not joggle the instrument, and so on.
“No, m’dear, you have to squat down a little more,” he advised her, his white-gloved hands shifting from her shoulders to her hips. “Like so.”
Nerissa saw more darkness (there must be a way of looking through these things!) and felt his hands slide gently to her waist.
Behind them the door opened and a friendly voice assaulted them. “Colonel Hogeston, you up here? I thought so! I spotted your spyglasses hanging on die stair-post and brought ’em up for you.”
As she jumped up, turning around, Nerissa ducked to one side while telling herself she must stop always acting as if she were guilty of something, especially now she was living alone. The Colonel suppressed the impulse to say “Stop following me up and baby-sitting me, Jack Casady!” and thought, it could have been worse; he could have shone a flashlight on us.
Casady went on in the same friendly tones, “Oh, you’ve been showing Miss Woodvale the stars.” He looked around at the fog. “Or the moon, or something.” “Good evening, Miss. A telescope’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? I never can see anything through one myself. There’s a knack, I guess.”
Nerissa nodded while the Colonel said somewhat severely, “The young lady was very kindly, at my request helping me bring my instrument up here and set it up. Actually we’ve not even introduced ourselves.”
Casady clumsily corrected that omission. The Colonel snatched off his right glove before holding Nerissa’s hand for a pregnant moment his head bent above it. She became conscious of the bag of milk and crackers still in her other hand. Casady guessed he’d done something wrong, and seeking to correct it said enthusiastically, “The Colonel’s the hero of the sixth floor, Miss Woodvale, did you know that? A couple of years ago he saved the life of an older lady occupying the same apartment you have who tried to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills.”
Ignoring or misinterpreting the Colonel’s horrified frowns and headshakes, he went on, “You see, he could see her from his apartment with his spyglasses, through the round window in hers, lying passed out, not like she was just asleep, and he got me and we got in and called an ambulance and got her to the hospital in time to be pumped out.”
“I see,” Nerissa said. “Wasn’t it lucky for her the Colonel was looking? Now I’d better put these things away. Thanks, Mr. Casady, and thank you, Colonel Hogeston, for showing me the roof.”
“My pleasure, m’dear,” he responded, but his voice no longer danced. “Thank you for your help.”
“She’s a cute little trick, isn’t she?” Casady observed when the door had shut behind her. “Here, let me carry that down for you.”
“I’m afraid she is,” the Colonel agreed heavily. “Did you know, Jack, that cute comes from acute?”
He let the big man take the telescope down for him, carelessly shoving his binoculars into his jacket pocket, their cord dangling outside. Later when he returned them to his bedroom table, he looked out the window, not very hopefully, at his new neighbor’s round one. Already it was covered with a thick gauzy material that hardly showed even the shadows of anything inside.
The fates on his side tonight? They were strumpets, all! What to do? Well, there was the Peops meeting. But first he’d have a drink. So he opened the brandy and from the refrigerator, one of the bottles of champagne he’d been saving for the next holidays or the start of his next drunk and fortified himself with a couple of French 75s before going down to Portia’s.
His arrival there with an opened fifth and a yet-to-be-popped magnum revived a dragging meeting and relieved Ms. Hotchkiss, who took a proprietorial attitude toward the Colonel and hadn’t been too happy about Frank Daulby’s report of his reactions to Miss Woodvale’s arrival.
The magnum made the end of the chapter that Gene Garson read them learnedly from the thin manuscript of his latest novel-attempt on the tray of his wheelchair appear farther from the inevitable bogging-down point than its beginning had seemed. It put more chill into the synchronicities of flight numbers, street numbers, telephone numbers, and room numbers Gunnar Nordgren had accumulated during a recent trip east. (“Those are fright numbers, Gun,” Saul Rosenzweig observed.) The demonstration of Roberta Roberts’, Dee Franklin’s, and Portia’s ability to improvise short-short stories in the manner of Katherine Mansfield went off particularly well. Dominique read her new ballad “Torquemada on Turk Street” while her big boyfriend Daq Duclose the metal sculptor, who was built like a bear but handsomer, was roused to tell about his season freebasing with the Hell’s Angels and how he’d secretly welded his stainless steel figure “Energy as Mischief” to structural members halfway through the N-Judah streetcar tunnel under Buena Vista Park. Portia herself was moved to talk nostalgically of her Calcutta years and ended by trying to stir up sad-faced Essie Furness, otherwise known as Madam Melancholy, who wore silver slave bracelets to cover up the scars on the insides of her wrists, to strike up an acquaintance with the sixth-floor newcomer on the strength of occupying the apartment across the hall from hers. The Colonel heard that and left off fascinating Dominique with tales of mysterious Mississippi and death-obsessed New Orleans, to tell Essie, with whom he sometimes pubcrawled on Geary Street, “If you do get to know her, try to see that the girl has a cross draught, else she’ll suffocate all shut up in that stuffy one-window room.”
Of the next lunar month it needs be said that harpsichord scales, runs, trills, and occasional melodies rather softly suffused the sixth floor and sometimes filtered down to the fifth and fourth hour after hour most days and evenings, that the Colonel’s drunk proceeded through its silent, otherwise barely-detectible stage and its voluble and weaving one towards its reeling, stumbling, screaming, who-knows-what? crisis, while October and more heat waves than anyone could remember, reviving recollections of the great “Don’t flush the toilet!” drought of 1976 and ’77 and shaking the general faith that San Fran was “the cool gray city of love.”
About the undampened twangy tintinnabulations of the harpsichord, Rachel Casady waited confidently for complaints and when they didn’t come in, took to visiting the sixth floor in hopes of stirring some up, adopting her not infrequent role of agent provocateur. What foiled her here was that the Apt Peops were particularly strong and influential in the sector of the Ultimate englobing #607 and while these odd folk differed vastly in their opinions on most topics, they were one and all behind anything that could be denominated as serious art, and Frank Daulby opined (and Gunnar Nordgren, who knew much more, confirmed) that what Nerissa worked on, when it wasn’t exercises, was mostly Bach, in particular an interminable cadenza which the Colonel entitled “Big Tin Bird Hovering on a Broken Chord,” but which nonetheless unwillingly fascinated him and sometimes made the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Finally Rachel got ancient Mrs. Drumm on five, her most suggestible crony, to register a protest, but when Jack came up to listen to the harpsichordic din, he couldn’t hear anything, not even the low notes that came buzzing down through the walls and up the legs of Mrs. Drumm’s bed to stab her in the back.
About the heat, it really was quite intense, especially on the sixth floor under the roof. At times the Colonel sympathized truly though muzzily with the plight of Miss Woodvale practicing in her little room without cross-draught, though more often as his drunk progressed it was apt to bring on the vindicative thought, “I hope she’s sweating like a little pig in there!” but this unfortunately had the effect of bringing on visions that were stimulating rather than disgusting and penetential. Fact was, the Colonel’s getting drunk when he did didn’t allow him to forget the newcome girl, but rather pinned down and set his sudden November-May infatuation. (Or should that last be April, even March? he asked himself.)
And then one day the Colonel noticed the harpsichord was distinctly louder in his apartment with its open windows, and going to one saw that the round window was no longer shut but open wider than his own and its inner drapes removed. A few feet inside the room, however, a tall hinged screen with posters on it shut off any view of the other side of the room and its resounding instrument and flashing-fingered occupant.
Later the same day he made a trip to the patio garbage chute to get rid of some empties (being still in the early, orderly stage of his drunk) and noted that the door to #607 was open on its two chains, so that while the rather metallic throbbing notes poured out, a perceptible cross draught poured in. Damn, he thought, the girl’s a veritable villain, a cunning, cunning fiend!
But why hadn’t the Colonel simply continued to press his attentions on the girl despite Jack Casady’s unfortunate revelation of his handiness with binoculars, which surely needn’t have been fatal to his aims? The answer was, he had; alas, the trouble being that the Colonel’s drinking tended to coarsen his always imaginative and reckless style. Finding himself mounting alone in the elevator with the object of his erotic fancy two days after the full-moon Peops Meet, he had inquired gruffly about her health and comfort and then pressed on to say, “And I trust, m’dear, your sex life proceeds satisfactorily? A handsome young female such as yourself should be regularly serviced by two or three vigorous and worthy young males until they’re fucked to exhaustion, it not only soothes the ego, gives and dispenses joy, it’s essential to health! Come, m’dear, don’t blush or turn away, else I’ll think you belong to my stuffy generation rather than your own liberated one!”
Lips tightly pressed, jaw set, eyes straight ahead, Nerissa disappeared from the cage in record time the instant it came to a stop, so that the Colonel’s move to hold the door for her was a lonely gesture. He stared after her with bleary-eyed disappointment and disillusion. Why did women have to be so ungracious about accepting honest compliments?
After a space of soul searching, Nerissa decided honor did not compel she leave the Ultimate and seek lodging elsewhere; things were getting close and she couldn’t afford to lose the time. But she ceased to recognize the Colonel and sometimes used the stairs to avoid him, while the “Big Tin Bird” cadenza quivered with a new intensity and hair-raising desperation.
So the Colonel perforce left off his pursuit of the harpsichordist (unfortunately his thoughts of her, his lubricious visions of her with sweat pouring off her baby fat, were not so readily shed) and a certain hair-raising desperation was added to the usual mounting course of his drunk. He found no relief with his friends and close acquaintances, they’d long ago discovered, even the closest of them, Frank Daulby, Portia Hotchkiss, that there was nothing whatsoever to be done about the Colonel’s drunks except to let them run their course.
Only Jack Casady kept closer watch on him the drunker he got, particularly as regards any visits he made to the roof to seek forgetfulness in the stars, and that was pure annoyance. Why, Jack had even tied white rags to the low standpipes and vents so the Colonel wouldn’t stumble over them in the dark, and taken down, though not successfully hidden, the little old six-rung wooden ladder that stood against the shack topped by TV antennas that housed the elevator’s motor and relays, and how even a child could get into trouble with that was unclear to Bew.
One more thing needs to be said about this troublous time before we explore its triple climax on the full-moon night of the next meeting of the Apartment People. Essie Furness successfully struck up an acquaintance with her new neighbor across the hall — and a good thing that, for even Nerissa mightn’t have been able to get through the grueling month without a single person she could turn to. It never got beyond the point of Nerissa dropping in at #608 for a cup of tea from time to time, Essie never got invited to #607, her place was a dreadful mess, Nerissa insisted, but it was a relief to Nerissa to be able to talk limitedly with someone. What created a bond between them was Nerissa’s interest in death and sepulchral matters and the melancholy mood (which fascinates quite a few seriously artistic people, especially ones who haven’t done much living), and Essie’s long history of unsuccessful suicide attempts by sleeping palls or razor blade (most of the scars her silver slave bracelet hid were of hesitation cuts) and her willingness to talk about them.
In the intervals of these rather dismal conversations, Madam Melancholy got in some public relations work for the Apartment People, discovering unsurprisingly that Nerissa was much interested in the supernatural though not addicted to any particular brand of the occult. Essie did not stress Colonel Hogeston’s role in the informal organization, his friendship with Portia Hotchkiss, etc., for she’d gathered the girl had a bad impression of him, even though Nerissa hadn’t told her about the incident in the elevator.
Essie also learned, on promise of secrecy, that Nerissa normally lived at home with her parents, but had taken an apartment of her own to practice for a trial performance with the San Francisco Businesspersons’ Chamber Orchestra, and that the pieces she was working on were chiefly by Scarlatti and Bach, including the latter’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, which was the one containing the long cadenza she so often repeated.
And there were times as October drew toward an end and the new moon grew through its crescent phase toward full when Essie could have sworn that the giri was on the brink of further revelations and only held back by doubt of her ability to express herself intelligibly or her listener’s capacity to understand what she had to relate. She had the abstracted look of one who has blundered into strange realms.
The Colonel, on the other hand, was getting the haggard visage and wild eye-glint that generally presaged a drunk’s catastrophe. His well-wishers, though fatalistic, felt a growing concern, an unwilling tension.
And the heat drummed on.
The evening of the full moon was heralded by a break in that, and the fog’s belated return, the polar bear clouds nosing in again, chill winds knifing into hot gusts, a feeling of meteorologic uncertainty. The Apt Peops were late in gathering in Portia Hotchkiss’s apartment, but they had begun their proceedings, although the Colonel and Essie were both absent, when there came two sharp raps on the door.
Dee Franklin, who was nearest, pushed through the curtain that masked the little entryway and let in Essie Furness accompanied by …Nerissa Woodvale. It was apparent even to those who hadn’t met her that the latter young woman was tremendously agitated and keyed-up, though fiercely in control of herself — “high”, one wise to drugs might have hazarded, most likely on cocaine.
It was also clear that she had something on her mind that preoccupied it and made small talk difficult, though she was doing her best. Portia, after a few covert words exchanged with Essie, asked her to introduce herself and tell them all whatever she felt minded to. Nerissa took a drink of the lemonade Frank Daulby had handed her without telling her about the vodka in it, sat up very straight, and looked around at her audience with an expression of polite defiance, or confrontation at any rate. She took a deep breath.
“I am,” she said as the room quieted, “the person who has been making all your lives miserable with my practicing on my keyboard instrument. I like harpsichord music myself — you’d expect that, wouldn’t you? — but one great pianist is reported to have said — ” (she seemed to brace herself, to put herself on the line) “ — that it sounded like two skeletons fucking on a tin roof. I must assume that others may share his distaste, and so I want to begin by registering my heartfelt thanks to you all for putting up with my racket for a whole month without making any complaints to the management, at least none that have been passed on to me.”
There was a small round of applause at that, started by Saul Rosenzweig, who was sitting on the floor of the bed next to Portia’s feet.
“Thank you for that,” Nerissa said, “because there’s something just happened to me I’m wild to tell about. You can see that, can’t you? Miss Furness has told me you exchange stories about strange happenings, and the way I think now this is the weirdest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life. But first I must give you a little background for it.” And she quickly told them as much about herself as she’d told Essie and then went on to describe her visit to the roof with Buford Hogeston, identifying him only as “an elderly gentleman who lives on six,” but only insofar as the roof visit involved the illusion whereby the full moon seen through fog had for a few moments become the window of some fabulous penthouse restaurant or skyroom, “or heavenly jewelry shrine or French cosmetics temple,” she added.
“Only you’ve got to remember this fearful yearning I felt to get there, a real pang,” she emphasized, “and this very real feeling I had that I could safely, not fly, but climb there through the air up the ladder of pearly light below it if only I could reach its bottom rung a few feet above my head, because that turns out to be very important for what happened tonight.
“Two other things I’ve got to tell you so you’ll understand the rest” she went on. “First, early in my stay here, I was terribly insulted by someone who lives in this building.” She looked around gravely. “The person is not in this room, so we can talk about it. It was a matter of a sexual approach, purely verbal, but I can’t recall anyone ever saying something to me about myself that shocked me as much in my whole life. Maybe I was too easily offended, but I don’t think so.”
Frank and Portia, and some of the others too, exchanged guarded looks of comprehension.
“That’s all you need to know about that,” Nerissa told them. “Second is about how I dress for practice. Now you all know how hot it’s been the past month, especially on six, under the roof.” And she went on to explain the means whereby she’d got some cross-draught. “I had to have the screen, you see,” she explained, “because it got so bad in there I’d taken to practicing in my underwear. And then it got so terribly fierce I couldn’t stand even that and — ” she braced herself, “ — I did my practice wearing nothing at all.”
Frank noticed she’d finished her drink and insisted on renewing it. Others had hurried refills.
As she resumed her narrative, Nerissa showed no signs of relaxing, seemed if anything still more tense and “high”, determined to relate everything exactly as it had happened. “Tonight I began my practice wearing what had become my usual hot weather costume. Everything was going remarkably well, so I decided to run through the whole Brandenburg Fifth without a single error, just as if it were performance night. But I hadn’t got very far into it when a gust of hot wind blew the screen over.
“I should have stopped and put it up again right away, of course, but I didn’t, I stuck to my decision, I kept on playing without missing a note — or making a mistake either. I told myself that anything can happen performance night — a string snap, an instrumentalist take sick and miss passages, lights go out, fire sirens, a fight start in the audience, gunshots, an earthquake tremor — and that this was a very proper test of my ability to meet such emergencies without panicking. I didn’t like that big black round of night out there and nothing between it and me in my hot-weather practice suit, but I tried not to look at it too much and concentrated on the Fifth and kept on going.
“And then I began to see, in glimpses, something rising just outside the bottom of the window. At first I didn’t know what it was, couldn’t imagine, once it looked like a furry little animal, but we were getting close to the long cadenza and I kept on playing.
“But then,” she went on, “the thing outside came floating higher and I saw it was — I swear this to you! — the face of the person who had insulted me, staring straight at me while hanging in the dark air (the ‘furry little animal’ had been the person’s gray hair). But now the rest of the orchestra had stopped playing and I was into the big cadenza where I’m carrying the Fifth all by myself. This was the one place where I couldn’t afford the least mistake.
“At first I thought the head was leering at me. But then I saw it was more a grimace of frenzy or rapture, I don’t know what, or — yes! — in a trance like an ancient witchdoctor or sibyl. I kept on.
“And then came what was, I think, the strangest part of my whole experience. I get the feeling very strongly that the person outside had levitated himself up there, or climbed a ladder of light like the one I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, between me and the moon portal, and was hanging there, but only for so long — oh, I don’t know how to make you understand how certain I felt about this! — as I kept on playing. If I stopped, or just missed, they’d fall. So now I had two reasons for keeping on.
“As I approached the end of the cadenza, the staring face began, little by little, just as when it had appeared, to float off and down into the night, safely, I prayed. By the time the orchestra joined in with me again, I could no longer see it I went on and finished the first movement”
She let out a breath. Some others did the same.
“I don’t think,” she continued, “I could have played through the second and third movements just then, although they’re shorter and less taxing for the harpsichordist I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. At any rate as soon as we were done with the first, I rushed over to the window, there’s a narrow bed in front of that, and kneeling across it, I looked out and down. I don’t know what I expected to see, a body hovering or flying? or one crushed on the paving of the little courtyard below behind the bar next door? but there was nothing at all.
“So I rushed over to Miss Furness’, barely remembering to grab up my robe, and I started to tell her all about it and got out some, and she persuaded me to come down here and tell all of you.”
She slumped back in her chair. But before she could respond to the rather excited flurry of questions and comments, indeed before those were completed, there came a sudden beating on the hall door, a frantic tattoo. Saul, who’d been on his way to replenish his drink, was the first to respond and when he’d got the door open there lurched through the curtain into the center of the room …Buford Hogeston.
The Colonel’s face was wild-eyed, pale but grimed, and with a four-day pepper-and-salt stubble. His white suit was rumpled and soiled and his white gloves were filthy. He peered around, his eyes alternately bugging and squinting, and then staggered toward the man who’d just emerged from the kitchen.
“Frank Daulby!” he proclaimed, his voice slurring. “You always been after me to write down my hallucinations when I’m having d.t.“s. Well, I want you to know I’ve just been having some beauties, and I happen to be in the mood to tell you all about ’em.” He took the fresh drink out of Frank’s hand, drained a third, and saying, “My God, what I been through,” staggered rapidly with it toward the foot of Portia’s bed and spinning around came down with a creak of the springs on the spot Saul had been occupying.
To his right Portia was sitting bolt upright against the pillows in her dark negligee and staring at him with an expression in which solicitude and suspicion were mixed, while off to his left Nerissa, leaning forward now, was studying him with an even greater intensity.
He leaned back against the wall, massaging his stubble, then took a smaller slurp of Frank’s drink, looked around at everyone again, and began, “You most of you know how I like to go up on the roof nights, when that bastard Casady lets me! in pursuit of my astronomic avocation.” The last phrase slurred wonderfully, as may be imagined, but on the whole his speech was rapidly becoming considerably more clear and intelligible than it had been at first
He continued, “Well, tonight I was up there again, outwitting Jack who’s been following me around like a damn nursemaid! — but this time he thought I was out on Geary, making the run. I was up there enjoying the cool breezes, thank God!, and watching the fog moving in, when I began having the damnedest hallucinations or illusions or whatever. Maybe relief from the heat was what brought them on. Or maybe they weren’t illusions, maybe some of them were really happenings, I can’t be sure even myself, you’ll have to use your own judgment there.”
He took another swallow of the drink, stared up at the ceiling, and said thoughtfully, “You know, illusions are damn funny things, I remember once going to the roof an hour or so before dawn, when most of the hotels have finally turned off their blinding top-lights, damn ’em! The fog was extremely thick — it was one of those nights when it almost gets down to street level — but through it I could see the moon quite distinctly in its proper shape and all (happened to be gibbous phase then).
“But then I realized I was seeing it pretty high in the north, where the moon couldn’t possibly be, and the fog thinned a little and I saw that it was just a single window high in the east wall of the Bedford Hotel, all the other windows were dark and the floodlights for that stupid billboard they have on top were off. But for a couple of seconds that window had been a perfect gibbous moon.
“What happened tonight was just the opposite of that. Through the gathering fog I saw the full moon rising over the back end of the Clift Hotel, only I didn’t see it as that at all, I saw it as a big round window, softly white, a huge moon porthole, I remember thinking, in a strange temple-looking structure, built by a jinni, I guess, on the back end of the Clift. And below it were short streaks of light, a whole ribbon of them like a moon track on a lake or the ocean, a moon ladder coming down almost to where I was. And I began to feel this awful urge, this yearning, to somehow climb up that ladder and get there to the Land of Heart’s Desire, or the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixer Vitae, or whatever else lay behind that wonderful window.
“Or maybe that was where illusion turned into hallucination, for I began to hear, very faintly at first, a strange dancing music, like a harp but more rapid, a harp with silver strings, I remember thinking, covered with diamond dust. It was a little like de Falla’s ‘Ritual Fire Dance’, but higher pitched and more spread out. And it seemed to be coming from the sky, or rather from the moon porthole itself, for the silver ladder I saw began to vibrate in time with it, very synesthetie.
“I wasn’t paralyzed by all this, or in a trance or anything, for the next thing I knew I’d got the short wooden ladder from where Jack Casady thought he’d hidden it, and set it against the pentshack, and begun to climb it. By that time I know the hallucinations must surely have been started, for that’s something I’d never do if I were in my right mind.”
He looked at his empty glass and saying, “My God, this yakking is thirsty work,” tossed it unexpectedly across the room at Frank, who even more unexpectedly caught it and hurried with it into the kitchen, whence he soon emerged with it refilled, and another drink for himself.
The Colonel took advantage of the pause to reach a hand behind him and pull his soiled jacket off over his head and drop it on the floor, and then strip off his dirty gloves and add them to the pile, explaining, “I got chilled on the roof, but it’s still hot down here.”
After a hefty slug of his new drink he resumed, “When I got four or five steps up the ladder I reached up and I actually touched the bottom rung of the vibrating ladder of light — more synesthesia, for it not only was palpable, but the music flooded through me from it, filling me with a new icy vitality and making me feel I could do anything.
“As I was transferring from the one ladder to the other I felt a rung suddenly give under my foot. It must have been one of the wooden ones, for the ladder of quivering light sustained me and I completed the transfer successfully, and right away I was going up the light-ladder very fast, a busy little bug — oh, did I have the hots to get to that wonder window! — without getting short in my breath at all.
“That proves if anything does that it all had to be hallucination by now, but God, it was real! The light-ladder would give a little, as if it were more like a rope than a rigid one, but I felt no fear. I remember stopping once or twice to bounce up and down on it and look down at the silly little people and cars in the street, and then scurry on up toward my pearly goal through the very fine cool mist that was gathering around me — I was getting into the fog. Hey, it was gay up there! — I mean dancingly delightful, not the homophilic kind.
“By now I was mounting very fast and I think there were beginning to be gaps in my awareness. Because the light-ladder seemed to curve and loop at times and then straighten out again, as though it were dipping into other dimensions and then out again, or as if the moon porthole weren’t where it had seemed to be at first.
“And then suddenly I was in front of the round, glistening, mother-of-pearl window. It wasn’t as big as it had looked to be from the roof, only about four or five feet across, and yet at the same time there seemed to be a sense in which it was the whole moon come down to earth — I can’t explain that any better.
“The music was still pouring out, stronger than ever, but now I seem to have lost the ladder, it was more as if a million tiny invisible fingers were holding me up. And I was paralyzed or in a trance or something, for although I was only a foot or so from the round window, I couldn’t stretch out so much as a finger to take hold of its sill and climb in or whatever, I could only stare.
“What I could see inside, through the general pearly radiance, was a small throne of silver lace-work, very fine and delicate. And on it there was sitting the moon goddess or moon princess herself, clothed in light. She had a very trim figure and she looked exactly like Louise Brooks with platinum hair — you know, Pandora’s Box, Rolled Stockings, A Girl in Every Port.” He glanced toward Nerissa and said, ‘You wouldn’t remember her, you’re decades too young and today’s young people don’t see the classics anyway.
“Across the window between me and her were stretched dozens of silvery strings with rather the effect of Venetian blinds wide open, but much finer. There were other banks of taut silver strings around her set at different angles. And she was making the music by plucking these very fast with her fingers and her toes too, I think — Hell, she was moving so fast that most of the time I couldn’t see anything clearly of her but her face; this part of my hallucination gets very spider-webby, and spidery, too.
“Her face stared at me, just as if she were trying to hypnotize me, and I stared back, couldn’t do anything else. She had a cruel, solemn, intense look most of the time, but every now and then she’d make faces and sort of smirk and laugh at me.
“And then gradually the music got softer and the million fingers began to give a little, to let me down and draw me little by little away from the nacreous window. They began to rock me gently and everything slowed… and suddenly I came to myself sprawled on my face on the roof. I think I must have thrashed around a bit while I was passed out,” he added, distastefully examining his grievously smudged white shoes and pants, and glancing down at the heaped dirty jacket and gloves. “I looked up through the fog and saw the full moon about an hour and a half above the Clift Hotel, so I came down here to tell Frank, who’s so I curious, all about my delirium tremens for once.”
Instantly there started a chattering flood of comments and questions directed not only at the Colonel but at Nerissa too, about the remarkable way the stories fitted together — at one point Nerissa said, “No, the face I saw was clean shaven,” while at another the Colonel ducked his head comically and lifted his hands over it, as if to shield himself from the deluge — and what explanation could there possibly be: telepathy? the collective unconscious with all its moon-myths? or one more weird effect of full moonlight itself, which was already known to have such strange powers over mad folk, lovers, spawning fish, werewolves, cat goddesses, and dogs.
But this tumult had not got very far, at least not developed its full pitch, when it was interrupted by three heavy knocks on the hall door, the unmistakable bangs of authority. Again it was Saul who went and this time the curtain was swept aside by Jack Casady looking rather hot in his invariable lumberjack shirt. He spotted the Colonel on the foot of the bed and greeted him accusingly, “There you are! I been worried about you the last half hour!”
By then Portia had thought to ask him if he wouldn’t please take a drink, and he’d made the inevitable response of, “Well, I don’t mind if I do,” and Frank had fetched , and he’d taken a good swallow after an appreciative nod to Portia. He looked around at them all then and said somewhat embarrassedly, “Excuse me, folks, for breaking in on you, but for the past few days I been a little concerned about our friend here,” with a polite shrug toward the Colonel.
“I think we understand, Jack,” Frank said softly.
The Colonel, looking very chipper, said sweetly, “Thank you very much, Jack, but would you mind telling me what reason you had to be worried about me?”
“I’ll tell you why,” the stalwart manager-cum-janitor responded, moving to the center of the room. “A half hour ago I found the door to your apartment wide open, and all your lights on, and you not there. Then up on the roof I found these spyglasses of yours —” He hauled them out of a pants pocket and held them up and shook them, there was a tinkle of glass “— broken. And I found the ladder —” He took time to explain to the others in the room, “It’s a short wooden ladder they use to get at the TV antennas,” then went on to the Colonel, “And I found the ladder with one of its end rungs broken, lying as if it had been set against the shack and then knocked down. What puzzled me especially was that the break was inward, that is, inward from the end.” Once more he included the room in his explanations, “You see, if you started to climb a ladder and the first rung broke when you put your weight on it, it would be broken outward. But what an end rung broken inward means I do not know, except that someone climbed a ladder and tried to do a balancing act on the top rung, and it bust. Anyhow, the full moon reminded me you people would be having your meeting, and knowing that Colonel Hogeston would be supposed to be there, I tried on the chance.”
(Anent these matters, Frank Daulby afterwards observed privately to Saul Rosenzweig, “I don’t know about the ladder, but about the binoculars, I’m sure they’re not the pair Bew’s using now, but an earlier pair very much like them he dropped on the sidewalk from the fire escape when he was out there looking at something or other with them. As for the way the two stories dovetailed, I know Bew has a key to Portia’s apartment from the time they were a little closer to each other than they seem to be now. Couldn’t it just have happened that he got there a half hour earlier than he appeared to, and let himself in with that key and heard the start of Nerissa’s story, and listened to it all from behind the curtain, dreaming up his own story the while to match it, and then let himself out again and started banging on the door. Yes, when I consider it, it strikes me as a distinct possibility, just the sort of stunt that Bew loves — and one that would have the bonus of making him look romantic to Nerissa. But, as I say, I really have no explanation for the ladder.”)
At the time, on full moon night, there was much wondering and jabbering, but no firm conclusions reached and no further revelations of consequence. The meeting soon degenerated, or flowered, into a drinking party, with the Colonel sitting on the bed beside Portia (he’d moved to its head when she invited him) and fascinating Nerissa (who sipped her third lemonade cautiously, she’d come to suspect them) with his stories about the cemeteries of New Orleans, the crypts, the glass-fronted coffins, brown bones glimpsed through cracks in mausoleums, the grates for burning Chinese bones prior to reverent shipment home to China, all the lovely sepulchral paraphernalia.
Portia asked the harpsichordist if she was at all worried about the performance just three nights away.
She shook her head and, smiling, said, “After what happened I think I could play the Fifth in a sleep-walk.”
(As a matter of fact, she did very well at the performance, sufficiently well, at any rate. By melancholy coincidence, on the same evening Frank and Saul escorted the Colonel to what he persisted in calling the Alcohol Hospital and said goodnight to him when he was abed in the detoxification ward.)
But on the night of the meeting and party, Nerissa was emboldened to add to her answer to Portia’s question, with a smile that seemed just the least bit wicked, “There’s one thing though, after the way I’ve been practicing this whole month, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to do the Fifth to full advantage with my clothes on.”