2

During dinner Fernanda talked a little about her afternoon at the club. Then, overriding interruptions from Beth, she went into a reminiscent account of the way she had come to help Gino and his family get from Italy to Rhodes at the start of the war. It was a story Dorcas had heard many times, yet she found herself tensing as she listened.

Gino’s Italian mother had worked in the small house Fernanda had taken for a few months in Milano. Her loyalty lay with her Greek husband who had long wanted to return to Rhodes. True, the island was in Italian hands, but he felt matters would be better there. Fernanda had used her own money to make that return possible, and the little family had left the country of Gino’s mother. In Rhodes they had found themselves caught by the Italian military occupation of the island and Fernanda had lost touch with them for a while. But she did not forget the boy Gino.

Even as a child Gino had known what he wanted and been able to turn others to his purpose with those winning ways that were in evidence as long as one gave in to him. And he had possessed a drive, a determination that matched Fernanda’s own.

“I’ll never forget,” she recalled wistfully, “that last talk we had in my sunny Milano garden before I left for home. Gino was tall for his age even then, and as quick and graceful on his feet as a dancer. I sat on a bench near a marble fountain and told him about America. While he listened he was up on the fountain, balancing on the rim, or down on the grass turning handsprings as likely as not. He was never one to be quiet. Do you remember, Dorcas?”

She remembered. In the man the sense of restlessness, of disquiet, both inner and outer, had sometimes been difficult to live with. There had been no repose in Gino, but always movement. His eyes turning, seeking, his hands nervous and never still. She did not want to remember, but Fernanda went on.

“It was he who announced that he would come to America. He told me that he would come because I would be there and because I would undoubtedly need him. Who else would there be to bring my morning coffee and run my errands and advise me on the problems of my life? Who could do these things better for me than my devoted Gino?”

She smiled, and there was a mistiness in her eyes. Beth started to talk, but Fernanda touched her hand and she was silent.

“I knew he had to have the chance I could give him. I promised him that day that I would send for him when it was possible. As I’d never married, and had no children of my own, Gino was like a son to me.”

She had kept her promise when the war was over. Gino had never again lived in Greece, although until his parents died he returned to Rhodes now and then to visit them. His brothers and sisters were older and already scattered when the war began. Fernanda had met none of them. It was upon Gino alone that her attention focused.

As Dorcas had reason to know, Greece had fascinated Gino and drawn him strongly. With his devotion to art, his love for the very feel of marble, he should have been a sculptor, Fernanda said. But somehow a willingness to perform the drudgery of learning a craft until it could become an art was not in him. He wanted too much too easily, too quickly. Or perhaps his real talent was for appreciation rather than creation. Had he been wealthy he would have been a collector himself. As it was, he had turned to a line of work that enabled him to handle the treasures he could not possess.

Perhaps it eased Fernanda’s heart to speak of Gino now, to bring him back as if to their midst. Perhaps, too, she wanted to remind his wife of her loss. It had been difficult to pretend with Fernanda.

When there was a pause in the narrative, Dorcas asked a question that had puzzled her more than once.

“Why did you never marry? You should have had a big family to mother, Fernanda, a husband to take up all your attention.”

“As if any one person or thing could do that!” Fernanda laughed. But she went on without resentment. “I suppose I’ve always attracted the wrong kind of man—the man who wants someone to lean on and thinks I’d make a good prop, when what I really wanted was a man strong enough to manage me. There aren’t many of those.”

So, not finding a husband, she had settled for a son, Dorcas thought—a son who could govern her with the imperative will of Gino Nikkaris. Strangely enough, Gino had loved her in return. He had used her, yes, but he had given her devotion and tenderness in return. Fortunately for her, the years between them saved her from the physical attraction that roused in Gino something the older woman did not suspect was there.

Fernanda ate her ice cream in dreamy sadness, yearning over her lost son. Dorcas ached for her a little. The Gino in whom Fernanda believed was only a small part of the whole. Real for Fernanda, but for no one else. Yet even after Gino’s death, she was still taking imaginary orders from him and that might prove difficult where Beth was concerned.

When dinner was over, Fernanda went to work on the galley proofs that must be returned to her publisher before she left on the trip. Dorcas read Beth a story and put her to bed, then she slipped into a coat and went out upon the penthouse roof. From behind a row of bleak and empty flower boxes she looked down into the one-way cross street where traffic flowed endlessly from east to west.

In a week, she reminded herself, she would be in Greece. There was still an unreality about the fact, even though she knew all the plans by heart. A man named Johnny Orion was to meet them in Athens and go with them to Rhodes. He was a young American high-school teacher who liked to spend his summers abroad whenever it was possible. Fernanda had met him at a lecture some years ago in Chicago and he had offered his services as a guide and driver for a previous trip to Greece. The arrangement had been successful and Fernanda had sent Johnny ahead to make plans for this trip also. Thus there would be no concern about those details of travel that Fernanda hated to bother with. Johnny Orion, to all accounts, also served another use for Fernanda, allowing her to get into just enough trouble to make for lively reading in her books, but not into anything disastrously serious.

What sort of man would be willing to take on such a job and put up with Fernanda’s autocratic ways, Dorcas was not sure. Perhaps he was one of the useful ones who made good errand boys, dancing willing attendance to whatever tune Fernanda whistled. It didn’t matter to Dorcas, providing he got things done.

She thrust her hands into her coat pockets and stared unseeingly at the flow of traffic below. The muted roar of the city after dark hemmed her in. The sky glowed orange with the reflection of light. City skies were never truly dark, and she could see no stars. Only one more week until Rhodes. She shivered in a gust of wind that cut through the corridor of the street, yet her shiver was not because of any physical chill. Its origin lay in the past.

With a quiet lift of her shoulders she steadied herself. In Rhodes she would not be the wife of Gino Nikkaris, not even by name. In spite of Fernanda’s shocked opposition, she had taken steps immediately after Gino’s death to regain the use of her father’s name. There had been something of a cleansing for her in the gesture. She had not wanted Beth to grow up with Nikkaris for her last name, even though it belonged to the beloved Greece of Dorcas’s own father. Brandt was a good name, a sound, sturdy name—they would be called by it from now on. All had been done that was possible to build toward a new future. Or would be, once she had found the wife of Markos Dimitriou.

The remembrance she had been fighting all day surged back like the rolling of a dark tide. She put her hands upon the rough edge of a flower box and braced herself. Let it come then. She was well now, and being well meant being able to face the past without running from it in that weakness and terror that had come to be part of her illness. But her legs continued to tremble as she stood there. She could not always follow her doctor’s instructions to face her own fears and then dismiss them. With Gino gone there was surely no real reason to fear. Yet in a certain sense he would not die. Fernanda kept him alive. Her own memories brought him back and would not be quiet. Sometimes he lived in Beth, frighteningly.

There were many reasons why life with Gino had become intolerable soon after her marriage. Her suspicion that some of the art objects he handled had not come legitimately into his hands had been accidentally confirmed. She could remember vividly the scene when she had confronted him with her innocent indignation. He had come home late in the evening while she was getting ready for bed. When he entered the room she had flung her discovery at him recklessly and he had stood behind her at her dressing table and laughed his enjoyment of her shock and indignation.

Now her fingers gripped the flower box in pain, but she let the memories come.

In the mirrored reflection Gino’s eyes had been aware of a beauty come to life in the heat of anger—an awareness all too easily whetted by opposition. She had come to know that he loved her best when she was angry with him and ready to fight him, when there was something in her for him to conquer and subdue.

In the mirror she had seen his hand flash out in a gesture she’d come to dread—a gesture that was both a mockery of affection and a prelude to an excitement in him that made her skin crawl in memory. His hand came swiftly from behind to touch her chin, the fingers following the line of her jaw, her throat—lightly, delicately, almost as she had seen him touch the smooth surface of marble. But with a difference. When he touched flesh with that particular gesture, he made a promise that he always kept.

She was not a cold woman. She had never been. In the early months of marriage she had given herself eagerly, willingly, expecting to be his partner in the matter of love. He had not wanted a partner. He had wanted from her an exquisite terror that he knew very well how to arouse. Toward the end that terror had begun with the first movement of his hand toward her chin.

Once, before they were married, she had seen him step on a dog’s foot. She had thought the incident an accident. Later she had known better. If only she had read it aright, what had happened was a clue to all that Gino Nikkaris was when it came to anything weaker than himself.

There were only two people he never deliberately hurt—Fernanda and Beth. From the first he had been a possessive father toward his baby daughter. And he had found new ways of hurting Dorcas through her love for Beth. The first time she had tried to run away, Beth had been only a year old. She had taken from the bank the small sum of money her father had left her and caught a train out of the city. But it had not been difficult to follow a mother with a baby in her arms. Gino had not troubled to come after her himself, but had sent one of his men.

Again memory quickened, flooding her mind with painful pictures.

Two days after she had run away, she’d opened her hotel room door one morning expecting the maid and had found a lean, sad-looking man in dark glasses standing there. He had stepped quickly into the room and closed the door behind him. She had known at once that her flight was up.

“I will take you back to him,” he said. He had spoken with an accent, she recalled, and he had never once mentioned Gino’s name.

She had not surrendered without an effort. She had tried to bribe him, offering the little money she had, promising more.

He had neither laughed nor grown angry. “It is no use to run,” he told her. “Perhaps I myself would escape if I knew the way. I find it better to stay alive.”

Whether or not he was threatening her she could not tell, but the last of her courage had seeped away. She went to the bed where the baby lay sleeping and picked her up.

The stranger had taken her back to Gino. He had been neither kind nor unkind, but she had been afraid of him. He had not talked to her beyond necessity, or even told her his name. In her terrified despair she had not thought much about him at the time, though once or twice later she had wondered if Gino’s death had enabled him to “escape.” Or was he still bound in some strange way to Gino and still serving him? Could it be this same cold, sad man who had entered her room today and left those eerie chalk marks by way of warning? She would be more afraid of him than of a total stranger.

All this, however, was pure speculation, and without purpose.

Gino had been cruelly pleased to have her back after that first attempt at flight. He had told Fernanda that she was mentally unstable and that Beth must be taken from her if she grew worse. Frighteningly, he had caught her up at every turn that seemed to indicate emotional imbalance, until she had begun to doubt herself and question her own fears uneasily. She had not tried to run away again for a long while, lest she lose Beth entirely.

In the meantime there were, of course, other women, and proof enough of the fact. She had not cared. Such interest on Gino’s part gave her a respite to a degree, though not wholly. She was safe only when she was numb, blank, indifferent. And not always, even then, for the whim might seize him to arouse her from lethargy and leave her once more in trembling terror.

The girl of seventeen who had stood before the statue of Apollo in the museum that day had not dreamed there were such men.

It was not until Beth was old enough to speak and understand that Gino began in subtle ways to turn the child against her mother. Dorcas had known then that she must take Beth away, and this time she must make good her escape. She must succeed, not only for the sake of her own life and sanity, but for all Beth’s future. In no way was Gino good for the child.

She had gone to her old friend Markos Dimitriou for help. He still worked at the museum and he had been delighted to see her. Early in their marriage Gino had interfered with their friendship. Perhaps he had not wanted careless remarks about his work made in the presence of Markos, who was simple and good and given to speaking the truth without fear.

How kind Markos had been when she had told her story and asked for his advice. He had said simply, “Come, we will go for a walk.” He had left his work at the museum, taken her to a bank, and drawn out the savings for a trip to Greece he and his wife planned to make as soon as he retired. The sum was not large, for his wife had known illness and been in the hospital. There was a thousand dollars and he had drawn it out in cash and placed it in her hands.

“It is a loan,” he said. “You are as good as any bank for money, my young friend. With this you will go away. At once. You must not wait. I have seen this coming. He is not a good man, this Gino Nikkaris. I think both Italy and Greece would be ashamed to own him. Take Beth and go to Chicago, or anywhere. You have your typing skill—you will find work and make a new life. Let me know, and we will be in touch. Do not worry that this is right or wrong. It is right. I think there is danger if you stay.”

She had embraced him warmly at parting and gone home to make hasty preparations. That was the last time she had seen him alive. If only she had left that same night. But she had waited for a morning train. Gino had been away on one of his many trips and she did not expect him home for another week. In the morning, as she went to the door with her suitcase in one hand and Beth by the other, he had walked into the apartment.

Not even Beth’s presence had held him in check. At a glance he realized her intent and pulled her handbag from her arm to open it. The money had been there, and he had taken in his hand the wad of bills.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded.

How well she remembered the look of him at that moment. Tall and slender, his angry vitality lending a flash to dark eyes, fury to winged brows.

Her throat had closed so completely that she could not answer, even to lie. But he needed no answer. He knew well enough the only person to whom she could have turned.

When he flung out of the room, taking the money with him, Dorcas had phoned the museum at once. Markos was not yet at work, but they would have him call her as soon as he came in.

How dreadful the waiting had been all that long morning. How frightening the silent telephone. Markos was not at home either, though she spoke briefly to his wife, trying not to alarm her. Beth had sensed her fear and was frightened, too. Trying to distract the child had been something to occupy her.

At eleven o’clock a news broadcast gave her the answer. A worker at the museum, Markos Dimitriou, had been struck down by a hit-and-run driver that morning on his way to work and had died in the hospital. The driver had been at the wheel of a green car. Gino had no green car, but she knew he would stop at nothing and he would behave with sharp intelligence, concealing his traces skilfully.

What had happened afterward was more difficult to recall in detail because it flowed into the blanketing fog and misery of her illness. She had confronted Gino, accused him, stood up to him. That she could remember. And she could remember his laughter and the cunning of the torment he’d begun to practice. Beth was whisked out of her hands and sent upstairs to stay with a loving, sympathetic Fernanda. It must have been easy for him to convince Fernanda of her breakdown and need for professional care. Anything Dorcas had tried to tell her was used as a pitiful affirmation of an unbalanced state. A nursing home was the only answer, Gino said.

She had gone to the home in near hysteria, beating against the wall of lies that surrounded her, weeping for her child and for Markos. They had treated her kindly in the home, listened to her without belief, fed her, rested her, soothed her. At last she, too, began to learn cunning. If she was to get out, if she was to return to Beth, she must fool everyone, including Gino. Her “improvement” consisted of an apparent acceptance of her illness with all the supposed delusions that had been part of it. Her nerves and hysteria had been no delusion and they had increased her own doubts, given her cause to fear that all that was said about her might be true. Yet somehow she managed to learn an acquiescence that hid both her rage and her fear. She presented to the world a meekness of demeanor that won her release. “Well” again, she was allowed to go home. Beth had missed her, and the joy of their reunion had been her reward. Beth had not been won away completely. Indeed, she seemed a little afraid of her father.

For months only Beth’s welfare had mattered to Dorcas. Still emotionally shattered, she managed, nevertheless, to offer Gino a blind submission that served her well, turning him from her in distaste. Biding her time, she waited until he was away on a trip, then she gave possible watchers the slip and went to the house of Markos Dimitriou.

Strangers occupied his home. Neighbors said his wife had returned to Rhodes. Newspaper reports had said she was in the hospital at her husband’s side when he died. But if she knew or suspected anything, she had not spoken out. The neighbors had no knowledge of her exact whereabouts, had heard nothing from her. A door seemed to have closed upon her.

Except for this one fruitless expedition, Dorcas had been exceedingly careful in those first months out of the home. That something new was in the wind with Gino, she was aware. She had learned to recognize his moods of dark excitement, his secret exultation when someone was being tricked, when a coup was in the making. There had been correspondence from Rhodes, even a transatlantic telephone call or two. Then Gino had decided upon a trip to San Francisco. She had kept her own council and hidden the fact that she watched him and waited—waited for the time when he would make a mistake and give himself into her hands. Her demeanor had continued to be mild, deceptively sweet, a little vacant. She suspected that he thought her slightly addled by her experience, and this suited him well. He did not want a wife with an unclouded memory. In fact, he no longer wanted her for a wife at all, but he had not yet decided what to do about her. Certainly he would never let her go and take Beth with her.

And then it had happened—almost like a blessing. Dreadful though it might be to think of another’s death as a gift from heaven, it had seemed nothing less at the time. On the day he had left for California she had driven him to the airport. On the highway, returning home, she had turned on the car radio and heard the news of the crash. His plane had gone down shortly after take-off and ended in flames. There were no survivors.

She had slowed the car and made the turn back to the airport. She had gone through the ordeal of being a shocked and bereaved wife. She had telephoned Fernanda, and that doughty lady had come at once to take charge of all that needed to be done—a task that included treating Dorcas as though so great a shock might well put her back in the hospital, treating her, in fact, like fragile glass. All the while, beneath what was indeed a state of shock, relief was beating like wings in Dorcas’s consciousness. Now she would be free of Gino and all he stood for. Free forever. She need not even keep his name if she wished to be rid of that as well.

All this had been like beginning again. She had needed to learn how to live without fear and deception. Fernanda had put aside her own grief to watch over her tenderly. Her trip to Greece had been long planned, and now she suggested that Dorcas come with her. Not as a guest, but in a working capacity. There was always typing to be done, notes to be set in order. Dorcas would be a wonderful help. Since Gino had been a lavish spender, he had left very little. Dorcas accepted Fernanda’s invitation gratefully, and the trip to Greece had begun to take form in her own mind—both as a pilgrimage she owed to her father and to Markos and herself, and also as a means of reaching Markos Dimitriou’s wife. There was a debt of a thousand dollars which must be repaid. More than that, there was an answer to be found. In a sense that answer would mean for Dorcas a confirmation of her own sanity and balance. If Mrs. Dimitriou knew anything at all, Dorcas Brandt meant to find it out. When she truly knew Gino for what he was, then the last of her shackles would fall away.

“Dorcas?” That was Fernanda calling from the living-room door.

She turned, glad to escape the trend of her own thoughts.

“Brooding, my dear?” Fernanda asked at the sight of her face. “What are we to do about you? I know you’ve been through a terrible experience. I know how hard it must be for you to live with this loss. But Beth needs you in good health. We must take the best care possible of you from now on.”

Fernanda’s concern was well meant and she had been courageous about her own deep loss, putting on the best possible face for Dorcas and Beth. Yet her irresponsible optimism sometimes set the teeth on edge. Especially when she was guilelessly innocent of any true understanding of what Dorcas had been through and was still experiencing. There was no point in trying to tell her the truth, even if she could be brought to accept it. Let her keep her illusions about Gino. They could harm no one now. But there was one thing that must still be answered—the thing she had shied away from mentioning earlier.

Dorcas returned to the living room. “Tell me why you erased those chalk marks from the end of the bed,” she said quietly.

Fernanda was working on her proofs again, pencil poised disapprovingly over a word. She did not look up. “What are you talking about, dear? What chalk marks?”

This, Dorcas thought, was why she had held back. She had seen the marks. And then they were gone. If Fernanda disclaimed any knowledge of them, what was she to believe? That Fernanda was lying? Or that her own mind was playing tricks on her? That she had seen the circles only because of the other time, only because she feared to see them?

By sheer effort of will she kept her voice low, unstrained. “When I found that upheaval in my room, I noticed something else. Two circles had been drawn in white chalk on the end of one bed. Why did you rub them out?”

Fernanda looked up from her work, less guilelessly now. “Oh, dear, you are upset about something. Dorcas, I don’t know a thing about any chalk marks. Are you certain—”

“I’m certain,” Dorcas said. But how could she be certain if Fernanda claimed she had never seen the marks?

Abruptly Fernanda flung down her pencil. “Oh, all right! I never was any good as a liar. I did see the marks and I erased them on purpose. I knew how upset you’d be if you found them, and of course I didn’t know that you’d been in the room. I suppose I’m really thinking of Beth and the upsetting effect you have on her when something frightens you. I meant well, dear. So you might as well forgive me. And now I’m going to put you to work and keep you busy until we leave. Then you’ll have no time for this brooding. You’ll feel fine once we’re on our way.”

Relief as well as fear could make one feel weak, Dorcas discovered. The marks had been real. There was no use being angry with Fernanda. The lights that guided her were her own and like no one else’s.

Neither of them mentioned the chalk marks again in the days that remained before leaving. Fernanda’s antidote for worry helped, and Dorcas was thankful to find herself assigned to one task after another, with no time at all to think about past or future. Except when she lay in bed at night and could not sleep. Or when she fell asleep and dreamed endlessly of white eyes staring.