Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (40 page)

This was where Blanche had been making her visits, and he had never known. Why hadn’t he persisted in asking her more about it? Did she know? How could she not know?

Somehow or other he made his way up the steps to the regal front door. But once there, he stood, looking from side to side, unsure as to whether or not he should go further.

Hardened with a new resolve, he rang the doorbell. He hadn’t been here for a long time—a year? Two years? No, he realized now it had been almost four years. That had been back when...He swallowed and stopped the memory by ringing the bell again.

No one was coming to the door. He glanced upwards and saw a light on in one of the upstairs rooms.

When another two minutes had gone by without an answer to the doorbell, he pulled out his key ring and carefully picked through it. He never threw away keys, but all the same, it had been so long ago that he might have gotten rid of this key, since he had been sure he would never come back here again. The situation had seemed so hopeless. He found the key.

Still, they might have changed the lock. Sliding it into the door, he turned it and heard a click. The outer door opened.

He stepped inside the long narrow entranceway that led to the internal door of the house—an oversized black door with a stained glass window, a golden coil snaking through huge red poppies. Through the clear glass surrounding the flowers, he could see the staircase and hallway beyond. There was no sign of life within. He walked down the short corridor to the door, wondering as he did whether he was tripping burglar alarms. He didn’t care.

Below the door window was a long brass plate that read
THE FAIRSTONS.

For a moment, he paused, taken aback. Was this the right house? Then he figured it out: Fairston. His father must have amalgamated his name with that of his second wife’s, something Bear supposed was a trendy New York thing to do. Instead of Fairchild-Denniston, just Fairston.

No wonder Blanche hadn’t made the connection—nor had he or Fish. He knocked on this door, just in case. Once again, no answer.

He took out the matching door key and unlocked the door. “Hello?” he called cautiously.

Inside, the air conditioning made the house frigid after the warm oven outside, and he shivered and shrugged on the jacket. Only the overhead chandelier lit the cold darkness, three stained-glass lotus-shaped flowers dripping orange glass tendrils over his head. He looked around at the staircase, the door leading into the downstairs office, and then met his own eyes in a huge mirror to his left.

That hadn’t been there before. He stared at the vast mirror, festooned with stained-glass ornaments of dragonflies and red fire flowers. It was nearly ten feet high, and its shiny surface reflected mainly the shadows of the rest of the dim interior, the reflection of the lotus lamp blending into the mirror’s other adornments. His father’s second wife had always had a thing for stained glass, he remembered now, though she hadn’t cared for churches at all.

“Hello?” he called again, and paused, listening. There was only the faint murmur of the air conditioning. Quickly, he walked down the passageway to the kitchen. There was a light on over the stove, but the rest of the kitchen was dark. He could see that someone had had a meal recently—dirty dishes on a tray sat beside the sink. Fresh yellow bananas sat on the counter, and an apple peel was left on the kitchen table. He guessed the servants still came in every morning, to clean up. His dad never cleaned house, and Bear couldn’t imagine his second wife doing so.

He opened the door to the garage and peered inside. Two cars sat in the garage, with space for a third. The garage doors opening on the back alley were tightly shut. No sign of life.

Shutting the door, he paced down the hallway towards the light at the other end, past several doors into a little sitting room that opened into the dark living room. There was a reading light on, and a fashion magazine was overturned on a coffee table.

It was a small room, but with marble tables, angular statues, sculptured metal lamps, lots of hard metal surfaces, more impressive than comfortable. His mother had never lived here—this had been the home his father had purchased after their separation. Painful memories welled up too quickly.

He had to see his father, but he didn’t like this place. It was almost as if there was a peculiar smell in the place that made him queasy. Unfortunately, it was all too familiar—that unpleasant feeling in his stomach.

But your past has a hold on you.
Blanche had told him in her last letter.
Do you think that maybe you can’t find peace because, on some level, you won’t forgive?
Though she might not have made her observations in a way that motivated him to change, she had been right about this.

“Hello?” he called once more, loudly, this time.

He listened hard, for the sound of the television, anything. There was silence, except for the usual vibrations of the City beyond the well-insulated walls that shielded the dwellings of the wealthy from the outside clamor. Now he became uneasy. Didn’t anyone hear him? Why wasn’t someone coming? Was there no one here, after all?

Finally, he stepped through an archway into the adjoining living room, and began prowling through the darkness, searching for light, for sound. He made his way to the windows and tried to look out, but couldn’t figure out the drapes. Giving up, he looked back at the lighted sitting room. All was stillness.

His eyes began to adjust to the darkness of the living room. The shelves on the walls had once held books, he remembered, but now he saw the outlines of various objects d’art, probably of the woman’s choosing. They had certainly remodeled this house since he had last been there. No surprise.

He moved toward a second wide archway. Before, this room adjoining the living room had been the music room. Cautiously he stepped inside the deeper darkness.

There had once been a piano here, and he had spent some of his lonely hours in this unbearable house here, working on piano lessons. Playing music had been a distraction with some satisfaction, an excuse to numb his outer senses to concentrate on those fascinating patterns of notes and bars. Bear put out a hand and touched smooth wood. The piano was still here. He caught a whiff of the smell of ivory and dusty innards, and lemon oil, and memories closed around him swiftly, inexorably. It made him want to run, but he stood his ground stolidly. He had hated it, hated the long corridors and stuffy interiors of this house, where everything was silence and secrecy and lies.

* * *

Trying to put his life together again, after prison. Sitting next to his brother on the couch in the living room behind him. His father, tight-lipped, standing before him, lecturing his sons about probation and accountability and curfews. “If you’re going to live in this house, I am going to expect high standards of behavior from both of you.” Arthur had listened, rather sarcastically thinking what a paragon of morality his father had suddenly become.

That had been his first day home from prison, also the day he discovered that the same blond woman he had caught with his father was now living with him. Although they were still not married, she had become a fixture in his life. She had begun to take possession of the house, rearranging things. Talking about plans for extensive renovations. Returning home blissfully from shopping with his father’s credit cards.

Arthur couldn’t figure out if it was moral for him and his brother to live with them. His father’s affair was about as interesting to him as one of the sordid soap operas the blond woman followed with professional interest, having once been an actress in television and off-Broadway plays. His father was fascinated with her. She wanted to start an investment firm, like the one his dad owned, but more “cutting edge.” She and his father discussed marketing strategies constantly. Arthur and his brother tried to tune it out as much as they could. They were preoccupied with far more visceral matters.

His last afternoon at the house, he had had a fever. His brother had been at a GED class, and his father was at work. Arthur had been playing the piano, but the melody he had been attempting to recreate had faltered into dull silence, and he was leaning on the piano lid, staring at nothing. His health hadn’t been great since his mother had died. The grief had become an ache that surfaced in bouts with the flu, and resulted in a sort of mental paralysis, where he would sit for long periods, doing nothing, half dozing, half aware.

His motionlessness must have made him invisible, because he had woken up to hear the blond woman in the next room, talking on the phone. He could see her long curving leg bouncing on her knee as she chattered, sitting on a cushioned chair. He buried his head in his arms to escape looking at her, though he could still hear her voice.

“Yes, it’s finally about to happen. I’m about to become a sinfully wealthy woman.”

The sluggishness of gloom was still infecting his mind, and he hadn’t quite understood.

“… Now that his wife’s really out of the picture, things are finally moving. Yes, it’s been almost a year. That annoying little woman. She kept hanging on forever, too. Fortunately for me there’s no cure for cancer.”

She laughed, apparently at someone else’s joking response. Her voice made his skin crawl.

“Yes, as soon as he makes the vows, I’m getting the company up and going. Yes, he’s promised to fund everything. I can’t wait.”

When the woman hung up the phone and rose from the chair, he didn’t want to move and let her know that he had heard. Anger surged through him, followed swiftly by a wave of hopelessness. Part of him cynically said
if Dad wants to marry a fortune hunter, let him
. But part of him grieved for the father he had once believed in and insisted that he not keep silent.

All this time, he was straining his ears, trying to figure out where the woman had gone. In the insulated silence of that house, it was difficult to know if she was still in the living room or if she had left.

At last, he had slowly lifted his head, to see her standing in the doorway watching him. A smile flitted around her red lips when she saw his expression.

“Go ahead and tell him. Your father’s never going to believe you,” she had taunted.

That night, his father had called Arthur into his home office and confronted him with the marijuana he had found in his son’s room. His face was taut. “I see I still can’t trust you.”

Arthur set his jaw, knowing that it was useless. After all, his father hadn’t believed him the first time. But he said it anyway. “It’s not mine.”

His father raised his eyebrows. He was turning red, which told Arthur that his father was dangerously angry, even though his tone was civil. “Just like the crack in your locker was not yours.”

“Yes.”

His father fumed. “Young man, tomorrow, I am checking you into rehab.”

I’m not going,” he said obstinately. “I’m not a user.”

“Oh really? Then how do you explain these joints?”

And just as before, his father hadn’t listened to his explanations. Now he started interrupting and talking back to his son, as though he were another teenager. “So why are you trying to blame all of this on Elaine, Arthur? Trying to spread the guilt around? You pretend to be so religious, and all I see is sneaking and lies.”

Something snapped inside Arthur, and he turned on his dad. “You only see what you want to see! You didn’t want to see how you were hurting Mom. You don’t want me on your conscience, so you pretend you don’t know me. You won’t see your sin, so you won’t see anything.”

“Shut up!” his father barked. “I’ve had enough of your dramatics!”

There was silence while his dad ran his hands through his silvered hair in frustration, and Arthur threw himself back down in his chair.

At last his father got up, walked over to him and looked him in the face, his eyes cold. “I will tell you this, son. You are not getting one single penny from me from this moment forth unless you go to rehab. You can’t stay in this house until you decide that you will. I am freezing all your bank accounts, I am taking away your checkbook, you are getting zip, nothing from me. Nada. You understand?”

He looked back at his dad. “You can’t take away the money I got from Mom,” he said, and regretted it as soon as he had said it.

“I most certainly can. I have control of those assets until you’re twenty-one.” His father walked away, then swung around and added, “And that goes for Ben too. You two might as well be the same person—he does everything you do.”

“That’s not fair! Ben has nothing to do with this!” Arthur exclaimed.

“A jury found you both guilty,” his father shot back.

“He’s just as innocent as I am.”

“Then you’ve just deprived him of his money as well,” his father said unreasonably. He sat down at his desk and turned on his computer, indicating that the conversation was closed.

Arthur rose, furious but unable to speak. After a long moment, he spoke, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Dad. What would I have to do to prove I’m telling the truth?”

His father hesitated, not looking at his son. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can ever trust you again.”

“Then it’s pointless for me to even try, isn’t it?” Arthur said bitterly. “I might as well go out and start doing drugs right now, for all the difference it would make to you.”