The Architecture of Fear (40 page)

"If things could come back," he said, not realizing he was still clutching her hand when their lunch orders came. She had to almost pry him loose so that the restaurant-keeper could put their plates on the table. When he'd toddled off, Donald leaned forward and said, "If you could recapture those years of closeness with your sister, with your parents when they were living, would you do it? Would you go back?"

"I have you, Donald. What good is such a speculation?"

"Would you go back
if you could?"

"No, Donald. No."

"Nona."

"What, Donald?"

They stared at each other, both with puzzled faces. Suddenly he lost his nerve and fell to eating from the plate—tasting nothing. They ate in silence. Afterward they went shopping, still barely speaking, though there was no anger between them. When they started home, Donald kept to himself his feeling of desperate horror.

***

The mild winter gave birth to an early spring, with Nona constantly fussing in the front yard, preparing the beds of flowers and the flowering shrubs with an expectation of producing a paradise of blossoms to mark the anniversary of their arrival. Donald fussed less consistently in the backyard, splitting wood, building a hen-house for the three hens he'd purchased and which presently ran loose through the orchard, and recreating his grandmother's vegetable garden with scant realization that he was doing so.

While hoeing a row for carrots, he dug up an old brass bell stuffed with dirt. He sat beside an outside faucet cleaning the bell with water and prying finger. The clapper was gone.

The bell reminded him of the uninspected boxes of Christmas decorations stored under one of the gables. He hurried into the house on a quest for further bells, intent upon his sudden idea of making a bell-tree to keep birds from his vegetables.

He half ran to the second floor, but went somewhat more slowly to the third after stopping at a landing to press palm to chest and take deep breaths. When he obtained the third floor he walked dizzily along the hall, toward the antique door of gryphons and mice.

The combined exertion of the long morning's labors and the quick flight through the house had conspired against him. He was totally winded. When he reached the attic door, it was all he could do to push it open. The dusty well leading upward into darkness was menacing and unreal. He gasped, opening and closing his hand, numb from hoeing or from splitting wood, he expected.

He sat on the bottom stair until he felt better, then took the stairs slowly, like an old man. He tugged the light, brittle cardboard box down the steps and into the hallway, as though it were a heavy chest. Inside were tree ornaments from his childhood, cheap things but fragrant as apples with the scent of memory.

Among all the junk he found steel jester's bells from England and several small brass bells made in India and Japan.

Through much of the early afternoon he was on the back porch with a rustic cross made from gray scrap lumber, attaching the bells one by one. He hung them from the cross-arm by means of varying lengths of thin copper wire from an old spool. How slowly, how methodically he worked at it! It was like an odd ritual, the magic of which would be spoiled by too much haste.

Only once did he look up from this loving work, and thought about making a couple of hutches, getting some rabbits to place just there by the edge of the wood. Yes, that was a good idea.

Nona found him about three o'clock, unconscious at the foot of the porch steps, the bell-tree in his hand like a shaman's wand. He awoke that evening under heavy sedation and to the news of a bad heart.

***

It was carefully explained to him that after a heart attack, there was often a severe depression brought on more by physiological conditions than by objective dangers or compromises he must face. He was warned and counseled. With blood pressure maintenance under the guidance of a physician, with a little care about exertion, with a careful diet, there was no reason to believe he couldn't regain, the doctor said, "As much as eighty percent of the heart's capacity."

When he was home, Nona was cheery to the point of lunacy, boning up on low-carbohydrate, no-salt, no-fat gourmet cookery. He felt a great fuss was being made over him on the chance that he might feel discouraged. But he really never felt the depression coming on, until it arrived without warning, triggered by the stair-elevator installed a week after he came home. Nona was cheery about that, too, though it made her beloved walnut staircase look a horror. "Now you needn't sleep in the living room!" she beamed. He rode the contraption up the curve of the staircase. And somewhere between the bottom and the top, he began to despair. He'd
liked
chopping wood. He'd
liked
hoeing in the garden. He enjoyed building that henhouse and had looked forward to making some rabbit hutches. What was he supposed to do now? The thing most couples did at that age: sell a big house and move into a condo...

Nona had walked beside him as he rode the chair-elevator on its trial run. She had watched the change come over his expression and the tears welling in his eyes. It didn't matter to her that the installers were standing there. She fell to her knees when they reached the topmost stair, she took hold of Donald, and they wept together. "Oh Donald," she said; "Oh, honey," wondering why no one had ever counseled her about
her
possible depression.

As summer neared, he sat more and more often on the front porch, watching Nona in the gardens. She was always watering things, wanting the flowers to last even through the height of summer when the world beyond the lane was brown and dusty. He didn't doubt she could manage so small a miracle.

She would come onto the porch from time to time and tuck blankets around him. He actually liked that.

"Shouldn't I have a rocker?" he said, his smile either half-hearted or wry.

"Maybe," she said. "And you could learn to knit."

Then she was back in the garden, weeding, wandering, vanishing behind the gigantic spray of wild roses in full bloom. He never made any fuss about his vegetables; Nona was interested only in flowers. But sitting there, he couldn't help but feel badly that
his
garden was going to seed. "Give it until spring," the doctor suggested. "You'll be chipper enough for hosing if you really must. A little exercise is good. But don't hurry it, old boy." And the doctor slapped his shoulder.

"Nona?"

She'd vanished behind that blossoming hedgerow some moments earlier.

"Nona?"

He sighed and let his eyes close, let the perfume of the gardens envelop him.
The perfume,
he thought:
perfume.
When he opened his eyes again, the wild roses looked smaller. Or, rather, the bushes themselves were well-pruned and vastly more domesticated. The blossoms were much larger. Grandpa Nathan was having his picture taken beside some of the bushes. Donny threw the blanket off his lap and ran out to be in the picture, too. "You all right, sonny?" asked Grandpa, mussing the boy's pale hair. "Don't wanna spread your cold now, do you?"

It was no cold but rheumatic fever. He was almost well but not supposed to exert himself. For some reason they kept calling it a cold. Everyone called it that. But the doctor said rheumatic fever.

"No, Grandpa Nathan. But I want my picture took."

On the front porch, Donny's grandmother appeared with unnatural suddenness, dithering nervously back and forth across the top of the steps as though fearful of testing a single stair. She didn't want to upset Grandpa while the flower judges were taking photographs, but she had to do it. It was an emergency. "Pa! Pa, come quick! It's Granny Bess. Oh, Pa!"

"Did you call me?" asked Nona, peeping through a break in the hedgerow.

Donald was colorless. His mouth and eyes opened at the same moment, but he couldn't speak. "Donald!" Nona came rushing through the hedge though the opening was almost too small to let her through, and she scratched her arms. She was at his side in a moment, fumbling in his pocket to get at the bottle of nitrite. His eyes peeled back and looked at her horribly as she placed the pellet in his mouth and closed it for him.

Then she sat hard beside his chair, flat on the wood of the porch, and couldn't control her emotions. She rocked her head in her hands and wept aloud, "I can't face it. No, I can't, can't face it." Donald's prematurely palsied hand gently touched her hair. And he noticed how the gray was completely gone from it. She looked up at him with wet, wet eyes and forced an apologetic smile. And her face was young, so young. "Nona," he said softly, lowering his head in meek submission. "Nona."

***

He read up on heart conditions and soon convinced himself it was much worse than they were telling him. This invalid treatment was a bit antiquated, unless things were really bad. It no longer seemed a choice between Nona and his childhood. It was a choice between living or dying. Yet he wanted to be with her, even more now that he felt he could escape forever. The house was being good to her. The house loved her. But it couldn't take her back with him; it couldn't give her his memories. It had different gifts for different people, that was the fact of it. The house stood between them—not willfully, but nonetheless.

Yet there were other possibilities in this, including the big one, that he was mad, had been mad all along. He didn't quite believe that, but did the mad ever think of themselves as such? Nona had felt the mystic touch of the house, and they couldn't both be mad. Nona had said there was nothing sinister in the haunting. And hadn't she gotten younger? It seemed as though she had. It seemed so. It had begun that way for him, too, but something else had happened instead—his memories. Had he made that choice? Had the house made that choice?

Had this house ever known hate?

He knew he was thinking of some escape that would part him from Nona, and intentional or not, it struck him as sinister after all. It all seemed calculated by some entity outside himself. His memories beckoned him. Some
one
or some
thing
in those memories or in the house wanted him and was calling for his return. He didn't like it. The choice wasn't
quite
good enough.

There was still something he wasn't facing, something... perhaps... unnecessarily cruel in his situation. He didn't know why he felt it, but he felt
there was someone to blame.
People in trouble often sought others to blame, and Donald had never been like that. He certainly oughtn't blame anyone else for his physical condition. Yet, maybe there
was
someone he should blame. Maybe it was no coincidence things had come to so terrible a pass.

Nona had gone out for a while, shopping he thought, he hadn't paid attention. His memory had been jumbled up by the strokes. He remembered the long ago much better than the present afternoon. He found himself alone in the house, neatly dressed and a comforter on his lap, books and a radio at hand. Nona had placed the phone beside him and promised not to be long. That was already more than an hour ago. He got up and took a careful stroll around the house, rode the elevator-chair to the second floor, stood at the bottom of the next staircase gazing wistfully at the third floor that was now effectively off bounds to him. He stroked the walls, as warm as flesh. He placed a cheek to a cool window and looked out over the gardens. He saw, coming down the drive between the wind-blown poplars, a row of black automobiles—vintage, every single one of them, their headlights on though it was day.

Donald backed away from the window. He looked himself up and down. He was still a man of fifty; he didn't know whether or not to feel relieved about that. He looked from the window once more and saw nothing unusual.

Two of the unused second-floor rooms had belonged to Granny Bess. Donald walked toward those rooms, his heels clicking on wood, echoing in a manner he thought peculiar. The door was open and he saw that the main room was full of flowers and a coffin. He pressed himself against the wall beside that door so he could not see in. He touched his own cheeks, felt that they were cold and wet; and his fingers were cold, cold and almost blue. His head was throbbing but nowhere else was there pain.

Bracing himself emotionally, he looked around the corner into the room.

There were only a few boxes Nona had stored there.

He heard a car entering the drive and wondered if it was another mourner, or Nona coming home. Careless of himself, he hurried to the walnut staircase and looked down. There were a lot of people in the foyer. Grandma and Grandpa were greeting them tearfully. Donald meant to sit on the stair-elevator, but it was gone. There weren't even holes in the wall where it had been installed. He took his hand out of his pocket, holding the bottle of nitrite, and it slipped from his grasp, pellets scattering down the steps.

He looked toward the foyer again and saw Nona with two boxes in her arms, trying to manipulate the door. She looked up at the clatter of pills but saw no one.

***

"Come out from there, Donny," said Grandpa Nathan. "Don't you want to say good-bye to your Granny Bess?"

He heard Grandpa pushing at the door carved with gryphons and mice.

"There ain't nothing to be afraid of, son. Death is just a natural thing."

But Donny hadn't hidden from Granny Bess. It was his mother. His mother was going to be in the house. Everyone had come to see Granny Bess off to heaven—absolutely everyone because it was that important—and the house was full of every relative from near and far, full of strangers too. Even in their mourning they could not contain the whispered gossip of that
girl
someone saw at the train depot. Someone had said, "Well it's about time she showed a little shame and a little respect for this house," and someone else, "She ain't done nothing but soil a good family's name."

His mother was coming and Donny was hiding. But Grandpa Nathan saw him go up the stairs.

"What you got jammed up against the door, boy? There ain't no lock on that side."

He'd set a row of Christmas bells along the bottom edge of the door, and they held it fast like teeth.