“Congratulations,” said Uncle Dimity. “I guess,” he added, looking at his wife. He cleared his throat. “But isn’t it a little early, son?” He looked at his wife again. “Yes. Yes, I think it’s a little early. I wouldn’t advise it yet, not just yet, no.”
“The house is in a terrible way,” said Aunt Rose. “We won’t have it fixed for a year yet.”
“That’s what you said last year and the year before,” said Mr. Greppin. “And anyway,” he said bluntly, “this is my house.”
Aunt Rose’s jaw had clamped at that. “After all these years for us to be bodily thrown out, why I—”
“You won’t be thrown out, don’t be idiotic,” said Greppin, furiously.
“Now, Rose—” said Uncle Dimity in a pale tone.
Aunt Rose dropped her hands. “After all I’ve done—”
In that instant Greppin had known they would have to go, all of them. First he would make them silent, then he would make them smile, then, later, he would move them out like luggage. He couldn’t bring Alice Jane into a house full of grims such as these, where Aunt Rose followed you wherever you went even when she wasn’t following you, and the children performed indignities upon you at a glance from their maternal parent, and the father, no better than a third child, carefully rearranged his advice to you on being a bachelor. Greppin stared at them. It was their fault that his loving and living was all wrong. If he did something about them—then his warm bright dreams of soft bodies glowing with an anxious perspiration of love might become tangible and near. Then he would have the house all to himself and—and Alice Jane. Yes, Alice Jane.
They would have to go. Quickly. If he told them to go, as he had often done, twenty years might pass as Aunt Rose gathered sunbleached sachets and Edison phonographs. Long before then Alice Jane herself would be moved and gone.
Greppin looked at them as he picked up the carving knife.
Greppin’s head snapped with tiredness.
He flicked his eyes open. Eh? Oh, he had been drowsing, thinking.
All that had occurred two weeks ago. Two weeks ago this very night that conversation about marriage, moving, Alice Jane, had come about. Two weeks ago it had been. Two weeks ago he had made them smile.
Now, recovering from his reverie, he smiled around at the silent and motionless figures. They smiled back in peculiarly pleasing fashion.
“I hate you, old woman,” he said to Aunt Rose, directly. “Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have dared say that. Tonight, ah, well—” he lazed his voice, turning. “Uncle Dimity, let me give you a little advice, old man—”
He talked small talk, picked up a spoon, pretended to eat peaches from an empty dish. He had already eaten downtown in a tray cafeteria; pork, potatoes, apple pie, string beans, beets, potato salad. But now he made dessert-eating motions because he enjoyed this little act. He made as if he were chewing.
“So—tonight you are finally, once and for all, moving out. I’ve waited two weeks, thinking it all over. In a way I guess I’ve kept you here this long because I wanted to keep an eye on you. Once you’re gone, I can’t be sure—” And here his eyes gleamed with fear. “You might come prowling around, making noises at night, and I couldn’t stand that. I can’t ever have noises in this house, not even when Alice moves in. . . .”
The double carpet was thick and soundless underfoot, reassuring.
“Alice wants to move in day after tomorrow. We’re getting married.”
Aunt Rose winked evilly, doubtfully at him.
“Ah!” he cried, leaping up, then, staring, he sank down, mouth convulsing. He released the tension in him, laughing. “Oh, I see. It was a fly.” He watched the fly crawl with slow precision on the ivory cheek of Aunt Rose and dart away. Why did it have to pick that instant to make her eye appear to blink, to doubt. “Do you doubt I ever will marry, Aunt Rose? Do you think me incapable of marriage, of love and love’s duties? Do you think me immature, unable to cope with a woman and her ways of living?
Do you think me a child, only daydreaming? Well!” He calmed himself with an effort, shaking his head. “Man, man,” he argued to himself. “It was only a fly, and does a fly make doubt of love, or did you make it into a fly and a wink? Damn it!” He pointed at the four of them.
“I’m going to fix the furnace hotter. In an hour I’ll be moving you out of the house once and for all. You comprehend? Good. I see you do.”
Outside, it was beginning to rain, a cold drizzling downpour that drenched the house. A look of irritation came to Greppin’s face. The sound of the rain was the one thing he couldn’t stop, couldn’t be helped. No way to buy new hinges or lubricants or hooks for that. You might tent the house-top with lengths of cloth to soften the sound, mightn’t you? That’s going a bit far. No. No way of preventing the rain sounds.
He wanted silence now, where he had never wanted it before in his life so much. Each sound was a fear. So each sound had to be muffled, gotten to and eliminated.
The drum of rain was like the knuckles of an impatient man on a surface. He lapsed again into remembering.
He remembered the rest of it. The rest of that hour on that day two weeks ago when he had made them smile. . . .
He had taken up the carving knife and prepared to cut the bird upon the table. As usual the family had been gathered, all wearing their solemn, puritanical masks. If the children smiled the smiles were stepped on like nasty bugs by Aunt Rose.
Aunt Rose criticized the angle of Greppin’s elbows as he cut the bird. The knife, she made him understand also, was not sharp enough. Oh, yes, the sharpness of the knife. At this point in his memory he stopped, rolled-tilted his eyes, and laughed. Dutifully, then, he had crisped the knife on the sharpening rod and again set upon the fowl.
He had severed away much of it in some minutes before he slowly looked up at their solemn, critical faces, like puddings with agate eyes, and after staring at them a moment, as if discovered with a naked woman instead of a naked-limbed partridge, he lifted the knife and cried hoarsely, “Why in God’s name can’t you, any of you, ever smile? I’ll make you smile!”
He raised the knife a number of times like a magician’s wand.
And, in a short interval—behold! they were all of them smiling!
He broke that memory in half, crumpled it, balled it, tossed it down. Rising briskly, he went to the hall, down the hall to the kitchen, and from there down the dim stairs into the cellar where he opened the furnace door and built the fire steadily and expertly into wonderful flame.
Walking upstairs again he looked about him. He would have cleaners come and clean the empty house, redecorators slide down the dull drapes and hoist new shimmery banners up. New thick Oriental rugs purchased for the floors would subtly insure the silence he desired and would need at least for the next month, if not for the entire year.
He put his hands to his face. What if Alice Jane made noise moving about the house? Some noise, some how, some place!
And then he laughed. It was quite a joke. That problem was already solved. Yes, it was solved. He need fear no noise from Alice Jane. It was all absurdly simple. He would have all the pleasure of Alice Jane and none of the dream-destroying distractions and discomforts.
There was one other addition needed to the quality of silence. Upon the tops of the doors that the wind sucked shut with a bang at frequent intervals he would install air-compression brakes, those kind they have on library doors that hiss gently as their levers seal.
He passed through the dining room. The figures had not moved from their tableau. Their hands remained affixed in familiar positions, and their indifference to him was not impoliteness.
He climbed the hall stairs to change his clothing, preparatory to the task of moving the family. Taking the links from his fine cuffs, he swung his head to one side. Music. At first he paid it no mind. Then, slowly, his face swinging to the ceiling, the color drained out of his cheeks.
At the very apex of the house the music began, note by note, one note following another, and it terrified him.
Each note came like a plucking of one single harp thread. In the complete silence the small sound of it was made larger until it grew all out of proportion to itself, gone mad with all this soundlessness to stretch about in.
The door opened in an explosion from his hands, the next thing his feet were trying the stairs to the third level of the house, the banister twisted in a long polished snake under his tightening, relaxing, reaching-up, pulling-hands!
The steps went under to be replaced by longer, higher, darker steps. He had started the game at the bottom with a slow stumbling, now he was running with full impetus and if a wall had suddenly confronted him he would not have stopped for it until he saw blood on it and fingernail scratches where he tried to pass through.
He felt like a mouse running in a great clear space
