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 a peculiarly pleasing fashion.
‘I hate you. You are an old bitch,’ he said to Aunt Rose, directly. ‘Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have dared to 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 restaurant, pork, potatoes, pie, coffee. But now he made dessert-eating motions because he enjoyed this little act. He made as if he were chewing.
‘So — tonight you’re 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 methods? Do you think me a child, only day dreaming? 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 began to rain, a cold nuzzling downpour that drenched the house. A look of irritation came to Greppin’s face. The rain sound was one thing he couldn’t stop, the one thing that couldn’t be helped. No way to buy new hinges or lubricants or hooks for that. You might tent the housetop with lengths of cloth to soften the sound, mightn’t you? That’d be going a bit far. No. No way of preventing the rain sounds.
He wanted silence now, where he had never wanted it 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 recalled 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, 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, roll-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 yelled 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! all of them smiled!
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. He’d have cleaners come and clean the empty house, re-decorators pull down the dull drapes and hoist new shimmery banners up. New thick Oriental rugs purchased for the floors would subtly ensure 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 ears. What if Alice Jane made noise moving about the house? Some noise, somehow, some place!
Then, he laughed. It was quite a joke. That problem was already solved. He need fear no noise from Alice. It was all absurdly simple. He would have all the pleasure of Alice Jane and none of the dream-destroying distractions and uncomfortables.
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 modern 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.
First, he paid it no mind. Then, slowly, his face lifting to the ceiling, the colour drained from his cheeks.
At the very apex of the house the music sounded, note by note, tone following tone, and it terrified him.
Each tone came like a plucking of one single harp thread. In the complete silence the small sound of it was made larger until it grew 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, sliding, 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’d 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 of a bell. High in the bell sphere the one harp thread hummed. It drew him on, caught him up with an umbilical of sound, gave his fear sustenance and life, mothered him. Fears passed between mother and groping child. He sought to shear away the connection with his hands, could not. He fell, as if someone’d given a heave on the cord, wriggling.
Another clear threaded tone. And another.
‘No, keep quiet!’ he shouted. ‘There can’t be noise in my house. Not since two weeks ago. I said there’d be no more noise. So there can’t be — it’s impossible! Keep quiet!’
He burst upwards into the attic.
Relief can be hysteria.
Rain-drops, falling from a vent in the roof, struck shattering upon a tall cut-glass Swedish flower vase, with resonant tone.
He destroyed the vase with one violent kick.
Putting on an old shirt and old pair of pants in his room, he chuckled. The music was gone, the vent plugged, the vase in a thousand pieces, the silence again ensured.
There are silences and silences. Each with its own identity. There were summer night silences, which weren’t silences at all, but layer on layer of insect chorals and the sound of electric lamps swaying in lonely small orbits on lonely country roads, casting out feeble rings of illumination upon which the night fed — summer night silence which, to be a silence, demanded an indolence and a neglect and an indifference upon the part of the listener. Not a silence at all!
And there was a winter silence, but it was an encoffined silence, ready to burst free at the first nod of spring; things had a compressed, a not-for-long feel, the silence made a sound unto itself, the freezing was so complete it made chimes of everything or detonations of a single breath or word you spoke at midnight on the diamond air.
No, it was
