Whereupon the duchess, in three nimble moves, peeled herself raw as a blanched oyster in the summer doorway.
I stood aghast, gripping her clothes.
“Come in, boy, you’ll die of the heat!” And the bare duchess walked serenely away among the well-dressed people.
“Beaten at my own game,” cried Nora. “Now, to compete, I must put my clothes back on. And I was so hoping to shock you.”
“Never fear,” I said. “You have.”
“Come help me dress.”
In the alcove, we waded among her clothes, which lay in misshapen pools of musky scent upon a parqueted floor.
“Hold the panties while I slip into them.”
I flushed, then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “Forgive me,” I said at last, snapping her bra in back. “It’s just here it is early evening, and I’m putting you into your clothes. I—”
A door slammed somewhere. I glanced around for the duchess.
“Gone,” I murmured. “The house has devoured her already.” True.
I didn’t see the duchess again until the rainy Monday morn she had predicted. By then she had forgotten my name, my face, and the soul behind my face.
“My God,” I said. “What’s that, and that?”
Still dressing Nora, we had arrived at the library door. Inside, like a bright mirror-maze, the weekend guests turned.
“That”—Nora pointed—“is the Ballet Russe. Just arrived. To the left, the Viennese Dancers. Divine casting. Enemy ballet mobs unable, because of language, to express their scorn and vitriol. They must pantomime their catfight. Stand aside, Willie. What was Valkyrie must become Rhine Maiden. And those boys are Rhine Maidens. Guard your flank!”
Nora was right.
The battle was joined.
The tiger lilies leaped at each other, jabbering in tongues. Then, frustrated, they fell away, flushed. With a bombardment of slammed doors, the enemies plunged off to scores of rooms. What was horror became horrible friendship, and what was friendship became steam-room oven-bastings of unabashed and, thank God, hidden affection.
After that it was one grand crystal-chandelier avalanche of writer-artist-choreographer-poets down the swift-sloped weekend.
Somewhere I was caught and swept in the heaped pummel of flesh headed straight for a collision with the maiden-aunt reality of Monday noon.
Now, many lost parties, many lost years later, as my car drove away, here I stood.
And there stood Grynwood manse, very still.
No music played. No cars arrived.
Hello, I thought. A new statue down by the lake. Hello again. Not a statue … but Nora herself, seated alone, legs drawn under her dress, face pale, staring at Grynwood as if I had not arrived, was nowhere in sight.
“Nora …?” But her gaze was so steadily fixed to the house wings, its mossy roofs and windows full of empty sky, I turned to stare at it myself.
Something was wrong. Had the house sunk two feet into the earth? Or had the earth sunk all about, leaving it stranded forlorn in the high chill air? Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?
The front door of Grynwood stood wide open. From this door, the house breathed out upon me.
Subtle. Like waking by night to feel the push of warm air from your wife’s nostrils, but suddenly terrified, for the scent of her breath has changed, the smells of someone else! You want to seize her awake, cry her name. Who is she, how, what? But heart thudding, you lie sleepless by some stranger in bed.
I walked. I sensed my image, caught in a thousand windows, moving across the grass to stand over a silent Nora.
A thousand of me sat quietly down.
Nora, I thought. Oh, dear God, here we are again.
That first visit to Grynwood …
And then here and there through the years we had met like people brushing in a crowd, like lovers across the aisle and strangers on a train, and, with the whistle crying the next quick stop, touched hands or allowed our bodies to be bruised together by the crowd cramming out as the doors flung wide, then, impelled, no more touch, no word, nothing for years.
Or it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended, a sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sand pail and here I came with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello William, as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks.
I had often wondered if a day might come when we would circle the long way round and stay. Somewhere back in time there had been one moment, balanced like a feather trembled by our breaths from either side, that held our love warmly and perfectly in poise.
But that was because I had bumped into Nora in Venice, with her roots packed, far from home, away from Grynwood. In Venice, free of her house, she might truly have belonged to someone else, perhaps even to me.
Somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere! But not Grynwood, not Grynwood ever again.
Stay! Perhaps the light of noon was cruel, perhaps it showed too many of our pores. Or perhaps, more accurately, the nasty children were bored again. Or terrified of a prison of two! Whatever the reason, the feather, once briefly lofted on champagne breath, fell. Neither of us knew which ceased breathing on it first. Nora pretended an urgent telegram and fled away to Grynwood.
We spoiled children never wrote. I did not know what sand castles she had smashed. She did not know what Indian Madras had bled color from passion’s sweat on my back. Very simply, I married. Most incredibly, I was happy.
And now here we were again come from opposite directions late on a strange day by a familiar lake, calling to each other without calling, running to each other without moving, as if we had not been years apart.
“Nora.” I took her hand. It was cold. “What’s happened?”
“Happened!?” She laughed, grew silent, staring away. Suddenly she laughed again, that difficult laughter that might instantly flush with tears. “Oh, my dear Willie, think wild, think all, jump hoops, and come round to maniac dreams. Happened, Willie, happened?!”
She grew frightfully still.
“Where are the servants, the guests …?”
“The party,” she said, “was last night.”
“Impossible! You’ve never had just a Friday-night bash. Sundays have always seen your lawn littered with demon wretches strewn and bandaged with bedclothes. Why …?”
“Why did I invite you out today, you want to ask, Willie?” Nora still looked only at the house. “To give you Grynwood. A gift, Will, if you can force it to let you stay, if it will put up with you—”
“I don’t want the house!” I burst in.
“Oh, it’s not if you want it, but if it wants you. It threw us all out, Willie.”
“Last night …?”
“Last night the last great party at Grynwood didn’t come off. Mag flew from Paris. The Aga sent a fabulous girl from Nice. Roger, Percy, Evelyn, Vivian, Jon were here. That bullfighter who almost killed the playwright over the ballerina was here. The Irish dramatist who falls off stages drunk was here. Ninety-seven guests teemed in that door between five and seven last night. By midnight they were gone.”
I walked across the lawn. I looked down. Yes, still fresh in the grass: the tire marks of four dozen cars.
“It wouldn’t let us have the party, William,” Nora called faintly.
I turned blankly. “It? The house?”
“Oh, the music was splendid but went hollow upstairs. We heard our laughter ghost back from the topmost halls. The party clogged. The petits fours were clods in our throats. The wine ran sour down our chins. No one got to bed for even three minutes. Doesn’t it sound a lie? But Limp Meringue Awards were given to all and they went away and I slept bereft on the lawn all night. Guess why? Come look, Willie.”
We walked up to the open front door of Grynwood.
“What shall I look for?”
“Everything. All the rooms. The house itself. The mystery. Guess. And when you’ve guessed a thousand times I’ll tell you why I can never live here again, must leave, why Grynwood is yours if you wish. Go in, alone.”
And in I went, slowly, one step at a time.
I moved quietly on the lovely lion-yellow hardwood parquetry of the great hall. I gazed at the Aubusson wall tapestry. I examined the ancient white marble Greek medallions displayed on green velvet in a crystal case.
“Nothing,” I called back to Nora out there in the late cooling day.
“No. Everything,” she called. “Go on.”
The library was a deep warm sea of leather smell where five thousand books gleamed their colors of hand-rubbed cherry, lime, and lemon bindings. Their gold eyes, bright titles, glittered.
Above the fireplace, which could have kenneled two firedogs and ten great hounds, hung the exquisite Gainsborough Maidens and Flowers that had warmed the family for generations. It was a portal overlooking summer weather. One wanted to lean through and sniff wild seas of flowers, touch harvests of peach-maiden girls, hear the machinery of bees bright-stitching up the glamorous airs.
“Well?” called a far voice.
“Nora!” I cried. “Come in! There’s nothing to fear! It’s still daylight!”
“No,” said the far voice sadly. “The sun is going down. What do you see, William?”
Out in the hall again, by the spiral stairs, I
