“He’s a master carpenter,” my mother broke in gently. “And he’s very good—he studied ancient architecture at university, before going into the theater.” She turned to Hillary and explained, “This is just another example of masculine rivalry that goes back long before you children were even born…”
“Oooh la la,” said Hillary.
“Not that kind. And it doesn’t even involve us, really—” She gave my father a warning glare. “It’s between Axel and Ralph and—some friends. And it goes back a very long time. Unk sided with Axel—”
“And Ralph went independent,” finished Hillary. He looked very pleased with himself, but when I watched my parents I saw something complicated, almost disturbing, pass between them. My stomach lurched: all I could think of was that snowy morning when Hillary had whispered that Ali’s parents were getting divorced.
“Right,” my father said after a moment. “Ralph remained—independent.”
I knew by his tone that he was talking over our heads. Hillary didn’t even notice. He speared some spaghetti, wolfed it down and asked, “So this party’s tomorrow? What time?”
My mother’s delicate eyebrows rose. “Are the children invited?”
“Everyone’s invited.” My father sighed. For an instant I thought he was going to leave the table. He pushed his chair back and stared out the darkened window behind us. In the distance the ragged bulk of Muscanth Mountain blotted out the stars; but at its very tip I could see a faint glimmer of gold, as though bonfires burned there. My father stared at it for a long time. At last he said, “It’s not an invitation you can turn down.”
“Cool.” Hillary grinned. “Too bad my folks’re out of town.”
My mother shook her head, striking her best Livia Defending Her Young pose. “Darling, are you sure? After that trouble in—”
“Absolutely.” My father turned with such force that everything on the table bounced. “Axel hasn’t seen Lit for years. He’s her goddam godfather, Audrey—”
My mother set her mouth and glanced down at another page of script. “Do you have something nice to wear, Lit?” she asked calmly. “We’ll have to go to Lord and Taylor if you don’t.”
“I can always borrow something from Ali.”
“Fine.” She nodded without looking at me, and I almost pointed out that any dress that fit Ali would only come up to my crotch. But my mother had deliberately lost herself once more in Livia’s world, slitting her eyes as the wickedest woman in daytime television plotted her family’s downfall.
When we finished eating I walked Hillary next door, the two of us scuffling through piles of leaves and hunching our shoulders against the chill. “What the hell you think was going on at dinner?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I—Do you think they’re getting divorced?”
Hillary laughed. “You nuts? Your mom and Unk are, like, the only people in this whole town who would never get divorced! No way.” He grabbed me and rapped my head with his knuckles. “You idiot. Is that what you’re worrying about?”
“I guess. I don’t know. They were just acting so weird.”
“What, somebody in Kamensic is acting weird? Wow, alert the media.” He shook his head, clambering atop the tumbledown stone wall that was the dividing line between our property and his. “Everyone here is always acting weird. No, this is something about Ralph Casson. He’s bizarre, man. Jamie hates him. I mean, he really hates him.”
“How come? He seems okay to me.”
“I don’t know.” I followed him to his front door. Hillary stood there for a minute, staring at the terra-cotta mask hung on the knocker. The porch light spilled too brightly onto its blank face, two small holes for eyes, its mouth a black slit. “It is weird,” he said, almost to himself. “We never think about it, but Jamie said you never see stuff like this in the city. Or anywhere else, probably.”
Suddenly he gave the mask a tug, yanking the hempen cord from the door. “What the hell does it mean, Lit?” he asked in a low voice, and held up the ugly grinning face. “What does it mean?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it means anything,” I said, but that wasn’t true. As I stared at the tiny mask between Hillary’s fingers I felt revulsion and something very close to fear. Again I saw that terrible figure moving slowly through the trees, and heard the rustle of its antlers as they tugged at the leaves. “Hillary…”
Hillary’s eyes remained fixed on the mask. His expression grew dark. Before I could say anything more, he tossed the mask into the drift of leaves beside the porch.
“I just want to get out of here,” he said softly. “I just want to get to New Haven and never see this town again.”
He opened the door and slipped inside. For a moment he hesitated and I saw him framed in shadow, the porch light igniting his face so that he resembled the mask, his mouth a livid gash and his eyes blackly staring. He dipped his head in farewell.
“’ Night, Lit. See you.”
“Yeah…”
He shut the door. I waited, half-expecting him to come back, to ask me in, to act like Hillary again. But he didn’t. After a minute or so I turned and started back to my own house, glancing at the pile of leaves where the mask had landed. There was no sign of it, and even when I kicked through the heap, sending a spray of gold and brown and scarlet up into the night, the mask remained hidden.
When I got home my parents were already in bed. I called Ali; her phone was busy, and after three tries I stopped. I went into the darkened living room and sat in the wing chair by the window, staring out at the silhouette of Muscanth Mountain. Lights still burned from the promontory where Bolerium stood, but whether these were indeed bonfires, or just light glowing from the mansion’s windows, I couldn’t tell. After a while I stood, yawning, and crossed to the fireplace mantel, where my mother’s awards and the photo of my father and Axel Kern leaned against the brick.
But the photo was gone. I frowned, glancing around to see if my mother had moved it to one of the end tables cluttered with old scripts and issues of Italian Vogue. It wasn’t there, either, and when I checked to see if it had somehow fallen on the mantel I found nothing. Finally I gave up. I went to my own room, a small haven under the eaves with a map of Middle Earth on the wall and George Booth cartoons torn from The New Yorker, the ceiling covered by a collage I had made of magazine and newspaper pictures.
“That’s your whole problem right there,” Hillary had said once, pointing to a photo of Lou Reed thumbtacked onto a publicity still of the Moody Blues. “You can’t make up your mind whether you want to be a freak or just totally uncool.”
He was right. I was tainted by the same impulse that made my parents adhere to their Oriental rugs rather than shag carpeting, oak harvest tables rather than glass-and-chrome bookshelves. I stared up at the ceiling, then hopped onto the bed and peeled away the Moody Blues, in their place stuck a page torn from Creem, showing a silver-haired Iggy Pop in a recording studio. Then I collapsed back onto the unmade bed, kicking its flimsy India-print spread onto the floor, and turned on the radio.
Alison Steele’s dusky voice filled the room. She read a poem and an excerpt from The Prophet, segueing into trancey music. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Lothar and the Hand People, a band I’d never heard before singing about the Autobahn.