“So much for my future.”
“It can mean salvation,” she said. Her forefinger traced the line of her lower lip.
Mary demanded, “Is the money there?”
“Yes—it’s there,” she said absently. And suddenly she gathered the cards, shuffled them over and over, and laid them out again, muttering her ritual under her breath. She didn’t seem to study individual cards but to see the whole group at once, and her eyes were misty and remote.
A good trick, I thought, a killer at ladies’ clubs—or anywhere else. So must the Pythoness have looked, cool and composed and confusing. If you can hold people tense, hardly breathing, expectant for a long time, they’ll believe anything—not acting, so much as technique, timing. This woman was wasting her talent on traveling salesmen. But what did she want of us or of me? Suddenly she gathered the cards, patted them square, and put them in the red box, which said: I. Muller & Cie, Fabrique de Cartes.
“Can’t do it,” she said. “Happens sometimes.”
Mary said breathlessly, “Did you see something you don’t want to tell?”
“Oh, I’ll tell all right! Once when I was a little girl I saw a snake change its skin, a Rocky Mountain rattler. I watched the whole thing. Well, looking at the cards, they disappeared and I saw that snake changing its skin, part dusty and ragged and part fresh and new. You figure it out.”
I said, “Sounds like a trance state. Ever have it happen before?”
“Three times before.”
“Make any sense the other times?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Always the snake?”
“Oh, no! Other things, but just as crazy.”
Mary said enthusiastically, “Maybe it’s a symbol of the change in fortune that’s coming to Ethan.”
“Is he a rattlesnake?”
“Oh! I see what you mean.”
“Makes me feel crawly,” Margie said. “Once I kind of liked snakes and then when I grew up I hated them. They give me the willies. I’d better be going.”
“Ethan can see you home.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
“I’d be glad to.”
Margie smiled at Mary. “You keep him right here with you,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be without one.”
“Nonsense,” said Mary. “You could get a husband by crooking your finger.”
“That’s what I did before. It’s no good. If they come that easy, they’re not worth having. Keep him home. Someone might grab him.” She got into her coat as she talked—a fast scrammer. “Lovely dinner. I hope you’ll ask me back. Sorry about the fortune, Ethan.”
“Will we see you in church tomorrow?”
“No. I’m going up to Montauk tonight.”
“But it’s too cold and wet.”
“I love the mornings on the sea up there. Good night.” She was out before I could even hold the door for her, out as though something was after her.
Mary said, “I didn’t know she was going up there tonight.”
And I couldn’t tell her: Neither did she.
“Ethan—what do you make of that fortune tonight?”
“She didn’t tell one.”
“You forget, she said there would be money. But what do you make of it? I think she saw something she didn’t want to tell. Something that scared her.”
“Maybe she once saw the snake and it stayed in her mind.”
“You don’t think it had a—meaning?”
“Honey roll, you’re the fortune expert. How would I know?”
“Well, anyway. I’m glad you don’t hate her. I thought you did.”
“I’m tricky,” I said. “I conceal my thoughts.”
“Not from me you don’t. They’ll stay right through the second show.”
“Come again?”
“The children. They always do. I thought you were wonderful about the dishes.”
“I’m devious,” I said. “And, in due course, I have designs on your honor.”
Chapter six
It has been my experience to put aside a decision for future pondering. Then one day, fencing a piece of time to face the problem, I have found it already completed, solved, and the verdict taken. This must happen to everyone, but I have no way of knowing that. It’s as though, in the dark and desolate caves of the mind, a faceless jury had met and decided. This secret and sleepless area in me I have always thought of as black, deep, waveless water, a spawning place from which only a few forms ever rise to the surface. Or maybe it’s a great library where is recorded everything that has ever happened to living matter back to the first moment when it began to live.
I think some people have closer access to this place than others—poets, for example. Once, when I had a paper route and no alarm clock, I worked out a way to send a signal and to get a reply. Lying in bed at night, I would see myself standing on the edge of the black water. I pictured a white stone held in my hand, a circular stone. I would write on its surface in very black letters “4 o’clock,” then drop the stone and watch it sink, turning over and over, until it disappeared. It worked for me. On the second of four I awakened. Later I could use it to arouse me at ten minutes of four or quarter after. And it never failed me.
And then sometimes a strange, sometimes hideous thing thrusts up to the surface as though a sea serpent or a kraken emerged from the great depths.
Only a year ago Mary’s brother Dennis died in our house, died dreadfully, of an infection of the thyroid that forced the juices of fear through him so that he was violent and terrified and fierce. His kindly Irish horse-face grew bestial. I helped to hold him down, to pacify and reassure him in his death-dreaming, and it went on for a week before his lungs began to fill. I didn’t want Mary to see him die. She had never seen death, and this one, I knew, might wipe out her sweet memory of a kindly man who was her brother. Then, as I sat waiting by his bed, a monster swam up out of my dark water. I hated him. I wanted to kill him, to bite out his throat. My jaw muscles tightened and I think my lips fleered back like a wolf’s at the kill.
When it was over, in panic guilt I confessed what I had felt to old Doc Peele, who signed the death certificate.
“I don’t think it’s unusual,” he said. “I’ve seen it on people’s faces, but few admit it.”
“But what causes it? I liked him.”
“Maybe an old memory,” he said. “Maybe a return to the time of the pack when a sick or hurt member was a danger. Some animals and most fish tear down and eat a weakened brother.”
“But I’m not an animal—or a fish.”
“No, you’re not. And perhaps that’s why you find it foreign. But it’s there. It’s all there.”
He’s a good old man, Doc Peele, a tired old man. He’s birthed and buried us for fifty years.
Back to that Congress in the Dark—it must have been working overtime. Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so that you would say, “He can’t do that. It’s out of character.” Maybe it’s not. It could be just another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot—a coward turning hero and a brave man crashing in flames. Or you read in the morning paper about a nice, kind family man who cuts down wife and children with an ax. I think I believe that a man is changing all the time. But there are certain moments when the change becomes noticeable. If I wanted to dig deep enough, I could probably trace the seeds of my change right back to my birth or before. Recently many little things had begun to form a pattern of larger things. It’s as though events and experiences nudged and jostled me in a direction contrary to my normal one or the one I had come to think was normal—the direction of the grocery clerk, the failure, the man without real hope or drive, barred in by responsibilities for filling the bellies and clothing the bodies of his family, caged by habits and attitudes I thought of as being moral, even virtuous. And it may be that I had a smugness about being what I called a “Good Man.”