The Balcony Read online

  “Anne, my dear,” said Amanda, too perturbed to observe how she had startled me, “there’s been some mistake. This is not the Blue Room. This is Father’s room.”

  “Wanda—Wanda brought me here.”

  “Wanda?” Her voice was sharp, alert. “Then it wasn’t my sister Patience?”

  “No. I’ll gladly move,” I said, and to my consternation felt tears spring into my eyes.

  I had a strong impression that Aunt Amanda meant to move me elsewhere and at once. Unfortunately, she misunderstood completely my own emotions.

  “Move? Indeed you won’t! You’re tired to death. You’re going straight to bed. Father would be pleased to know that the youngest member of the family has his room.”

  After that no protest was possible. Immediately she made up her mind, Aunt Amanda mounted the carpeted platform, expertly balanced herself upon the stepladder and folded back the velvet counterpane on the bed. As I approached to help, she said, “You’ll find the pillows in the bolster.”

  I turned over the old-fashioned wooden bolster, thrust my fingers into the opening, captured a crumpled pillow. As I pulled the pillow free, something else, which had been hidden there, escaped my grip and thudded to the floor. On the lower step of the platform lay a huge, old-fashioned pistol. The candlelight gleamed on the clumsy, silver-plated handle.

  Aunt Amanda heard the noise, my accompanying gasp, and craned her neck. There was a silence. Then, “It’s Father’s pistol,” said Amanda slowly. “Strange, I thought it was in the bureau. I wonder what it was doing in the bolster.”

  I can’t say exactly what made me think that my Great-aunt Amanda was acting. Possibly she was a shade too casual as she explained that John S. Hieronomo, like many men of his generation, had been used to sleep with a pistol underneath his pillow and that someone— name unspecified—must have returned the pistol to that hiding place, which she professed to consider not in the least unusual. She would inquire, she said. The light and casual air was slightly overdone. She may have sensed what I was thinking. At any rate she peered at me. “What is it, dear? You look very pale. Do firearms make you nervous?”

  “I—I suppose they do,” I said uncertainly.

  She dismounted from the ladder. “That’s foolish, Anne. The pistol isn’t loaded, hasn’t been in years. Here, let me show you.”

  She broke the gun, and I saw that it was indeed unloaded. Nevertheless I drew back. She laughed, and leaned to kiss me.

  “Just to make you easier, I’ll leave it in the bureau. Now blow out your candles and climb into bed.”

  She waited until I climbed into the bed that would have accommodated six. She herself blew out the candles. In the darkness she moved noiselessly toward the door. At the heavy walnut bureau, however, I heard her pause and open a drawer. I heard her open the drawer and close it, and then, with a last good night, she was gone.

  It took me several minutes to slide cautiously from bed, to locate matches, to relight the candles. Finally the task was done, and I was started toward the bureau. I opened the drawer that Aunt Amanda had opened.

  The drawer, lined in yellowed newspapers, was empty. My great-grandfather’s gun wasn’t there.

  I was still staring into the empty drawer when for the second time very softly the door behind me opened. I started violently. Patience Hieronomo came in.

  Instinctively, and without thought, I pushed the drawer into place. I dare say I looked somewhat shaken. I felt shaken, certainly.

  “Anne, my dear, I’m sorry,” cried Aunt Patience. “I should have knocked, but I thought I’d find you in your bed.” She too held a candle in her hand. She raised it higher. She looked full into my face. “Is something wrong?”

  Again instinct guided me.

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong. It’s—it’s only that you came in so quietly.”

  It was her turn to hesitate. She leaned a little forward. In the candlelight, the dyed hair rose above her round, full face like the crest of some fantastic bird. Her voice, when finally it came, was swift and low and very urgent.

  “I had to talk to you. I want to ask what brought you East? Why did you come from Wisconsin to Hieronomo House?” Her small bright eyes were fixed upon me. They seemed to glitter.

  “Why did I come here?” I repeated, utterly confused. I stared back at her. “Aunt Amanda invited me to come and meet the family.”

  “Is that all she wrote you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did she give no other reason for bringing you fifteen hundred miles?”

  “What other reason could there be?” I stammered. “Since the house is being sold, it would be my last chance . . .”

  “I know that story,” said Patience Hieronomo. Her eyes slid toward the door, came back to me. Her voice sank to a whisper. “I know, too, that it isn’t like Amanda to want to hold a sentimental wake because the house is being sold at last. Believe me, she has some other reason for bringing us all together. Amanda isn’t sentimental. Amanda isn’t sentimental in the least.”

  Patience Hieronomo turned, then, and left the room.

  IV

  I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL THAT NIGHT, but I slept late into the morning. It must have been nearly noon when I climbed from my great-grandfather’s massive bed, dressed and went downstairs. The vast, lonely rooms that opened off the foyer—the shadowy, funereal drawing room, the dining room in Chippendale and Sheraton, the somber library—were quiet and deserted. A low murmur of voices was issuing from the regions toward the rear, and I guessed that my aunts were conferring in the kitchen.

  I badly wanted coffee, but I wanted more to defer a meeting with either of my hostesses. I looked quickly around the foyer and then I slipped outside. The instant I left the house behind, my spirits lifted. The winter day was cold and crystal clear, illumined by a distant sun. In that clear and sparkling air, my night-time apprehensions became melodramatic and absurd. As absurd as was my strong regret that I had ever left Wisconsin.

  It seemed to me that I had allowed trifles to unnerve me, trifles that shrank to unimportance as I examined them. Aunt Amanda could have had a dozen different reasons for removing her father’s gun, particularly when I had evinced such an active distaste for it. Even the cryptic little conversation with Great-aunt Patience suddenly seemed a shade ridiculous. Almost every family includes one over-imaginative individual anxious to make a mystery out of nothing. What ulterior motive could Amanda Silver have had in planning a reunion of the family? I could think of none.

  Through crisp, unbroken snow I walked briskly past the ice-encrusted cypress avenue that dropped in beauty to the public road below, and around the house. I meant to enter through the kitchen, and greet my aunts with the cheerfulness I felt.

  I paused briefly to survey the grounds. In a winter garden where clumps of edelweiss and lobelia were brave against the snow, I saw Amos engaged in earnest conversation with a workman who had come to repair the electric wires and had paused to waste the company’s time. Beyond the two men, unsightly in the white and sweeping landscape, rose a high, board fence. I waved to Amos, subconsciously observed the fence, and then my absent gaze passed on to a sprawling barn some distance off. From the cupola which topped the barn, John S. Hieronomo had been used to watch and clock his trotting horses as they circled a long-abandoned track immediately below.

  I turned to enter the house, paused abruptly. A woman was standing in the open cupola of the barn. It was her attitude that caught my attention. She was absolutely motionless. She was staring down.

  I started walking toward the barn. I kept my eyes fixed upon the woman in the cupola. She was small and plump, rather like a bedraggled but well-fed little pigeon, very chipper and completely self-contained in a shabby coonskin coat. She had brassy yellow hair, bobbed and curled elaborately, spilling from a cheap red hat. She didn’t fit into the lovely winter scene. Nor did she look like any family friend. Yet there she stood, boldly staring from her height toward a snowy slope bey
ond and below the barn. I glanced curiously at the little rise, barren except for the grotesquely beautiful shapes of three yellow pines, came into earshot, called:

  “Hello!”

  She did not answer. I called again. This time she certainly heard. Still she didn’t move. When I reached the barn, she was gone. I know; I went inside. I passed by Princess and Betsy comfortably munching oats, and climbed a steepish ladder that mounted to the cupola. The woman with the brassy yellow hair had somehow contrived a swift departure.

  I investigated. I discovered a second door on the opposite side of the barn. The door stood ajar. Leading from it was a line of footprints in the snow. I made no attempt to trace them. Nevertheless, I felt mystified, uneasy. With a vague notion of questioning Amos, I returned to the garden, only to discover that he and the workman had transferred their consultation elsewhere. Uncertain and perplexed, suddenly a little chilled, I hesitated there in the long black shadow cast by the ugly fence. At that point something happened which drove the woman from my mind.

  A bright red rubber ball sailed through the air and struck me squarely on the nose. The ball came over the high board fence, and was followed by the prompt arrival of a wire-haired terrier. The terrier approached by means of a hole underneath the fence, and made evident that the ball was personal property by sitting on his haunches and begging that I hand it over.

  I was about to oblige him when a loud, unseen voice called:

  “Skipper! Skipper! Come here at once.”

  The terrier knew his rights. I still had the ball, and

  he didn’t budge. The loud, peremptory voice called again. I was annoyed.

  “Skipper,” I shouted back, “seems to like it here.”

  To my astonishment the unseen voice became enraged and threatening. “Give me that dog!”

  “He seems happy here!”

  Skipper whined and begged. I held the ball just out of reach. The terrier howled dolefully.

  “You let me have that dog!”

  “Why don’t you come and get him?” I suggested meanly.

  Immediately I heard a sound of scuffling. A moment later a masculine head appeared above the wooden barrier, followed by broad shoulders and a pair of long, lean legs. A tall man, intensely blond, vaulted over the fence and landed at my feet. He straightened up. The words that were on his lips died there. He leaned back against the fence and looked at me. I looked at him. I saw everything about him very clearly, and as though each detail had importance—the tie he wore, his ungloved hands, the dark brown hat aslant his yellow head, the two tiny crimson feathers tucked jauntily into the band.

  As we stared at one another, everything was very quiet. It was one of those odd moments which comes seldom in any life-time when two strangers meet, not as strangers but as familiars. One sometimes and very rarely glimpses in a crowd a stranger’s face and thinks, surprised, “I could know that person well. I could be his friend.” This was such a moment.

  For what seemed a long time I waited for the tall blond man to speak. Then, finally, I said, “You must be my neighbor.”

  He seemed to wake up from a dream.

  “Neighbor!” he repeated sharply. He took a backward step. “Oh, no! Decidedly I’m not a neighbor. My name is Ayres. Dan Ayres. Who are you?”

  Dan Ayres’ manners weren’t then or ever the secret of his charm. Nevertheless, I think I understood instinctively that his emotions went beyond any ordinary rudeness. I had been so sure that we had shared that brief and fleeting moment of intense awareness. I gazed at him, astonished.

  “Who are you?” he demanded a second time.

  “Anne Hieronomo.”

  “I thought as much.” He turned abruptly on his heel and then bewilderingly reversed himself and gazed again at me. He spoke incomprehensible words. “It’s too bad, isn’t it, that we’ve got to meet like this? I thought at first—well, let it pass! But somehow you don’t look like a Hieronomo. Tell me, don’t you sometimes find that hate is a heavy load to carry?”

  “I don’t understand. . . .” And then I saw that high, dividing fence and grasped not the truth but some dim inkling of it. It was as though a sudden bitter wind had chilled the sunlit day. Dan Ayres, too, was staring at the wooden barrier, and his face was grim.

  “Ugly, isn’t it? A spite fence can be almost as ugly as the things it stands for. Your Great-uncle Richard put it there. That was his idea. Your great-aunts—the charitable Amanda and her sister Patience . . .”

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  He broke off, and once again he peered at me. The black look faded from his eyes. He frowned.

  “Come clean, Anne Hieronomo! Don’t stand there and pretend the Ayres-Hieronomo feud is news to you.”

  “I’m not pretending,” I said, and felt anger rise where quite another emotion had been. “I thought feuds were

  confined to the mountains of Tennessee, and were old hat there. I see you think otherwise. But I’d like to point out it’s not my fault that you dislike my people . . .” “Dislike!” he cried. “Dislike! I hate them as they hate me, and with better reason. Go inside and ask your relatives about the Ayres. Ask Amanda Silver how she tried to keep me from working in the village bank just because the sainted John S. owned it once. Ask her how she withdrew her account and caused an uproar that rocked the town. That was six months ago. Ask her why. Maybe she’ll tell you how she and Patience killed my father years ago, with their filthy, lying tongues. They broke his heart. They’ve made my mother’s life a hell on earth. They’ve done their damnedest to run me out of town. They . . .”

  “I—I don’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t expect you to,” said he, and started toward the fence.

  Perhaps pride should have halted me, but I was too aroused to think of pride. I stepped squarely into his path. I grasped his arm. I shook it.

  “See here, my friend. It strikes me that you carry a heavy load of hate yourself. You may be justified, I wouldn’t know. But I do know no one would behave as you say my people have behaved without some reason. You started this, now suppose you enlighten me. What caused the trouble in the first place?”

  He peered at me as though he could hardly credit my honest ignorance. Apparently he was at last convinced. I saw his mood change, his anger vanish. He didn’t smile, but once again he became the tall blond man who had leaped an ugly fence, and for an endless moment looked at me. We had completed a circle, and were back at the beginning. Or so I thought confusedly. With an air of strain and urgency, he spoke.

  “We can’t stand here talking. At least I can’t. It—it’s quite impossible. But—” he hesitated—“I do want to say—”

  “What?”

  “It sounds too crazy.”

  “Don’t let that stop you,” I said with an intended irony that went flat before his intent and brilliant eyes.

  “You and I aren’t enemies,” said he in that odd and hurried tone. “I know that, too. I knew it from the first. Maybe you and I don’t need to worry about a row that began when we were in our cradles. I hope so, Anne Hieronomo. And I hope you’ll listen to what I say.”

  “I’m listening,” I said faintly.

  “Leave Hieronomo House,” he said in a fierce, low whisper. “Leave there at once. Believe me when I tell you that your own people—and I know them as you cannot—are cruel, evil human beings. They’ve invited trouble, they’ve hugged it to their hearts, and they’re bound to reap the harvest. They don't even trust or like each other. Don’t stay with them, I beg of you. Don’t stay another minute. Believe me when I tell you that great bleak house itself is evil . . .”

  His sentence broke squarely in the middle. He was facing me, and the house. I watched his expression alter. I turned around.

  Amanda Silver was coming through the winter garden.

  V

  FOR AN INSTANT I WAS RIGID. Dan gave a low, excited laugh. He leaned back against the fence.

  “Now you’ll see,” he said. “Now you’ll unders
tand exactly what I was getting at. Just watch Amanda Silver when she finds me here.”

  That he meant to stand his ground I was certain. Whatever the rights of the ancient quarrel, I perceived quite clearly that Dan Ayres was willing to do battle then and there. I have often wondered whether I would have changed the course of what was to happen afterwards had I let him have his way. I could not do it.

  “Go,” I said. “Go at once.”

  He hesitated.

  I pushed him feverishly. “Please go, Dan. Don’t make it hard for me.”

  “But I’ve got to make you understand. Lots of things. It’s important, Anne. Vitally important that I talk to you. Let’s face Amanda Silver now.”

  “No,” said I. “I’ll meet you here this afternoon.”

  “Four-thirty, then,” said he, “and that’s a promise.”

  With that he was over the fence and out of sight. The wire-haired terrier had long since vanished. But I still held in my hand the red rubber ball. I managed to push it through the hole to the other side as Amanda approached. If she noticed and wondered she gave no sign of it. She began to talk before she reached me.

  “Anne, my dear, we were getting worried. You’ve been gone so long and without a bite to eat. We were driving into town to do our marketing, and Patience thought you might like to go along. Accordingly, Wanda went up to wake you ...”

  I stammeringly apologized. “I had a headache. I came out to get a breath of air.”

  She accepted the explanation. Indeed, she was so solicitous about my health that I felt like the veriest hypocrite. Looking at her, striding along beside me in her riding clothes, it seemed incredible that Dan’s bitter words could be true. But I lacked the courage to mention him to my Great-aunt Amanda. I did not intend to maintain a deception, but I did intend to keep my own confidence and withhold my opinion until I heard all that Dan Ayres had to say to me.