'What is it?' he asked her.
He stepped into the hollow and slipped two yards down on cold mud. The dog barked once sharply, then turned in a tight circle and flattened herself out again on the ground. She was looking at a stand of fir trees growing up on the far side of the hollow. As Lewis slogged through the mud, Flossie crept forward toward the trees.
'Don't go in there,' he said. The dog crept up to the first of the trees, whining; then it disappeared under the branches.
He tried to call it out. The hound would not return. No sound came from within the thick cluster of firs. Frustrated, Lewis looked up at the sky and saw heavy clouds scudding on the north wind. The two days' respite from snow was over.
'Flossie.'
The dog did not reappear, but as he looked at the dense curtain of fir needles he saw an astonishing thing. Stitched into the pattern of needles and branches was the outline of a door. A dump of dark needles formed the handle. It was the most perfect optical illusion he had ever seen: even the hinges were represented.
Lewis took a step forward. He was at the spot where Flossie had flattened herself out on the ground. The illusion grew more perfect the closer to the trees he went. Now the needles seemed almost to be suggesting the grain of polished wood. It was the way they alternated colors and shades, darker green above lighter above darker, a random pattern solidifying into the whorls on a slab of monkeywood.
It was the door to his bedroom.
Lewis slowly went up the other side of the hollow toward the door. He went close enough to touch the smooth wood.
It wanted him to open it. Lewis stood in his wet boots in a cold, lifting breeze and knew that all the inexplicable occurrences of his life since that day in 1929 had led him to this: they put him in front of an impossible door to an unforseeable experience. If he had just been thinking that the story of Linda's death was-as Don said of the story of Alma Mobley-without point or ending, then there behind the door was its meaning. Even then Lewis knew that the door led not to one room but many.
Lewis could not refuse it. Otto, rubbing his hands before a twigfire, was only a part of an existence too trivial to insist on its worth-too trivial to hold to. For Lewis, who had already made his decision, his past, especially the latest years in Milburn, was dull lead, a long ache of boredom and uselessness from which he had been shown the way out.
Thus Lewis turned the brass knob and fell into his place in the puzzle.
He stepped, as he knew he would, into a bedroom. He recognized it immediately: the sunny bedroom, filled with Spanish flowers, of the ground-floor apartment he and Linda had kept in the hotel. A silky Chinese rug stretched beneath his feet to each of the room's corners; flowers in vases, still hungry for the sun, picked up the golds, reds and blues of the rug and shone them back. He turned around, saw the closing door, and smiled. Sun streamed through the twin windows. Looking out, he saw a green lawn, a railed precipice and the top of the steps down to the sea which glimmered below. Lewis went to the canopied bed. A dark blue velvet dressing gown lay folded across its foot. At peace, Lewis surveyed the entire lovely room.
Then the door to the lounge opened, and Lewis turned smiling to his wife. In the haze of his utter happiness, he moved forward, extending his arms. He stopped when he saw that she was crying.
'Darling, what's wrong? What happened?'
She raised her hands: across them lay the body of a short-haired dog. 'One of the guests found her lying on the patio. Everybody was just coming out from lunch, and when I got there they were all standing around staring at the poor little thing. It was horrible, Lewis.'
Lewis leaned over the body of the dog and kissed Linda's cheek. 'I'll take care of it, Linda. But how the devil did it get there?'
'They said someone threw it out of a window… oh, Lewis, who in the world would do a thing like that?'
'I'll take care of it. Poor sweetie. Just sit down for a minute.' He took the corpse of the dog from his wife's hands. 'I'll straighten it out. Don't worry about it anymore.'
'But what are you going to do with it?' she wailed.
'Bury it in the rose garden next to John, I guess.'
'That's good. That's lovely.'
Carrying the dog, he went toward the lounge door, then paused. 'Lunch went all right otherwise?'
'Yes, fine. Florence de Peyser invited us to join her in the suite for dinner tonight. Will you feel like it after all that tennis? You're sixty-five, remember.'
'No, I'm not.' Lewis faced her with a puzzled expression. 'I'm married to you, so I'm fifty. You're making me old before my time!'
'Absentminded me,' Linda said. 'Really, I could just kick myself.'
'I'll be right back with a much better idea,' Lewis said, and went through the door to the lounge.
The dog's weight slipped off his hands, and everything changed. His father was walking toward him across the floor of the parsonage living room. 'Two more points, Lewis. Your mother deserves a little consideration, you know. You treat this house as though it were a hotel. You come in at all hours of the night.' His father reached the armchair behind which Lewis stood, swerved off in the direction of the fireplace, and then marched back to the other side of the room, still talking. 'Sometimes, I am told, you drink spirits. Now I am not a prudish man, but I will not tolerate that. I know you are sixty-five-'
'Seventeen,' Lewis said.
'Seventeen, then. Don't interrupt. No doubt you think that is very grown up. But you will not drink spirits while you live under this roof, is that understood? And I want you to begin showing your age by helping your mother with the cleaning. This room is henceforth your responsibility. You must dust and clean it once a week. And see to the grate in the mornings. Is that clear?'
'Yes, sir,' he said.
'Good. That is point one. Point two concerns your friends. Mr. James and Mr. Hawthorne are both fine men, and I would say I have an excellent relationship with both of them. But age and circumstance divide us. I would not call them friends, nor would they call me their friend. For one thing, they are Episcopalians, just one step from popery. For another, they possess a good deal of money. Mr. James must be one of the richest men in all of New York, Do you know what that means, in 1928?'
'Yes, sir.'
'It means that you cannot afford to keep up with his son. Nor can you keep up with Mr. Hawthorne's son. We lead respectable and godly lives, but we are not wealthy. If you continue to associate with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne, I foresee the direst consequences. They have the habits of the sons of wealthy men. As you know, it is my plan to send you to the university in the autumn, but you will be one of the poorest students at Cornell, and you must not learn such habits, Lewis, they will lead only to ruin. I will forever regret your mother's generosity in using her own funds to provide the wherewithal to purchase you a motorcar.' He was on another circuit of the room. 'And people are already gossiping about the three of you and that Italian woman on Montgomery Street I know clergymen's sons are supposed to be wild, but… well, words fail me.' He paused midpoint on the track from the corner of the room and looked seriously into Lewis's eyes. 'I assume that I am understood.'
'Yes, sir. I understand. Is that all?'
'No. I am at a loss to account for this.' His father was holding out to him the corpse of a short-haired hound. 'It was lying dead on the walk to the church door. What if one of the congregation had seen it there? I want you to dispose of it immediately.'
'Leave it to me,' Lewis said. 'I'll bury it in the rose garden.'
'Please do so immediately.'
Lewis took the dog out of the living room, and at the last minute turned to ask, 'Do you have Sunday's sermon prepared, father?'
No one answered. He was in an unused bedroom at the top of the house on Montgomery Street. The room's only furniture was a bed. The floorboards were bare, and greasepaper had been nailed over the only window. Because Lewis's car had a flat tire, Sears and Ricky were off borrowing Warren Scales's old flivver while Warren and his pregnant wife shopped. A woman lay on the bed, but she would not answer him because she was dead. A sheet covered her body.
Lewis moved back and forth on the floorboards, willing his friends to return with the farmer's car. He did not
