His face tightened at that. “Yes,” he whispered, and I let go of his shoulders. “It was not the lady, sir. It was you. I want that understood this time.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not doing this because of what she said.”
“You aren’t the master, are you? For God’s sake tell the truth.”
“I have always told the truth, sir. No, I am not the master. Do you remember the picture I gave you?”
I nodded.
“You discarded it. I took the liberty, sir, of rescuing it from the waste can in your bathroom. I have it here.” He reached into his coat and pulled it out, just as he had on the first day, and handed it to me.
“It’s one of these? One of the servants?”
Priest nodded and pointed with an impeccably manicured forefinger to the figure at the extreme right of the second row. The name beneath it was
“Him?”
Silently, Priest nodded again.
I had examined the picture on the night he had given it to me, but I had never paid special attention to that particular half-inch-high image. The person it represented might have been a gardener, a man of middle age, short and perhaps stocky. A soft, sweat-stained hat cast a shadow on his face.
“I want to see him.” I looked toward Marcella, still leaning against the stonework of the mantel. “We want to see him.”
“Are you certain, sir?”
“Damn you, get him!”
Priest remained where he was, staring at me; I was so furious that I think I might have seized him as I had threatened and pushed him into the fire.
Then the French windows opened, and there came a gust of wind. For an instant I think I expected a ghost, or some turbulent elemental spirit. I felt that pricking at the neck that comes when one reads Poe alone at night.
The man I had seen in the picture stepped into the room. He was a small and very ordinary man in worn khaki, but he left the windows wide behind him, so that the night entered with him, and remained in the room for as long as we talked.
“You own this house,” I said. “You’re Kevin Malone.”
He shook his head. “I am Kevin Malone—this house owns me.”
Marcella was standing straighter now, drunk, yet still at that stage of drunkenness in which she was conscious of her condition and could compensate for it. “It owns me too,” she said, and walking almost normally she crossed the room to the baronial chair Malone had chosen, and managed to sit down at his feet.
“My father was the man-of-all-work here. My mother was the parlor maid. I grew up here, washing the cars and raking leaves out of the fountains. Do you follow me? Where did you grow up?”
I shrugged. “Various places. Richmond, New York, three years in Paris. Until I was sent off to school we lived in hotels, mostly.”
“You see, then. You can understand.” Malone smiled for a moment. “You’re still re-creating the life you had as a child, or trying to. Isn’t that right? None of us can be happy any other way, and few of us even want to try.”
“Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again,” I ventured.
“That’s right; you can’t go home. There’s one place where we can never go—haven’t you thought of that? We can dive to the bottom of the sea and someday NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there’s one place where we can’t go. We can’t go where we are already. We can’t go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there.”
Not knowing what to say, I nodded, and that seemed to satisfy him. Priest looked as calm as ever, but he made no move to shut the windows, and I sensed that he was somehow afraid.
“I was put into an orphanage when I was twelve, but I never forgot The Pines. I used to tell the other kids about it, and it got bigger and better every year, but I knew what I said could never equal the reality.”
He shifted in his seat, and the slight movement of his legs sent Marcella sprawling, passed out. She retained a certain grace still; I have always understood that it is the reward of studying ballet as a child.
Malone continued to talk. “They’ll tell you it’s no longer possible for a poor boy with a second-rate education to make a fortune. Well, it takes luck, but I had it. It also takes the willingness to risk it all. I had that too, because I knew that for me anything under a fortune was nothing. I had to be able to buy this place—to come back and buy The Pines, and staff it and maintain it. That’s what I wanted, and nothing less would make any difference.”
“You’re to be congratulated,” I said. “But why . . .”
He laughed. It was a deep laugh, but there was no humor in it. “Why don’t I wear a tie and eat my supper at the end of the big table? I tried it. I tried it for nearly a year, and every night I dreamed of home. That wasn’t home, you see, wasn’t The Pines. Home is three rooms above the stables. I live there now. I live at home, as a man should.”
“It seems to me that it would have been a great deal simpler for you to have applied for the job you fill now.”
Malone shook his head impatiently. “That wouldn’t have done it at all. I had to have control. That’s something I learned in business—to have control. Another owner would have wanted to change things, and maybe he would even have sold out to a subdivider. No. Besides, when I was a boy this estate belonged to a fashionable young couple. Suppose a man of my age had bought it? Or a young woman, some whore.” His mouth tightened, then relaxed. “You and your wife were ideal. Now I’ll have to get somebody else, that’s all. You can stay the night, if you
