On, Off

appalled some of her colleagues, Desdemona didn’t think herself imperiled because her route led right through the Hollow. Her height, her athletic stride, her air of confidence and her lack of a pocketbook rendered her an unlikely victim of any kind. Besides, after five years, she knew every face she encountered, and received none but friendly waves in answer to her own.

The oak leaves were already falling; by the time Desdemona turned on to Twentieth Street to walk the block to Sycamore, she shuffled through piles of them because the council trucks hadn’t been this way yet. Ah, there he was! The Siamese who always hung out on top of a post to say hello as she passed; she stopped to pay homage. Behind her, footsteps shuffled for a fraction of a second after hers had ceased. It was that made her turn in surprise, a tiny hackle prickling. Oh, surely not after five years! But there was no one in sight unless he lurked behind a nearby oak. She went on, ears tuned, and stopped again twenty feet farther on. The rustle of dead leaves behind her stopped too, half a second too late. A faint sweat broke out on her brow, but she continued as if she had noticed nothing, turned onto Sycamore, and astonished herself by racing the last block to her three-family house.

Ridiculous, Desdemona Dupre! How silly of you. It was the wind, it was a rat, a bird, some small creature you didn’t see.

When she climbed the thirty-two stairs to her third-floor apartment she was breathing harder than either the run or the steps warranted. Involuntarily her eyes went to her work basket, but it was undisturbed. Her embroidery lay exactly where it ought to be.

Eliza Smith had made Bob’s favorite dinner, spare ribs with a side salad and hot bread. His state of mind worried her hugely. Ever since the murder he had gone steadily downhill; touchy in temper, critical of things he usually didn’t even notice, often somewhere so distant that he neither saw nor heard anything. She had always known that he had this side to his nature, but between a brilliant career and his folly in the basement – as well as a good marriage, she hastened to add – she had been positive that it would never dominate his thinking, his world. After all, he had gotten through Nancy – oh, been a bit rocky for a while, yet rallied – and what could be worse than that?

Though the papers and the TV news programs had ceased to harp on the “Connecticut Monster,” Bobby and Sam hadn’t taken their hint. Every day that they went to the Dormer Day School they basked in the glory of having a dad closely involved in the murders, and failed to see why they ought not to harp on them some more after they came home. I mean, cut in pieces!

“Which one do you think it is, Dad?” Bobby asked again.

“Don’t, Bobby,” said his mother.

“I reckon it’s Schiller,” said Sam, gnawing at a spare rib. “I bet he was a Nazi. He looks like a Nazi.”

“Hush up, Sam! Leave the subject alone,” said Eliza.

“Pay attention to your mother, boys. I’ve had enough,” the Prof said, his plate hardly touched.

Conversation ceased as the boys ate more spare ribs, crunched through crusty bread, and eyed their father speculatively.

“Aw, gee, Dad, please, please tell us who you reckon it is,” Bobby cajoled.

“Schiller’s the killer! Schiller’s the killer!” sang Sam. “Achtung! Sieg heil! Ich habe ein tiger in mein tank!”

Robert Mordent Smith put both hands on the table and lifted himself to his feet, then pointed to a vacant space in the big room. Bobby gulped, Sam whimpered, but both children got up and went to where their father had pointed, rolling their pants up to their knees. Smith took a long switch with a shredded end from its traditional position on the sideboard, walked across to the boys, and swung the implement at Bobby’s calf. He always hit Bobby first because Sam was so terrified of the switch that having to watch Bobby doubled his own punishment. The first cut raised red welts, but five more followed while Bobby remained still, manfully silent; Sam was bawling already. Six more cuts on Bobby’s other calf and it was Sam’s turn for six on each calf, laid on as hard and viciously as Bobby’s despite the screams. Sam was a coward in his father’s opinion. A girl.

“Go to bed and think of the pleasures in being alive. Not all of us are that lucky, remember? I’ll have no more of this pestering, hear me?”

“Sam maybe,” Eliza said when the boys had gone, “he’s just twelve. But you shouldn’t take a switch to a fourteen-year-old, Bob. He’s bigger than you already. One day he’ll turn on you.”

For answer, Smith went to the basement door, the keys to its police locks in his hand.

“And there’s no need for this obsessive locking up!” Eliza called from the dining room as he disappeared. “What if something happened and I needed you in a hurry?”

“Holler!”

“Oh, sure,” she muttered, starting to carry the remains of dinner to the kitchen. “You wouldn’t hear over the racket. And mark my words, Bob Smith, one day our boys will turn on you.”

The strains of a Saint-Saens piano concerto erupted from a pair of gigantic speakers poised in the doorless aperture that led out of the kitchen. While Claire Ponsonby shelled raw shrimp in the ancient stone sink and picked the veins from them, her brother opened the “slow” oven of the Aga combustion stove, hands inside mittens, and withdrew a terra-cotta casserole dish. Its lid was glued on with a dough of flour-and-water to keep in every last drop of precious juice; depositing the dish on the marble end of the three-hundred-year-old worktable, Charles then began the tedious job of chipping the casserole lid free from its sealing of dough.

“I coined an excellent aphorism today,” he said as he toiled. “Gossip is like garlic – a good servant, but a bad master.”

“Appropriate considering our menu, but is the gossip at the Hug really that bad, Charles? After all, no one knows.”

“I agree that no one knows whether the body parts went to the incinerator, but speculation is rife.” He tittered. “The main object of gossip is Kurt Schiller, who blubbered all over me – pah! An ornamental Teuton, a furtive fumbler – I had to bite my tongue.”

“That smells divine,” Claire said, turning to face him with a smile. “We haven’t had a beef daube in God knows when.”

“But first, shrimps in garlic butter,” said Charles. “Have you finished?”

“Last one being deveined now. Perfect music for a perfect meal. Saint-Saens is so lush. Shall I melt the butter, or will you? The garlic’s crushed and ready to go. That saucer there.”

“I’ll do it while you set the table,” Charles said, pushing a block of butter into his pan, the shrimps ready for their brief immersion the moment the butter boiled and the garlic was brown. “Lemon! Did you forget the lemon juice?”

“Honestly, Charles, are you blind? Right beside you.”

Every time Claire spoke in her husky voice the big dog lying with its chin on its paws in an out-of-the-way corner would lift its head, thump the floor with its tail, its lumpy blond brows rising and falling expressively in its gentle black face like an accompaniment to the music of Claire speaking.

The shrimps in Charles’s capable hands, the table set, Claire moved to the battered, stained marble counter and picked up a large bowl of canned dog food. “Here, Biddy my love, dinner for you too,” she said, crossing the room to where the dog lay and putting the bowl down just beyond its front paws. On its feet in a trice, Biddy gulped at the food hungrily. “It’s the labrador in you makes you greedy,” said Claire. “A pity the shepherd can’t tone you down. Pleasures,” she went on with a purr in her voice, “are infinitely sweeter when taken slowly.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Charles. “Let’s take an hour at least to get through our meal.”

The two Ponsonbys sat down one on either side of the wooden slab end of the table to eat, a leisurely process that was only interrupted when the LP record on the turntable needed replacing. Tonight was Saint-Saens, but tomorrow might be Mozart or Satie, depending on the dinner menu. To choose the right music was as important as the right wine.

“I presume you’re going to the Bosch exhibition, Charles?”

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. I can’t wait to see his actual paintings! No matter how good the color prints in a book are, they can’t compare to the originals. So macabre, so full of what I don’t know is conscious or unconscious humor. Somehow I can never get inside Bosch’s mind! Was he schizophrenic? Did he have a source of magic mushrooms? Or was it just the way he’d been brought up to see not only his world, but the next? They thought of life and death, reward and punishment, differently than we do today, of that I’m certain. His demons ooze glee while they subject their hapless human victims