the horses and drove the Mercedes and the cranky, appealing old Jaguar as though they were our own. We did everything, in fact, except buy the groceries and pay the taxes and the servants, but someone else was doing that, and every morning I found one hundred dollars in the pockets of my clean clothes. If summer had lasted forever, perhaps I would still be there.
T
he poplars lost their leaves in one October week; at the end of it I fell asleep listening to the hum of the pump that emptied the swimming pool. When the rain came, Marcella turned sour and drank too much. One evening I made the mistake of putting my arm about her shoulders as we sat before the fire in the trophy room.
“Get your filthy hands off me,” she said. “I don’t belong to you.
“Priest, look here. He hasn’t said an intelligent word to me all day or done a decent thing, and now he wants to paw me all night.”
Priest pretended, of course, that he had not heard her.
“Look over here! Damn it, you’re a human being, aren’t you?”
He did not ignore that. “Yes, madame, I am a human being.”
“I’ll say you are. You’re more of a man than he is. This is your place, and you’re keeping us for pets—is it me you want? Or him? You sent us the ad, didn’t you? He thinks you go into my room at night, or he says he does. Maybe you really come to his—is that it?”
Priest did not answer. I said, “For God’s sake, Marcella.”
“Even if you’re old, Priest, I think you’re too much of a man for that.” She stood up, tottering on her long legs and holding on to the stonework of the fireplace. “If you want me, take me. If this house is yours, you can have me. We’ll send him to Vegas—or throw him on the dump.”
In a much softer tone than he usually used, Priest said, “I don’t want either of you, madame.”
I stood up then, and caught him by the shoulders. I had been drinking too, though only half or a quarter as much as Marcella, but I think it was more than that—it was the accumulated frustration of all the days since Jim Bruce told me I was finished. I outweighed Priest by at least forty pounds, and I was twenty years younger. I said, “I want to know.”
“Release me, sir, please.”
“I want to know who it is; I want to know now. Do you see that fire? Tell me, Priest, or I swear I’ll throw you in it.”
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?”
