Illyria (4 page)

28

The thought of mice made my bare flesh prickle. I snatched up my flannel shirt and started to pull it on.

"Hey!" Rogan tugged my sleeve. "Don't do that! I was looking."

"I'm cold. Well, not cold, but I don't want mice crawling on me."

"How about
this?

He pulled me toward him. I smacked him, not hard, and pretended to struggle. He pinned me to the floor, I kicked at the blankets as he laughed and tickled me.

"Rogan! Don't--"

I kicked again. My aim went wild and my foot connected with the wall. I felt the wood buckle.

Then, alarmingly, the wall pushed back.

"Shit." With all my strength I pushed Rogan away. "Damn it, look. I broke something."

One of the wood panels had come loose and fallen onto the blankets, leaving a gap as wide as my hand. I nudged the board with my foot, then froze.

From inside the wall, light glimmered. Neither cold blue candle-flame nor an electric bulb; more like starlight, fractured and wavering yet also warm, as though embers had rained from the rafters. For an instant the rhythmic tapping fell silent. Then it started up again, louder now that the wall had been breached.

And I could hear something else besides that soft strange pattering--a susurrus, sweet and high-pitched, like the sound that hunting swallows made in the twilight above Fairview's lawns. I leaned, breathless, toward the opening. Rogan did the same. His arm circled me as our faces drew within inches of the gap.

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"Oh, Maddy," he breathed. "Oh, Maddy, look."

Inside the wall was a toy theater, made of folded paper and gilt cardboard and scraps of brocade and lace. Curtains of scarlet tissue shrouded the proscenium. The stage floor was mottled yellow and green, as though to suggest a field starred with flowers. Thumbnail-sized masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from the proscenium arch, beneath a frieze of Muses that looked as though it had been painted with a single hair. Columns no bigger than a pencil rose to either side, and a dizzyingly intricate arrangement of trompe l'oeil cutouts and folded paper walls and arches made it seem as though the stage receded endlessly, into topiary gardens and ruined statuary, a fallen tower and snow-peaked mountains and, most distant of all, a beach of golden sand with a ruined ship silhouetted against a wintry sun. A row of tiny footlights burned at the edge of the apron, each light the size of a glowing match-head, and there were loops of colored string that hung from the flies, so the curtains could be raised and flats or scrims lowered.

There was even an orchestra pit.

But no orchestra. No actors or stage manager or director. And no audience, save for Rogan and me. We craned our necks, trying to see it all.

We couldn't. The opening was too small.

And the toy theater, tiny as it was, was too big. Rogan shook his head and gazed at me questioningly. "Mice," I said.

We both started laughing, our voices edging into hysteria. Rogan finally drew a shuddering breath and wiped his eyes. "How the hell did they get that in there?"

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"Jesus, I have no idea." I rubbed my neck.
"Who
put it there? That's what I want to know."

"Maybe they just stuck it inside. Or, you know, built it in pieces then assembled it."

I gave him a dubious look. "How?"

"I dunno. How do they put ships in bottles? Maybe it was like that."

We both turned and peered back inside. The eerie rustling and tapping continued unabated, though nothing moved save the shadows cast by the diminutive footlights.

"There's lights in there," I said flatly. "Those little lights? How come it doesn't burn down?
Who lit them?"

Abruptly I felt sick. Rogan grew pale. He bit his lip, then reached to thrust his hand through the opening.

"Don't!" I stopped him, gasping, and shook my head. "Don't."

"Why not?" demanded Rogan. But he sat up, crossed his arms, and stared at me. "Is it--"

"I don't know what it is. But."

I grabbed the fallen board and started to angle it back into place, then hesitated. Without looking at each other, we lowered our heads once more.

It was all still there, the picture-frame proscenium and paint-spattered floor, gilt-and-cardboard mountains and tissue curtains and rows of paper columns stretching to an impossible distance beneath an impossible sunrise. For a long time we gazed at it, our cheeks touching, until finally I drew away.

"We should go." I felt a sudden pang. "If someone found it..."

We looked at each other, our hair tangled, Rogan still shirtless. He nodded.

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Silently I replaced the panel, making certain we could remove it next time. Rogan blew out the candle and switched on his flashlight. We dressed; I grabbed my copy of
Tales from Shakespeare,
and we crept into the attic storeroom. I helped Rogan move the stacked boxes back into place against the wall, then followed him into his bedroom.

We didn't talk about what we had seen. I felt exalted but also subdued, near tears. Rogan went to the window and stared at the sky, twilit now, the sun a red disk above the Palisades and a shimmering strand of lights poised between the hill where Fairview stood and the nebulous glow of Manhattan, ten miles downriver.

"It looks so far away," he said at last.

I crossed to stand beside him. "It's not, really."

For a few minutes we remained there, watching until the sun disappeared behind the cliffs and the sky darkened to indigo. From a room below a television droned. I could smell roasting chicken and hear Michael talking on the phone. Rogan looked at me and smiled ruefully.

"Latin?" he asked.

We got our textbooks and went downstairs.

***

I STAYED FOR DINNER THAT NIGHT. MICHAEL WAS

there--he was a high school senior that fall--and Thomas, who commuted to his first year at Fordham. And Aunt Pat, who'd arrived home from her job at Gimbels to get the chicken and potatoes in the oven.

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She was slight and briskly cheerful, her fair hair streaked with gray, her skin taut and lined from smoking.

"Your mom says you're doing well with all your classes," she said as she handed me the string beans.

"Yeah, pretty well, I guess."

"Not like Knucklehead here." She looked fondly at her youngest son. "See if you can get it to rub off on him, will you, Maddy?"

Michael made a crude face. "That shouldn't be too hard."

Rogan kicked him under the table. "You--"

Just then we all heard the front door open. Aunt Pat raised her eyebrows but said nothing. The rest of us straightened in our chairs, even Thomas, who had grown a beard when he started college and had yet to shave it. I paid great interest to my chicken, as I listened to the familiar sound of a briefcase being dropped, the door to the hall closet opening and closing, and then my uncle Richard's tread across the foyer and into the dining room, a heavier echo of my own father's footsteps.

"Hello, everyone."

It was a big doorway, but my uncle filled it. Neither he nor my father was particularly tall. Both scanted six feet, both were wiry though strongly built, broad-shouldered, long-legged, with light-brown hair barely thinning from their foreheads.

But, as the older twin, my uncle seemed to have absorbed the greater psychic mass. He was a bit grayer than my father, more worn about the face--like Aunt Pat, he was a heavy smoker--and more choleric. Seeing both twins in a crowded room, you might be hard put at first to tell them apart.

But inevitably, your gaze would be drawn to my uncle. Even in

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daylight he appeared to stand half-shadowed, and no matter how animated he was, you were always conscious of something waiting, a coiled anticipation. It was only as I grew older that I realized this sense of expectation didn't come from my uncle himself. It emanated from his children. Being in a room with his sons was like standing in a pen crammed with nervous horses. Their fear was palpable, and their mute hatred; their love.

The older boys all resembled him. Only Rogan was different, with his flaming hair and uncanny sea-foam eyes. He looked like me, and like my father; as though the strange displacement that gave my uncle his somber weight cast a bright aura around his youngest child. In a crowded room with Rogan and me, you would always look at Rogan first.

"How was your day?" asked Aunt Pat.

"It was fine." My uncle bent to kiss the top of her head, then set a big hand on my shoulder. "Hi, Maddy. You setting a good example for these reprobates?"

"Trying to." I smiled weakly.

"Michael, you take care of those gutters like I asked you?"

Michael nodded, staring at his plate. "Yup."

"Good." My uncle's gaze barely touched the other boys as he turned to go upstairs to change. "I'll be down in a minute. Make me a drink, will you, Pat?" When he could be heard in the hall above us, everyone began to eat again.

I left soon after, not waiting for Uncle Richard to return, or for dessert. When I looked at Rogan across the table, I felt as though I must give off sparks.

And as I stood to go, I saw Michael staring at me.

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"Make sure she rubs off on you," he called as Rogan walked me to the porch.

"Fuck you," said Rogan under his breath. Once we were outside, he bumped his forehead against mine. "Hey, I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay," I said. "That was amazing. Up there ..." I tilted my head toward the upper stories.

Rogan grinned. "It was incredible." He looked the way he did on Christmas morning.

He went back inside, and I headed up the winding driveway. I'd gone about halfway when someone called out.

"Maddy!"

I turned. At the bottom of the hill, where the drive wound down to the carriage house, Aunt Kate stood and beckoned to me. "Come here!"

I lifted my hand in a wave and walked down to meet her, my shoulders hunched against the chill night wind. Aunt Kate looked beautiful and exotic as always, in green lizard-skin boots and a russet swing coat, her cheeks pink with cold and a paisley scarf loosely knotted around her neck. Someone was with her, a tall figure I didn't recognize; a man.

No surprise there. Aunt Kate had never married, but she had a lot of male friends. This caused great consternation among her family, especially the women, who took it as a personal affront that Kate had a (presumably) active sex life, as well as an intellectual one. None of her friends were stockbrokers or lawyers or doctors, which might have made their presence slightly more palatable, or at least

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comprehensible; and most of them appeared to fall under some vaguely defined rubric that identified them as artists of one sort or another: men who had too much hair or none at all, men who gave a blank look when someone brought up the Mets, but who had visited slightly louche destinations, Tangiers or Nepal or London or San Francisco. They had often read the same books as Rogan and me and, despite the disparity in our ages, sometimes listened to the same music.

This man, though, didn't look like the others. He was tall and thin, with a long, angular, ascetic face, and black hair cut very short. He wore a pinstriped suit, with a white shirt open at the neck. No tie. I slowed my steps.

But then Aunt Kate grasped the man's arm with one hand, her emerald ring glinting in the darkness; and with her other hand grabbed mine.

"So this is her?" The man looked at me and smiled. His dark eyes were kind, and amused. "The famous Madeline."

"Peter, I'd like you to meet my niece. Maddy, this is my friend Peter Sullivan. He's going to be teaching you."

"Uh, hi." We shook hands. I looked around, embarrassed and somewhat suspicious. A teacher?

"Next month I'll be teaching at St. Brendan's," explained Mr. Sullivan. "English. Taking over for Sister Alberta. You know she has breast cancer?"

I shook my head, as disconcerted by the realization that nuns could get cancer as that I had just heard a man utter the word
breast.

"Oh, jeez. That's terrible," I said, then hastily added, "I mean that she's sick, not that you're a teacher."

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"Madeline is
extremely talented"
said Aunt Kate. I blushed, though I was pleased. I was accustomed to hearing my parents say those words in the same tone they used to describe Ookie Connell--
He's a little slow.
"She and my nephew Rogan."

Mr. Sullivan cocked his head at Fairview. "Is he the one I hear singing?"

Aunt Kate nodded. "Yes, that's Rogan."

I stared at the ground, then glanced uneasily at Rogan's house.

Of course I knew people had heard Rogan sing. At night, he leaned out the window on purpose so his voice would carry. He'd sung at church.

Yet, somehow, I'd never thought that a
stranger
might hear him; someone who might, however remotely, matter in the world beyond Arden Terrace.

"He has an extraordinary voice," Mr. Sullivan went on. "Does he take lessons?"

"No, they won't train them," said Aunt Kate. She might have been referring to dogs that weren't housebroken.

Mr. Sullivan turned to me again. "What about you? Do you sing?"

He looked so open and encouraging that I felt a sudden desolation. As though everything good that had happened in my life was all a mistake--Rogan, outgrowing my glasses, being smart at schoolwork. Even the memory of what we'd seen earlier in the hidden attic; even the memory of Rogan himself, his taste, his hands, and his warmth and his soft skin ... it all seemed distant and unreal. As though I'd opened a wonderful present, only to be told it was meant for one of my older, prettier sisters, and not for me.