The Barnum Museum: Stories

A GAME OF CLUE

The board. The board shows the ground plan of an English mansion. The nine rooms are displayed along the sides of the board and are connected by a floor consisting of a series of identical yellow squares the size of postage stamps. In the middle of the board, on a stairway marked with a white X, rests a black envelope. Each room bears its name in the center, in black capital letters: the STUDY, the HALL, the LOUNGE, the DINING ROOM, the KITCHEN, the BALLROOM, the CONSERVATORY, the BILLIARD ROOM, and the LIBRARY. Each room contains furniture, drawn in black outline and pictured from above, as if we are viewing the room from the center of its ceiling. One corner of the board is partly concealed by the edge of a saucer, on which lies a smoking cigarette.

The table. The board lies not quite in the center of a green folding table, which shines with a dull gleam in the glow of two lights: the overhead porch light, encased in four squares of frosted glass, and the small red-shaded lamp attached to one of the porch walls. Additional light comes through the four small panes of the kitchen-door window, part of which is covered by translucent yellow curtains. If we view the table from directly above, as if our vantage point were that of the moth beating its wings against the glass of the overhead light, we see that the green border of the table is crowded with objects: a coffee-stained saucer on which lies a smoking cigarette; four pads of Detective Notes; a green quarter-full bottle of wine, bearing on its label a purple sketch of a grape arbor with three purple birds flying overhead; two yellow hexagonal pencils, one round black pencil (supported by a hand), and one round shiny-green pencil; an opaque glass bowl, white on the inside and orange on the outside, containing a few broken three-ring pretzels lying among crumbs and pretzel salt; a nearly empty stem-glass of red wine, which bears on its cup, in white letters, the legend BROTHERHOOD: AMERICA’S OLDEST WINERY; two tulip-shaped glasses of red wine; a slender wineglass one-third full of 7-Up; a half-empty cup of coffee; a transparent green glass bowl of potato chips; and a small china plate showing, beneath a scattering of brown crumbs, a blue stone bridge overlooking a blue stream with three blue ducks, one of which is raising its head toward the outstretched blue arm of a girl in a blue bonnet. In the course of the game, while the tokens move on the board, these objects also move; some of them move small distances, whereas others, like the bowl of potato chips, the bowl of pretzels, and the bottle of wine, exchange places or move to different, unpredictable places on the table. In addition there are, at the moment of observation, three hands on the table: one hand taps restlessly between the saucer with the cigarette and the nearly empty glass of wine; the side of another hand, lightly tanned, lies quietly on the table while the pad of the forefinger moves slowly, slowly back and forth against the glistening tapered thumbnail; and a third hand, holding the round black pencil, writes a question mark beside the words Professor Plum on the Detective Notes and at once erases it.

Jacob. Jacob Ross, twenty-five, sits tapping the fingers of his right hand on the tabletop as he stares unseeing at the fan of five cards in his left hand: the LIBRARY, the KITCHEN, the BILLIARD ROOM, Professor Plum, Mrs. White. He is so angry that he feels it as a pounding in both temples and a beating in his throat. He is so angry that he would like to weep, to cry out, to kill, to sweep his long hand across the board and fling from the table the tokens, the weapons, the die, the black envelope, but when, by old habit, he imagines how he appears to whoever may be watching him, he sees only a look of tense concentration, an exaggerated and brooding attention to the cards in his hand. But he is angry. He is enraged. At Marian: for speaking to him in a certain tone of voice, in their father’s study four hours ago, immediately after dinner. At Susan: for their epic argument in the car that afternoon, lasting from 3:37 (by his watch) on the Mass Pike to 5:54 (by his watch) under the railway trestle by the Post Road, exactly two minutes and thirty-six seconds before he drew up in front of his parents’ house. At David: for saying nothing, for concealing his hurt, for flooding him with forgiveness. At himself: for spending eight hours a day (2:00–6:00 and 8:00–12:00) six days a week at his desk for the past four months unable to write a single new word of what was to have been Part One (The Book of Childhood) of the greatest American poem of the second half of the twentieth century, after a period of five months during which he had accumulated 180 pages of manuscript in a minuscule handwriting in a single spiral-bound notebook (Narrow Ruled). He is enraged at his failure, at his evasions, at his later and later awakenings, at the slow erosion of his belief in his destiny, at the inexplicable wreckage of his dream, at his inevitable future as an embittered professor of English at a major university, at the unknown obstacle, at his daily defeated will. Jacob taps his fingers against the tabletop, not metrically but in a nervous and disordered rhythm that exasperates him as if the hand belonged not to him but to some clumsy stranger inhabiting him and smothering his brain. “Colonel Mustard,” he says sharply, not looking up. “In the library. With the revolver.”

Pray forgive me. Colonel Mustard enters the LIBRARY and sees, standing with her back to him to the left of the fireplace, Miss Scarlet, in a tight crimson dress, reaching for a book in the bookcase. At the sound of the opening door she turns suddenly; the book drops to the floor. “Oh, I didn’t—” she says, crouching swiftly to pick up the book and with her other hand sweeping a lock of pale hair from her eye. “Pray forgive me for disturbing you,” the Colonel remarks, closing the door quietly behind him. Her crouching knees, one higher than the other, press through the clinging crimson, which seems stretched to the breaking point. It is an effect not lost on the Colonel, who feels, in his right palm, a sudden sensation of taut silk and tense thigh. Proper now, aren’t we. Ripe for it.

The library. Viewed from above, the LIBRARY is a symmetrical figure that may be thought of as a modified rectangle: from each of the four corners a small square is missing. The resulting figure has twelve sides. As in all the rooms, the furniture is pictured from above and drawn in black outline. Thus the lamp on the central table reveals only the hexagonal top of its shade, whereas the standing lamp beside the fireplace reveals the top and side of its shade, the slanting line of its stand, and the slender oval of a base we assume to be circular.

Marian. Marian Ross, twenty-four, rolls the red die, which tumbles past the DINING ROOM into the LOUNGE and comes to rest beside the lamp. Four. Marian is no longer angry at Jacob, who was not one, not two, not three, not four, but four and a half hours late on David’s fifteenth birthday; who’d been expected for lunch but who arrived, without a phone call, four minutes before dinner; who stepped from an unknown car in the unannounced company of some girlfriend or other; and who said something impatient and unsatisfactory about a broken alarm clock, while Miss Slenderella stood with a little frown and suddenly introduced herself with an outthrust hand and a tinkle of silver bracelet: hello, I’m Susan Newton. Marian moves her piece, Miss Scarlet — she always chooses Miss Scarlet — from the LIBRARY in the direction of the distant BALLROOM. Two or three moves from now she will enter the BALLROOM, which she holds in her hand, and will suggest that the murder was committed there by Mr. Green, whom she also holds in her hand, with the Lead Pipe, which she does not. After dinner, in her father’s study, she asked Jacob why he hadn’t called. His evasive reply angered her. “You should have called. It’s David’s birthday.” “Should have, should have. Christ, Marian.” She called him selfish, and he walked out of the room. Now she wonders: was she too harsh? Marian loves Jacob and knows he is unhappy. He has passed his orals brilliantly at Harvard but has refused to begin his dissertation. He argues that scholarship and poetry both require a lifetime of devotion and that he has only one life. His decision to write for a year has brought him no peace. Was it necessary for her to use the word “selfish”? Couldn’t she have found a word with less sting, like “inconsiderate”? He had looked at her with hurt surprise. Is it possible, Marian asks herself, that her outburst was directed not at Jacob but at Susan Newton? — for having the bad taste to come with Jacob on an intimate family occasion, for being Jacob’s girlfriend, for being beautiful and desirable, for having an easy life. Marian’s own life is unsatisfactory. The men she meets are superficial or humorless, her assistant editorship in the science division of a textbook publisher interests her less and less, she is dissatisfied with her appearance (hips too broad, hair impossible), she has a sense of waste and drift. At twenty-four she is already afraid of ending up alone. Or worse: of making a safe marriage out of fear of ending up alone. Where did she go awry? Robert’s words, when she broke with him: “You talk too much about your family. What about me?” Jabbing his forefinger into his chest. “What about me?” She can still hear the sound of his finger thumping against the breastbone. Marian looks at her cards: the BALLROOM, Mr. Green, the Revolver, the Wrench. The thought comes to her: am I selfish?

Tokens and weapons. Of the six original tokens, made of wood and shaped like pawns, five remain: the red token (Miss Scarlet), the yellow token (Colonel Mustard), the green token (Mr. Green), the white token (Mrs. White), and the blue token (Mrs. Peacock). The purple token (Professor Plum) has been lost for years and has been replaced by the top half of a black wooden chess knight. There are six weapons: the Rope, the Knife, the Candlestick, the Revolver, the Wrench, and the Lead Pipe. The Rope is a small piece of white rope, formed into two coils, one on top of the other, and knotted at the ends; the five remaining weapons are made of metal. The Lead Pipe is soft and can be bent back and forth. Unlike the tokens, which are essential to the conduct of the game, the weapons are merely decorative; their movement from room to room serves no purpose, except perhaps an atmospheric one, and in no way affects the strategy of the game

The porch. One wall of the porch is shared with the kitchen, one wall is shared with the garage, and two walls contain screened windows: four in the longer wall that faces the garage, and three in the shorter wall that faces the kitchen. All seven windows are partially covered by the narrow wooden slats of roll-up blinds (dark green), held in place by ropes that pass around pulleys at the corners of the upper windowframe and around hooks under the windowsills. The rolled-up portion of the long blind lies in a slightly slanting line across the four windows. Marian sits with her back to the long blind. To her left is Jacob, with his back to the wall of three windows. Behind him, in the wall angle formed by the windows and the garage, is an aluminum chaise longue with a flower-pattern cushion on which lie a small black AM-FM radio with extended antenna, a section of the New York Times folded in half twice so as to display the crossword puzzle, and an open Clue box with partitions for the cards, the tokens, the weapons, the die, the black envelope, the Detective Notes, and the instructions. The Clue box lies aslant on its upside-down green boxcover, whose split corners have been fastened with package tape. On the wall above the chaise longue hang the red-shaded lamp and a Navajo sand painting from Albuquerque, New Mexico, showing three identical stick-figure Indian girls with outstretched arms. Susan sits to Jacob’s left, with her back to the garage. She faces Marian and the slightly slanting line of the rolled-up portion of the blind. Beneath the rolled-up blind, through the four screens, she sees mostly darkness. In one corner she can also see a porch light and part of a front porch post across a street. To Susan’s left, facing Jacob, sits David, with his back to the kitchen door. The four-paned window of the kitchen door is partially covered on the inside by translucent yellow curtains. Two wooden steps, painted gray, lead up to the door. There are two more doors on the porch: the wooden maroon door, which opens to the garage, and to which is fastened a used Connecticut license plate with two white letters and four white numerals on a blue ground; and the aluminum porch door, which opens to the back yard and is located beside the four windows near the kitchen wall. The top panel of the aluminum door is glass, and is mostly covered with a dark red strip of cloth with black and gray geometric designs, hung there for the sake of privacy by Martha Ross, who received it from a friend traveling in India. The narrow lower panel is a screen; it is changed to glass in the fall. Whenever Marian, Jacob, or Susan rises from the table in order to go to the kitchen, or to the small bathroom past the kitchen near the entrance to the cellar, David moves his chair forward under the table. He wishes to leave plenty of room for the person coming around the table toward the two steps leading to the kitchen door, even though there is room enough. When David looks to the left he can see, reflected in the narrow band of glass beneath the dark red strip of cloth, the back of his chair and a piece of his light-blue shirt. When he looks to the right he can see, over Susan Newton’s shining hair, a green, red, and black lobster buoy from Maine, hanging by a rope from a hook in the wall.

David. David Ross, fifteen, puts down the black pencil and stares at his four cards: the STUDY, the CONSERVATORY, Miss Scarlet, and the Rope. As early as the fifth grade, when Jacob, home from Columbia, had sat down and taught him to play, David had begun to notice flaws in the game. Of the total of twenty-one cards (six suspect cards, six weapon cards, nine room cards), three were placed in the black envelope in the center of the board and eighteen were dealt to the players. When three people played, each person received six cards; but when four people played, two received five cards and two only four cards — a distinct disadvantage for the four-card players, each of whom had one less clue to the murder than the five-card players did. The unfairness had disturbed him; and although it was partly rectified by the fact that the deal passed from player to player, David had always secretly discounted games with four players. All that afternoon he had waited eagerly for Jacob, assuring his mother that things would be all right, calming Marian, who had arrived from Manhattan on the 10:48, and imagining elaborate, desperate explanations for Jacob’s lateness (the train from Boston had been delayed an hour; Jacob had gone out to change a five-dollar bill in order to call and had missed the train; he hadn’t called because he was afraid of missing the next train, which was due any minute but had also been delayed). When Jacob finally pulled into the driveway four minutes before dinner with an unknown girl in an unknown car, David’s relief at seeing Jacob, his sense that things would be all right now, was mixed with a sharp disappointment: there will be four players, the games won’t count.

Doors and passages. On the board there are seventeen doors, all exactly the same: yellow, with four gray panels. Like the furniture, they are pictured from above, in sharp perspective: they are inverted trapezoids, the top of each door being nearly twice the length of the bottom. The four corner rooms have a single door each; the DINING ROOM, the BILLIARD ROOM, and the LIBRARY, two doors each; the HALL, three doors; the BALLROOM, four. In addition to their single doors, each of the corner rooms has a SECRET PASSAGE, indicated by a black square containing a yellow arrow. When a token is in any of the four rooms containing a SECRET PASSAGE, it may, on its turn, advance immediately to the room diagonally opposite. The doors and passages are the secret life of the game, for they permit the tokens to enter and leave the nine rooms, and it is solely in the rooms, and not in the yellow squares or central rectangle, that play takes place, by means of continual guesses at the three cards concealed in the black envelope.

The pleasures of secret passages. Professor Plum walks in the SECRET PASSAGE between the LOUNGE and the CONSERVATORY. He enjoys traversing the house this way: the passage corresponds to something secretive, dark, and wayward in his temperament. The erratic earthen path, the dank stone walls, the dim yellow glow of irregularly placed kerosene lanterns, the spaces of near-dark, all these soothe and excite him, and bring back those boyhood rambles along the bank of the brook in the wood behind his father’s house. He thinks of Pope’s tunnel at Twickenham, of the emergence of eighteenth-century English gardens from the rigidity of French and Italian forms, of the grove of hickory trees in the wood, of asymmetrical architecture and the cult of genius. Professor Plum does not suffer from delusions of boldness. Part of the pleasure of the serpentine dark lies in knowing that he is walking between two well-known points, the LOUNGE and the CONSERVATORY, and it is precisely this knowledge that permits him to experience a pleasurable shiver at the appearance of a lizard in the path, the fall of a mysterious pebble, the ambiguous shadows that might conceal the murderer, the sudden extinction of a lantern on the wall.

A woman of mystery. Miss Scarlet enters the BALLROOM and sees with relief that she is alone. The silent piano, the empty window seat, the polished parquet floor, the high ceiling, the gloom of early evening coming through the high windows and making a twilight in the dying room, all these comfort her in a melancholy way, as if she might lose herself in the mauve shadows. And yet, as she crosses the floor to the window seat, she imagines herself observed, in her evening dress of close-fitting red silk (tight across the hips, flared below the knees, dropping to midcalf), takes note of the firm delicate neck, the soft waves and curls of her short blond hair, the slight but firm-set shoulders, the long svelte stride, the motion of hips under the small, elegant waist: a woman desirable and untouchable, a woman of mystery. She detests the Colonel. She detests him even as she imagines his eyes following her slow, swinging walk across the echoing room; detests his faintly flushed cheeks, his bristly brown-and-gray mustache, the small purplish vein at the side of his nose, the short neat hairs on the backs of his fingers, above all, those melancholy and relentless eyes. They are organs of touch, those eyes — she can feel his indecent gaze brushing the back of her neck, rubbing lightly against her calves, drawing itself like a silk scarf between the insides of her thighs, brushing and lightly rubbing. His eyes appear to include her in a conspiracy: let us, my dear, by all means continue this little farce of civility, but let us not pretend that you do not wish to be released from your restlessness by the touch of my thumbs against your stiffening nipples. The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded loveless rooms.

A warm night in August. It is nearly midnight on a warm August night in southern Connecticut. 11:56, to be exact. Through the screened windows of the Ross back porch comes a sharp smell of fresh-cut grass and the dank, salt-mud, low-tide smell from the Sound three blocks away. A stirring of warm air moves through the porch and touches the lightly sweating foreheads of the four Clue players. Six sounds can be distinguished: the shrill of crickets, the gravelly crunch of footsteps passing along the street at the side of the house, the rising and falling hiss of a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler, the faint music of a jukebox from a seaside bar ten blocks away where the summer people from New York and New Jersey have their cottages, the soft rush of trucks on the distant thruway, the hum of the air conditioner in the bedroom window of the neighboring house near the back porch. These sounds mingle with the snap of a pretzel, the scritch-scratch of a pencil, the click of an ice cube, the soft clatter of a tumbling die. The glow of porchlight spills beyond the screens and touches faintly the catalpa in the side yard. A solitary passerby, walking on the gravel at the side of the road, sees, through branches of Scotch pine and the exposed portion of the screens, the four players in their island of light, distinguishes a woman’s bending shoulder, a white upper arm, a tumble of dark thick hair, and feels a yearning so deep that he wants to cry out in anguish, though in fact he continues steadily, even cheerfully, on his way.

A pause on the way to the kitchen. Mrs. Peacock, proceeding toward the KITCHEN from the LOUNGE, pauses not far from a door to the DINING ROOM. Through the half-open door she can see part of the mahogany table, the branch of a silver candlestick, the gleam of the cut-glass bowl on the sideboard. Mrs. Peacock appears to be waiting for something, there by the partly open door. Does she expect to see a line of red blood trickling through the door, does she expect to hear the sound of a candlestick thunking against a skull? Her lavender dress is a trifle mussed from the day’s exertions, really it is far too warm in these airless corridors, she must look a fright. In the KITCHEN she will drink a glass of cool water. Mrs. Peacock prides herself on looking neat. She has always been attractive in a girlish sort of way, though too short: she has always had to look up into faces, as if offering herself for inspection: please notice my nice smile. Not like Edith White: all eyes turned when she entered a room. Mrs. Peacock thought he had noticed, but evidently she had been mistaken. Why is she lingering in the airless corridor? What is she waiting for? Through the half-open door of the DINING ROOM she can hear the silence, falling drop by drop.

Susan. Susan Newton glances up from her cards — the HALL, the LOUNGE, Colonel Mustard, the Lead Pipe, the Knife — and sees again the fatal profile: the line of David’s nose and upper lip exactly reproduces the line of Jacob’s, except for some faint difference difficult to account for. Is there more calm in David’s profile, less sense of inner force pushing outward into form? Susan is continually startled and disturbed by the physical likenesses among the Ross children: Marian has Jacob’s eye-brows and cheekbones, though her face and features are wider — she is less elegant, less beautiful than Jacob. Susan is struck by how all the Ross faces register emotions sharply, as if her own emotions were unable to find expression in her face, as if her face were an instrument less developed than theirs. The harmony of the faces at the card table excites her but shuts her out: she is so clearly alien. Although David’s kindness has touched her, she senses Marian’s dislike. Marian is a powerful woman with lines of tension between her eyebrows and a surprisingly rich, throaty laugh. It’s as if she is continually releasing herself from some constriction through the act of laughter. Jacob has been cold to Susan all evening. She is angry at him for making her come unannounced on David’s birthday, for making them late, for making her an accomplice. He has been sharp with her lately, unkind, impulsive, autocratic. She understands that his anger at himself, his furious disappointment, is making him desperate: perhaps he wishes to confirm his sense of failure by failing with her. The understanding does not help, for she can feel Jacob removing himself from her in a series of small, precise withdrawals. He will leave her soon, her homme fatal, she can feel it in her bones, and in her unhappiness she turns again to look at David, startled to see, in the long, slightly upturned upper lip, the thick, nervous eyelashes, the devastating hook of hair over the crisp collar, a purer, gentler Jacob. “Mrs. White,” Susan says. “In the kitchen. With the rope.”

Mr. Green hesitates. Mr. Green, formerly the Reverend Green, stands frozen in the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, watching Miss Scarlet advance toward the window seat. He wishes to step noiselessly from the room and vanish along a corridor, but he fears that his slightest motion will startle her into attention. Mr. Green does not dislike Miss Scarlet, but she makes him uneasy; young women in general make him uneasy. He does not know where to look when he speaks to them, and in particular he does not know where to look when he speaks to Miss Scarlet. To look away is rude; to stare into her restless, twilight-colored eyes is unthinkable; to fasten his attention on her full small mouth is to have the sensation of being about to be swallowed; to lower his eyes, even for an instant, to her distinctly separate breasts is an indecency. Mr. Green is a bachelor of thirty-eight who lives with his mother and still sleeps in his boyhood room. The same bookcase that once held Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Kidnapped, and The Three Musketeers now holds Skeat’s English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day, the thirteen volumes of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Celtic Scotland by W. F. Skene (3 volumes), the county volumes of the English Place-Name Society, all the volumes published by the Early English Text Society, including 194 volumes (up to 1933) of the Old Series and 126 volumes (discontinued in 1921) of the Extra Series, as well as philological quarterlies, dialect dictionaries, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English grammars and morphologies, and miscellaneous publications of the Camden Society, the Pipe Roll Society, the Canterbury and York Society, the Scottish Text Society, the Caxton Society, and the Rolls Series. A tendency toward the eccentric, held in check and made respectable by faith, has been released and accentuated by the loss of faith. Mr. Green has a passion for English place-names (he is the author of “A Contribution to the Study of Cheshire Place-Names of Scandinavian Origin,” published in Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire), obsolete card games (ombre, primero, noddy, ruff and honour), gem lore, Pictish history, ogham inscriptions, a theory of Wyatt’s versification according to which a strong pause is the equivalent of a stressed syllable and a line contains an irregular number of unstressed syllables, pre-Celtic Britain, and the history of armor. Mr. Green walks twenty miles a day and is subject to attacks of melancholy. He is comfortable only in the presence of children and elderly women; he fears the Colonel, likes Mrs. White, and is especially fond of Mrs. Peacock, who reminds him of a favorite aunt. In a properly regulated society, he has been known to say wryly, all girls on their twelfth birthday would be removed to Scottish castles, from which they would be released on their sixtieth birthday after forty-eight years of instruction in harmony, prosody, and needlepoint. In the shadows of the northwest corner of the BALLROOM, Mr. Green is riven with distress. If she should discover him, standing in the shadows, his silence will be impossible to explain. It might even appear that he has been spying on her, as she walks in her nervous stride across the long floor of the BALLROOM, swinging her hips, swinging her hips, touching herself on the sleeve, running a hand along the side of her hair, touching herself on the hip. Mr. Green has come from the LIBRARY, bearing with him a book on Norman castles that now lies on a chair with claw-and-ball feet beside his left leg. He cannot pick up the book without fear of being heard by Miss Scarlet, who is approaching the window seat. She will sit down and see him standing in silence across the room. He must not appear to be aware of her when she sees him, but when he looks away he feels that she is turning to look at him, now, this very moment, and he looks back abruptly to make certain that he has not yet been seen. It occurs to him that he cannot possibly pretend to have been unaware of her long walk across the echoing floor. His position is worsening by the moment.

A secret. David’s love for his brother runs so deep that he feels it as an oppression in his chest. David feels there is something wrong with him: he imagines other people too intensely. He has forgiven Jacob for his lateness, which he attributes to some difficulty or sorrow in Jacob’s life, but he has no clear sense of Jacob’s trouble and is hurt at being excluded from it. David feels older than Jacob, as if he were the one who could give comfort. He can sense Marian’s anger at Jacob, her dislike of Susan, and Marian’s own trouble, which he detects in her eyes, in her self-disparaging remarks, and in an occasional tone of voice. He feels sympathy for Susan, whose uneasiness is plain to him; he is disturbed by Jacob’s coldness to her and desires to be kind to her, in part to make up for his own initial disappointment at her presence. He sees that she is pretty, possibly beautiful, though he observes this neutrally, since it is not a kind of prettiness or beauty that attracts him: there is something cool and sculptural about it, a beauty of the moon. He admires most of all the color of her hair, a light brownish red shot through with threads of blond. The thought of her hair disturbs him, for he has a shameful secret: he imagines the pubic hair of all women, even of his sister, a habit that began at the age of twelve when he saw his first nude photograph in one of his father’s photography annuals. David thinks continually about the bodies of women; although he is without sexual experience, he has a strong sense of sexual corruption. He feels that if Susan knew what he was thinking she would be shocked and would despise him; and as he studies his cards — he knows that either Mrs. White or Mrs. Peacock is the murderer — he feels a burst of gentleness toward Susan, as if she must be protected from himself.

Cards. There are twenty-one cards: six suspect cards, six weapon cards, and nine room cards. Each suspect card shows a large, colored token in the foreground and, behind it, the head and shoulders of the suspect, in two colors or three. Each weapon card pictures a weapon in a single color: yellow or blue. Although the rooms on the board are gray, and the furniture in black outline, each room card shows a pale orange room with furniture in two, three, four, or five colors (red, yellow, blue, and two distinct shades of green). Three cards — the CONSERVATORY, the HALL, and the Wrench — have been lost over the years and have been replaced by traditional playing cards labeled appropriately. Thus David’s CONSERVATORY card is a seven of clubs with the word Conservatory printed in blue ballpoint across the top; Susan’s HALL is a two of spades with the word Hall printed across the middle; and Marian’s Wrench is a five of diamonds with the word Wrench printed above the central diamond.

Nymph reclining. As Colonel Mustard silently enters the BALLROOM by the door nearest the BILLIARD ROOM, he is aware of two things: Miss Scarlet sitting at the window seat with her back to him in one of her ludicrous attitudes (head lifted, hands loosely locked over one raised knee, a show of white stocking, glossy heel dangling: Miss Scarlet exists as a series of tableaux vivants, animated from time to time by little bursts of hysteria) and Mr. Green standing in a corner intently studying his pocket watch. The Colonel’s decision follows swiftly: get rid of Green, rearrange the picture on the couch (Nymph Reclining: a study in rose and marble, disposed upon a background of red plush velvet, the whole set off by tumbled white silk underthings, glossy ink-black pubic curls, and a brilliant silver chain dangling from one languorous wrist). “I say, Green,” remarks the Colonel, “have you the…”—time, he would have said, but Mr. Green turns abruptly, cracking his elbow against the wall and gasping with pain, while from the window seat comes another gasp and a rustle of rearrangement: Nymph Upright, Tense, and Cold. Legs sharp as scissors, the long femurs shut tight like the silver sides of a nutcracker: crack crack, a scattering of broken shells. It occurs to the Colonel that there may be a certain satisfaction in disencumbering Miss Scarlet of her propriety.

Samuel’s dream. In an upstairs bedroom Samuel Ross, age fifty-seven, wakes from a troubling dream. He has not been sleeping well lately. Martha lies in her separate bed beside him, facing him, asleep. In the dream he was back in his childhood apartment on Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. His father, Solomon Ross, né Rostholder, wearing a brown vest with a pocket watch, was seated at the kitchen table, bent over his account books. Suddenly his father’s face had a stricken look, the pen dropped from his fingers, he stood up holding his chest; and a stream of bright blood burst from his mouth onto his vest. Samuel shakes his head once and sits up in bed. His father died at the age of sixty-four, when Samuel was twenty-one. In six years David will be twenty-one and Samuel will be sixty-three. Samuel thinks: I have seven years left. From the porch he hears the sound of voices, laughter. He thinks: it is David’s birthday. He thinks: my children are home, the family is together. I am happy now. He thinks: forgive me, Father.

Borders. The nine rooms are surrounded by a green border, which itself is surrounded by a narrow black border that forms the outermost edge of the playing board. Unlike the smooth green border, the black border is grainy in texture; it forms part of the black paper used for the back of the Clue board and has been carefully folded over each of the four sides. The colorful playing surface is a square sheet of smooth paper pasted over a slightly larger square of cardboard. Under the green border you can see the slight elevation caused by the black paper, which extends nearly half an inch beneath the smooth surface.

Of course! Mrs. White — the widow White — stands in the KITCHEN staring at an object in her hand. It is smooth and heavyish, with a gleam or shine; through it she can see her hand. She runs her long thumb along the side, over and over, watching the play of the tendon. Of course: it is a glass. It is a glass of water. I am standing in the kitchen with a glass of water in my hand. A glass. Of water. In my. She is standing, in the kitchen, with a glass of, and it is all strange, so utterly strange. Is it perhaps a dream? Fifteen years of making the best of it (how well she has adjusted!), fifteen years of long dreary afternoons (how well she looks!), and then last night, was it only last night, the earth-shattering proposal, flames of happiness, and next morning the cold corpse at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. White stares at the mysterious glass in her hand: how did it get there? She hears a noise and turns to see Mrs. Peacock — dear, dear Evelyn — enter the room.

From the window seat Miss Scarlet. From the window seat Miss Scarlet watches Mr. Green retreat awkwardly from the BALLROOM, shutting the door behind him a little too loudly and enclosing her with the Colonel, who strides to Mr. Green’s corner, picks something up, and begins to walk toward her across the long, polished floor. She feels that she is watching her doom approach, as if the intensity of her detestation no longer mattered. Men are of two kinds: the coarse, sensual, and indifferent tribe, who wish to enact their curious little rituals upon her arranged, convenient flesh, and the gentle tribe, with their pale hands, wry phrases, and alarmed eyes. If she were an empress, she would choose for her lover a beautiful fourteen-year-old boy with small round buttocks and strong white teeth: she would instruct him slowly in the art of love, she would be mistress and mother to him, goddess and tender sister. Miss Scarlet feels there is something shameful in this fantasy, which she has revealed to no one. As the Colonel approaches she feels his gaze lapping at her, rising insolently along her legs, sliding along her hips like thumbs. Miss Scarlet feels arranged by his gaze, emptied of interest, rendered desirable and trite: he confers upon her a sensation of absence. He unsees her: makes her invisible. “A pleasant evening,” the Colonel remarks, flawlessly banal, placing something, a book perhaps, on the window ledge and glancing incuriously at the romantic twilight dying over the black yews. “Is it,” he continues, turning upon her silken throat his melancholy gaze, “not?”

Ballrooms. For Jacob, the BALLROOM is the salle de bal in the château de Fontainebleau, dimly remembered from a day trip during his summer in Paris, when he turned seventeen: the glossy floor stretching away, the sunken octagons in the ceiling, the chandeliers plunging from the great arcades, the tightly clutched copy of the Oeuvres Complètes of Rimbaud purchased at a bookstall on the Seine and carefully cut with his Swiss Army knife, the tormenting breasts of a tour guide called Monique. He can still see her coppery braided hair and the white, loose blouse, suddenly heavy with breasts from a twist of the shoulders. His seventeenth birthday: two years older than David. Jacob is glad to be rid of adolescence; he worries about David, but doesn’t know how to protect him. For Marian, the BALLROOM is a nearly forgotten black-and-white movie in which a bride, abandoned by her groom, dances a waltz alone, round and round, one two three one two three, as the members of the hired orchestra exchange nervous glances and continue playing. For David, the BALLROOM is the high school gym, festooned with pink and green crepe paper for the spring dance. He tries to see another, more plausible ballroom, but the images are vague — a British officer with neat mustache and slicked-back hair gazing across a room at a girl with masses of blond ringlets overflowing with ribbons — and keep turning into the high school gym. For Susan, the BALLROOM remains unimagined: a gray rectangle on a board.

Other rooms. The board does not mention the other rooms of the mansion, rooms that are nevertheless implied by the board and have their own life apart from the game: the three wine cellars with their tiers of bottles in slanting rows, the two beer cellars, the servants’ bedrooms in the cramped upper story, the gun room, the scullery, the butler’s pantry, the serving lobby, the breakfast room, the day nursery, the summer smoking room, the winter smoking room, the glass pantry, the governess’s rooms, the night nursery, the larders, the maids’ sitting room, the maids’ lavatory, the housekeeper’s room, the servants’ dining room, the five bathrooms, the six bedrooms in the family wing, the eight guest bedrooms, the dressing rooms, the anterooms, the refrigerated cold store, the garage with its motorcar (a Daimler). And let us not forget the entrance court, the rose garden, the park, the pleached avenues, the summer pavilion, the ruined rotunda in the lake, the hunting lodge, the carp pool glistening in the sun…

Martha. Martha Altgeld Ross lies dreaming of summer at Blue Point. She is cutting beans into a pot on the unrailed back porch. Jacob is swinging on the wooden swing that hangs from the twisted apple tree. Under him his shadow is swinging through the tree-shadow onto the sunny unmown grass. Sun streams onto her hands, onto the apple leaves, onto the beanstalks on their rickety poles, onto Jacob’s plump strong legs stretching, stretching into the blue air. Suddenly she puts down the knife, runs down the unpainted steps into the yard, seizes the ropes of the swing. Jacob is startled and looks up at her with his dark, earnest eyes. She snatches him from the swing and kisses his stomach, his neck, his long-lashed eyelids. O my handsome boy, my son. She feels crazed with love. Martha is sitting on the swing, with Jacob on her lap. Higher and higher they go, she is laughing, she is happy, sun and shade ripple over her outstretched legs. Jacob is laughing. O how do you like to go up in a swing, up in the sky so blue? O I do think it the pleasantest thing. Sunlight glints on the pot of beans on the porch. O my handsome baby boy. Tears burn in her eyes, she is heavy with love. She is calm now.

Ritual. Although it is past midnight and he is already tired, David plans to stay up the entire night, if necessary, in order to be alone with Marian and Jacob, and then with Jacob. When Marian visits, she and David always stay up and talk after their parents go to bed; when Jacob visits, he and David stay up till three or four in the morning, or even till dawn. The long night with Jacob is a well-established ritual, which David looks forward to intensely, for aside from the sheer excitement of late, forbidden hours it is a way of asserting intimacy. Surely Jacob will not fail him on his birthday. David is aware that his formulation of the thought contains a doubt: he isn’t entirely certain of Jacob, who arrived four and a half hours late, with an unannounced girlfriend, and who now sits remote and unhappy at the other end of the table. Jacob’s unsatisfactory reason for his lateness — he hadn’t fallen asleep till five in the morning and had slept until noon — is, from another point of view, reassuring: if Jacob has slept late, then he will stay up late, quite apart from the question of obedience to their late-night ritual. Of course, this line of reasoning is far from decisive: the badness of last night’s sleep might easily lead to early tiredness. It’s true that even if Jacob goes to bed early, they will be sleeping in the same room, since Susan has been given Jacob’s attic room and the folding cot has been set up for Jacob in David’s room. But isn’t it possible, isn’t it even likely, that Jacob will sneak upstairs with Susan, in defiance of his mother’s chaste arrangements? The possibility of no talk, no late-night summer walk, no assertion of the ritual, is so disturbing to David that he pushes the thought away with another: after all, even though Jacob was four and a half hours late, even though he is sitting remote and unhappy at the other end of the table, they are playing Clue, as they always do.

Not uninteresting. The Colonel, who is continually threatened by an appalling boredom, does not take pleasure in easy conquests. He is therefore surprised, indeed disturbed, by the ease with which matters seem to be taking their course: the rigid arm unwithdrawn from the negligently brushing hand, the thigh tensed but motionless under the testing palm, the silken knees irresistant to his slight pressure of parting. The Colonel is not a profound student of human nature, but he is quick to understand that the exaggerated ease of surrender is intended to convey contempt: you may stick my body, which I value less than an old, discarded hat, with your swollen red member, it is nothing to me, who live elsewhere. In this sense Miss Scarlet intends her swift surrender to be the precise opposite: a resistance deeper than flesh, a spiritual negation. The thought pleases the Colonel; Miss Scarlet continually proposes erotic riddles that require complex solutions. It is important, he reflects, to linger now, seated beside her on the window seat, his torso twisted toward her as she leans back fully dressed but already a little disheveled against the far pillow, with her stockinged feet on the seat-cushion, her knees raised and parted a hand’s width, her crimson hem draped over the tops of her knees — affording the Colonel a piquant view of her elegant silk stockings, her long thighs in the mauve shadows, her fashionable pink crepe de chine knickers with plissé frills (the Colonel is extremely knowledgeable about ladies’ undergarments), the clearly outlined pink fold between the slightly parted thighs, the transverse crease that divides one raised thigh from the firm but flattened base of the coyly proffered buttock. It is yet another of Miss Scarlet’s poses — all in all, the Colonel reflects, a not uninteresting one.

A trifle anxious. At a bend of the path there is a stretch of darkness, and Professor Plum experiences a delicious confusion. Although he has passed this way before, he cannot remember whether the black passage proceeds straight for the next few steps, or continues to turn in the same direction, or turns the other way. Each time he descends from the civilized world of well-appointed rooms and high windows to the dank dark of the SECRET PASSAGES he has the pleasurable sensation of losing his way, of immersing himself in an alluring and alien realm of flickering lantern-lit walls, unlit stretches of darkness, black fissures and crevices, sudden cavelike openings. The paths are growing increasingly familiar, but at the same time they are accumulating strangeness, for the growth of familiarity releases him to search for new details, not seen before. The two passages, moreover, really constitute four different paths, depending on his point of descent, since it is impossible, in the semidark, to commit to memory the precise pattern of turns or the exact number and order of crevices, fissures, and curious outcroppings; and as if to conspire with the dark, and increase his sense of uncertainty, he cannot always recall whether he is on the way to the KITCHEN, the STUDY, the LOUNGE, or the CONSERVATORY. The four descents to the two passages are strikingly different: the rickety wooden stairway leading down from the KITCHEN, the rusting iron handrail rattling in the wall over the stone steps behind the secret door in the LOUNGE, the grass-grown earthen steps descending from the CONSERVATORY, the circular stairway behind the sliding panel in the STUDY. Professor Plum reaches out a hand and touches the damp wall; it appears to be crusted with loose, brittle growths, several of which drop lightly to the path. The sense of strangeness is, to be sure, carefully contained within an encompassing sense of the familiar; the passages, however dark, surprising, and uncertain, always lead to one of the four rooms. It cannot be otherwise. Professor Plum advances slowly, with his hand on the wall. It is like the experience of reading a detective novel: a rigorous design bristling with dangerous surprises and leading to an inescapable end. But is this an original thought? Has he perhaps read it somewhere? Lantern-light is already visible on the path; the Professor, who has begun to be a trifle anxious, feels a little burst of relief, of disappointment.

Physical. It is an old board, which goes back to Jacob’s childhood. The line down the center, representing the place where the board folds in half, has become more visible over the years; the paper has gradually worn away over the fold, exposing the gray cardboard beneath, so that a thin gray line now runs through the center of the HALL, across a row of yellow squares, through the central rectangle, across two rows of yellow squares, and through the center of the BALLROOM. The O in the word LOUNGE is shaded with a pencil. Part of the shading has been erased, but the erasure has removed an arc of the O and the gray color beneath the shading, and has left a white smudge. A small brown stain beside the R in BILLIARD ROOM, on one side of the fold, corresponds to a pale stain, identical in shape, on a wall of the DINING ROOM, on the other side of the fold. A faint pencil line is visible in the LIBRARY. A darker, wavy line shows in two yellow squares beside one of the doors of the BALLROOM.

Rooms. The Ross house has eight rooms: a kitchen, living room, dining room, and study (formerly a playroom) downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs, and an unheated bedroom (formerly a study) in the attic. There is also a small screened porch in back, in the space between the kitchen and the attached garage. When David was born, he slept in a cradle in his parents’ bedroom for three weeks, before being moved to a crib in Marian’s room. Marian, aged nine, moved into Jacob’s room and stayed with him for nearly a year. When Marian was ten, she moved back to her room and David’s crib was moved into Jacob’s larger room for a trial period; to everyone’s surprise, Jacob liked having David in his room and spent many hours sitting on the floor with him, reading books patiently over and over and showing him how to fit the bright red apple and the bright yellow banana into his fruit puzzle. When Jacob entered high school, his father converted the playroom to a study and Jacob moved up to the room in the attic, where he used an electric heater in the winter. Jacob liked being alone at the top of the house, in a room with a slanting ceiling, a room whose walls were entirely lined with bookshelves. David missed Jacob but liked having complete control of the room; he felt he was taking care of it for his brother, who still kept some of his clothes in the closet. When Jacob left home for Columbia, David, aged eight, felt that his brother had moved to a still higher room. Every day for nearly a month he climbed the stairs to Jacob’s room in order to straighten the books and make certain everything was all right; one day he stopped going up there, and did not return until Jacob came home for Thanksgiving. He began staying in the living room when Marian practiced her Czerny exercises and Chopin études, and he had long talks with her before going to bed. When Marian left home for Barnard, David did not feel that the house had grown larger: he felt that two rooms had been lost, since there was now no reason to enter Marian’s room or Jacob’s attic room. One night when his parents were asleep he went into Marian’s room and crept into her bed; he thought he could smell her perfume on the pillows. When he woke up in the middle of the night he did not know where he was; he thought that he must be in Grandma’s apartment in Washington Heights, and only when he remembered Grandma lying proud and white in the coffin did he realize his mistake.

Still life. Miss Scarlet is struck again by the Colonel’s ability to turn her into an arrangement: to be inspected by that banal gaze is instantly to become a tableau, a wax figure, a mediocre artist’s gilt-framed still life (the staring fishhead, the glossy green grapes each with its careful highlight). She feels, in that pause of inspection, that she has achieved the condition of utter banality. It is a condition more extreme than death, for to die is to continue to exist in the body; but she has ceased to exist in the body, she is impalpable, the cells of her flesh have dissolved in the solvent of a trite imagination. Despite her revulsion for the vulgar Colonel, Miss Scarlet is grateful to him for permitting her to savor this annihilation.

Research. David has not yet told Jacob of his morning’s research. In anticipation of Jacob’s visit, David spent the morning at the library, searching for facts about the history of the game. After two hours of failure, he was in the Fine Arts section sullenly and half curiously turning the pages of an illustrated book about British board games when he made his triumphant discovery. Clue was not an American game at all. It was a British game exported to the USA in 1949 and sold in the States by Parker Brothers, who had introduced small changes in design. The British game was called Cluedo, a bewildering name that David decided was intended to allude to another British board game, Ludo. The book showed a color photograph of the board, which was strikingly like the Clue board with one notable difference: the rooms were without furniture. Other differences between the two versions emerged: the mansion of Cluedo was owned by Dr. Black, not the embarrassing Mr. Boddy of Clue; the colored border running around the ground plan of the mansion was light red, not green; the backs of the cards bore no illustration. The suspects were the same, except that Mr. Green was the Reverend Green: Jacob would enjoy that, he would spin some wild theory to account for the change from Reverend to Mister when the game crossed the Atlantic. The British murder weapons were the same, but three of them had different names: the Wrench was called the Spanner, the Knife was called the Dagger, and the Lead Pipe was called Lead Piping. David is so eager to reveal the results of his research to Jacob, who will know how to appreciate each detail, that the thought of an obstacle is intolerable to him, and he suddenly imagines Marian seizing Susan by the hair and plunging the Knife into her throat. He is shocked at the thought, and glances guiltily at Susan, startled to see her staring directly at him.

Feminine stratagems. The Colonel reflects that Miss Scarlet is the kind of woman who, by primness of temperament and propriety of upbringing, cannot confess to herself a crude desire for sexual adventure, and in particular a desire for sexual adventure with a coarse womanizer like Colonel Mustard. It is therefore necessary for her to disguise from herself the fact of her craving, while at the same time arranging for its satisfaction. This problem she has solved instinctively and brilliantly by the tactic of striking scornful attitudes whenever she finds herself in the Colonel’s presence. Her attitudes serve the double purpose of affirming her sense of decorum and drawing continual sexual attention to herself. She has in effect pursued him relentlessly through deliberate demonstrations of indifference. Miss Scarlet, the Colonel surmises, can permit herself to be seduced only if she persuades herself that she feels contempt for her seducer, thereby removing responsibility from herself while inviting his attentions through disdainful poses tinged with erotic display. The little game, rich in nuances, holds specific but limited charms for the Colonel. It is always of course a pleasure to observe the unfolding of feminine stratagems however transparent, but the Colonel cannot find indefinitely stimulating the two-dimensional role created for him by the charming Miss Scarlet. From the very beginning she has produced in him an odd and distinctly unpleasant sense of constriction. In her continual flight from herself, her relentless assumption of attitudes, her striving to become nothing but an object, she diminishes him: he becomes a cartoon villain in her gallery of pornography (The Disdainful Maiden and The Aging Lecher). Her provocative little pose, on the velvet window seat, in the mauve light, appears to be an invitation to pleasure, but in fact it is an invitation to death: its intention is to confirm the Colonel’s mediocrity, to divest him of imagination and thereby turn him to stone. It is to evade this divestiture that the Colonel prolongs his refusal.

Words. The nine names of the rooms, in black capital letters, constitute eleven words: the seven single-name rooms and the two double-name rooms, BILLIARD ROOM and DINING ROOM. Five additional words appear in the center of the board: beneath the word CLUE, in large white capital letters with black shadows, appears the word THE, in small black capital letters, and beneath the word THE appear the words GREAT DETECTIVE GAME. When we observe the board so that the word CLUE is right-side up, then we see, in the lower left-hand corner of the playing board, in the green border that runs around all nine rooms, the words © 1949 JOHN WADDINGTON, LTD. In the same green border, in the lower right, we see four lines of print: PARKER BROTHERS, INC./SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS/NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO CHICAGO/MADE IN U.S.A. Still other words appear on the board. The four rooms with secret passages all contain words: in a corner of the STUDY are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/KITCHEN/(ONE MOVE), in a corner of the LOUNGE are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/CONSERVATORY/(ONE MOVE), in a corner of the KITCHEN are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/STUDY/(ONE MOVE), and in a corner of the CONSERVATORY are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/LOUNGE/(ONE MOVE). Finally, six of the yellow squares adjacent to the green border contain the word START, with the name of a different suspect under each one: MISS SCARLET, COL. MUSTARD, MRS. WHITE, MR. GREEN, MRS. PEACOCK, PROF. PLUM. If we consider the date 1949 to be a single word, the abbreviations U.S.A., LTD, and INC. to be single words, and combinations such as NEW YORK, PARKER BROTHERS, and MR. GREEN each to be two words, and if we ignore the symbol ©, then on the Clue board we find seventy-five words.

Jacob did it. Susan lowers her eyes, ashamed to have been caught staring at David. Now he too will dislike her: the outsider, crasher of birthday parties, Jacob’s shikse, insolent starer. She cannot look at Jacob, who has insisted that she come with him and now is drinking too much wine and shutting her out. She cannot look at Marian, who resents her presence and wants her dead. She cannot look at David, who has caught her staring at him, spying on him. She can look only at her hateful horrible cards: the HALL, the LOUNGE, Colonel Mustard, the Lead Pipe, the Knife. Oh, Jacob did it. On the porch. With his cold, cold eye.

Mr. Green’s dilemma. Mr. Green stands in the corridor near another door of the BALLROOM, not far from the DINING ROOM, paralyzed with uncertainty and chagrin. He has left the BALLROOM in a manner so awkward, sudden, and inexplicable that he feels it only proper to return and proffer an apology. At the same time, the thought of entering the BALLROOM again after his disgraceful exit is so painful that as he imagines it he draws an audible sharp breath. Besides, how can he possibly explain to Miss Scarlet, whose gasp was caused not simply by the Colonel’s sudden words in the silence but by the shocking revelation of Mr. Green’s presence, that he had been standing in a corner during her entrance into the room and had remained there without a word during her long walk across the echoing floor? The thought of entering the room again is itself unspeakably painful to Mr. Green, but in addition to entering the room he will be obliged to walk across the long, loud floor, carefully observed not only by Miss Scarlet, whose initial surprise at finding him in the corner will have had time to darken to indignation, but also by the Colonel, in whose presence, under the best of circumstances, Mr. Green feels uncomfortable and anxious, and who now, as witness to Mr. Green’s inglorious retreat and as a probable confidant and champion of the injured Miss Scarlet, will await Mr. Green in the manner of a stern father barely willing to listen to an excuse already dismissed as contemptible. Mr. Green will not know where to look; he will not know what to say; the entire purpose of his return, which should be to clarify a possible misunderstanding and render him less foolish or odious in their eyes, will be undermined by his undoubted inability to utter a single word and the general impossibility, even if he were not at a loss for words, of explaining his shameful behavior. Despite these extremely compelling reasons for evasion there remain, nevertheless, equally decisive arguments for confrontation. It is too much to hope, for example, that he can avoid either or both of them during the remainder of his visit. It might therefore prove even more painful in the long run if he does not, immediately, face up to the inevitable. Besides, he has left behind his book, a clumsily written but learned study which he took with him from the LIBRARY with the express intent of finishing it before dinner. Mr. Green takes a deep breath, raises his right foot, and does not move.

Sprechen Sie Englisch? “How’s Dad been?” Jacob asks out of the blue, looking up abruptly from his cards. David is startled and exhilarated: things are going to be all right after all, the family is sticking together, everything’s bound to be all right. “Oh, he’s been all right,” David answers. He knows that Mrs. Peacock did it, with either the Revolver or the Candlestick; his father is slumped in an armchair, a revolver at his feet, a red hole in his temple. “Actually there was one, I don’t know, episode.” Marian turns her head sharply. “What episode, Davey?” “Episode,” Jacob says, frowning thoughtfully and pulling at his chin. “Episode, episode.” His face assumes a hopeful expression. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” “Well,” David says, “you know how he likes to park as close to his classroom as possible? So he doesn’t have to carry his briefcase too far? Well, last month someone took his space, so Dad had to walk across the whole parking lot with a load of books. He told Mom he was so short of breath he had to sit down. Now he’s bought an extra copy of every book for the course and he keeps one copy in his office and one at home.” “You never told me that,” Marian says. “Davey, you promised to tell me, no matter what.” “Mom made me promise not to tell. You know how Dad is.” “And he won’t see Hershatter?” Jacob asks. “No way. He tells Mom, but she’s not allowed to tell me. But she does, sometimes. He gets furious if she tells him to see Hershatter.” “Am I living in a bad novel?” Jacob says, flinging up an arm. “What is this crap? Can’t Mom get him to see Hershatter?” “You try getting him to see Hershatter. Mom says he gets too angry. She doesn’t want to upset him.” “She doesn’t want to upset him? He can’t walk across a parking lot and nobody’s allowed to know?” “He’s been better lately,” David says, “really.” Jacob stares at David; for a moment his arm is suspended in the air. He lowers his elbow to the table and leans his forehead into the heel of his hand. His long fingers are thrust into his hair and his eyes are heavy-lidded. “Dad is sick,” he says slowly. “He needs to see a doctor. If he keeps on like this, he’s going to die.” “Jake,” Marian says, placing a hand on his forearm. “It’s David’s birthday.”

Professor Plum makes a discovery. As he advances once again along the SECRET PASSAGE toward the KITCHEN, or is it the CONSERVATORY, Professor Plum notices, around a darkening bend in the path, a narrow fissure in the rough stone wall. He has noticed it before. In the half-darkness lit only by the distant flame of a kerosene lantern, he stops for a moment to give it his close attention. The fissure rises from the floor to the height of his forehead; it is wide enough to admit a man sideways. The Professor is in no great hurry to arrive at the CONSERVATORY, or is it the KITCHEN — indeed, his supreme pleasure is to traverse the passages — and on a sudden impulse he steps sideways from the path into the fissure, bending his head awkwardly and protecting his spectacles with a hand. Behind the entrance the fissure widens and admits the Professor to another dim-lit passage. It is much like the one he has left but covered with a strip of carpet and lined with shelves containing a variety of amusing objects: small colorful glass jars, faded magic-lantern slides, pipe racks filled with pipes of many shapes, lacquered wooden boxes. The Professor advances by slow steps, looking back at the receding fissure, which closes into darkness. He plans to follow the new passage only a short distance, before turning back and continuing on his way.

Cards (2). The backs of the cards show a magnifying glass in whose lens is pictured, in blue-black and white, the posts of a gate, a curving walk, and a gabled mansion with four chimneys. Each chimney is crowned by three chimney pots. A large blue-black tree with bushy blue-black foliage, situated between the gate and the mansion, spreads a curving branch above part of the roof. Each gatepost is surmounted by a finial composed of a cone with concave sides topped by a sphere. Each sphere, in the foreground, is large enough to contain the door of the mansion, in the background. On the handle of the magnifying glass are long parallel blue-black lines, suggestive of palpable ridges like those on the circumference of a coin.

Love and death. Jacob crushes down a reply and, with Marian’s hand still on his arm, remembers suddenly the new baby home from the hospital: he and Marian standing on both sides of the cradle looking down at David. He thought: he looks like me, in the album. The unexpected resemblance gave him the sense that he was the father, that he was peculiarly responsible for this child: his child. He sees his father’s grave face, hears the solemn words: Jacob, Marian, I want you to love your brother always, do you understand, you’re all he’ll have when your mother and I are no longer here. Jacob tried to understand, but the words frightened him; he wondered why they were no longer going to be there.

A deeper significance. Miss Scarlet, fixed by the Colonel’s mediocre imagination in an attitude of banal surrender, senses that matters are not proceeding quite as they should be. The smooth revolting precision of the Colonel’s advance upon her has suffered interruption, indeed breakdown. At first Miss Scarlet imagines some merely masculine trouble, but gradually she divines a deeper significance. The Colonel, in order to enjoy himself, requires a small pleasure she has failed to provide. Her stylized offer of herself, which perfectly expresses his vulgar and trivializing fantasy of conquest, nevertheless irks him because it deprives him of a pleasure still more banal: the overcoming of an obstacle. Miss Scarlet does not cease to marvel at the fascinating depths of the Colonel’s inexhaustible banality. It is in order to provoke in her a show of titillating resistance that the Colonel lingers on the threshold of seduction, and it is in order to prolong his hesitation, and postpone the degradation of his touch, that Miss Scarlet remains motionless on the window seat in an attitude of erotic invitation.

The two Mr. Greens. Slowly, very slowly, Mr. Green advances toward the BALLROOM door. He has not made up his mind to enter, but he has made up his mind to advance slowly in the direction of the door, in the hope that forward motion, with its apparent decisiveness, will demonstrate to his doubting mind that decision is possible. But with every step forward there rises, in Mr. Green’s mind, a new reason for retreat. It is as if the fact of forward physical motion has released his mind from the need to find reasons to advance, thereby permitting it to exercise its full powers in producing evidence for retreat. Mr. Green is therefore moving in two direction: forward, physically; backward, mentally. A diagram would show twin figures back to back, each with its foot raised, each with its head turned over its shoulder.

Is that all? David, frightened by Jacob’s words, glances over his cards at the board and sees a square of cardboard with yellow and gray plane figures on it. The flatness of the board startles him: it is a depthless world, devoid of shadow. There are no rooms, no doors, no secret passages, only the glare of the overhead light on the black lines, the yellow spaces. For a moment he wants to shout: is that all? is that all?

A new life. Marian removes her hand from Jacob’s arm but continues to think about her father. He is sicker than she knew; the signs are there, she has been deceiving herself. The thought of her father’s death is so disturbing that she feels a ripple of panic pass across her stomach; she looks up guiltily, as if she has been detected in a crime. Her father’s absence from her life, a life that hasn’t even begun yet, is not possible. She will speak to her mother in the morning. She will call more often. She will begin her life. She will change her life. She will meet someone. She will do something. Marian thinks: stop. You are growing morbid. Stop. You are being selfish. It is David’s birthday, a day of celebration.

Go back. Professor Plum has not advanced far along the carpeted passage when he comes to an open place from which three other passages stretch away. In the open place sit several old armchairs and couches. The Professor is a cautious man. He is perfectly aware that he must not lose his way, must under no circumstances permit himself to yield to the temptation of unknown passageways; but it is precisely this awareness that frees him from the constraints of caution, and permits him to continue his exploration of the unknown, for he knows that he is not the sort of man who takes foolish and unnecessary risks. Even as he admonishes himself to return to the SECRET PASSAGE before he loses his way, he is deciding among the new, alluring passages. One is hung with paintings; one is lined with writing desks, highboys, and wing chairs; one contains two rows of closed red doors. The Professor hesitates a moment before choosing the passage of red doors. After walking a short way he tries a door and is admitted to a flight of carpeted steps going down. Go back, the Professor reminds himself, as he descends the stairs.

A lack of imagination. The Colonel, paralyzed in a pose of suspended seduction, is beginning to grow a little bored. He has no intention of sparing Miss Scarlet, but her inept imitation of whorish abandon cannot sustain his indefinite interest. He would like to get on with it and repair to the BILLIARD ROOM for a whiskey and soda before dinner, but every possible advance is fated to confirm Miss Scarlet’s crude imagining of him. To act is to become her fantasy, to assent to his inexistence. The Colonel feels himself dissolving into an imaginary Colonel with a trim mustache, pulled-back shoulders, and reddish cheekbones. Utterly unimagined, devoid of detail, he is beginning to fade away.

David looks up. David wonders whether he is the only one to notice that Susan is playing badly. Her Suggestions reveal that she has no grasp of strategy; he knows that she doesn’t have the STUDY, Professor Plum, or the Revolver, yet on her last turn she named all three, as if guessing at random instead of using her own cards to make controlled guesses. The poor quality of her play disturbs him, and he tries not to look up when it is her turn, for fear that his irritation will show on his face. True, she has never played before this evening — David has never known anyone who hasn’t played Clue, and he imagines it as a misfortune, a childhood deprivation, as if he had been told that she had never eaten a piece of chocolate or visited an amusement park — but the rules are easy and the principles of inference elementary. It isn’t likely that Susan, a Radcliffe graduate who majored in mathematics, cannot follow the game, and David senses a deeper reason: something is wrong between her and Jacob, she is worried and distracted, she is filled with an unhappiness that doesn’t show on her cool, lovely face. And when he looks up suddenly from his cards, in order to see whether she is concentrating on the game, he is unsettled to see, three feet away, staring over Marian’s shoulder at the porch windows, the large, beautiful, sorrowing eyes of Susan Newton.

The doorknob. Mr. Green’s hand is resting on the knob of the BALLROOM door. He hears nothing within. It is possible that Miss Scarlet and the Colonel have left, and that Mr. Green can enter with impunity and retrieve his book; but there are other explanations of the silence. The room is large and the door is thick; it is quite possible that a conversation at the far end cannot be heard by someone standing outside the door, his head bent almost to the wood, listening intently. It is possible that Miss Scarlet and the Colonel are within, but silent. It is possible that Miss Scarlet has left the room by another door, leaving the Colonel alone, or that Miss Scarlet is alone, having been abandoned by the Colonel. It is possible that they are within but have been joined by a third person, say Professor Plum, who had not expected to find them there and whose unanticipated appearance has rendered everyone silent. It is possible that Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, Mrs. White, and Mrs. Peacock are all inside, facing this very door, awaiting the return of Mr. Green, whose comic disappearance has been discussed at length. Indeed, as Mr. Green stands with his head bent close to the wood, he is surprised at how the possibilities proliferate: it is possible that neither Miss Scarlet nor the Colonel is inside but that someone else, whose appearance caused them to leave, has remained; it is possible that Miss Scarlet has been murdered and is lying with her throat cut on the window seat; it is possible that Mr. Green is inside and that he is imagining himself outside, with his hand on the doorknob and his head bent close to the wood of the door. Even as the possibilities multiply, Mr. Green realizes that he does not know whether he desires Miss Scarlet and the Colonel to be present or absent, since he is not certain whether he wishes to confront them and apologize, or to evade them and retrieve his book in peace; and as he watches his hand begin to turn the doorknob he does not know whether to be astonished at his audacity or ashamed of his timidity.

The bodies of women. David is disturbed by how much time he spends thinking about the bodies of women. He is released from this necessity only rarely, under the influence of a stronger passion, and Susan’s presence on his birthday is disturbing in part because she interferes with his release into family feeling. Although she is dressed modestly, in a vanilla silk blouse and tan corduroy skirt, David is aware of her breasts pushing lightly against the thin cloth, especially when she leans forward to roll the die; and when she crosses and uncrosses her legs, or shifts her position slightly on the padded wooden chair, he is disturbed by the soft sounds of cloth, the creak of the chair, and the hushed slippery sound of sliding and rubbing skin. Susan had arrived in nylon stockings, but when she came down from her room he saw that she had taken them off. Stockings themselves, their scratchiness and glisten, have always disturbed him, but the fact of their removal disturbs him even more, as if she had suddenly drawn attention to the act of lifting each leg in turn to roll down the tight, clinging stockings, as if, carelessly lifting each leg in turn, she were taunting him with the suddenly exposed flesh of her upper thighs, as if, lifting each leg in turn, higher and higher, she were attempting to slip her legs into his mind and leave them there, lifting turn by turn, forever, while she vanished into Cambridge, Massachusetts. One afternoon, in the year before Marian left for college, David had entered her room to look for a piece of paper. He was startled to see Marian standing in a half-slip, facing him. At the sight of the heavy white breasts with their red wounds he felt a rush of fear and sorrow, even as he felt something relax at the back of his mind, as if he had suddenly remembered a word that had eluded him. Marian instantly crossed her arms over her chest, gripping her shoulders with her hands. What David remembers is the white-knuckled fingers, the crushed, painful look of the breasts, the proud and sorrowful turning away of Marian’s face, and the fact that although she turned her face to one side, she did not turn her body away.

The Colonel makes up his mind. At the sound of the turning doorknob the Colonel turns his head sharply toward the distant door and is aware, even as he turns, of the silk-and-flesh slapping together of Miss Scarlet’s knees and the sudden stiffening of her limbs as she prepares to fling herself upright. The Colonel, although he once beat a man senseless with his fists, is essentially a discreet man, who prefers not to be caught in compromising situations. Nevertheless, during the moment when he hears the turning doorknob and the clapping together of Miss Scarlet’s knees, he realizes two things: he is not going to permit Miss Scarlet to escape her banal destiny, even if the door should open to admit a regiment; and the banging together of her knees, the tensing of her body, the look of sharp alarm constitute Miss Scarlet’s sole failure to assume a pose, and render her suddenly desirable. As she struggles to rise, the Colonel admires for a moment the tendons of her neck tensed like ropes, the harsh twist of her torso, the lines of strain between her elegant eyebrows, before throwing himself on her expertly.

Late. It is growing late. Susan yawns through tightly shut teeth, slitting her eyes and giving a faint shudder. She wonders whether Jacob will tuck her in and talk to her, she wonders whether he will make love to her in the narrow bed in his attic room before leaving for the cot in David’s room. Marian’s large eyes are half closed; she leans her temple on the heel of a hand, so that the skin above her eyebrow is taut, giving her a look of alertness that clashes with her drooping, sleepy air. Jacob has been steadily drinking glasses of wine and cups of coffee; the whites of his eyes are cracked with red, his irises glitter. Now he leans forward on both elbows and runs three fingers of each hand slowly along his temples, over and over; his thick, springy hair has a slightly mussed look. David’s eyes are tired, and burn with Jacob’s cigarette smoke; his heart is beating quickly, as if he has been running. Upstairs, Samuel Ross lies asleep on his back, breathing through his mouth, rasping lightly. Martha Ross, turning heavily in her sleep, half wakes and hears voices from downstairs. She must tell Sam that the children are still up, the children, yes, but again she is asleep. Across from the Ross house a light goes out in an upstairs window of the Warren house. Sandra Warren, closing her eyes in the dark, can hear through the open window the sound of the exhaust fan in the Rosses’ attic and a faint sound of voices from the Ross back porch as she thinks of Bob Schechter coming out of the water with his hair flattened down and his streaming body shining in the sun. A foghorn sounds. The tide is going out; on a blanket on the dark beach, two lovers lie facing each other, stroking each other’s cheeks. Far out on the water a blinking lighthouse shows where the dark water meets the dark sky, before plunging both into blackness. On the other side of the beach a dull red glows in the sky, from the shopping center a mile away. Again the foghorn sounds; on the Ross porch, David listens to it and thinks of train whistles, night journeys, distant cities, all the unseen places longing to be seen.

The rigors of civilized life. Better and better: at the bottom of the stairs Professor Plum comes to another passage, from which he notices stone stairways going up and down. At this point it is still not too late to turn back. The Professor has only to return to the carpeted steps, climb to the top, turn left along the passageway of doors, and proceed to the open space, which stands at the end of the carpeted passage that leads to the fissure; as he rehearses this information, he continues along the new passage, which is intersected by other passages. The Professor is enchanted — by a stroke of luck, he has discovered a honeycomb of secret passages under the mansion. No doubt the original owner, bored by the rigors of civilized life, constructed this shadowy escape from the sunlit realm; or perhaps a number of owners, each discovering the fissure in the SECRET PASSAGE, constructed independent systems of passageways that they cunningly joined to existing systems. As he explores the proliferating realm of crisscrossing passages, connected by numerous stairways to passages above and below, the Professor does not forget that he is on his way to the KITCHEN, or is it the CONSERVATORY. At any moment he plans to turn back.

An unscreamed scream. As Miss Scarlet struggles with the Colonel, she opens her mouth to scream but does not scream. To scream is to secure rescue, to assure the flinging open of the door, the clatter of feet across the hard floor; but rescue means discovery, and Miss Scarlet does not wish to be discovered sprawled beneath the odious Colonel with her crimson dress above her hips and her pink crepe de chine knickers at her knees. She cannot but hope that the door will remain closed; even to struggle is to risk discovery. The unscreamed scream struggles inside her, ripples across her abdomen, makes her fingertips itch. Miss Scarlet realizes that her sudden, involuntary resistance has aroused the Colonel, whose dull brain no doubt teems with juicy images of struggling maidens; she further realizes that the necessary cessation of struggle will satisfy his trite image of conquest. As the seconds pass, and no other sound is heard at the far end of the BALLROOM, Miss Scarlet marvels at the way in which the world has conspired with the Colonel, for whom even the act of vision is hackneyed and hand-me-down, to absorb her into the realm of the imaginary.

Hair. The game is winding down now, and Marian wonders whether David has had a good birthday. He appears to be engrossed in the game; he studies his cards intensely, continually makes marks on his pad, shakes the die over and over in his fist, flings it vigorously onto the board. He is taking on some of Jacob’s characteristics, as he sometimes does: when he flings the die onto the board he gives his wrist a twist that is Jacob’s, and he talks to the die in Jacob’s voice: come on baby, three baby, three big ones for Brother Dave. Jacob has thrown himself into the game; his excitement, which has infected David, makes Marian uneasy. There is sweat-shine on Jacob’s cheekbones and on one side of his nose; his thick hair, ruffled by his thrusting fingers, has sprung out of place. David’s hair has always been different: straight and pale brown, it falls slantwise across his forehead almost to his eyes. From time to time he sweeps it up with a hand, leaving a few long hairs fallen. Marian looks across at Susan, startled by the beauty of her hair. Marian has always been troubled by the thick abundance of her own hair, which breaks the teeth of combs. She remembers David’s childhood hair, silky and brown, the fineness of it, and the sweetness of his scalp’s smell. Susan looks tired. She is far from home, in a strange house. She too is part of David’s birthday. “Susan,” she says, reaching for the bowl of potato chips and realizing that it’s the first time she has said the name aloud. “Can you use some more of these?”

In the darkening corridor. In the darkening corridor Mr. Green stands with his hand on the turned doorknob. It seems to him that he hears dim sounds from deep within the dangerous BALLROOM, but the sounds are so faint that they may be nothing more than sounds of the house itself. The house is full of sounds: loose window sashes knock in their frames, water pipes mutter, floorboards creak, the very walls seem to breathe and sigh. The memory of his discovery in the shadowy corner, and of his awkward, guilty retreat, is so vivid to Mr. Green that he cannot continue his arrested motion. With alarm he realizes that his current posture is no less dubious — anyone happening along the corridor might well mistake him for an eavesdropper, for his hand is on the knob, his forehead is bent forward almost to the wood of the door. Indeed, it would not be difficult to imagine that he harbored a weapon in his waistcoat. Mr. Green looks stealthily over his shoulder: no one. He is alone. He thinks of the quiet arbor in the garden behind his mother’s house, of the well-worn leather of the armchair in his room. His mother had been right: he would not enjoy the weekend.

The Black Hag. The Colonel, at the instant he enters Miss Scarlet, begins to lose interest in her. Miss Scarlet has exhausted her purpose as prey; her remaining usefulness is severely limited. The Colonel prides himself on not being a sentimentalist. His interest, he reflects, will steadily diminish as his thrusts increase in intensity until, at the famous moment, Miss Scarlet will become superfluous: and the Black Hag, bending over him with cold fingers and heavy-lidded eyes, will claim him once again.

The die. The die is a translucent red cube with slightly rounded corners. The spots are sunken, opaque, and white. It is difficult to tell whether the spots are small holes in the surface that have been painted white, or whether they are small white plugs that have been set in holes in the surface. Through any of the six translucent sides, other spots are visible as little reddish lumps shaped like the heads of bullets.

Poor thing. Miss Scarlet slips nimbly from her body and takes up a position not far from the window seat, where she observes with interest the scene before her: the Colonel’s pale, well-muscled, heaving buttocks peeping out from beneath his agitated shirttails (the Colonel is naked only from the waist down), the young woman’s raised knee pressed back against her ribs by the Colonel’s splayed hand, a tangle of pink and white at the ankle of the other foot. The young woman’s visible arm is stretched out, the hand limp at the wrist; her face is turned to one side and her eyes are closed. She looks for all the world as if she has been slain — only, from time to time, a barely perceptible tremor passes over her body. Poor thing, Miss Scarlet thinks.

Stunning. Susan is not deceived, by Marian’s gesture, into sudden intimations of intimacy. She is grateful anyway. She sets down the bowl beside her glass of wine, bites into a saddle-shaped chip, and looks directly at Jacob’s sister, whose face is already turned toward David. At that moment, in that light, at that precise angle, Marian’s unlovely face is stunning: her high cheekbone shines, the tide of her hair rolls along her face and dashes down on her shoulder, the sharp proud line of her forehead and nose slashes across the dark green blinds like a blade of light. Susan’s hair has been admired since early childhood, but she feels that its straightness shows lack of character. She has always been attracted to forceful, intelligent, unbeautiful women stronger and bolder than she. In high school her best friend had wild hair and braces, wore torn jeans and floppy lumberjack shirts, practiced the violin three hours a day, and once punched a boy in the mouth when he refused to stop torturing a cat. Susan is willing to be proud of her hair because Jacob adores it, but if she were Jacob she would be more critical. Jacob is stern when it comes to her taste in literature (Faulkner is a gasbag) and music (rock music is what Yeats meant by “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”), but he is reverent toward her body, which makes him seem careless. If she were a man, she would want to plunge both hands into Marian’s torrent of hair. If she were a man, she would reject herself and choose Marian.

Mrs. Peacock and Mr. Green. Mrs. Peacock cannot endure the presence of Mrs. White for another second: the slumped shoulders, the dark eyes glistening with desolation, the hands moving helplessly, the air of dazed bewilderment, all these inspire in Mrs. Peacock a sense of suffocation. She must escape from this room that is filling up with grief, a grief that rushes outward in all directions, pushing down everything in its path, pressing against the walls, hurting her skin. “Yes yes, dear,” Mrs. Peacock says, “it will be all right,” and escapes from the desperate gaze, the inconsolable bulk of flesh. She makes her way down the corridor toward the DINING ROOM, passing on her way the corridor to the BALLROOM, where she is surprised to see Mr. Green standing with his hand on the doorknob, his head half bowed. At the sound of her footstep Mr. Green whirls to look at her, gives a gasp, then fumbles at the door and thrusts it open, disappearing within. A queer one, Mr. Green. One might almost think he was afraid of her.

Endgame. David knows that the murder was committed by Mrs. Peacock, with the Candlestick, in one of three rooms: the BILLIARD ROOM, the DINING ROOM, or the BALLROOM. The game is winding down now; it is simply a matter of moving his piece across the board from room to room, eliminating the incorrect ones. Although Susan’s guesses have grown more skilful, she does not appear to know either the murderer or the room, but David is less certain of Marian and Jacob. Jacob almost never loses at Clue; his logic is flawless, his instincts sure. Marian, in her quiet way, is a dangerous player who can never be ruled out. David knows, from his system of checkmarks and X’s, that Jacob has identified Mrs. Peacock and the Candlestick; he is almost certain that Marian knows both, though he can’t be sure about the weapon; all three of them are moving from room to room, searching for the final clue. This part of the game always draws attention to another disturbing flaw in the game’s design: although play is supposed to be based on logical inference, it admits a high proportion of sheer chance, since each time a player’s token is accused of the murder it must be moved to the room in question. One is continually being whisked away, to the wrong part of the board. Jacob is known to absorb this whimsical element of the game directly into his strategy, and to make a useless Suggestion deliberately, for the sake of removing a token as far as possible from its apparent destination. He has already pulled David across the board to the STUDY, which he knows David holds in his hand, thereby delaying David’s progress and wasting a move of his own; the result is to give Marian an advantage in the race to new rooms. The game cannot last much longer. David is pleased to see Jacob bending intensely over his Detective Notes, trying to wrest an additional secret from his complex system of marks; Jacob seems in a better mood, he has been drawn into the game. David wonders what will happen next. Will there be another game? It’s almost one in the morning. Will Susan retire and leave the three of them together, to talk in the living room? Marian seems tired; perhaps she too will go upstairs. Will Jacob want to stay up till dawn? Will they walk to 7-Eleven and buy Cokes at four in the morning? Will they go down to the beach and walk out to the end of the jetty and sit looking across the black Sound toward Long Island? The foghorns are silent now; maybe the sky has cleared. Will Jacob want to talk? Will he talk about Dad? About Susan? His writing? David hopes he can somehow let Susan know that it’s all right for her to be here on his birthday. He shakes the die in his loose fist, enjoying the tension of the game, holding back, savoring the moment when he will suddenly open his hand and watch the red die tumble across the bright, loud board.

Just going. As Mr. Green hurtles into the BALLROOM he sees, on a corner of the distant window seat, Miss Scarlet sitting with her hands in her lap. Ten feet away the Colonel stands with his back to Miss Scarlet and his hands clasped behind his back. Miss Scarlet looks up, the Colonel turns his head: they are waiting for an explanation. Mr. Green cannot speak. His cheeks are aflame, his heart is pounding, he feels light-headed with embarrassment. The Colonel goes to the window, picks up a dark object, turns sharply on his heel, and begins striding toward Mr. Green. The Colonel is going to strike him. The Colonel is going to murder him. Mr. Green cannot move. “I say, Green,” the Colonel says, striding directly up to him. “Forgot your book.” The Colonel thrusts out the book. Mr. Green feels a bursting sensation in his heart; tears of gratitude prickle his eyes. “I am so terribly sorry,” Mr. Green says. “I mean happy, of course. I do hope I haven’t—” “I was just going,” the Colonel remarks.

The black envelope. The black envelope is a little larger than the cards it contains and is open at one of the narrow ends. In the open end is a shallow semicircular notch intended to ease removal of the three hidden cards. On one side of the black envelope appear the words CLUE CARDS, printed in dim silver. On the other side the structure of the envelope is visible: a single sheet of black paper has been folded in such a way that narrow strips overlap the side and bottom; the overlaps are glued in place. Years of use have caused the black envelope to tear at the corners of the open end; minuscule black hairs of paper twist from the splits.

In which the Colonel is thirsty, and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water; and what he finds there. The Colonel feels a slight dryness in his throat after his late exertions and, as he passes the KITCHEN, decides to drink a glass of water before proceeding to the BILLIARD ROOM. When he enters the KITCHEN he sees, in the middle of the room, buxom Mrs. White, standing sideways and holding in one hand a tilted but unspilled glass of water. She is staring straight before her, with her lips slightly parted; her cheeks are wet with tears. Her slumped shoulders, her gleaming cheeks, her loosening braids of hair, her air of desperate disarray, all these form a pleasing foil to her ample well-corseted bosom and handsome high posterior. “Pray forgive me for disturbing you,” remarks the Colonel, and closes the door gently behind him as Mrs. White turns her dazed wet face in his direction. The Colonel makes a quick calculation. There will still be time for a game before dinner.

A sound of shattered glass. The Professor has counted seven tiers of crisscrossing passages, but he is no longer certain of the number because many of the passages dip and climb, attaching themselves to higher and lower tiers without the evidence of steps. The multiplying passages cannot be endless, the Professor reminds himself: that is a delusion born of anxiety. Evidently the builder, or series of builders, desired an impression of extravagance, of freedom, as if a single SECRET PASSAGE moving from one known locus to the next were a form of intolerable constriction, for attempts have been made to disguise or blur the intermingling of passages and create confusion in the unwary wanderer. Passages scrupulously resembling other passages have been introduced, so that the illusion of having returned to familiar ground is continually created, only to be disrupted by a deliberate change in the pattern; passages containing shelves, furniture, and paintings lead suddenly to primitive passages where large rocks lie on the earthen paths and water trickles along the stony walls. It occurs to the Professor that perhaps he has been ceaselessly retracing a small number of cunning passages. Or it may be that he has been following a slowly widening and deepening series of passages, a series that he has far from exhausted, a series that has barely begun. His legs are growing tired, and despite the cool air he is perspiring. He stops for a moment to wipe his eyeglasses, which slip from his fingers to the hard path. He hears a sound of shattered glass. He crouches and pats the ground; grains of moist dirt cling to his fingertips. When he picks up his eyeglasses, he brings them close to his eyes and sees that the lenses are unbroken. He stands up quickly. I am imagining things, he says aloud. You are talking to yourself, he says aloud. His voice is very clear. He puts on his eyeglasses and begins walking briskly. This is not happening, he says aloud. Ahead of him, the path divides in two.

Is it possible? In the mauve dusk Miss Scarlet sits in the corner of the window seat smoothing her crimson dress, black in the twilight, over her knees. The Colonel has escaped through the door. Already the late episode is fading, becoming implausible. Is it likely that she? Is it possible that they? The Colonel, after all, has never seen her. He experiences women solely as a series of banal erotic images; he transforms real flesh into figments of his imagination. The Colonel is a magician: in that dark, unseeing gaze, women vanish. Miss Scarlet cannot have been present at the unlikely scene at the window seat, because the Colonel’s lovemaking is strictly solitary. The thought is somehow bracing. In the violet gloom Miss Scarlet pinches herself on the forearm and gives a little gasp of pain. She looks up suddenly. “Mr. Green?” she asks, straining her eyes. But Mr. Green is no longer there.

Jacob raises his glass. Jacob rolls a three: two short of the DINING ROOM. The game is almost over. He raises his wineglass and says, “Happy birthday, Davey.” David looks down, flushing with pleasure. Marian places a hand on his hand. “Hey. Happy birthday.” David looks up to see her smiling at him; her tired, sorrowful eyes brim with tenderness. Susan pushes back her chair and stands up. She steps around the table, bends over suddenly, and kisses David on the cheekbone. “Happy birthday, David,” she says. He can smell the clean scent of her blouse, mixed with a tang of something else: skin? hair? The kiss was a little high, just under his eye. He hears her sit down. David looks quickly at Susan, at Jacob, at Marian. His sister’s hand is warm on his hand, his cheekbone still feels the pressure of Susan’s lips, his brother’s greeting sings in his ears. He would like to tell them that they can count on him, that he will take care of them, that everything will be all right: Jacob will be famous, Marian will be happy, Susan will marry Jacob, Dad will never die. He knows that the words are extravagant and says them only to himself. “Thank you,” David says. For a moment, it’s as if everything is going to be all right.

In the attic. It is late, on a summer night. In the Ross attic, light from a streetlamp passes through a window-screen, makes its way past the spinning, misty blades of an exhaust fan, and falls dimly on a narrow stretch of floor flanked by old bookcases filled with childhood toys. One shelf holds an uneven pile of abandoned board games (Sorry, Parcheesi, Pollyanna, Camelot), a puzzle showing on the cover a three-masted ship with billowing sails plunging in black-green waves, a pile of Schaum music books with colored covers and miscellaneous sheet music such as “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “O Mein Papa,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and “Old Black Joe,” and a shoebox with crushed sides that contains wooden red and black checkers pieces embossed with crowns, a notched Viewmaster reel called “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” tin play-money coins, a wooden slice of watermelon the size of a section of orange, a three-lobed puzzle piece showing rich blue sky, an edge of red roof, and a corner of yellow chimney, a small flip-book featuring a mouse who picks up a sledgehammer and cracks open a gigantic egg from which emerges a frowning chicken with a bump on its head that grows longer and longer, a green rubber grasshopper, a blue fifty-dollar Monopoly bill, and Professor Plum. Beyond the bookcases, in the dark part of the attic, Marian’s old German school, a gift from her mother’s mother, Rebecca Altgeld, lies under the slanting front wheel of a fallen bicycle. The teacher sits tilted at her desk with raised arms, the six pupils lean in different directions on three wooden benches. Deeper in the blackness, old wooden barrels stand among cardboard cartons and dress boxes. On the floor Pierrot sits with his head against a barrel, his blouse torn, his face stricken with sadness, dreaming of Columbine beside a trellis in moonlight.

Finale. It is late, and in the mansion a tiredness comes over things. The books in the LIBRARY bookcases have lost their depth, and in their flatness can no longer be removed. The billiard balls and the billiard table form one unbroken surface, smooth as paper to the stroking thumb. In the KITCHEN cupboard a mouse knocks over a fragile upright plate, which begins to fall slowly, as if through water, and dissolves in shadow. Miss Scarlet, alone on the window seat in the melancholy BALLROOM, feels a stiffening in her limbs: she is slowly turning to wood. Colonel Mustard will stop, his arm held out toward Mrs. White, who, already beginning to lean toward the consoling hand, will pause on the threshold of a momentous decision. Mrs. Peacock will enter the DINING ROOM and freeze in an attitude of disdain, Mr. Green will remain with one foot raised in a shadowy corridor, Professor Plum is already fading among his fading passageways.