Ariel

Eighteen

When Ariel got out of bed that morning her night table was centered under the portrait of the woman with the rose. Its top was empty except for the jar lid. The candle stub had burned down to less than half an inch. A burnt match lay in a pool of congealed wax at the side of the candle.

She moved quickly, putting the candle away, returning her table to its usual position, replacing her clock and lamp on top of it. Then, hesitantly, she looked up at the portrait.

Evidently she had awakened in the middle of the night to go through the candle ritual again. But she couldn’t remember any of it. As far as she could recall, she hadn’t even dreamed during the night. The last thing she recalled was lying in bed on the verge of sleep.

Maybe she had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Sometimes that happened and she’d go and come back and be half asleep, barely able to remember it the next day.

But this was different, wasn’t it? Whatever woke her, whatever got her out of bed, she’d evidently gone through a whole ritual with the candle, moving furniture and lighting a match and doing God-knew-what while the candle burned. She looked at the portrait again, trying to learn something from the woman’s compelling gaze, but it didn’t help. Her memory was blank and it frightened her.

Was that all she had done? Just light a candle and go through some mental hocus-pocus number?

Or had she left her room?

She dressed and left it now, walking directly to the bathroom, hurrying past the closed door of Caleb’s room. She washed up, brushed her teeth, used the toilet. In the hallway, she cocked her head and listened. David and Roberta were both downstairs.

She walked to Caleb’s door, stood outside it for a moment. Her hand settled on the doorknob, hesitated. She turned the knob, drew a breath, opened the door.

The room was untouched. Everything was as it had been when Roberta last straightened it. Caleb’s fish mobile remained in place over the crib.

Relief. Whatever weirdness she’d been a part of last night, at least she hadn’t done a number on Caleb’s room.

She closed Caleb’s door and went downstairs for her breakfast.

While Jeff Channing had known Etta Jellin for years, it never occurred to him to turn to the realtor for information about previous occupants of the red-brick house on Legare Street. Instead he did what his legal training had taught him to do, searching the house’s title. He’d done this sort of thing any number of times in connection with real estate transactions, and there was no particular difficulty now in tracing the ownership of the house down through the years since it was built in 1822 by a Colonel Joseph Warren Clay.

The house had changed hands half a dozen times during the nineteenth century. A man named James Petersmith had bought it in 1903. His children had sold shortly after the 1929 stock market crash, and since then the house had never remained in the hands of a single owner for longer than seven years. Several owners had bought and sold the place within periods of less than a year.

A curious history, he thought. Americans were a mobile lot, certainly, especially since World War Two. He recalled reading somewhere that twenty percent of the nation’s families pulled up roots and moved every year. But homes in Old Charleston didn’t tend to turn over quickly. The sort of people who were attracted to them tended to stay put for a while.

Maybe there was something about the house, something vaguely disquieting that made its occupants sufficiently uncomfortable to sell and move on. The Traphagens, who had sold to the Jardells, had been transferred to another location, and no doubt other residents had had similarly sound reasons for moving. But it seemed a fair assumption that at least a few of the house’s recent owners had been made uneasy by the night sounds and had shrunk from the damp. Perhaps they’d seen things in the corners of the bedrooms too. Perhaps their noses had wrinkled at the smell of gas when the stove’s pilot lights had refused to stay lit. After a while people could weary of rationalizing the peculiar and just get out... unless, like himself, a person was concerned about one of them and was drawn in, out of curiosity and concern, to probe further, regardless of realistic skepticism... in spite of it...

Odd, too, that no one had even gotten around to replacing the old gas range. Odd, for that matter, that so many owners had made so few changes in the old house.

Odder still that the portrait had lain unnoticed for years until Ariel came on it. You would have thought some previous owner would have cleaned out the attic.

By the time he left the Deeds Registry, Jeff had covered a sheet of paper with names running all the way back from Traphagen, Carl and Julia, to Clay, Colonel Joseph Warren. He scanned the list, unsure that it represented anything beyond busywork. The subject of the portrait in Ariel’s room might be on the list, and if so hers was very likely one of the first six or eight names on it. But it seemed even more likely to him that some recent tenant had picked up the portrait at an auction or garage sale, then stowed it in the attic and forgot it at moving time. The painting needn’t have anything to do with Bobbie’s house; indeed the woman it depicted might well never have been within five hundred miles of Charleston in her life.

Fool’s business, he thought. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything better to do. He’d been letting his work slide shamefully lately, staying away from the office for long stretches every day and finding himself incapable of concentrating during those rare hours that he did spend at his desk. The informal title search he’d just conducted was the first genuine legal work he’d done in far too long.

It was, no question, getting to him and he didn’t know just what to do about it. His inability to work was just a symptom, and not the worst of the lot. His mind was acting strangely, hurling uncomfortable thoughts at him, leaving him anxious and jumpy inside however calm the exterior he managed to present to the world. His perceptions were askew, his judgment unreliable.

He kept a lid on this most of the time. When Bobbie had shown him the portrait, he’d been strong and logical and reassuring, the apostle of pure reason.

Yet he’d looked at the portrait and had seen, instantly. Ariel’s face. Ariel as an adult, strong and seductive, pale face shining and damned eyes burning hypnotically as they had burned when they had held and looked into his. That was what he had seen — but he had given no sign, and a later glance told him, all reasonably, that the portrait was merely a portrait, the woman in it merely a long-dead flower of the south.

Sometimes it seemed obvious to him that the only answer lay in breaking things off with Bobbie once and for all. The hours they spent in interchangeable motel rooms, for all the frenzy and heightened tension, were increasingly unsatisfying, leaving him time and again with a feeling not unlike a hangover, dry of mouth, short of breath, determined never to touch the stuff again. That he elected to continue the affair sometimes seemed to him the clearest evidence of all that he was indeed losing his grip on things, that he was truly losing his mind.

And yet something inside him kept insisting that Bobbie was the core of his life, his destiny — she was the mother of his dead child... they’d shared life and death, after all — that the hours he spent away from her were unbearably flat and lifeless. Just the other night he’d been sitting in the basement recreation room with Elaine and the girls, watching something unmemorable on the tube, glancing from time to time at the wet bar and the knotty pine walls and the recessed lighting, then at his wife and daughters, then once more at the oversize color television set. The good life in the suburbs, he had thought, and all of it hollow, pointless, and he found himself yearning to be away from all of this, away from it and from them forever, alone somewhere on an island or in a city or off in the middle of the desert with Bobbie — her pull was that strong, however much she upset him.

There was a time, he thought now, when that might have worked. When she was pregnant with his child, that would have been the moment for them to turn their backs on everything and just go. But instead it was the moment that had just gone, and he had stayed with Elaine while she had stayed with David, and Caleb was born and died and—

Well, fool’s business, he told himself, was better than no business at all. He left the Deeds Registry, strode on foot to his office and past it, and headed for the newspaper offices.

Erskine was waiting for her when school let out. “Well, we’re on our way,” he said. “Got busfare?”

“Oh.”

“Nice day for an expedition, isn’t it? Sunny, not too cold out.”

“Maybe we should forget it.”

He looked at her.

“Well, I haven’t even seen him around the past few days,” she said. “Maybe Roberta just had to see him for some reason or other, and then we happened to see him a few times out of coincidence.”

“Some coincidence.”

“It’s possible.”

“Why would she be seeing some lawyer, anyway?”

“Maybe to get a divorce.”

“From David?”

“Well, who else is she married to, birdbrain? Of course from David. She’d be glad to get a divorce from me but you can’t divorce children. It doesn’t work that way. The only way she can get rid of me...”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say the only way she’ll get rid of me is by killing me, but I don’t want to say it too loud. I wouldn’t want to give her any ideas.”

They walked as they talked, heading automatically for the bus stop on Meeting Street. Erskine pointed out that Channing had been at the funeral, that he had been cropping up in their lives too frequently for his connection to be merely professional.

“Oh, I know,” Ariel said. “I just don’t know if I feel like going all the way out there, but it’s all right. I’m going, aren’t I?”

“It’s just a bus ride and a walk.”

“And a bus ride back.”

“Right. Maybe we’ll see his kids. Greta and Debbie.”

“That’ll be a thrill. Which was the one you talked to?”

“Greta. She’s the older one.”

“Right, and you told her you were Graham. You can show her your spleen.”

“You always tell me I’m gross, Jardell.”

“Well, look who taught me. Maybe she’ll be cute and you can make out with her.”

“She’s all of nine years old, remember?”

“Well, tell her you’re Graham and you can pretend she’s Veronica.”

“You must have taken a weird pill today, Jardell.”

On the bus, he said, “Speaking of Veronica, she wasn’t in school today.”

“So?”

“I wonder what’s wrong with her.”

“The poor little thing probably has the sniffles.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course if you want to send her a get-well card, go right ahead. What’s the big deal that she stayed home from school today?”

He shrugged. “Just that I was thinking,” he said. “That conversation we had, and then Graham got hit by a car and now Veronica stayed home from school.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I suppose not.”

She thought of a candle stub centered beneath a portrait — but that was crazy. She hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t even thought of Veronica in days.

“Graham got hit by a car,” she said.

“I know.”

“And Veronica probably has a cold or a stomach ache. Or maybe she just stayed home to go someplace with her mother.”

“Maybe.”

“Talk about me being weird today, Mr. Erskine Wold. You could make money giving weird lessons.”

Investigation is a simpler process when you know what you’re investigating. If Jeff had had the benefit of David’s conversation with Etta Jellin, he’d have been looking for material on Grace Molineaux from the start. Instead he had to spend several hours in the newspaper files, scanning endless yellowed issues of last century’s newspapers for anything he could find relating to various occupants of the brick house on Legare Street. He came on the stories of several persons who had died in the house and made copious notes on each, having no way of knowing whether or not he’d found what he was looking for.

When he hit Grace Molineaux, he knew he was home.

The story was much as Etta Jellin remembered it, with a few exceptions. Grace Duprée Molineaux’s four children, three boys and a girl ranging in age from four months to five years, all died within a three-week period in September of 1882. The youngest, a boy, was the first to go, dying in his sleep on the night of the fifth. The girl, a three-year-old, died six days later, and her eighteen-month-old brother perished the same night. The oldest boy failed to wake up on the morning of the twentieth.

The newspaper coverage was guarded. The first death was unremarkable — infant mortality was high in those days. Jeff missed the initial story, a two-line squib on a back page. But when the boy and girl died in the same night, and only a week after the first death, the coincidence drew journalistic attention.

The fourth death was the clincher. Reading between the lines, Jeff could easily determine that public opinion suspected the Molineaux woman of smothering her children while they slept. Without suggesting as much, the anonymous author of one news story hastened to point to extenuating circumstances, showing that Grace was under a strain. She was a young woman who had married a man twenty years older than herself. Jacob Molineaux, a heavily-decorated hero of the Confederacy, had given her four children in as many years, only to be lost at sea weeks before the birth of his youngest son. Grace’s own father had died a matter of months earlier, and a favorite cousin had killed himself at about the same time in remorse over heavy gambling losses. All of these tragedies, cited ostensibly to show that the loss of her children was by no means the first blow Grace had suffered, served to imply that, if indeed she had murdered her children, she had done so out of stress-induced emotional instability.

Perhaps for lack of evidence, perhaps in deference to her family background and her husband’s war record, no charges were brought against Grace Molineaux. Her name disappeared abruptly from the newspapers, only to reappear just as abruptly on November 4th, when the newspaper reported her sudden death as a result of gas inhalation.

She had been found, it was reported, in the kitchen of her Legare Street home. While suicide was not mentioned, in keeping with the newspaper’s evident view of decorous journalism, the inference was inescapable.

She killed her kids, Jeff thought. Maybe the first one did die of crib death or some nineteenth-century infant malady. That was certainly possible, but somewhere along the line Grace had snapped, and she’d certainly murdered the other three children, and when she found she couldn’t live with herself she put her head in the oven and turned on the gas.

Could it be the same stove? The one Roberta cooked on, the one with the eccentric pilot lights? Was her restless ghost haunting the stove, leaving it only to appear in the upstairs bedroom with a baby in her arms? Lord, was this Jeff Channing, man of laws, thinking this way...?

His head was reeling by the time he left the newspaper offices. His nostrils were full of the musty smell of ancient newsprint. He’d been unable to find a photograph of Grace Molineaux, but he had no doubt that she was the woman whose portrait hung in Ariel’s room. He had no grounds for this belief. There was no evidence that Grace had ever had her portrait painted, or that her appearance had been anything like that of the woman in question. But he only had to remember the expression on that face, the look in those eyes, to be sure the likeness was that of Grace Molineaux, madwoman, murderess, and suicide. Good Lord...

He did not return to his office, did not even consider returning to his office, but walked instead to where he’d left his car, got into it and drove around. He passed the house on Legare Street three or four times, returning to it compulsively, staring at its brick-clad bulk as if it might reveal itself to him. Roberta’s car was parked at the curb, but he had no desire to stop for a word with her. He couldn’t tell her what he had learned. She was under a strain as it was, having a tough time emotionally and—

Just like Grace Molineaux, he thought.

And pushed the thought aside, and drove aimlessly around, trying to think if there was any further direction his investigations might take. Could he possibly establish whether the painting was of Grace? It occurred to him that there might be a way. Even if the painting was unsigned, a comparison of the style with that of various local portraitists of the time might establish who had painted it. Painters frequently kept records, and historical societies tended to preserve records of that sort. A little creative research might clear things up.

For that matter, a little further research in the newspaper files might be time well spent. He already knew as much as he wanted to know about Grace Molineaux, but it occurred to him to wonder what effect her house might have had on persons who had occupied it after her death. He already knew the house had changed hands at an unseemly rate. Had there been a disproportionate number of deaths? Was unexplained infant mortality a legacy of Grace’s?

Or had other people sensed something and moved away, before their lives were affected by whatever permeated the damp old walls? Maybe the house had been waiting all these years, waiting for the Jardells... A house waiting? The defense better rest...

He drove around until he tired of aimless driving, then found a main avenue and headed north. It was getting on toward dinner time. Time to leave both the nineteenth century and the cloying streets of Old Charleston. Time to get back to his own time, his own house, his own wife and children.

Until, on his own block just two doors from his own house, he saw them.

Erskine and Ariel.

The bus heading back into the city was two-thirds empty. Ariel and Erskine sat all the way in the back. Erskine had his legs draped over the back of the seat in front of them.

“I almost ran,” he said.

“Why run?”

“No reason. Just blind panic. When he drove up and saw us I thought we were going to be in trouble.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

“I know. I’m not saying it makes any sense. I just figured he’d be pissed off. We looked at his house and talked to his kids.”

“Just one of his kids.”

“Just Debbie. Greta had to practice the piano. She’s only nine. Isn’t that young for piano lessons?”

“Some kids start taking when they’re seven. I wonder if she’s any good.”

“You could play duets, Jardell. Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, the piano artistry of Miss Greta Channing and the flute wizardry of Miss Ariel Jardell. For their first selection, your ears will be treated to... to what?”

“Go Tell Aunt Rhody, I suppose. We used to live in a house like that one. Erskine, what if we’re moving back?”

“To the same house?”

“To one like it. To any other house. I really don’t want to move.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Right.”

They were silent for a moment. Erskine burped and Ariel clucked her tongue reprovingly. He took his feet down from the seat in front of him and yawned elaborately.

Then he said, “You were very cool. Just staring back at him when he stopped the car.”

“Well, it never occurred to me to run. I was surprised to see him, but after all it’s his house. I guess he has a right to go there.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“No.”

“Not even when he stopped the car alongside us?”

“No.”

He glanced at her. “I get the feeling you sort of like him,” he said. “He can be your new boyfriend.”

“Well, he’s not bad-looking.”

“Huh?”

“He’s not. I think he’s handsome.”

“Oh, come on, Jardell. He’s like you said in the beginning, he looks like a television emcee. Remember the Funeral Game?”

“That doesn’t keep him from being good-looking. It bugs you, doesn’t it?”

“What bugs me?”

“That I think he’s handsome. It really bugs you.”

“You can think Dracula’s handsome if you want. I don’t give a fuck.”

“Really bugs you.”

“Just cut it out, Jardell. That lah-di-dah singsong teasing shit.”

“Hey, calm down.”

“You want to think he’s handsome, that’s fine with me. The big dumb shit’s old enough to be your father.”

“Two children,” Jeff explained. “A boy and a girl. About, oh, twelve or thirteen years old. The girl’s the taller of the two. A very long, pale face. The boy’s very small with thick eyeglasses.”

“What about them, darling?”

“I saw them out front,” he said. “Just as I was driving up. I hadn’t seen them before.”

“You know this neighborhood. The only constant is change. People move in and out all the time, and the number of children—”

“I thought they might have come here. To the house, I mean.”

“What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. The way they were walking. There was something sort of furtive about them, as if they’d just broken a window of ours or something like that.”

“You got this impression just watching them pass by?”

He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “If you didn’t notice them, there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “Maybe Debbie or Greta saw them.”

“Jeff...”

“What?”

“Are you feeling all right, darling?”

“Of course. Why?”

“You seem under a strain. I wonder if you haven’t been working too hard.”

He nodded, seeming to weigh the thought, while inside him he fought to keep from laughing. Crying. Working too hard? He wasn’t working at all. If he was under a strain, it certainly had nothing to do with work.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I guess I’ve been pushing lately. I’ll have to try taking things a little easier.”

She nodded, moved closer to him, slid an arm around his waist and laid her head against his chest. Reflexively he put a protective arm around her. His wife, he thought, hearing the words in his mind. His wife, the mother of his children. “Elaine the fair, Elaine the beautiful, Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat...”

He hugged his wife close, closed his eyes, and saw Bobbie’s face grinning mockingly at him, one eye squinched shut in a lewd wink, the inevitable cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth — the face flashed and was gone, and then it was Ariel’s face, burning with an unholy knowledge... then melting into the face in the portrait, the face of Grace Molineaux...

He opened his eyes, and he was standing in his own house with his arm around his wife, inhaling the fragrance of her hair.

Easy, boy, he told himself sardonically. You’ve been working too hard. You must be under a strain.

That night Ariel went to her room directly after dinner. She tried to play the flute but the music didn’t want to come and she gave up on it. She did her homework, then sprawled on her bed with a book and tried to get lost in it. But her mind kept wandering away from the words on the page and after a while she closed the book and set it aside.

She looked up at the portrait.

“Old enough to be your father.”

She hadn’t reacted openly to Erskine’s words, even though the impact was like getting hit between the eyes with a fist.

Jeffrey Channing was old enough to be her father. And he’d come over to the house to talk to Roberta, and had turned up at Caleb’s funeral, and had then taken to lurking in his car, spying on her and... Suppose he was her father? Suppose thirteen years ago Jeffrey Channing had an affair with someone, maybe with a girl much younger than he was, for example. She got pregnant, but he was married and couldn’t marry her. The girl had the baby, and she put it up for adoption, or maybe she died in childbirth, but anyway, the baby wound up getting adopted by David and Roberta Jardell... And then years later Jeffrey Channing found out about it, he was a lawyer and he would know how to investigate that sort of thing... In between he’d had two children of his own, Greta and Debbie. And they didn’t know about Ariel, and neither did Mrs. Channing. What was her name, again? Erskine had found it out and she ought to be able to remember it, but it wouldn’t come to mind. Well, it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t know about Ariel. (Elaine, that was Mrs. Channing’s name.) They didn’t know, and her fa — Jeffrey Channing wanted to take an interest in his... in her and learn a little about her without anybody finding out his secret. Maybe Roberta herself didn’t know who he really was. If he was a lawyer, he probably had some clever way or other to explain what he was doing.

Father.

She tested the word, let it echo in her mind. Part of her wanted to believe that this handsome well-dressed man was indeed her father. Another part couldn’t regard the notion as anything more than a seductive fantasy. At least it made for a harmless mind-game... Ariel Channing...

Twice now they had exchanged long glances, their eyes sort of locked in a wordless stare. Both times he had been behind the wheel of his Buick while she had been walking with Erskine. Both times something had passed between them, something special... was the look they exchanged a father’s and daughter’s?

It was exciting and upsetting and a little crazy. After a while she ran a tub, took a bath, making the water hotter than usual and adding some of Roberta’s bath salts. She lay back with her eyes closed, soaking for a long time in the hot tub. Then, drained, she dried off and went to bed.

She lay in bed exhausted but unable to sleep. She began touching herself, as if to reassure herself that she was there, as if to read her features as a blind person might. She touched her face, her shoulders, her breasts. She touched between her legs, then put her hand to her face and breathed in her own scent.

Images bombarded her. At one point she saw Channing standing alongside the woman in the portrait. They were dressed like the man and woman in American Gothic. Instead of a rose, the woman was holding a baby. For a moment the baby was herself, and then it was Caleb, and then it was a rose again, a rose that wilted until a drop of blood fell from its petals.

Ariel slept.

Jeff couldn’t sleep. After an hour’s tossing and turning he gave up and got out of bed. In the living room he tried to concentrate on a magazine but couldn’t make sense of what he was reading. He tossed it aside and tried to make sense out of the afternoon.

Had he really seen them?

It was hard to believe he had seen two children who looked like them. Their appearance was too distinctive and he had had too good a look at them to have been confused in that fashion. Of course it was possible that he had fancied a resemblance where none existed. He’d been tired, emotionally exhausted, and he could have seen two children who really looked nothing like Ariel and her friend and his imagination could have connected the dots.

Or there might have been no one there at all. No boy and girl walking past his house. People under a strain sometimes saw things that weren’t there. It was not comforting to admit that possibility where one’s own self was concerned, but it was not a possibility which could be categorically denied.

Finally, it was possible that he had seen precisely what he had thought he had seen. But what on God’s earth had sent them wandering through his neighborhood? It was miles from where they lived. Assuming they had a reason to be in Charleston Heights, was it sheer coincidence that put them in front of his house on his return?

Or had they come looking for him?

He put his head in his hands, pressing against his temples, trying to make his thoughts run along logical lines. There ought to be some way to make sense of all this and he couldn’t seem to latch onto it. Was all of this linked to pressure resulting from his affair with Bobbie? Or did it somehow tie in with what he had learned about the portrait?

He closed his eyes, and his mind filled with Grace Molineaux’s image. It flickered and was gone, replaced, for God’s sake, by a vision of Ariel. He wanted to open his eyes, but half afraid that should he do so he’d discover her standing there in front of him.

He opened his eyes. He was alone in the room, and he reacted to this discovery with a mixture of relief and disappointment.