Sick Of Shadows

CHAPTER EIGHT

EILEEN’S FAILURE to appear at dinner was attributed to her fatigue from painting. The family ate at six, which Elizabeth considered unusually early, but no one else seemed to think it was strange.

Amanda, apparently under the impression that two doctors would be ideal dinner companions, had placed Carlsen Shepherd next to her husband, but Dr. Chandler’s monologue on colonial medicine seemed less than successful as a conversational gambit.

“What do you think is really the matter?” Elizabeth whispered to Geoffrey, who was sitting next to her.

“I don’t know. I tapped on her door, but she howled at me to go away. I expect she’d let Satisky in, but he seems to have an aversion to hysterical females, even if he’s engaged to one.”

Across the table, Satisky was cutting his meat with studied concentration. His movements were slow and cautious, as though he were trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

“He seems like a nice guy. Dr. Shepherd, I mean.”

Geoffrey continued to stare at Satisky.

“And, Geoffrey, she did invite him herself.”

“Maybe Mother’s right about wedding nerves,” said Geoffrey.

Alban had not been asked to dinner, but had phoned to say that he would be over later. Elizabeth hoped she would have a chance to talk to him; maybe things would make sense to him.

Amanda had abandoned her role of effusive Southern hostess, and spent most of the meal conversing with Captain Grandfather in a quiet undertone. She ate very little and excused herself early, pleading that she had a headache.

Elizabeth found the tension annoying, so she left the table soon after Amanda did, and went upstairs to Eileen’s room. The door was locked.

“Eileen?” she called, knocking gently. “It’s Elizabeth.”

There was no sound from within. With a sigh, Elizabeth gave up and started to her own room. The empty frame of the mirror stood crookedly against the wall; the glass shards on the floor had already been cleared away by the unobtrusive Mildred. Elizabeth wondered why Eileen chose to hit the mirror: was it deliberate or did she simply lash out at the first thing she saw?

“Elizabeth?”

She turned. Eileen had opened her door partway and stood looking at Elizabeth with a pitiful expression.

“I came up to see if you were all right,” said Elizabeth.

Eileen’s eyes welled with tears. She peered anxiously toward the stairs as if she were afraid that someone else would see her. Impatiently she motioned to Elizabeth. When the door was safely shut behind them, Eileen sat on her bed and hugged a yellow stuffed bear, resting her chin on the top of its head. Elizabeth sat in a chair beside the dresser.

“Everybody is very worried about you,” she said in what she hoped was a sympathetic tone.

“I’ll bet they are! I know what they’re thinking!” Her voice quavered.

Oh, God, thought Elizabeth. If I set off another attack of hysterics, Aunt Amanda will tar and feather me. Soothingly, she said, “You’re just nervous because you’re getting married next week. You have all these plans to cope with, and you’ve been trying to finish that painting. I know what a strain it can be to have to finish something by a certain time. You’re wearing yourself out, aren’t you?”

Eileen looked thoughtful. “The painting. Yes, it has been quite a strain.”

“Of course it has!” said Elizabeth heartily. Eileen looked calmer now. She had put down the stuffed animal and was looking at Elizabeth with an expression of relief. I should have been a psych major, Elizabeth thought with a twinge of satisfaction. “You know, Eileen, I’m sure Michael would understand if you wanted to stop working on the painting until after the wedding.”

“No. It’s almost finished. I’ll be fine. Really. You’re right; I was just tired.”

“There’s no reason you wouldn’t want Dr. Shepherd here, is there?” asked Elizabeth doubtfully. Despite her success in calming Eileen, she still felt that hysterics and mirror-breaking were excessive reactions, even for a nervous bride.

“No, of course not. Dr. Shepherd is very kind. I’ll apologize to him tomorrow.”

“Look, Eileen. You’re worried about something. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“About what? Worrying? Oh yes I would! Do you realize that I’ve just graduated from college and haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do next?”

“Oh,” said Eileen faintly.

“I know I should have thought of that earlier, but I was sort-of-engaged to an architecture major named Austin. Did I tell you about Austin?”

Eileen shook her head. Good, thought Elizabeth, I’ve got her attention. She explained about Austin and the duck pond incident. Eileen actually began to smile when she heard that story, so Elizabeth went into great detail, describing Austin clambering out of the pond, dripping weeds.

“And I told him if he stayed in there long enough, he might have a real alligator on his chest!”

They began to laugh. “He was such a sight!” Elizabeth giggled. “I wish I had a picture of him coming out of that pond!”

Eileen’s smile faded. “Elizabeth, I’m not feeling well. I really think I need to be alone.”

“Well-sure, Eileen…” I wonder what I did to upset her this time? Elizabeth wondered as she closed the door behind her. Curiouser and curiouser.

It was too early for bed, so she went back downstairs to see if Alban had come over as he’d promised, or if Geoffrey were doing anything amusing. She heard voices coming from the library. Hoping that it might be one of them, she opened the door and peeked in.

Alban and Carlsen Shepherd were hunched over the table amidst a pile of papers. Shepherd was scribbling furiously on a small note pad, and Alban was saying, “I’ve been Ludwig of Bavaria for about four years now, and on the whole-”

“Oh, excuse me!” she blurted out. “I’ll go.”

Shepherd looked up and smiled. “No, it’s all right. Come on in. Nothing important. You’re welcome to sit in.”

Elizabeth tried to sort things out in her mind. Alban had “been” Ludwig of Bavaria-should she stay and hear the whole story or run? And why should she be permitted to sit in on a medical consultation?

“But-what about your psychiatrists’ rule about patient confidentiality?” she stammered. Surely they weren’t really going to allow her to listen to a description of Alban’s reincarnation delusions.

They stared at her, letting the question sink in. Shepherd’s face lit up in sudden comprehension, and he roared with laughter. “Patient confidentiality! Well, now you know what your family thinks of you, Cobb!”

Alban grinned. “I think I worried Elizabeth a bit this morning by mentioning reincarnation.”

Elizabeth wished they would stop laughing at her and start making sense. “Will you please tell me what is going on here?”

They exchanged smirks. “We’re discussing a war game, Cousin,” said Alban. “It’s called Diplomacy. Ever heard of it?”

“Only in connection with Camp David,” she sighed. “A game? You’re playing a game? You just met!” She might have known it would turn out to be another batty family hobby. The fact that Shepherd was familiar with it did not surprise her in the least, once she considered the matter.

“Well, we’ve been playing in separate games-separate wars, even, because Alban’s game is a Prussian variant, but we still have a lot to talk about,” said Shepherd cheerfully. “It’s a very challenging game. See? These little short blocks are armies-”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Thanks, I’ll take a deferment.”

“Perhaps we can come up with a Jacobite variant,” suggested Alban with a trace of a smile. Catching Shepherd’s puzzled look, he explained. “The only war that interests Elizabeth is the Rising of 1745 in Scotland.”

They turned back to the technical matters of the game, and Elizabeth went off in search of Geoffrey. She found him in Amanda’s den, reading a newspaper.

“Hullo,” she said, curling up beside him on the sofa. “I’m bored. Anything interesting in the news?”

“Certainly not!” he answered in shocked tones. “This is the local newspaper, so it contains no news. Anyway, we only read it to find out who has been caught.”

“Then I won’t ask to borrow it.”

He nodded, absently turning a page.

Elizabeth tried again. “Chandler Grove isn’t a very exciting place, is it?”

“You can dial a wrong number and still talk,” said Geoffrey, without looking up.

“There’s absolutely nothing to do. Alban and Dr. Shepherd are in the library-playing with blocks!”

Geoffrey looked up, raising an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Have you talked to Eileen?”

He tossed the newspaper on the pine coffee table. “As a matter of fact, I did knock on her door after dinner. Still no response. So I asked Mildred to take a tray up to her. If she’s not hungry, she can throw it, which may help her nerves enormously.”

Elizabeth looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, you may be a very nice person,” she said, as if the idea had not occurred to her before.

“How dare you think such a thing!” He huffed. “No, Cousin. I think it only counts as being nice if you do it to someone you don’t like, if I remember my catechism correctly.”

“Are you very worried about her?” asked Elizabeth, wondering if she should confide in him.

“Impertinent of you to ask, since you are not,” Geoffrey replied.

“I am so! I went up to see her right after dinner. And,” she added triumphantly, “she let me in!”

“Is she all right?”

“I think so. She says she’s tired and that doing the painting has been a strain for her. I asked her to quit, and she says she won’t.”

“Of course she won’t. That was an excuse. Eileen loves to paint. If she didn’t have that damned painting to work on, she’d never get out of the house and away from Mother.”

Elizabeth nodded sympathetically. “Well, it’s only for another week. If she can just keep telling herself that through the rehearsal and the fittings, and all the rest of it…”

“She’ll be all right. Satisky should be all right for her. He’s too much of a sponge to hurt her. With, of course, one possible exception.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh… just that frightened sponges can be deadly.”

“Oh, Geoffrey! Don’t talk doom and gloom! We’re being silly!” Elizabeth shivered, wanting very much to be talked out of her own apprehension. “The wedding is going to go off just fine, in spite of all our collective nerve storms, and after that, it will be up to Eileen and Michael, and that’s all there is to it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Geoffrey said grudgingly. “We are a nervy family. It’s probably the money.”

“You mean Great-Aunt Augusta’s legacy?”

“No, just money in general. Having it, I mean. People with money have to find other things to fret about. Haven’t you ever noticed that people on soap operas never worry about car payments or unemployment? They all have their minds on higher planes-like adultery and drug addiction.”

Elizabeth laughed. “And what does this family worry about?”

Geoffrey considered. “Well, I myself live in constant fear of boredom, but thus far I’ve managed to stave it off. Yes, Elizabeth, I know you find it dull here, but I don’t-perhaps because I enjoy my own company so much.”

“You’re never serious,” sighed Elizabeth.

“On the contrary, I am always serious,” said Geoffrey. “I learned long ago that if you tell the truth as matter-of-factly as possible, no one ever believes you.”

“Bill does that, too, sometimes,” said Elizabeth thoughtfully.

“Yes, but with him it’s a hobby. With me, it is an art.”

“He is certainly less arty than you are, if that’s what you mean,” said Elizabeth, with a suspicious hint of irony in her voice.

“Yes, but he is not nearly so interesting. Law school, indeed!”

“Oh, Bill can be very interesting. You should hear about his new roommate! He’s an archeology major and he brings bones home to study and leaves them lying around. I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

Geoffrey looked at her solemnly. “Why?”

“Because-well, because-oh, you know what I mean! Anyway, just because Bill isn’t one of the family eccentrics doesn’t mean he’s dull.” She sighed. “At least he knows what he wants to be, which is more than I can say.”

“Don’t you know?” asked Geoffrey. “Since you told me that you were majoring in sociology, I naturally assumed that you were in the marriage market.”

Elizabeth laughed. “There doesn’t seem to be much demand for the product. Anyway, I guess I was in the marriage market, as you put it, but my campus romance broke up this spring, and-”

Geoffrey held up a restraining hand. “Spare me!” he pleaded. “Spare me all heartrending details! I beg you to carry the sword in your heart, and be brave!”

Elizabeth was struggling to think of a sufficiently witty reply when Satisky blundered into the room, with a ready frown of apology.

“The library is occupied, and I just thought-”

Geoffrey stood up. “They’ll be leaving soon, I expect,” he said casually. “I think I’ll go with them. They may need a referee. You never can tell with barbarians. Would you like to come along, Elizabeth? You could be a cheerleader. Scream for blood and that sort of thing.”

“No, thank you, Geoffrey.”

“Then I’m off.”

“You certainly are,” muttered Satisky, when his tormentor was safely out of earshot. He sank down in the armchair with a weary sigh.

“How was your trip to the library?” asked Elizabeth politely.

“Oh, pleasant enough, I suppose. It gave me something to do while Eileen was painting.”

“Have you seen Eileen this evening?” asked Elizabeth in a carefully neutral tone.

“No. I don’t even know what’s wrong. It isn’t anything I did. I mean, I heard that she took one look at Dr. Shepherd and went cra-I mean… Oh, you know!”

“Yes. She seems nervous. I think she may be pushing herself too hard to finish that painting. How much does she have left to do?”

“I don’t know! She won’t let me see it either, not that I-” He stopped short of saying “care.” If this cousin of hers went tale-bearing, he would really be in trouble. Elizabeth seemed nice enough, he grudgingly admitted, but he suspected her of having a sarcastic wit. Satisky didn’t care for sarcastic women; they tended to use ridicule as a weapon in disagreements. He much preferred tears, which he could dry manfully, and forgive, while still getting his own way in the argument. There was a slight family resemblance in looks between Elizabeth and Eileen, but the dispositions were altogether different. Eileen was a sweeter, softer girl. She looked like a picture of Elizabeth taken with an out-of-focus camera. When Eileen was not actually present, he found it difficult to picture her features, but he remembered her as a pleasant beige blur. This Elizabeth person was too positive by half. Vaguely he wondered if he were being interrogated.

“I was thinking that you might tell her not to work so hard on it,” Elizabeth was saying. “I think the pressure of trying to finish is upsetting her. Could you tell her that you don’t care if it’s not ready in time?”

“Oh, sure. Sure.”

“You’re probably nervous, too, around all these strangers. Will your family be coming down for the wedding?”

“No.” Satisky never wanted to say anything more than no to questions about his family, but in the silence that always followed, he found himself explaining that his parents had divorced when he was eight and that he had been raised by his grandmother, who had died two years ago. He had lost touch with his father, and his mother, who had remarried and was living on the West Coast, would not be coming to the wedding. He rattled off this explanation to Elizabeth, hoping that she wouldn’t become cloyingly sympathetic and ask him about his childhood. He didn’t like to talk about it, but he had survived it, and things were going well for him now. The only effect that he could determine was a distance between himself and other people, which had come from his years of solitary childhood. He had spent much of his time reading, and that was good; his literary background had served him well as a student of English, but it had made him unsure of how real people wanted to be treated. He never knew what to say to people whose next line he could not anticipate. He was uneasy with anyone who was not confined to the pages of a book, preferably a nineteenth-century edition. Perhaps that was why he had been able to love Eileen; she was not quite real.

Elizabeth was looking at him with interest, but not, he had to admit, with any particular sympathy. “How did you meet Eileen?” she asked.

He told her about the Milton seminar, and Eileen looking as vague and lost as-as Lycidas. She had been so shy and frightened that he had forgotten his own uneasiness around people. Eileen made him confident by comparison, so much so that he no longer worried about mispronouncing a name when he talked of literary matters. Like all people who read more than they conversed, Satisky had had his own way of pronouncing things before he had met anyone to discuss them with. This had led to embarrassing moments as an undergrad when he had spoken of “Frood” or “Go-Eth,” much to the amusement of his classmates. He did not explain all this to Elizabeth, of course. He had not even confided his insecurities to Eileen. How could Eileen depend on him if she knew how uncertain he was?

Satisky began to hit the arm of the chair gently with his fist. “Maybe I rushed her,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t ready-isn’t sure. Maybe she told Dr. Shepherd how she really feels about this marriage, and she’s afraid he’ll say something.”

He told Elizabeth about the sweet clinging girl he had fallen for, and his fantasy of rescuing her from dragons. Then she had turned out to be a very wealthy and complicated article. More than he’d bargained for.

“And even though I do want to marry her-I think-I’m afraid to ask myself why. Afraid it might turn out to be the money. It’s so much money! I don’t like what it’s doing to me! I don’t like what I’m becoming.”

“Have you tried to explain this to Eileen?”

Satisky looked shocked. “Of course not! She would be terribly hurt that I could even think of money instead of just of her. You know her-uh-background. What if she killed herself because of me? Do you expect me to live with that?”

One of the problems of listening to other people’s troubles is the difficulty in finding soothing noises to make. Elizabeth considered saying that everything would be all right, but the chance of that seemed remote. If Satisky really was so unsure of his feelings, he probably shouldn’t go through with the marriage, but she shared his apprehension. Eileen’s nerves were not yet strong enough to see her through a shock of that magnitude. Elizabeth had no intention of offering any advice on the subject, because she wanted no part of the guilt that Satisky seemed to be stuck with either way. She wished he hadn’t chosen to confide in her. One thing was certain: she had better get him off that subject before whoever-it-was-that-just-walked-by-the-door decided to stop and listen. God help her if anyone thought she was encouraging Satisky to have doubts! She would be accused of trying to steal her cousin’s fiancé, or trying to improve her chances for the inheritance, or both. She could imagine Aunt Amanda’s reaction to the situation.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this!” she whispered to Satisky. “Don’t even think about it anymore! Just-don’t!”