The Tunnel Page 18

  She made herself keep them shut till she had counted to sixty, and then opened them cautiously. She glanced over her shoulder to the door where the conductor would enter with the telegram in his hand. He wasn’t there. It was a good omen. Maybe today was going to be all right.

  Once inside the revolving doors of the department store, Natalie hesitated. When you were going to change a house inside and out, where did you begin? She had brought home swatches of fabrics quite some time ago, but that hadn’t worked at all. The sensible thing to do would have been to get Mona to design her something special and then ask Trev to have the factory make it up. But then the house would not be hers, but Mona’s. That was what Mona wanted and that was what Mona couldn’t have. Besides, she wanted to surprise Trev with it.

  She could also get a decorator to come to the house and do the whole thing. It would be a nice juicy job, well worth a lot of time and trouble on somebody’s part. But Natalie wanted to plan everything herself. It had to be hers. She had to fool the house somehow, convince it that she was in charge, and not her dead mother-in-law.

  It was quite a large house, and it would be confusing to tackle the whole of it at once. She had decided nothing specifically; not the colors of the walls or the disposition of the new furniture; but she did know that she wanted everything to be modern, bright and on the bare side.

  She walked firmly to the elevators.

  “Where is the lamp department?” she asked the operator.

  If she began with light, she would surely not end in the darkness. Pleased with this conclusion, she realized that the little red lantern she’d bought at the hardware store had pointed the way. Something at the back of her mind must have been telling her to fill the house with light, to illuminate it gaily from attic to cellar. That way the dark comers, the obscure hallways, the crafty, dim spaces would be forced to show themselves; reduced to pitiless brightness, they would lose their power to intimidate her.

  And when Trev had finally killed her, she would leave the well-lit house to Mona. By that time, Mona might have grown to crave darkness and seclusion. Well she might. And she wouldn’t get them.

  “We have some beauties,” said the saleswoman enthusiastically, tossing her gray curls, tucking her yellow pencil firmly behind her ear. “Now was it for the living-room you wanted them or for the bedroom?”

  “For every room in the house,” Natalie told her. “Perhaps if I just wander around and look, and call you when I want things explained?”

  She wanted to be alone with these lovely rows and rows of lamps, these colorful, glowing allies. Dozens of them, and all of them ready to spring to attention at the touch of her hand on the switch. Flowers and stripes and bold patterns, reds and greens and yellows; floor lamps and lamps for tables, with bases of wood and onyx and metal. Natalie scarcely noticed when the saleswoman marched huffily away.

  But there was no point, she soon saw, in buying all her lamps at one time. Better to choose one, or a pair; better to add gradually to her store. After all, that was the way she and Trevil had planned to buy their furniture—one piece at a time, each a rare delight to gloat over and admire. One lamp to wrap carefully and pack beside the vacuum cleaner in the attic—that was what she really wanted; that was her own way of going about things.

  It was difficult to choose—like being allowed to pick one flower from a garden. If you were given pictures of a thousand babies and told to pick the one you wanted for your own, you would bog down in hopeless confusion and would probably wind up childless.

  She must be clever about this. She must remember that possessions chose their owners, not the other way around. When she had traversed the whole floor, darting from beckoning lamp to beckoning lamp, she began to grow desperate. She glanced at her watch. She had been there an hour; it was getting late and she had accomplished nothing. She suddenly came upon the stores current model house, tucked away in a corner between the lamp department and the furniture. It was a cunning little house, almost too cunning, Natalie thought, designed for newlyweds. Fronted by a white picket fence, the small windows were framed in the starchiest of white curtains, the perkiest of blue bows drawing them away to expose the domestic charm within. It was easy to imagine that the host of chairs and tables flanking the cottage to the right were in reality tall stands of shade trees. The bright lamps became flowers, summer flowers; hollyhocks, roses, stock, clumps of mimosa, waving patches of Scotch broom. Natalie clicked open the gate, walked up the cork-stone path, and entered the tiny living-room.

  She sat in a comer of a pink loveseat and pretended she was waiting for Trev to come home. Dinner was in the automatic oven; the cocktail things were laid out on the low walnut coffee table before the fire, which glowed redly behind colored cellophane. In a minute the train announcing his arrival would whistle beyond the hill. Meantime, she could sit at her leisure and glance over a fashion magazine, or she could go into the bedroom to make sure she looked her best. Perhaps a touch of lipstick …

  She crossed to the hallway that led to the rest of the house. Yes, here were linen closets, their gleaming glass doors inviting frank appraisal of the neatly stacked sheets and towels within. And here was the bedroom with a chair in blue polka dots, the immense bed with headboard of carved cherry, her own dressing table bedizened in white frills, complete with silver brush, comb and mirror and a bottle of Chanel No. 5. Trev’s high bureau sat between the windows, mirrorless. A man liked to brush his hair in the bathroom. Natalie touched up her lipstick, patted her hair, and decided it was time to look at the roast.

  The kitchen was spotless, a dazzling white. Salad chilling in the icebox, the shining stove exuding the delicious smell of beef and browning potatoes. The time she’d spent on the aspic this morning had been well worth it. It was such a wonderful kitchen that she might even bring herself in time to cook crabs in it. Trev loved them so, she could surely overcome her unreasonable fear.

  Heavens! It was time to call the children! They’d been so quiet out in the backyard that she’d actually forgotten them! She stepped to the kitchen door and flung it open, her throat lifted for the summoning.

  But the instant the door was open she couldn’t remember their names, for in fact there was no backyard, no stoop, no garbage can. There were only the bare boards the department store carpenters had put up to separate the furniture section from whatever lay beyond. It was a movie set; the audience wasn’t supposed to look beyond the range of the cameras. The cast did not include children, either. The story was about a husband and wife who were trying to kill each other, the husband because he was in love with another woman, and the wife because she was mad.

  Natalie suddenly felt a great need for Trev, no matter what his intentions. If she hurried, she could get to his office in time to ask him to take her out for lunch.

  Humbly, she left the little cottage by its only exit.

  Chapter 31

  Natalie believed that professional psychiatric treatment was for people who wouldn’t be, or couldn’t be, honest enough to figure out what was the matter for themselves. That is, if the trouble hadn’t gotten beyond you.

  What you did was tell an impersonal expert everything you could remember about yourself, whether or not you thought it had any bearing on your trouble. You held nothing back, for the doctor could make no analysis unless he had all his material before him. The idea was to drag it all out into the open, where your fears were supposed to dissipate. It was the buried things that made the trouble, and it was the psychiatrist’s job to exhume them. You told him your earliest childhood memories and were surprised to find that you remembered quite a lot of things. You told him your dreams, and he tied those up, if he could, with your feelings of guilt, your complexes, and your fears. Natalie had a feeling that your cure would be sounder if you could manage to work things out for yourself. She was certain that no psychiatrist would agree with her. But she was a little afraid that psychiatry made people into vegetables, so well adjusted to what was called, loosely, “reality,
” and “society,” that they lost the sharp edges of personality.

  She had known one terrible case of a brilliant, unhappy artist who had taken treatments for two years. At the end of that time he was no longer unhappy, but from that time on he had not set brush to canvas. Furthermore, he became so uninteresting and well adjusted that his friends drifted away from him.

  She also knew a girl, an actress, who thought she had a guilt complex about her child. The child had arrived early in her married life and the actress was afraid that she subconsciously resented its interference in her career. Her psychiatrist uprooted the guilt complex but left another in its place. The actress was never again able to take the elevator to the top floors of Radio City; extreme heights put her in a panic. So she could never take any of the radio jobs that actors use to eke out their incomes between stage engagements. Her money ran out and she couldn’t afford to go to the psychiatrist for more treatments on her new fear. Besides, she was afraid of what psychiatry might do to her next.

  Dr. Olessa had once told her that if there were as many good psychiatrists as there were good medical doctors, one need not be afraid to present one’s mind readily to examination. But, he concluded, the profession was in its infancy, the real experts were sadly overworked, and many so-called psychiatrists were quacks or tyros.

  Natalie decided that a man would need a lot of nerve to perform a delicate operation on someone else’s mind.

  Something inside her told her authoritatively that she was not yet beyond her own recall.

  She had tried to be honest about remembering things. She had dragged long-forgotten happenings from the dim past and inspected them relentlessly, hoping they could cast light on her present dilemma.

  Her most terrifying recurrent dreams were those in which she allowed some living creature to die through neglect. Sometimes the creature would be a dog or a cat or a fish, locked up and forgotten by her, wasted and dead when she found it again. Several times it had been a child. She would leave the child bouncing and happy and when she returned to it, it would be no bigger than her fist, and she would realize she hadn’t fed it in days.

  Natalie decided that a psychiatrist would love that one. Reason told her that she was probably frustrated; that she wanted children but wouldn’t allow herself to have them. That was perfectly true; Bob stood in her way. She didn’t want to have Bob’s children, apparently; she wanted Trev’s.

  Or perhaps the dream had nothing to do with children, except abstractly. Perhaps it meant that she was neglecting her own marriage, letting it die through lack of care.

  This idea hit her as she was crossing the street to Trevil’s office building. When she reached the sidewalk she stopped in front of a florist’s window and stared at hothouse daffodils she didn’t see.

  How much imagination was in her book, and how much truth?

  If the present impasse of her marriage continued, how much would be Trev’s fault and how much her own? She prided herself so fatuously on her reason, her lucidity even when it verged on madness. Why had she never seen this before? How long had she been having those dreams? She thought back frantically. Before the accident on the railroad tracks at the tunnel, yes. So far she’d only been dating the real trouble back to that. But farther, farther—had she had them in Seattle? No. Then it must be—yes, she’d been dreaming that horrible dream since she and Trev first came to the Sherrett house to live.

  Then it must be—she hadn’t been wrong! It had been something about the house—the house was alive; it did resent her; she had been right to fear living there.

  Bob was connected somehow with the house, too. His grim promise that he’d come back, alive or dead. She, Natalie, was half dead too, but she didn’t know it. There was a song about that: I’m dead but I can’t lie down.

  Trevil and Mona. Mona had explained, but Natalie had told herself she didn’t believe her. She’d never given Trev a chance to explain. She’d just taken it all for granted, the story she’d built up in her mind. There wasn’t a word of truth in it. To Trev, Mona was only an automaton, a brilliant designer, an employee worth every cent she was paid. Trev had said, “I’d rather have you.”

  She turned toward the canopied entrance, a smile on her face.

  They didn’t see her as they came out, even though she stretched out her hand from the shadow of the canopy. Trev had Mona by the arm; he was bending over her dark beauty, talking eagerly. They were alone, though crowds passed by; they were wrapped up in each other.

  Under her gray suede gloves, the palms of Natalie’s hands were wet as she turned her back on them and walked swiftly to a point beyond the florist’s window. She didn’t have to hide. They wouldn’t have seen her if she danced a jig in front of them.

  If she followed them, she could probably find out for certain. She’d know the truth at last.

  Natalie slowly fell into step behind her enemies.

  Chapter 32

  Natalie was conscious of a faint ringing in her ears, as she plodded down the busy street after Trevil and Mona. It was something like the warning bell in a railroad station which sounds as the train approaches. It seemed, she thought wearily, that she had been thinking in terms of trains all her life and would forevermore. She was sick of trains, sick of change. She was sick of the dust and grime that trains leave in their wake. Yet, as long as you lived, you had to keep moving to somewhere; you had to accept change or fall by the wayside. Now she was so tired that she thought that even if Trev should tell her they could leave the Sherrett house tomorrow, she wouldn’t be able to go.

  Trains had carried her from Oregon to California, to New Orleans, to Chicago, to New York, and to Washington, to larger and more important cities as her father’s career progressed. Trains had carried her to boarding school, to colleges in Missouri and Virginia. They had taken her back to California, rocketed her to Washington again and Florida, to Seattle, and finally a train had deposited her in Kenwood, supposedly for good. You almost never took trains unless something had happened to you, and once on a train you were never really safe from harm unless you were in a tunnel.

  The trains themselves had been warning her all her life and this was the day she was going to heed their message. Right now she was on her way to a big happening, a sort of crisis. She could feel it in the air about her, in the furtive way the people rushed from the office buildings. Even Mona and Trev, who had turned into a seafood restaurant on the comer, seemed to be walking strangely, as if they were pushing their way against a high wind. Natalie caught a glimpse of Mona’s serious, lovely profile, framed against the deep green of her hat, as Trevil stood aside to let her go first through the revolving doors. Natalie felt suddenly weak with hatred. She forced herself to wait for a moment, to give them a chance to get settled inside, and then she took her own turn at the revolving door.

  Whatever was going to happen now would happen as inevitably as the rising of the sun. Danger leered at her from the four comers of the restaurant; fear lurked in the dry roots of the potted palms set discreetly about. She must take care not to walk under the ornate crystal chandelier, lest a stealthy hand seize its opportunity to cut the wires that held it to the high ceiling. The headwaiter came up to her smilingly and at the same instant she caught sight of Trev’s face across the room. Natalie smiled back automatically at the headwaiter.

  “May I sit over there?” she indicated the line of booths which flanked the wall, not too far from Trev’s table. If she could only reach its sheltering dimness before they saw her, she could watch them unobserved. You could tell, when you watched a man and a woman together, whether there was—anything—between them or not.

  But there was, she knew, something more than the state of things between her treacherous husband and her erstwhile friend for her here today. Something as yet unannounced, unfathomed. Something, though. The ringing in her ears increased. Warning her. Warning …

  If she cringed, if she showed fear, whatever it was would surely strike. She was using the wrong tactics a
ltogether. She must walk with sure feet now; she must turn their machinations back on themselves. She would astound them with her courage. Natalie set her shoulders back, lifted her head, and sailed proudly in the wake of the headwaiter, passing directly beneath the chandelier, which failed to drop upon her. She settled herself in her booth and allowed herself one quick look at Mona and Trev. They hadn’t seen her; they seemed to be so wrapped up in each other that the place might have been empty of people as far as they were concerned.

  A fleeting glance at the outsized menu showed that crabs were in abundance here. That was certainly another omen. She was seeing things very clearly today; her incredible prescience told her that the crabs, too, were inevitable. She must eat crabs now or destroy the pattern. She must overcome her repugnance or be killed. She ordered them, deviled, and when the waiter had gone, lifted her glass of water to her lips with trembling hands. Let them try anything now. Only let them. They were too obvious, they were playing into her hands. Her opponents in this odd game of chess, flushed with seeming victory, were growing careless. She could checkmate them every time.

  She surveyed the noisy, smoke-filled room with a smile. How calm she was, in the very camp of her enemies. How sure of herself. Surely they were muttering to themselves at her courage. Surely they were, for the moment, nonplussed. When it came time to eat the crabs blatantly before their astounded eyes, she knew she would come through with flying colors.

  She would pretend each crab was a tender piece of steak, and she would force herself to inhale the aroma of good beef. Was that what they called autosuggestion, or was there such a term? If a man blindfolded was convinced that a hot iron was to be applied to his back, he would suffer agonies at the touch of an ice cube.