A sense of shadow v1 0, p.1
A Sense of Shadow (v1.0), page 1
10-03-2023
THE LAWYER DISDAINED IT.
THE PSYCHOLOGIST SWORE
IT COULDN’T HAPPEN.
AND THEY WERE WRONG .,.
“Regina! What’s wrong with you?” Janet shook her by the shoulders. Regina was slumped on the floor, propped up by the wall, her eyes open but blank.
She was slipping away, slipping away from the hands, toward a void. She yearned to be there, to be alone, forever out of reach, beyond everything, to be nothing…
Not her! Janet thought. He can’t want her—she’s too pretty, like Viola} he knows he can’t trust her! He always hated women like herl
But Janet felt it too. The whole house was alive with it, alive with his death, resonating with his sinister will and trembling with…
A SENSE OF SHADOW
Books by Kate Wilhelm
City of Cain The Clewiston Test Fault Lines Juniper Time Margaret and I
A Sense of Shadow Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Published by TIMESCAPE BOOKS
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A SENSE OF SHADOW
KATE WILHELM
A TIMESCAPE BOOK
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK
for Jennifer
A Timescape Book published by
A Timescape Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of
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Copyright © 1981 by Kate Wilhelm
Published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company
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Contents
Part One
October 14
October 15
October 16
October 17
Part Two
October 17, Continued
October 18
October 19
October 20
October 21
October 22
Part Three
October 23
October 24
Part One
October 14
I forgot to bring my journal with us. It’s the first time in ten years that I haven’t had it wherever I’ve happened to be. Lucas opened a chest of drawers and found one of his old school notebooks and handed it to me. Nothing in his room had been changed, he said, as though offended.
Our room, his old room, is very large. All the rooms in his father’s house are large and airy. This one has twin beds, two chests, two comfortable chairs, a desk with its own chair, a long bookcase, and a radio and clock on the bedstand between the beds. There is plenty of room to move around the furniture, to get to the windows, to the closet, without being crowded. The windows are very tall, without curtains; they have heavy blue draw drapes. The bedspreads match the drapes. A boy’s room, curiously lacking a trace of boyishness. I looked at the carpet—rust colored, fluffy, thick,* and soft—to see if there was an old stain from a spilled cup of cocoa, paints, anything. There was nothing. Hotel room keeps coming to mind; this, the hotel where Lucas spent his childhood. There is no way to compare this to our cluttered apartment, two rooms heaped with our possessions. Much of the disarray is my fault, but Lucas contributed substantially to the mess. He was not messy when he was a child in his father’s house. Also he did not collect anything—no fish, fossils, rocks, posters…
Lucas has gone out to walk with his brother Mallory. I watched them from our window: Lucas, slight and long haired, still thin from his bout with the flu last month; Mallory, forty pounds heavier, several inches taller, bearlike.
“We’re all different,” Lucas warned me. “Three brothers, all different in every way, and a sister like none of them. Same father, three different mothers. I come from a screwed up family, honey. Screwed up, screwed over.”
This morning when his father’s fourth wife called to tell Lucas his father was dying, he took a deep breath and said, “Finally.”
“He isn’t dead yet,” Mallory said, when he met us at the airport. “But any time now.” He clasped my hand, and studied my face for what seemed too long, then turned to Lucas. “Did he pay your way out?”
“Yes. We couldn’t have come otherwise.”
“Thought so. You talk to Greta?”
Lucas nodded. “I think she had a statement she was reading from. It didn’t sound natural. Something about the will, and his demand that we all be here now.”
“He didn’t object that you brought Ginny?”
I was startled at his nickname for me. No one had called me Ginny since my grandfather died when I was very young. Any reservations I had about Mallory vanished at that moment. Lucas had described him, not the way he looked so much as the way he was: blunt, big and gentle, smart. He was sixteen years older than Lucas, and had been more father than brother to him. When Lucas was ten, his mother had died; Mallory had taken care of him for almost two years. I had been prepared to be jealous of Mallory, but there was no need.
Lucas said with some surprise that Greta had ordered two tickets for us, apparently expecting me to come along.
Mallory looked puzzled, then shrugged. “He made it clear that he didn’t want Sarah here. And the kids were out. Curious.” We started to walk toward the baggage claim area at the Portland airport, and he added, “Course, no way on this earth would Sarah have come.”
Mallory drove us out to the farm, a little over an hour from the airport. When we left the highway for a private road of crushed red lava, Mallory said, “Old homestead starts right here, Ginny. Far as you can see.”
We crossed a railroad line, then a bridge that spanned a rapid little river. To our left were fields of winter wheat, and other fields freshly plowed, ready to be planted. To the right were orchards, where some men were setting up a net under an apple tree, while a mammoth red machine reached for the trunk with a monstrous arm. Next was a pasture with a large pond and grazing cattle. Ahead were grassy hills and sheep, and there were higher hills, or mountains, deeply wooded.
I kept thinking, oh, my God! Lucas had said he grew up on a farm in Oregon, but there had not been even the slightest hint that he was talking about a plantation, land holdings that royalty might envy.
We turned on to a drive lined with rhododendrons, each standing alone. Beyond them the lawn flashed by in strobe-like glimpses of brilliant green, smooth enough to look artificial. The house looked small at first, but only became the evergreen trees around it were so tall. There were spruces and firs, a scattering of dogwood trees on one side of the home, deep borders of hedges and flowering bushes, chrysanthemums and dahlias in bloom, and a rose garden.
The exterior of the house is cedar, the first-story boards are vertical and others, on the upper floors, diagonal, meeting in the center, following the peak of the cedar-shake roof. Orford cedar, Mallory said, so rare now that it is hardly used for anything but decorative trim.
Mr. Culbertson had the living room added to the house before Lucas was bom. The addition is wood and glass with a fieldstone fireplace. Curved stairs lead to an upper level where a balcony room overlooks the living room. The balcony has glass walls on the west and south. It is a room of plants, a hanging garden. Emerald greens, forest greens, pale shades of avocado…The light coming through the greenery into the living room below is cool and invigorating. It is like being in a deep forest.
All so lovely, I thought when I first saw the grounds, the house, the living room. It was too lovely to touch. Entering the living room, I felt almost as though we had been brought there to be stage props, that we were supposed to arrange ourselves here and there and never move again. I had a momentary vision of myself in a group of children being herded through a museum where nothing lived and the air was thick with warnings: Don’t touch! Don’t touch! All I retained of that field trip was the oppressive memory of hostile eyes watching. I had the same urge I had felt on that day, the urge to draw myself up as tightly as possible, to wrap my arms around myself, and concentrate on walking in order not to brush against anything, not to touch.
When we arrived, Conrad, the second oldest of the Culbertson sons, was in the living room with Janet, their sister.
Conrad is very tall and lanky. His arms and legs are almost abnormally long, and his feet are fascinating, the largest feet I’ve ever seen. He must have his shoes made for him. They look very comfortable and handsome, and surely there are few men who could wear them or who could pay for them. Conrad is forty, Mallory forty-six, Janet thirty-five. L ucas is thirty.
Janet and Conrad were having a drink at a black and chrome bar. She grinned at us and said, “We have gin, bourbon, and rye. No mixer, or soda. Father never did like to dilute liquor and, by God, in his house, no one else does either.” She smiled at me and said, “Welcome to the family.** And she hugged and kissed Lucas. Conrad hugged him, shook my hand.
Janet is obese; flab hangs down from her arms and under her chins. Her legs are monstrous. She wore a tentlike dress, a print with clusters of grapes climbing up ladders. She had on white ankle socks and no shoes.
She could be very pretty, I decided, trying not to stare at her. Her eyes are beautiful. They are as soft as a doe’s eyes, very large, with heavy black lashes that sweep up in a curl. Her hands are pretty too. Her fingers, as boneless as Mona Lisa’s, are long and pale with perfectly shaped nails. She could model rings or gloves, or eye makeup, or glasses. This in spite of the fact that she must weigh over a hundred pounds too much. If she were slimmer, how beautiful she would be, I kept thinking, sipping bourbon and water.
“We’re all crazy, you know,” she said, refilling her glass after handing drinks to Mallory and Lucas, pausing to look at me directly. “Crazy, but not dangerous. Amiably crazy. We’re here to celebrate a death, you see, and since we’re not really ghouls, we must be crazy.”
“Shut up,” Conrad said, but without inflection, as if he actually paid no attention to her.
They talked about the last half dozen or more years, bringing each other up to date, and it was pleasant and comforting to be in a family. I had always imagined a reunion would be something like this, taking turns at filling in the blanks after the separation that followed growing up, leaving home to pursue different ambitions.
Conrad was in charge of a laboratory of a chemical company based in Denver. He was the best dressed of them all, with gray slacks, a sport coat that must have cost him several hundred dollars, a dove-gray shirt that looked very much like silk. He was aloof, bored possibly, as if he had other, more pressing, matters on his mind and this was an irksome interruption that had to be tolerated with as good grace as he could manage.
Janet talked about her house, left to her by her grandmother. Seven years ago she had remodeled it, and now rented out three apartments, keeping the last for herself. What she needed, she said, was a maintenance robot, a creature she could store in a closet until needed, which was only every single day. With a glint of amusement in her eyes she told about fixing a plumbing leak herself when the plumber simply would not come. “Actually,” she said, “there wasn’t much to it. I got a book from the library, asked a lot of questions at the hardware store, and I did it.”
Mallory shrugged off questions about his ranch. “Everything stays pretty much the same,” he said. They had all been to his ranch apparently; no one pressed him.
When it was his turn, Lucas also shrugged; it was pitifully like a small boy trying to copy consciously an innate gesture of his older brother. “I*m the black sheep,” he said. “I’m willing to let my wife support me.”
I found myself growing hot and wanted to protest that it wasn’t like that, but Mallory stood up then, finishing off his drink. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs,” he said. “Same old room. Maybe you’d like to stretch your legs after you get your bags up? Give Ginny time to rest a little before dinner. Still at seven, like always.”
He wants to talk to Lucas obviously, and there must be many things to talk about. No one said anything about their father, how he is, if Lucas is expected to go to visit him, if I am.
The house is luxurious by any standard: so well built that no sound carries from one room to another, a private bath with each bedroom, and each room must have a magnificent view. From our windows I can see the sheep on the grassy hills: They could be pale rocks catching fire from the setting sun, turning red-gold all at once. I imagine Lucas spending hours at this window, looking at sheep on the hillside. He never mentioned it.
Was Mallory warning me that they dress for dinner? I thought of that suddenly with alarm. I had no formal clothes, only a long skirt and shirt that I sometimes wear at home. I looked at them and reluctantly put them on. I was feeling nervous, alone in a house where I didn’t know the rules, where everyone else communicated by oblique looks and silences, where mention of the event that had brought us all together was carefully avoided.
I wandered to the window again and looked out through the deepening twilight. It seemed to bring the hills closer; the sheep were like moonflowers growing in clumps here and there. Mallory said it went on as far as you can see. How big was it? Thousands of acres. It looked very expensive, like the bluegrass country of Kentucky or the rolling hills of Delaware and Virginia. The figure four thousand an acre popped into my head as I watched the sheep vanish into the darkening shadows. Why that figure? I kept saying it to myself: four thousand an acre. Five thousand acres? Six thousand? As far as you can see. The land is worth millions. Lucas is in line to inherit a fortune. I can say it, but it is an abstract; I can’t believe it.
I wrote in this old notebook until I became too restless to stay in the room waiting for Lucas to come home. I looked out into the hallway and saw no one; there was no sound. At the end of the corridor was a closed door; I turned toward it, confused suddenly about how we had come to our room. Up a rather narrow staircase, but at which end of the hall? I went to the end door and stopped with my hand on the knob. I looked back; all the doors were closed. The hallway was paneled in a golden wood, there was gold carpeting. There were lights in gold sconces on the wall, and here and there between the doors there were paintings that looked very good, oils, landscapes and seascapes.
The doors should be numbered, or something, I thought in dismay. I was no longer certain which one was my room; with the realization, I turned the knob and pushed the end door open enough to see through the crack. It was the greenhouse balcony. Almost gaily I went into the plant room.
The western sky was streaked with bands of midnight-blue against violet; as I stood there several fluorescent lights came on automatically, and the room was as bright as midday. From below in the living room, the balcony had seemed reasonably small, but from inside, there was no way to estimate its size. The plants were everywhere, obscuring walls and corners, giving the room the illusion of stretching out into vast regions beyond the house. The effect was magical almost; even the ceiling was deceptively camouflaged by plants and slanting glass walls. It was possible to stand in the room and look at the sky overhead and imagine that a forest started on one side and cut the sky from view, and that there was a clearing to the west, ending in a sunset that was turning the horizon into a purple-violet band.
The plants all looked healthy and lush, and the air smelled good among them: damp earth mixed with sunshine, I thought in surprise. I never had considered what good earth actually smelled like. I touched a waxy leaf, smelled a blossom or two, and wandered closer to the south window wall; I could see the pond in the distance, and two dark figures walking slowly. Mallory and Lucas were coming back. As I watched them, the thought came to me that one of the Culbertson children, probably Mallory, would inherit the land. Was that why he had been summoned? To break the news that the land was indivisible, that one of them would inherit it all? I shook my head at the idea. Insane. Of course the estate would be sold and the proceeds distributed among the children.
