City of the Dead

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A big old Tudor set high on a hill above the Hudson River. Inside, in the huge living room with its lofty, beamed ceilings and its musty, heavily curtained silences, “Paul Konig stands before tall French windows. From where he stands, he can look out over a stone patio and a moon-flooded garden that creeps up to its edge, and beyond that to a steep, grassy declivity tumbling downward to the river. Beyond the great black void of the river, he can see the cliffs of the Palisades rising squat and gibbous on the other side, and atop them, a dim, sluggish pulse of lights denoting early-morning traffic on the Palisades Parkway.

“Paul—we need more champagne.”

“Coming, Ida. It’s coming. For God’s sake, give me a minute. I only have two hands.”

Beyond the stone patio, shadows drift and flicker back and forth in the moon-flooded garden.

“Isn’t she lovely?”

“Image of her mother.”

“Fortunately for her.”

Laughter rippling up through the branches of beech and poplar swaying above the garden. The air heavy with the scent of lilac and honeysuckle, hyacinths around a goldfish pond. Laughter echoing now through the great tomblike silence of a house long vacant.

“Aren’t you proud of her today?”

“Of course I am. Of course I’m proud of her.”

“What’s she going to do now she’s finished school?”

“God only knows. Watch out for that cork—bang—there it goes. Get a glass. Quick.”

More ghostly laughter echoing through the immense silences of the house.

“Got some funny notion she wants to go abroad for a few years and paint.”

“Doesn’t sound funny to me.”

“You finance her then. I won’t. I’ve footed bills for twenty years. I’m tired. Now’s her turn.”

“But I imagine you’d feel a little different about financing her through, oh, let’s say for instance—medical school.”

“Don’t be so goddamned smug, Chester. We all have ideas about what our kids should do.”

“Just ideas, Paul. Seldom ever works out the clever way we plan it for them.”

“Well, I don’t want her to go to medical school to please me. She can do what she goddamned pleases. I’ve washed my hands of it.”

Standing now before a marble mantel, Konig stares at the craggy, pitted visage wavering in the smoke-glazed mirror opposite him. The eyes are Ted and bleary, as if they’d peered too long into a blast furnace.

“Depressing, isn’t it, Paul? Being around so many young people?”

“’Specially when you’ve just had a glimpse at your own EKG’s. Ida—who’s that fellow with Lolly?”

“I don’t know. Some young man she met at school. I think he’s an instructor or something on the faculty.”

“Oh?” Konig frowns deeply. “Well, I don’t like him.” Stillness hovers about the house with palpable weight, crouching in shadows and corners, inhabiting rooms and hallways long untenanted. Upstairs now, Konig drifts like a stranger down corridors he has known for a quarter of a century. Past doorways he has walked in and out of, and gloomy spaces still haunted by the aura of occupants long since gone.

In his own bedroom, where he has not slept since the death of his wife, the fine old French furniture—the tall canopy bed, the Louis XVI escritoire, the graceful silken Recamier—is shrouded now in sheets. On a night table on the side of the bed where Ida Konig slept is a yellow, faded photograph—a bridal picture, formal and stiff, depicting a tall, stern-visaged young man awkwardly attired in top hat and tails; beside him, a dark, diminutive woman in long peau de soie lace, more handsome than pretty, with a strikingly arresting gaze.

Farther on, a music conservatory. A grand piano sits before a huge bay window with leaded panes and insets of stained glass depicting shepherds and lambs, swains and milkmaids, saltimbanques and saints, funereal crows in laurel branches, all limned in scarlets and cobalts, regal, ecclesiastical purples.

On the music stand on the grand piano, a book stands open to a Chopin nocturne; an air of expectancy about it all, as if the whole setting were simply awaiting animation by the appearance of players soon to come.

Farther on, the lace and tapestried bedroom where his mother died eight years before in ghastly pain. The closets still hung with her clothes, redolent of old persons—camphor and mothballs, the vapory medicants of the sickroom.

Other rooms—guest rooms, sitting rooms. Gracious old baths, generous in size and opulently appointed—sunken tubs, fine old Italian brass fixtures. Certainly not the baths of a civil-servant physician with no visible private means of his own, but very definitely the baths of a young professional man who happened to marry quite well. Even now, the bitter rue of the have-not in a world of haves still rankles in him.

Then, at the far end of a corridor, a sewing room, large and cozy beneath steep-pitched gables, with a stone hearth and a loom. Ida’s hideaway. Balls of colored yarn still lie there in wicker baskets, a vase stocked like a quiver full of knitting needles, a beautiful old antique Singer; and on the loom itself, just as she left it, half completed, a white Bargello needlepoint rug studded with immense blood-red hydrangeas.

Then, finally, another room, smaller than all the others; a silken nook of a room—a small canopied bed, an elegant little vanity flounced with ruffles. Paintings of ballerinas line the flower-papered walls. An exquisitely feminine room, that of a child who had entered womanhood in that room. Once a nursery with a crib where an infant slept, an infant who’d arrived completely unexpected by her parents, long after they’d given up all hope of ever having a child of their own. Ida Konig had for many years appeared to be one of those stubborn and curiously begrudging cases of infertility. Responding to neither drug nor treatment, a mystery to a half-dozen specialists, all of whom were unable to determine the root of her problem. Then one morning, a few days past her fortieth birthday, she woke up and found strange stirrings inside herself. Nausea, flushes, menses long overdue. Even the gynecologist was unwilling to attribute the symptoms to pregnancy, preferring instead to call it some vague hormonal disorder. Then he saw the results of the rabbit test and the urine analysis, and a little later, during the course of an internal examination, felt a tiny fetus clinging to the wall of the uterus. And that night, Paul and Ida Konig lay in each other’s arms and laughed themselves to sleep.

Lolly Konig’s room was a clutter of pieces and oddments from every stage of her life from infancy to young womanhood. An old moth-eaten hobbyhorse, shelves lined and crowded with every imaginable kind of doll—Dutch dolls, china dolls, Raggedy Anns, cinnamon teddy bears with button eyes, Pinocchios and harlequins, a grenadier with pink cheeks and a shako, ballerinas and toreadors, little Hummel figurines out of Grimm and Andersen. And beneath the shelves of dolls, the shelves of books—Madeline, Babar, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Guki the Moon Boy. Then the somewhat older books—Heidi, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and on through Dickens and Twain. Then books about the planets, the life of fish and insects. Later, books on plant histology and art history. Then huge, opulent books crammed with paintings, cave paintings from Lascaux, medieval and Byzantine icon painting, Italian Quattrocento and Flemish painting, great French and Spanish masters, Impressionists and Russian moderns, and endless books of American painters—Eakins, Ryder, Sargent, Homer, Burchfield, Hopper, Remington, and Russell.

In the drawers and the closet, her clothing, piled and hung neatly, awaits her return—Shetland sweaters, tartan skirts, suits of wool and camel, jackets of suede, old patched and faded denim jeans from college days, shoe racks crammed with pumps and sandals, scuffed and beloved old oxfords, girlish saddle shoes and smart, young-ladyish patent leather. And, further on, in the darkest corner of the closet, a silk organza gown, redolent of orange blossoms from a graduation garden party two years prior.

“Lolly, who is this man? Why did you bring him here?”

Konig’s finger plays gently over the flaxen head of the Hummel goose girl. From her basket of wicker she strews feed to three plump geese who promenade about her feet.

“Daddy, I’m sorry you don’t like Tom’s politics, but I can’t very well ask him to leave.”

Konig flicks out the light, then picks up the small goose-girl figurine and carries it over to the narrow bed. Sitting on the edge of the bed he kicks off his shoes, and still otherwise dressed in the sour, rumpled, death-drenched clothing of his day, he slumps backward into the thick, welcoming darkness, the small goose-girl figurine balanced comfortingly on his chest.

Only now that he is off his feet is he aware that the pain in his leg and back is excruciating. A few grams of Demerol will help, he thinks, but as of late he has been relying too heavily on Demerol, craving it always at night, just before sleep.

Instead of Demerol, he flings an arm across his face and lets the darkness wash over him. It is comforting to hold the little goose girl there on his chest in the dark—in his daughter’s bed, on the down mattress and bedding that still bears the imprint of her body, the memory of her weight. He feels somehow closer to her there in that familiar darkness where he has slept night after night for almost five months. He imagines her in some dingy, squalid place, a small, mean cell, a place of self-banishment. And he wonders if at that same moment she is thinking of him.

Suddenly the phone rings. Sitting bolt upright in bed, he hears it ring across the hall in his own bedroom. He sits there, eyes open and staring, nerves trembling with expectation, waiting for it to ring again. But it rings only once and then is silent. A mistake, he surmises, and yet his heart is thumping wildly as he hears the echo of that ring fading through the great, gloomy solitude of the house—a cry of anguish from somewhere far out in the clammy, terror-haunted night, like the bleating of a lost and stricken lamb.

The weekend has commenced now. Spreading out before him, the dreaded hours of idleness and inactivity; hours somehow to be gotten through in order to reach the blessed self-forgetfulness of back-to-work on Monday morning.