The Curse Page 6

  She bit thoughtfully into a doughnut and laughed when the lemon filling oozed over her fingers.

  "Slob," Pegeen said; and Terry relaxed; amazed at how stiff she had been positioned as she waited for that first word.

  "Sister, don't you think you can tell me now?"

  The laugh was more like a bark, and twenty-three years seemed more like forty. "What can I tell you that you don't already know, Ter?"

  "Vic's been laid off again. Why? Company trouble? Or . . . you know."

  "There was a letter with the paycheck. They called it a furlough, which is a nice way of saying we're not in that much trouble, but it's a good way of getting rid of the undesirables."

  "He drinks?" A former suspicion turned unpleasant fact chilled her.

  "Drinks, fights, thinks he's down at the Lock Kenny Arms hoisting one with the boys just in from the fields. Terry, he's frightened of this country, has been ever since he came over. But the damned fool won't admit it."

  "And today?" she prompted, sensing another lecture on the difference between a homegrown Irishman like Syd, and Vic's not so perfect example of the genuine article.

  "A week ago, actually," Peg corrected, though she refused to look up from her tea. "Vic came home with the news, then went out for a drink at a bar. He never drank at home, Ter. He doesn't think it's right for me to see it." She smiled weakly and shook her head. "He came back around midnight, sober as Pop, and said he'd decided to move somewhere else—the Midwest, California, maybe—and look for a job he could hold down permanently. We, uh, talked about that a lot, leaving the East, I mean. Things seem like they're so much better out there, you know?" The cup began to move faster in her hands. "We, uh, didn't have enough money for the both of us, so . . . so he went alone. Chicago first, and he told me to come down here until he could get on his feet and send . . . ." Again the tears erupted without warning. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

  "And you stood there like an idiot and let him go?" Terry was angry. Syd would probably think the idea wasn't all that bad—they both knew Vic was a fawning supplicant at Pegeen's altar, and total desertion was absolutely out of the question. But to leave the child alone in that hovel they laughingly called an apartment, to force her to leave in the middle of a storm like this without knowing if Terry would really take her in—shit, she told herself, you're starting to sound like a goddamn soap opera.

  "Peg, you did have a say, didn't you? I mean, it was partly your decision, too, wasn't it?"

  Pegeen nodded, and Terry needed little boost from her imagination to hear her sister's redheaded temper filling the apartment with stevedore descriptions and hellfire extraction of a thousand promises, all of them impossible for Vic to keep. A child she may be, but Terry often envied the age that extended beyond her birth date.

  "He'll be back, Terry."

  "Sure, sis."

  "He said he would call every other night from wherever he was to let me know he was all right."

  "I know, Peg, I know."

  A silence as the kettle cooled, popping its heat into the kitchen loudly.

  "So, then, it's done."

  Peg nodded again, and Terry suddenly wondered how she was going to explain all this to Syd.

  "Okay, good," she said. "You can sleep out on the couch for a while," and her voice rose to curb the beginning of a protest, "until you can find a place of your own, and a job that will keep you in it. In fact, the Traubs—a couple of not so maidenly sisters in the last house on our side of the block—they might have some rooms to let. I've heard they do that once in a while. Tell you what: first thing in the morning, I'll give them a—"

  "Terry, please! I can take care of myself."

  And that's the hell of it, Terry thought. You damn well can when you really want to.

  "Well, look," she said, "just let me ask around, okay? You have a car? No? Well, no matter. Look, I'm tired of Syd taking his own sweet time getting back—"

  "Aren't you worried?" The little girl had returned, and Terry once more found herself the elder sister. The role switching—not a new thing—confused her momentarily, but she was used to it.

  "Listen, the day that skinny, bearded—"

  The telephone rang. Peg looked expectantly at her, but Terry only stared at the extension on the wall. "Shall I get it for you?"

  Terry nodded, her hands trembling on her lap. She reached for her cup and tepid liquid slopped onto the table. She made no move to mop it up, watched as Peg rose, picked up the receiver, and listened. Then she shrugged and hung up. "Nobody. Probably a wrong number."

  "Probably," Terry said. "Hey, look, I was just about to heat up something when you came. You must be starved, poor thing. Were the trains bad?"

  "I took a bus," Peg said, watching Terry slide two frozen dinners into the oven. "It wasn't all that bad until we reached New York. Then once we got out from under the river, it was like someone had stolen the highway. Would you believe I left Connecticut before noon?"

  "My God—"

  But if the bus had made it, if the various connections were still open though slow, where was Syd?

  "Of course, I had to take a cab from the next town—or do you call these places villages?—whatever. Anyway, I took a cab, from the next town, and the creep wouldn't even come up your street because it wasn't plowed. Had to walk that idiot suitcase Mom gave me for graduation. Damn, but the wind comes down this road, doesn't it?"

  The telephone interrupted her, and Terry jumped to her feet and snatched the receiver from Peg's hand. Sorry, she mouthed, gesturing and shrugging in an attempt to prove her nerves were doing fine but her apprehensions were working overtime.

  "Syd?" The static returned. She motioned to Peg to listen in and held the earpiece canted away from her head. "Syd, is that you? Speak up, I can't hear a thing."

  A crest, now, of distant moaning. Terry closed her eyes to find an appropriate picture and recognized the muffled sweep of the wind. She smiled, replaced the receiver on its cradle and leaned in a slump against the jamb between kitchen and dining room.

  "I don't get it," Peg said.

  "It's the storm, sister," she said, hugging relief to her breasts like a rag doll. "It's been doing that noise thing for a couple of hours now. A line's obviously gone down somewhere and there's a short or something making all that racket. You get to hear a lot of weird things, even the wind. A couple of times I even thought I was listening to my own name." She smiled, hugged herself tighter "Kind of listening to a seashell, you know? But I'll tell you something you'd damn well never better tell Syd," she continued as she pushed herself off the wall and began pulling the makings of a salad from the refrigerator. "It sure as hell scared me for a while. In fact, it happened just when you rang the doorbell, and I thought for sure I was getting my first obscene phone call."

  "You mean you never had one?'

  "Have you?"

  Peg lifted herself to sit on the edge of the counter and struck a pose of mock worldliness. "Hundreds of times, big sister. Twice, actually. One was just a lot of heavy breathing. The other was so foul it was like mucking around in bloody shit."

  "Talk about foul!"

  Peg grinned. "Oh, come on, Ter. You're no Miss Irish Purity, you know."

  "The real estate agent thought I was Spanish."

  "Oh Christ, what was he, a fag?"

  Terry laughed, looked at the clock and saw it was already long past eight. She stopped shredding the lettuce and stared. Peg followed her gaze, pushed herself back to the floor and put an arm around her waist. "Hey, Terry," she said quietly, "he'll be all right. Honest he will."

  "But he started when—"

  "Come on, hon, let's sit for a minute, okay?"

  Terry allowed herself to be guided into the living room and onto the couch. Peg's mutterings said nothing, but soothing nevertheless until the trembling left Terry as limp and exhausted as if she had worked all day without a break.

  "Terry, the bus thing is easy, you know," Peg said as though she were reading
Terry's mind. "You ever see the size of those interstate monsters? And what the hell have you got? An oversized roller skate. I'll bet he can't do more than five or ten miles an hour on highway. Believe me, the bus wasn't traveling all that fast, either."

  "You're right, I guess. But I still wish—"

  The phone rang and the door slammed open simultaneously.

  "Goddamn," Peg said, rushing for the kitchen.

  "Goddamn," Syd said while the snow blew in around his legs. "Happy New Year to you, too."

  Chapter IV

  Time lost its synchronization with the rest of the universe. Everything moved while Terry apparently stood still; there was noise while she could only remain silent. Nothing at all made sense in her confusion; then, illusion within illusion, she rose above herself and watched.

  The man in the doorway was flapping his arms like a penguin, scattering snow and water on walls and furniture. He was hatless, and the melting white in his hair quickly faded to glistening rivulets that streaked his face, dripped from his beard, as he threw his coat to the floor and kicked his shoes down the hall.

  The redheaded woman, ignoring this performance, was standing in the dining room, a pale green telephone receiver pressed to her mouth as her face flushed with the effort of yelling.

  The third character's face was hidden, but she stood with a fist to her throat while her free hand swept the air helplessly between the man and the redhead. And what was initially startling rapidly became comical, equally tragic.

  Terry laughed, cried, snapped back into the real world and ran into the crush of Syd's arms, heedless of the soaking her blouse suffered.

  While the noises gradually shifted into recognizable words.

  Syd: alternately soothing and demanding—both quietly—several times raising his voice dramatically to damn everything and everyone connected with the weather, the roads, and the designers of subcompact automobiles whose traction apparently ended at the miniscule hood ornament.

  Pegeen: unleashing her strained and straining nerves in a stampede of obscenities none of which Terry thought would possibly be matched, at least in volume, by the perverted imagination of her persistent caller.

  Herself: groping for relief, contact with her husband, explanations to be received and given, saying whatever her overwrought emotions prompted.

  It was Babel, and it was heaven; and when calm had finally been restored and Syd had dried off and changed into jeans and a blue flannel shirt, the three sat quietly exhausted in front of the television set to wait for the Times Square globe's marking off of another passing midnight. Pegeen was still fighting a blush of comely embarrassment that Syd should have heard her generally private store of vocabulary. And Terry sat on the floor next to Syd's armchair, refusing to let go of his hand while he reenacted the story of his trip home several times—and neither of the women grew tired of listening.

  "I tell you without exaggeration, Terry, it was absolutely insane." The muted announcer of a variety show pointed to a studio clock closing in on twelve, breathing as heavily as if the two hours left were a scant two minutes. "I got brand-new snow tires just a month ago, and you'd swear I didn't have any on at all. I was being passed like I was standing still! Even the goddamn plows were going faster than me. Man, now that is one hell of a lousy job to have. Imagine being out all the time in weather like this! Miserable! As fast as they went by, the stupid road covered right up again. A couple of times I thought I was going to have to get out and walk, it got so rotten." He shuddered for effect and kissed Terry's forehead. "However, I persevered, mainly because we ain't paid for the car yet."

  "It's the weight, you see," Pegeen said unexpectedly.

  "Huh?"

  "It's the weight of the car, Syd," she repeated, almost shyly. "Your tires aren't going to make all that much difference because the car is too light. Somebody once told me you should put a hundred-pound bag of sand or something in the back. You're supposed to get better traction that way."

  Syd blinked rapidly, a habit to cover slow understanding, and Terry couldn't help but frown. Neither her husband nor her sister had been particularly friendly before, but something in the circumstances set the two apart from her now in an indefinable way she wasn't sure she liked.

  Pegeen, meanwhile, dropped immediately back into her embarrassed silence, and Syd was about to launch into another version of his trip when Terry suggested and they played a spirited and ribald game of Scrabble. There were challenges no one took seriously, and cheating no one bothered to call, and when it had ended, amid a great explosion of laughter and tears still tinged with relief, Peg excused herself and disappeared into the bathroom.

  Terry slid the game box onto a shelf under the coffee table and sat in a corner of the sofa. "You seem to like her now, yes?"

  Syd leaned back, stretching his legs so his heels just caught the table's edge. The television's remote control unit was by his side and he cut off the volume, ignored the picture. "Funny, but I used to think she was surprisingly old for her age. I just now realized what a child she can be. Why, angel? You jealous?" He stared at her under half-closed lids, widened and then suddenly and laughed as he pointed. "By God, Irish, you are!"

  She felt herself grow hot as she denied it, immediately changed the subject to the phone calls.

  "Oh, yeah," he said, still smiling. "I'll have to call the business office tomorrow. They'll be able to tell me what to do."

  "Can't. Tomorrow's a holiday."

  "All right, so Thursday, then."

  She glanced down the hall at the slit of light under the bathroom door. "The trouble is, I'm not really sure if there was someone there or not. I mean, I couldn't swear to it. It could have been just my imagination."

  "If the thing rang, Terry, somebody had to be at the other end."

  She shook her head. "Not necessarily, Syd. It might have been a short, you know, or something like that."

  He held up his hands, palms out. "Okay, okay, I'm not arguing with you, angel. If you think there was somebody there, then I believe you already. Just the same, though, I think I'll call to see if there were lines down in our area. Just to satisfy my own curiosity."

  Argue was exactly what she was going to do, but she let it pass for the time being. None of it would help her to forget the day's double nightmare. But her smile was strained with Syd launched into a recital of a series of New Year's resolutions he'd thought up during the drive. She remembered to laugh brightly when he glanced over for her approval, to applaud enthusiastically or mockingly to show her appreciation of his cleverness under duress. But the sounds of the black fog over the telephone continued to haunt her. Overtired and overwrought was her instant self-diagnosis, though it didn't drive the sensations away.

  When Pegeen returned, her eyes newly swollen, they debated the program listings until they agreed on an old movie familiar enough to watch without worrying about talking spoiling their enjoyment. And for this Terry was grateful until she realized what it was they were watching. Edward G. Robinson as a man suddenly given to the curse of clairvoyance. Terry tried to anticipate the plot, not recalling the film's title: Robinson's daughter is going to be killed. No. He's going to kill an old man. Something about a plane wreck? A ship sinking off some deserted, deadly island? What was the title? Dead Man's Eyes, or was that one of those horrors with Lon Chaney, Jr.? Ridiculous, she thought, and the more she tried to ignore it, the more confused she became. Her hands tensed, began to tremble and she grabbed for a magazine lying on the table. Held it tightly. Saw but couldn't read the list of articles on the cover. A telephone rang during one scene and she dropped the magazine, covering her nervousness with a quick finger to her lips and a gesture toward the set.

  What was the matter with her? The clairvoyance? It was that, and something more. She sat stiffly—Pritchard had told her Syd would be coming home and he'd be all right. The old man's face under the store's fluorescent lighting had wrinkled into a smile completely without mirth; a knowing smile, she thought, but
it couldn't have been because he couldn't have known. Small talk. Comfortingly empty words for the nervous new girl on The Lane. It was easy—tell her everything's going to be just fine and maybe she'll get out of the store before she lapses into hysteria and loses some customers.

  "Crap," she said, and was startled when Syd and Pegeen turned to stare at her.

  "I thought you liked this one," Syd said, misunderstanding. "You want me to change it? There's a special on—"

  "No, no," she said. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking about Pritchard. I walked down there this afternoon after you called."

  Pegeen moved deeper into the sofa's opposite corner so she could watch Terry and the screen at the same time. "Who's Pritchard?"

  "Lives across the street, right opposite us," said Syd, pointing vaguely toward the drapes. "Owns a general store-type affair down around the corner."

  "We got to talking—you know how it is—and he told me that Syd would be coming home tonight in spite of the storm." And as she said it, Terry knew how stupid it all sounded. "I mean, he said it like he knew it. The movie reminded me. Predictions and things like that. What's the phrase . . . second sight? You know what I mean."

  "Come on, angel! Are you trying to tell me you believe all this stuff? Miss Cynic of the Twentieth Century? Look, love, Pritchard's a nice old guy who lives by himself. He was just trying to make you feel better, that's all."

  "I know that," Terry said, more sharply than she'd intended. "I . . . it was the stupid movie, that's all. It just reminded me of what happened. I know what he was doing, you know. I'm not completely an idiot."

  "Nobody said you were, angel."

  "Well, it sure sounded like it. The movie just brought it back, that's all. It was nothing, okay? Forget it."

  Pegeen, who had remained silent, only shrugged at Terry's challenging glare and began an overly intense study of a commercial break.