Magnificence A Novel

9


To celebrate she thought she would sleep in. She would lie in bed and yawn and not get up for a long time. She had won, she had won, she had won.

When Jim called and told her she was gleeful; then she felt sheepish and somehow frustrated in the effusive moment of rejoicing by herself. Tonight they’d go out, eat at a restaurant for once—maybe have sushi or Korean barbecue, something they didn’t get at home. And then they could stay up late and drive up into the Hollywood Hills and look down at the great sea of lights. She’d always liked it up there, the strange, huge agave plants with their ten-foot-high stalks that grew along the ridgelines and far beneath the millions of stars that signaled homes, rolling in waves all the way out to the Pacific.

Later, when they got home in the small hours, they could sleep as long as they wanted to, sleep till the sun rose high enough to fall across her face and she woke up and cast off the too-heavy covers. Then she would feel the light and warmth and think of the long gardens of the mad, dead kings of France.

It was a thought of luxury but the luxury wasn’t what made her happy. The luxury was an afterthought—embarrassing, ridiculous, and also now familiar. No, it was the safety of what could never be replaced, the house and the collection. It was the fact that the law said, now—on behalf of the house and the animals and the gardens and even on her behalf—the law expressly stated: No one could plunder them.

Then the doorbell rang and as she hurried down the wide hall to answer it she passed the church ladies, who were sitting in the rec room and playing cards—gin rummy was the usual. The oldest lady, the white-haired trembler named Ellen Humboldt, seemed always to be here these days. She stayed over three nights a week, whenever her son went out of town for work and couldn’t be on call—stayed in Susan’s house as an alternative to a rest home, apparently. The son was a commercial pilot. Angela seemed to have formed an instant attachment to Ellen, and Ellen to her. They walked everywhere together with a painstaking slowness, calling each other “Ellie” and “Angie” and holding each other fast by the arm.

“Susan!” called Angela from the card table. “We need to talk about elevators.”

She shook her head in disbelief; yet she was almost giddy enough to say yes. Hell, they should just put beds in the music room or something, make more bedrooms on the ground floor for the benefit of the old people. She’d seen four of them at the rummy table, Angela, Ellen, Portia—as always, regal and in command—and the slight woman in gray like a shade, trying not to be noticed. Susan was always forgetting the gray woman’s name but never forgot the name of her little dog: Macho. The elderly terrier came with her every time and so it was in the house at least three days a week, a curly black thing with bad breath and red bows on its head. It attended the Christian book club meetings, held on Thursdays, and liked to lie in the inside scoop of the three-legged dog’s body—the three-legged dog, which was far younger than the old, small one, curled around it protectively.

There were two sweaty-looking men outside the front door, and behind them, through the closed gate, a yellow machine. The pedestrian gate had been left open, she saw.

“Here about the digging,” said one of them. “Backhoe. A Mrs. Friedrich.”

“Friedrich?” she asked, blankly.

“Portia Friedrich,” said Portia, at her elbow. “I am she. The challenge will be getting it in without tearing up the vegetation. I ordered the smallest unit possible, of course, but still: that’s going to be difficult.”

Susan hung back as one of the men drove his backhoe in the gate, up the driveway, and through the garden, weaving slowly between trees and fishponds. Portia walked backward in front of him directing his steering; she wore a flowing robe with wide-open sleeves that made her look like a pudgy Merlin. When Susan tried to step in she was waved back impatiently, till finally the backhoe stopped, wedged between a rhododendron bush and a weeping willow.

“Great,” said Susan, shaking her head. “Great.”

“This was the only way,” said Portia sharply. “Over there you hit the pond with the little cherrywood Japanese bridge. There’s a steep grade on the other side, and the third option is over your lovely bed of angel’s-trumpet. I’m sure you don’t want that.”

“My what?”

“Angel’s-trumpet. The white flowers?”

Susan looked at them—large, drooping conical blooms, languid on their thick tussock of leaves.

“All things considered, I suggest you sacrifice this.”

They watched the backhoe rip out half the sprawling rhododendron, dragging a tangle of severed branches behind it. By the time it had reached the area of the manhole it had left a swath of destruction in its wake—torn-up limbs and grasses, red-brown earth exposed beneath the stripped-up turf. She felt a stab of guilt and worry for the plants, for the disturbed symmetry.

All for a poorly placed manhole, which, for all she knew, covered nothing but an ancient septic tank—she was deluding herself. The aging women, their absent-mindedness and dementia: by osmosis she was becoming more and more like them. Or maybe, in her own aging, here at the tail end of her forties, she had drawn these women to her. But more likely they had drawn her to them via some kind of post-menopausal force. When young women lived together, after all, or even stayed for a time in the same area, their periods grew to coincide—the pull of pheromones, legend had it. Possibly this was like that, minus fertility. The other end of the life cycle: contagious senility. Because she was less rational with each day that passed, less grounded. Wasn’t she? More closely tied to the place, but less closely tied to herself . . . she felt a quick, deep regret.

Once she had been pragmatic: once, when she was a younger person, she’d passed for normal on a daily basis. She’d been a teacher after all, first grade, second grade. She had personally been a trusted guide for children, had led them up to the new and tried to help them decipher it. She had felt the newness herself now and then—felt for an instant, as she showed them a simple picture of an apple, that she herself had never seen an apple before—never in two dimensions, never so flat. And so perfect.

In that instant she had a glimpse over the wall of a garden.

And society had let her do this, had even thanked her for it. Society had deemed her fully responsible, a shepherd of the dear flock. There had been small teaching awards; there had been offers of dull administrative positions as a reward for her years of service. The children had often loved her, the parents had smiled and thanked her profusely and the mothers brought her generic female gifts, soap or scented candles. Now—much of the time alone, far, far away from those glowing children—she roamed a big, dim mansion whose walls were lined with dead animals, herself growing old, surrounded by dust and fur, by remnants of fierceness, remnants of wildness, remnants of what had once been the world.

The old women weren’t dying quite yet but they were feeble and growing paler all the time, pale speech, pale minds, pale hair, pale skin. As the youth fell away they also shed the pigment, they shed every last vestige of youthful color . . . maybe that was why old women often wore clothes in garish hues. She forgot what the theories were about aging—cells failing to divide, cells dividing too fast. But however the molecules were getting it done, the women themselves were fading, lost to entropy and washing out. They went gray, grayer, white, toward the day in the future when they attained translucence. And so the reds, the violets, the pinks and emerald greens they wore were a desperate grab at pigment again, a simulation of life.

She was filled with longing. She knew what it was. She recognized it instantly. She wanted the small children back.

Yes, it was sentimental—it was pathetic, this yearning. But they were good; they were, almost always, so good. She missed their perfect skin—their beauty, the swiftly given trust. She wanted to see them again. She wanted them all around her. How had she ever let them go? Children! Come back. Come back now, dears, you dear beings. When I left, you know, I was only joking—a foolish joke, wasn’t it. I wouldn’t leave you. I’m here again.

When had this happened? Not with Hal’s death. Not with his death—long before that. It happened with the accident. She had turned from the children because of a terrible certainty, a certainty of what was coming.

“Are you all right, Susan?”

She realized the backhoe driver was staring. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with large underarm stains.

“Why don’t we let the gentleman begin his excavation,” went on Portia. “I’d like to go inside for a few minutes and check up on the ladies.” She tapped Susan’s arm and they turned back toward the pool and the tennis court. Tie-dye, Susan thought, was limited in its appeal to those who were dropping acid. No one in a sober frame of mind could possibly find it pleasing to the eye—though possibly the old women admired it for its garishness.

“Go inside,” she echoed, and nodded.

“You know: Ellen has to take her hypertension pills. I don’t like to leave it to Angela. Angela doesn’t run on a schedule and so she tends to forget.”

Portia must only be here to manage the others, Susan realized as they picked their way along the flagstones—or to ensure, rather, that Angela did not mismanage them . . . she must see that as her duty, watching over the frailer ones.

Herself, she was seeing how all those years had been, falling behind her in ripples, fading. In a rush she heard what Hal had said to her on the telephone from Belize. He was sorry for forgetting her, he said, so taken up with Casey, and he regretted that, regretted leaving her alone. It was true that she had often been alone, but not always; and she had left him too, obviously, for the theater of other men and the straining distraction of vanity. But that wasn’t what gripped her now, that wasn’t a new recognition. She had left the children also, when she turned from teaching to the coldness and orderliness of what she did now, the procedural neutrality of office work. She had decided to be anonymous in her public life and flagrant in privacy—anonymous except to the few people she selected. She chose the sly exhibitionism of her new slut vocation and turned away from the openness that she used to have, once, with children.

Not their openness but her own. That was what was missing.

She had left them behind because she was a coward. It was clear. Only a fool could have missed it.

She had missed it herself and so she must be a fool—or if not a fool, then a person without self-awareness, though she’d always flattered herself otherwise. But there it was: she had looked at her little first graders and seen Casey and seen, after childhood, everything else that would happen to them. Everything that could, and would, and never—not even at the furthest limit of possibility—the single thing that should, that they should remain this way forever, the way of being children, the way of eagerness, sweetness and hope. The hope she used to have for them, the warm hope you had to have for each child once you had a child yourself, was lifted like a thin veil and replaced with cold certainty: they would feel pain and die, some of them before they even found out who they were. Others would soldier on and meet defeat in everything they did, the joy of that first thrill of life falling away, disintegrating. She saw them in their futures, pitted and bowed down.

This was what Hal had known, how she had been captured by dread. He hadn’t known the other part, how she pursued a certain state of being known—sex as a form of fame, wanting to be instilled in other people’s memories. She’d wanted to make herself stay with them, an image in a great hall of figures. She’d thought she would live more that way. But Hal had known she was running, in the end he’d seen: in the fell swoop of the accident she’d been gripped with a fear of children, of them and for them. The sadness of the future had dazzled her. She turned her face away.

But at least they could have the present, its heat and light. Weightlessness! The lightness of now, the infinity. The children had no past, so all they had was in front of them. Not far in front but right in front, now. You could get a glimpse of it yourself—what it was to be unencumbered. She wanted to be there with them.

Then she would have the past in her house and the present in her work—she could dispense with the future, she could stop wishing for what she’d never have.

•

For some minutes she rested with the old women around her, while outside in the backyard the backhoe ground and creaked and, in reverse, emitted a harsh warning beep that went on and on and penetrated the eardrums. She sat a few feet from their card table on a couch, in a daze until Angela came over and arranged herself on the cushions nearby. It was Oksana’s day off and Susan had said they could do without a sub, knowing the ladies would be there. Now they’d taken Ellen Humboldt aside and were holding a glass of water at the ready, prying her assortment of pills out of a long white-plastic tray whose compartments were marked with the beginning letters of the days of the week.

“There are small elevators that are quite affordable,” started Angela. “You can order the whole thing, they put it together at the factory. I saw it in a brochure. Or they also have the kind that lift wheelchairs. They put them right on the rail of the staircase.”

“We don’t need an elevator,” said Susan distractedly.

“Well, you see,” said Angela, “I’d like Ellie to live with me. And she really wants to. You know, her son has a new girlfriend. Most nights she’s all alone.”

Susan turned and looked into her face. Angela was smiling uncertainly, as though she knew the request was outlandish.

“But Angela,” said Susan gently, “you’re not even living here permanently yourself.”

“My son could pay for it. He’s very generous. And Casey could use it too, when she visits.”

“You do understand,” said Susan again, “you’re staying here with me just until they get back from Malaysia. Right?”

Angela gazed at her, wounded. Her eyes shone.

“As far as I know, that is,” went on Susan, to soften the impression.

“I like it so much here,” said Angela.

“Thank you,” and Susan put her hand out to pat the woman’s arm. “But I’m not quite ready to discuss major renovations. Ellie looks to me like she may need real care. More than we can give her. With nurses and doctors. You know, medical help on standby in case of emergencies. Don’t you think?”

“She doesn’t want that,” said Angela. “She doesn’t want that at all.”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we move you down the hall for now. OK? We can put you both in the same room, together. We’ll set up some screens up around your beds, however you want them. The music room, maybe. Then she won’t have to navigate the stairs and you can look after her.”

And Oksana would look after both of them.

“The music room,” mused Angela. “Does it have lamps? We like to read our books in the evening. We eat cookies and drink tea and I read to her before we go to sleep. Because she can only read the large print.”

“It’s a pretty spacious room,” said Susan. “And you’d have that whole wing of the house to yourself at night.”

“Can we have tents to sleep in?”

“Tents?”

“Pink tents make a nice light inside them. We could have lamps under there. And cushions. It’s the Arabian Nights,” said Angela.

They were girls in a fairy tale—children again, listening to stories. That was how Angela saw herself with Ellen. The novels about angels coming down to earth were only the beginning. Together, as they faded out, they could step onto those sweeping dunes, they could look up at white palaces and minarets, flying carpets, clouds that bore horses with wings. They would move among the genies and camels and the thieves, the women in veils, reflecting pools and curtains of brocade.

Storytime: to sit and listen and let the years pass. How many years had it been? Five was the school district’s limit, she thought she remembered. It had been longer than that now. But before she could teach again she would have to call the teaching commission, renew her credentials, maybe work for a while at a small private school.

“Ladies? I’m going to drive Ellen up to the drugstore to refill her Adalat prescription,” said Portia.

“Wait, wait. Will you come back tonight, Ellie?” asked Angela eagerly, and rose from beside Susan.

Susan watched as they walked the oldest one slowly down the hall to the door—all five of them, long skirts swaying gently. The dog called Macho trotted at their heels.

Then she composed a letter to send to Casey and to T. She was resigning from working for him, now that they were family, now that his business had changed, now that he had become a foreign traveler and a philanthropist. She was happy for both of them, she wrote, she loved what they were doing. Or the idea of it, because truthfully, she wrote, she didn’t really understand what it was they were doing, she failed to understand the venture’s actual content. The “non-timber forest products,” the “sustainable community-based harvest models,” frankly it was pretty much Greek to her. In her mind’s eye she only saw brown men with loincloths, looking quite good. She saw women who had never heard of brassieres tapping latex out of big trees.

Despite her lack of comprehension she liked the gesture, she wrote. She liked the idea of the shower that hung from a branch and was heated by the sun, she liked the all-terrain wheelchair, she even liked the non-timber forest products that stopped you from having to cut down the trees; but there was no room for her in all of that. There was no reason for her to go into the office anymore, to draw a paycheck for sitting at an empty desk and staring at the unruly stacks of his boxes—boxes whose documents were no longer relevant anyway. She was alone in the shell of what had once been his company, and she was turning the light off, locking the door behind her, and leaving.

She was still his mother-in-law, she wrote jokily, so he had better be nice to her. She hoped all was going well in Borneo. She hoped there were no more frightening incidents of violence. Here in the city, she was digging up her yard. She was fending off lawsuits with moderate success. Her house was turning into a retirement home, though it still retained its displays of ferocity. Old people roamed the halls, forgetting everything. The old people forgot their lives, but still they kept on living them.

•

None of the others were in the house when the backhoe driver came to get her, beckoning but not saying much, wiping his dripping brow with the back of his forearm and swigging from a large bottle of orange soda. It was the end of the afternoon.

She followed him out the French doors in the back, through the pool enclosure, down the path to the grove. She saw the yellow of the digger first and then a waist-high mound of dirt piled up beyond. Then she was at the hole, standing a couple of feet back because the edge obviously wasn’t stable—the soft, dug-up earth gave under her foot when she put her weight on it. She couldn’t see in: only a small round of darkness behind the hill of soil.

“But what is it?”

“It’s a tunnel. It’s got a ladder going down.”

She peered over, her stomach turning in a quick thrill.

“But no—no manhole shaft? No metal tube that goes down? That’s what Portia said there’d be.”

“No metal tube, no. The cover was just sitting there on some cement.”

“Huh.”

“Can’t see how deep it is right now, ” he went on. “Too late in the day. The sun’s low.”

“Then we should wait till tomorrow to go in?”

He fished in a baggy pants pocket for what turned out to be a soft pack of Camels, so badly crumpled the cigarettes should be broken.

“We need to get the dirt back a ways from the opening, make sure it’s not going to fall in and collapse the thing. I can’t vouch for how safe it is even after we do that, though. That shit’s not my deal. You need to get some kind of professional in to reinforce it or test it or whatever before anyone tries to go in there.”

“But can you at least move the dirt out of the way now? So you don’t have to come back? Or is it already too dark for that?”

He flicked his lighter and lit up and she asked him for one, leaned in close so he could light it for her. After they both inhaled he shrugged and then nodded and blew out his smoke. “We got another forty-five minutes easy.”

She watched as he stubbed out his cigarette and climbed back into the digger. He pulled a lever and crunched a gear or two and the yellow arm behind the cab rose off the ground: JCB, read the black letters on the side. It was a claw, though she didn’t know if that was the official name. She went back to the house as he started rolling, got herself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and brought it out to drink while she watched. She looked down at the dirt, at the tracks the backhoe left in the loose piles and in the sparse grass that was flattened beneath the tires; she looked up at the light in the canopy of the trees.

It was a light she’d seen a hundred times before—a light she knew from cinematography as well as from life, a certain familiar watery flutter of sun through high-up openings in the leaves. The way it slanted down, the way it wavered through the blur of green, conferred a sense of a life unmoving yet slowly filtering memories—waiting, existing without a sign of change in the long, semi-bright moment before dark.

•

When he drove the backhoe away and her front gates closed behind him it was dusk.

Jim wasn’t coming; he had stayed late at work and she would see him later at the restaurant—a famous, touristy place where the Chinese food was bland and greasy but the good tables had an unparalleled view, on a verandah high on a hillside, overlooking the valley.

She scrounged around in the kitchen drawers till she found a flashlight with live batteries and took it out to the hole in the yard. The soil had been smoothed back and she stood a few inches from the edge, pointing the flashlight down into the hole. She saw the metal rungs of the ladder and could make out, on the walls of the tunnel, a pattern of brickwork. She didn’t think it was deep; she thought she could make out the bottom, a dim, flat floor.

If the bricks collapsed, no one would know where she was. She stood still, hesitating.

In front, headlights scoped around and then cut off as a car turned into the drive. It was someone who had the gate remote. She stood with her flashlight pointed at the house, listening. A couple of car doors slammed faintly.

The old ones had returned.




They left Angela with Ellen Humboldt in the kitchen, heating up microwave dinners: chicken with small cubes of carrot, Susan noticed, which resembled the rehydrated food of astronauts or recalled the gray airplane upholstery of economy flights to Pittsburgh. Angela had once been a good cook but these days she was catering to Ellen, who preferred to eat small portions of highly processed frozen entrees. Portia and the gray lady came outside with Susan—the gray lady whose name, she realized, had been told to her enough times now that she could never ask again. She would have to listen slyly to the others until she caught it.

“So where do you think it could lead?” asked Portia, carrying her own flashlight.

There were footlights along the path, but once they came to the end of the flagstones and into the dark of the trees they needed the spots of light at their feet.

“Maybe down to an old cellar, at least,” said Susan. “On the original plans there was a basement and a wine cellar. But it’s so far from the house, Jim says there’s no way.”

“It would be better to wait till morning,” said Portia.

“I’m just going to take a quick look,” said Susan. “That’s all. Just to see what it is. Then I’ll come up the ladder again.”

She knelt next to the hole, her flashlight in a back pocket, as the lades focused their beams on the first rung of the ladder. She stretched a foot back and felt for the bar.

“What if the ladder’s unstable?” asked Portia. “You could fall down and break your neck.”

“It’s not that deep,” said Susan. “Maybe twelve feet. Maybe fourteen.”

She looked up at their faces, relieved to see that the gray lady was nodding.

“Hold on to my hand till you get down a ways,” said Portia, and reached out to Susan, who grabbed it.

“Here goes,” she said, and put her weight on the top rung. It held; it was solid. Down to the second, the third, the fourth, until she could let go of Portia’s hand and grab the top rung with both of her hands. Their flashlight spots glanced off the bricks, into her face when she looked up, blinking, and then away again. A few seconds later she felt hard ground beneath the leading foot, stepped onto it and switched on her own flashlight.

“Concrete floor,” she called up as she turned. Her magnified voice echoed.

“What do you see?” asked Portia.

“A door,” she said. She stood in a kind of simple well, nothing to see but the bricks around her, the cement beneath her feet and the gray of the door.

It was metal, with a key lock. She felt a sinking disappointment but reached out anyway and grabbed the knob—gritty with dust, but it turned without stopping and she felt the mechanism click. She pulled it toward her and it gave; cold air swept in. Ahead there was a hallway with the same concrete floor and brick walls. The end of it was too dark to see, but it seemed to lead back toward the house.

“Give me five minutes,” she yelled, turning her face up so that the old ladies were sure to hear.

“I warn you, after that it’s 911,” said Portia. “Because we’re not standing here all night, and I’m certainly not coming down.”

Susan pointed her beam at the narrow hallway’s ceiling: a naked bulb with a dangling cord. That meant it was wired. She reached up and pulled: nothing.

Maybe the bulb was out, she thought, and kept walking.

The hallway turned and she faced another door—nothing but that. It was just like the first and like the first it opened. She pulled it all the way back until it scraped the wall beside her and stopped; she stepped in. And here she was, in her own basement.

It was a gray, industrial space, almost clinical. There were old pipes along the ceiling, dusty and utterly dry, bearing no beads of moisture; there was the same gray cement floor, stretched out from where she was standing. In rows stretching along the far walls, and then spaced neatly between them like library stacks, were banks of metal cabinets that looked like high school lockers, and between them aisles with enough space to walk. There was the thick smell of mothballs and also something else—a chemical scent she couldn’t identify.

It was surprisingly dry. She scoped her flashlight around again, looking for another lightbulb, and finally saw a switch on the wall. After she flicked it there was a pause, then a series of clicks and flickers and the overhead fluorescents went on, long bulbs in the ceiling, mostly out of sight beyond the tops of the cabinets. They cast a sickly, clinical light. She turned off her own. Other than the closed cabinets everywhere she noticed only one other element: sacks marked with printed words, lying along the tops of the cabinets and piled on the floor at their ends. She leaned down to the pile nearest her and read the words on the bags: SILICA GEL MIXTURE. DESICCANT.

Desiccant, she thought. Desiccant?

She heard someone call, then—it must be Portia. She propped the basement door open quickly with a bag of the silica so the light would fall into the hallway, then ran back along the hall.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. No 911 needed,” she called up from the bottom of the well. “It’s a basement. It’s just a basement. But there’s a lot of storage space and I want to check it out.”

“I’m curious,” came Portia’s voice. Flashlight beams shone into Susan’s face.

“Relax, get on with your evening,” said Susan. “I’ll give you a full report. Go inside and have dinner, don’t wait outside in the dark. Really—it’s just a basement. Concrete and brick and there are lights that work. The walls aren’t going to fall in on me.”

She waited till they took their flashlights and left, then went back down the hallway. In the morning, she was thinking, she’d bring Jim down and he could help her look for the connection between the basement and the main house—there must have once been a door, must have once been a passage between them. It made no sense, this isolation.

The metal cabinets were of all different widths, she saw, some tall and thin like lockers, others as wide as a walk-in closet, and all closed tightly, though she could see no locks. When she pulled at the handle on the first locker she felt another pull against her, as though the door was vacuum-sealed. But the handle moved down, there was a pop, and the door was open.

She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur—beautiful, striped—or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.

She pulled it out gently—it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a hook or something—and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe—a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters: Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883. In wild, @ 1870s.

She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point—she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something—possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.

She counted the doors, moving back through the room—dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.

She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors, two metal handles that met in the middle. She took one in each hand and wrenched them downward. It took a minute, but then the seal broke, they too came open and she stood back.

It was a wolf, already mounted. A gray wolf, it looked like to her. It stood with its front paws close together, its head raised, as if listening. The mouth was shut; it did not look fierce at all, merely attentive, even faithful.

She turned to look at the right-hand door, where another white sticker read North America Mammals 1.1.7.01. Newfoundland wolf, Canis lupus beothucus. Canada native. Extermination. Wild specimen, @ 1911. It was a kind of wolf she hadn’t heard of, she thought. But she couldn’t leave it here: she would have it moved upstairs. The next cabinet took her by surprise: a huge penguin-like bird, black on its back and white on its stomach, standing on a fake rock. It was almost three feet tall, and had big, webbed feet and atrophied-looking wings. North America, Europe Birds. 1.2.1.02. Great auk, Pinguinus impennis. Iceland native. Collection. Zoo specimen, @ 1844.

The great auks were extinct—had been for a long time. She had read about it in one of the old man’s natural history books, a thick one in the library with lithographs or pen-and-ink drawings, she didn’t know which. She’d trailed her fingers over them for their minute details and the fineness of the lines. She found it while she was looking up another bird, looking up albatross. She’d wanted to know what kind of scenery an albatross would need, to order a fix on an albatross mount, and then she came to auk and read the auks’ story and it was impossible to forget. Auks mated for life; they did not know how to fly and walked very slowly, so they were easily taken. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the last known pair in existence was found incubating a single egg on a rock in Iceland. Both the adults were quickly dispatched by strangling and their only egg was crushed beneath a boot.

The auks had been known to be on their way out, down to that one last, isolated colony, and collectors had wanted them for the skins.

Had the wolf and the quagga also vanished?

She crossed the room and opened another cabinet at random—a small, square one at eye level. She saw what looked like a mouse. South America Mammals. 3.1.8.06. Darwin’s rice rat, Nesoryzomys darwini. Galápagos native. Competition by nonnatives. @ 1929.

Beside it, in another square compartment, was a brown frog with yellow spots sitting on a large plastic leaf, which looked, like most of the amphibian mounts in the old man’s collection, as though it had been shellacked. South America Amphibians. 3.3.7.14. Long-snouted jambato, Atelopus longirostris. Ecuador native. Uncertain; disease, weather warming. @ 1989.

She turned and went to another wall, opened another small locker and this time found a bird: Asia Birds. 5.2.2.08. Bonin Islands grosbeak, Chaunoproctus ferreorostris. Japan native. Habitat destruction by nonnatives. Zoo specimen, @ 1827.

She stopped and looked around her—the many closed doors beneath the fluorescent tubes, the few she’d left standing open with their mounts visible within. The bags of silica gel must be to keep them from molding, though it wouldn’t work forever. Maybe they were already gathering mildew, breeding the larvae of beetles and moths beneath their wings or claws . . . they should be moved, she should move them as soon as she could. She wondered what T. would say, with his interest in rare animal species. All of these were extinct, obviously; the dates would have to be when they disappeared.

In a dark back alcove off the main room, past what looked like a disused furnace, she saw a big glass case. There were no fluorescents on that section of ceiling and it was too dim to see; but maybe the case had its own light. She walked over and looked around on the wall for a switch, but couldn’t find one and impatiently turned on her flashlight instead.

Inside the case there was no backdrop—no diorama at all, only a bare plywood floor and an oversized bird skeleton. It was brown and ancient, not the usual clean white of bones, and its bill had a bulbous, rounded end. From head to foot the skeleton was easily the size of the great auk and looked like a dinosaur to her, maybe a kind of bird dinosaur, but the sticker on the side read Raphus cucullatus. Dodo. Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715.

That was all.

It had to be: the old man’s legacy.

•

Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen—Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.

“It’s just a regular basement with a lot of closet space,” she told them. “And more skins for taxidermy.”

“Good lord,” said Portia.

“Talk about overkill,” said the gray lady, in a small chirp of a voice.

“I think these might be valuable, though,” said Susan. “I think maybe a university or something might even want them. Maybe they could be donated.”

“Dear, aren’t you late for the meeting with your lawyer friend?” asked Angela—as though Jim didn’t, for all intents and purposes, live in the same house with them. With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again. She moved a cube of carrot around with her fork.

Susan had almost forgotten, she realized, after the basement. It was late but she could still go to meet him.

“Thanks for everything,” she told Portia, and took the back stairs up to her bedroom to change her clothes.

In fact she felt cut off and subdued. She couldn’t say anything to the old women, she was not qualified to tell them about the basement’s contents. She was marginal in all this and they were even further away from the matter: they had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing about it, disturb the truth with a false statement. She didn’t know what the legacy was, if it was important or run-of-the-mill, whether its specimens were real or reconstructed, contraband or legal. For all she knew they had been stolen in the first place. Best to move on, best to close off the subject of the mounts in the rooms beneath to casual discussion and quietly bring in her own natural history expert.

Best to leave out what purported to be the skeleton of a dodo.