Houses of Stone, KATHY [classic literature books TXT] 📗

would amuse me to solve it. I will have the place cleared out; perhaps some clue as to its function lies buried under the dust. "

Ismene had not intended to speak, unless to express approbation of his intent. She heard her voice as if it had been that of another. "May I, thereafter, claim it as my own? A private place in which to write and read and reflect?

Astonishment shaped his features as he drew her away. "This grim, lonely place? There is much to admire in the uncultivated expanses of nature, but it is wild, uncontrolled—"

“So must Eden have been,'' Ismene said. Her hands were clasped so tightly they pained her. "I would be alone.

"I see." Thoughtfully he repeated, "Yes, I see. If this is your desire—" But then he broke off with a cry, and caught her up in his arms, swinging her aside; and she heard a rustle of foliage and beheld a sinuous footless form glide through the open doorway into shelter.

“There is a serpent in your Paradise, Cousin,'' Edmund said with a strange little laugh. "If it offers forbidden fruit, will you resist the tempter?

Karen rolled over onto her back. She had tried every other conceivable sleeping position, and she was still wide awake. She couldn't blame the weather; it was, as Peggy had said, a perfect night for sleeping, cool and crisp as autumn, with a soft breeze stirring the curtains and rustling the leaves.

Nor was it the thought of her "talk" next day that prevented her from sleeping. Stage fright no longer bothered her and she had delivered countless lectures on the immortal Jane, to her own classes and elsewhere.

Could the Screaming Lady be a distorted, romanticized memory of a woman silenced not by nature but by her society? Karen would have liked to believe it—what a subject for an article that would make!—but she couldn't. The symbolism was too subtle, too farfetched. Did the weird story contain the seeds of some actual past event, or was it only another version of a common folk legend? Peggy's admission that she had reached a dead end in tracing the ownership of the house implied a corollary Karen hated to admit. This might be the first of many dead ends. She might never know who Ismene really was.

She forced her tense muscles to relax; she had been lying stiff as a board, fists clenched. Historical research seldom presented neat, unanswerable solutions to problems. Scholars were still arguing about whether Richard III had slaughtered his nephews in the Tower, and how much Mary Stuart knew about the plot that had taken her despised husband's life. She had been unreasonable to expect that a few days or weeks of investigation would provide an answer to the question that had become an obsession. Sharon would probably say she needed counseling. It wasn't "healthy" to care so much about a dead woman.

I don't need a psychologist to explain why I feel that way, she thought, turning onto her side. That same sense of helpless rage, of voicelessness, was familiar to her too, though—thank God and Betty Friedan—not to the same extent. She understood Ismene's need for a place of her own, even a place as forbidding as the abandoned house in the woods. It was desirable because of its very desolation; no one else would claim it.

Did everyone feel that same need for solitude, she wondered, or was it an aberration, experienced by only a small percent of the human race and incomprehensible to the rest? And why was it so difficult to attain? Modern life had added various forms of mechanical intrusion into one's privacy; the very ringing of a telephone was a demand for attention, even if one had enough willpower to ignore it, and automobiles made it easier for friends to drop in and purveyors of goods and services—including purveyors of salvation—to reach one's door. Resentment of intrusion provoked not apology but indignation and hurt feelings. That had been true even in Jane's day, when she sat writing in the parlor, covering her papers when she was interrupted as she so often was. Some people found that picture charming—cute little Jane, curls tied back and slippered feet dangling, looking up with a smile whenever someone popped in to chat. It had always made Karen's blood run cold.

She yawned and stretched and wondered drowsily whether that had ever been used by a mystery writer as a motive for murder: the frantic, frustrated need to be alone. Snatching up the first weapon that came to hand—shotgun or knife, frying pan or baseball bat—striking out in a frenzy, seeing faces turn from smiles to blood-streaked, ruined horror.

Perhaps it had been a motive for murder more frequently than anyone suspected—uncomprehended even by the killer.

Chapter Ten

The sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy, Gaysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin's whimsey, or else bright and stillborn.

Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959

KAREN had spoken at a number of luncheon meetings. This wasn't the first time she had toyed with the idea of starting a protest movement. Serving the food before the speech might suit the audience, but it was sheer hell for the speaker. If she didn't dribble salad dressing down her front or spill coffee onto her skirt while making genteel conversation with her neighbors, she might get a scrap of lettuce or spinach caught between her teeth, with no hope of extracting it genteelly before she was introduced. If she ate too much she ran the risk of emitting what some Victorian writer had called "an unseemly sound of repletion" in the middle of a sentence.

In this case Karen wasn't tempted to overeat. The entree was creamed chicken and peas, just as Peggy had predicted. The gluey mass rested in and on a patty shell so flaky it exploded like a grenade whenever she cut into it. At least she wasn't pilloried on a podium, in