Man Sinister

The strange car was gone from the driveway. I threw my cigarette over the porch railing, went back in the house, and turned into the heavy, gloomy, overstuffed parlor. A woman was sitting in a mohair wing chair. She was thumbing through a magazine without seeing it.

When she looked up, I said, “How do you do? You must be Vera.”

“Why, yes, and I suppose you are Steven.”

She was beautiful. Her hair was a soft blonde mane. She had wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and good legs, and full breasts with a promise of lushness not hidden by her plunging neckline.

I offered her a cigarette. She took it, and as I held a light for her I had a close-up of her face. Natural, unplucked even brows, gray eyes, a mouth that was full without seeming large.

“Do you plan to be in Asheville long?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

I caught the cloud that shadowed her eyes for an instant. Maybe she had made the trip against her will. Or perhaps she just didn’t like it here.

“How do you like our natural wonders — Chimney Rock, the Smokies, the Vanderbilt house?”

“I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen any of them.”

Again that strain in her face. The room grew uncomfortable. She rose, walked to the window.

“How far is it to Pressley’s Drug Store?” she asked.

“About four blocks. Would you like something from there?”

“No. Harold went over there. He should have been back by now.” She stopped speaking. Her face was white. I went over beside her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No... no,” she said quickly. “I just haven’t been feeling up to par. The trip down and all, you know.”

Where the lace curtains parted, I glanced through the window. A man was standing in the shadows of a tree across the street. I couldn’t see details from here, but he was not Harold. Too short and blocky.

“It is a little close in here,” I said.

I raised the window, propped my palms on the dusty sill. The man across the street walked away. I turned from the window.

Vera said, “Would you mind terribly walking down toward the drug store? I’m worried about Harold. He’s a little upset. We had a bit of trouble with the car on the way down.”

“I’ll take a walk down there,” I said.

I went out into the hall. It was a long hall, with a high ceiling, gloomy as twilight. Portraits of Cranfords long dead reposed against the walls in oval frames.

As I reached the porch, Harold’s black car swung into the driveway. I waited for him. He smiled as he came up the porch steps carrying a small package he’d brought from the drug store.

We shook hands and said the usual. Long time no see. You’re looking well. All that.

He hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen him. Still the clear, fragile china skin, the light blond hair that waved a little, and with a few locks loose to the breeze. A few more lines were about his eyes, and his mouth was beginning to develop some of the steel-trap qualities of Papa Joe’s.

He was a magazine illustrator, a successful one. Periodically he would send little notices to the Asheville papers when his work was appearing in one of the big national magazines. Now and then nice old ladies and aspiring young artists from the local art club would drop around to ask for Harold’s address.

“It’s nice you could get away for a while,” I said to him.

Whatever was between Papa Joe and myself, I had lived a portion of my life with this man like a brother. We had never been close, though, and in school while I’d been getting a collar-bone broken playing football Harold had been on the debating team. Yet there was bound to be a sort of feeling between us in spite of the fact that we were only foster brothers, and nothing Papa Joe said or did would affect that.

“You should have written that you were married,” I said, “and were coming down. We’d have given you a reception.”

“The past three years haven’t given me much time to write,” he said. “I don’t care for parties, anyway.”

“Liar!” I laughed.

He turned on me suddenly. His eyes got hard. His voice was harsh. “I mean it, Steve! No parties. I didn’t come down here to fool around with a lot of people.”

“It’s your trip,” I said.

He hesitated. “Well, look, Steve. I didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded.”

“Forget it. I met your wife. Was she a model?”

“No. A secretary to a magazine editor.”

“She know how come I’m a Martin in a family of Cranfords?”

He nodded. “I sketched the details when I told her about you.”

I watched him go into the parlor. I’d been tense, talking to him. But he hadn’t asked about Bryanne, my own wife.

Chapter II

I walked upstairs. But I wasn’t in the house. I was back again in a USO club and it was the time of the big war. I was fresh out of OCS, a green as grass ninety-day wonder in the infantry. A crowd of brass was gathered near the punch bowl. As a rift appeared, I saw her. She was dark, smoothly tanned by the sun with black hair and eyes as merry as chinkapins. She was wearing white.

“North Carolina?” she said to me as we danced. “At last the Army is improving.”

“What part?” I asked.

“Greensboro,” she said.