Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman Page A

know?”
    “Just that.” I threw my hands up in despair. “He wouldn’t talk to me or say one way or another. I know it sounds incredible. I’m trying to think what I did between yesterday and today that offended him.”
    “Is he there?”
    “Of course he’s there.”
    “How do you know, if he didn’t talk to you?”
    “I could hear him breathing, moving around.” I was suddenly furious. “What the devil are we doing with this boy in our basement, anyway? How did we get into this thing?”
    She sat down on the bed, her shoulders slumping wearily. “Well, I’m just sick to my heart.”
    “I’m sorry, Alice. It’s all my fault. When I invited him and he said nothing, I simply assumed that by his silence he meant yes. Don’t ask me why.” I put my hand on her shoulder and she pressed it there with her own. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s not your fault, dear, any more than it is mine. We both wanted this thing very badly. So we stretched facts a bit.”
    I sat down on the bed next to her and took her hand, and we were silent together.
    After a few moments I spoke: “I did exactly as you suggested. I left the packages where he could get at them easily. Then I restated the invitation to him. I offered him the downstairs bathroom to clean up in if he wanted it.”
    “Well, then, we’ve done all we can.”
    “What shall we do now?” I said.
    “Go ahead with our plans just as if nothing had happened.” She threw her chin out jauntily. “We’ll have our pig and our port and our plum pudding and all the rest. Then we’ll go off to services. And when we come back, we’ll open our presents and have a glass of mulled cider and go to bed.”
    “Just the two of us,” I said, a little forlornly.
    “Just the two of us, dear. Just as it’s always been.” She said it with so much pluck and good spirits that it made me feel more miserable than ever. I put my arm around her shoulder and hugged her to me.
    “Yes, Alice. Just as it’s always been.”
    We bathed and dressed without a word. In anticipation of our guest we’d both planned our wardrobes the night before. I was to wear a rather formal blue serge I’d usually reserved for such occasions of state as marriages, funerals, and the like. Acquired from a Savile Row tailor on a business trip to London, it was easily the best I had.
    Alice had a semi-formal gown of fine old peau de soie, I’d bought it for her in Paris only a few years before in a rather fashionable salon for the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary. It was by far her favorite.
    Now by tacit agreement we were determined, in spite of Richard Atlee, to wear the wardrobes we had planned.
    We bathed, dressed, combed and primped, all the while trying to affect an air of nonchalance. But I could tell, as undoubtedly she could, that our hearts were not in it, and that more than anything, we were both listening, hoping against hope for some encouraging sound from below—a door closing, a toilet flushing, the flow of water from a tap, anything. But the silence from below was pitiless.
    We were dressed and ready to go down long before the appointed time. But we sat upstairs in the bedroom and waited, hoping—I suppose—for some miracle. Also we had the notion that if by some freakish chance he’d decided to come, and was on his way up just as we were starting down, our too sudden appearance might scare him off.
    By six forty-five we could contain ourselves no longer. So together—Alice in flowing peau de soie, wooshing about as she moved, me in stiff blue serge and feeling a trifle ridiculous and forlorn, the smell of moth balls wafting all around us—we started arm in arm down the steps. Just for a moment, one silly, giddy second, while descending, a picture of Alice and me, three decades younger, on a spring Sunday, being wed in the living room of her father’s house, flashed before my eyes.
    At the bottom of the stair we looked around timorously like strangers arriving at a party too