Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman Page B

early and fighting the impulse to bolt. I started a fire on the hearth and we sat quietly together on a small love seat before it sipping cream sherry. We made a few miserable little attempts at conversation, at being cheery and casual.
    I think the painful faculty of recollection was upon Alice, too, that evening. She kept harking back over the years. We chatted with a lot of bogus nostalgia about Christmases past and how we spent them. When I was a businessman I always made a point of going on buying trips around Christmas time and taking Alice with me. There’d been Christmases we’d had together in Paris, Zurich, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, the Bahamas, Nantucket, New York. In the rosy hues of retrospection we attributed to those times wondrous, magical qualities they never really possessed.
    Now sitting there that night with the snow falling silently outside we knew in our hearts that all of those past Christmases were as fake and hollow and rotten as the one we were about to celebrate. After a while we abandoned all efforts at lively chatter. Instead, we sat listening to the fire hiss and crackle and sipped our sherry and gave ourselves up to despondency.
    There was still no sign of Richard Atlee at seven-thirty and so, the moment the minute hand of the grandfather clock brushed the six, we rose as if by prearranged signal. Alice took my arm, and with all the solemnity and grandeur of a wedding march, together we strode through the parlor and the library to the dining room, where we silently took our places at table.
    I’ll always remember the first anguished moments of that Christmas supper. I can still hear, over the years, the lonely tinkle of Alice’s spoon striking lightly on her melon plate. It’s one of the saddest sounds I think I’ve ever heard. Seeing her in lace seated before all the resplendent finery of that table, I was afraid to look across at her, for fear that if for one moment our eyes met, we would cry. Who would ever have thought we would have taken such a wretched little incident so much to heart?
    It wasn’t until we had finished our melon and started the soup that we heard the first footstep—and even then we didn’t believe what we’d heard. We must have heard it at the same moment, because just as I looked up, Alice did, too. But as I say, we both doubted it. I suppose we were skeptical at that point; or possibly, like the poor, superstitious idiots we are, we hoped that by denying the reality of the footsteps, we could make them come true.
    In the next moment another step creaked quite distinctly on the cellar stair. And then another. Alice’s face flushed with sudden color. “He’s come.” It was half whisper, half cry; her eyes beamed. “He’s come. I knew he’d come. I knew it.”
    I recall closing my eyes very tight and clenching my fists, torn somewhere between intense anger and relief, then murmuring inwardly a few words of thanks to Richard Atlee.
    At the top of the stairs the footsteps paused and hovered on the other side of the library door. I sat there rigid like something struck in marble, my soup spoon frozen midway between the steaming bowl and my lip. Alice was looking at me and smiling. There was a question in her eyes.
    I heard the doorknob turn. Then the hinges of the library door squealed open. Footsteps whispered across the floor. Just outside the dining room there was a moment of total suspension when we no longer heard him. Time seemed to stop. Nothing happened. Our hearts sank. Then he was there.
    I have no accurate recollection of that moment or of my first impression of Richard. All I recall is that he stood there in the doorway. Alice and I didn’t look up at him. Instead we continued to stare into each other’s eyes—Alice still smiling that enigmatic smile, I with my soup spoon still poised in midair.
    It was only after he took his place and started his melon that I looked at him and realized that the person I was looking at I’d