The Cry of the Owl Read Free Page B

Shive, had asked him to go bowling once, and Robert had gone. Mrs. Rhoads had the curiosity of the classic concierge as to who came and went, Robert felt, but she was good-natured, and he actually liked to feel there was someone in the house who cared, or who at least formed some opinion about his being alone or with someone, and whether he came in at five or seven-thirty P.M . or one in the morning. For about the same amount of money, ninety dollars per month, Robert might have found a medium-sized house to rent somewhere in the environs of Langley, but he had not wanted to be alone. Even the mediocre furniture of his two rooms was a comfort somehow: other people had lived here before him, had managed not to set the sofa on fire, had done no more damage than burning a cigarette streak in the bureau top, had paced the same dark-green carpet, and perhaps taken the trouble to notice, Wednesdays and Saturdays, that it had been vacuumed. Other people had lived here before him and gone on somewhere else, to lead perfectly ordinary and perhaps happier lives. He had a month-to-month arrangement with Mrs. Rhoads. He would not want to stay here more than a month or two more, he thought. Either he would take a house in the country or move to Philadelphia, where Langley Aeronautics had their main plant and did their assembling. He had six thousand in the bank, and his expenses were less here than in New York. He hadn’t yet received the bill for the divorce, but Nickie was handling that through her lawyers in New York. She was getting married again and had not wanted any alimony from him.
    Robert turned on the electric oven in his kitchenette, looked over the directions on a couple of packages of frozen food, thenopened them and slid them into the oven without bothering with the preheating. He looked at his watch, then settled himself in his armchair with a pocket book on American trees. He read about “The Winged and Slippery Elms.” The flat, factual prose was refreshing.
    The inner bark of Slippery Elm twigs was formerly chewed for relief of throat ailments. The twigs are hairy but not corky. … Coarse, hard and heavy, it makes fence posts.
    He turned the pages with pleasure, and read on until a smell of scorching food made him jump up from his chair.

2
    Ten days later, around the middle of December, Jennifer Thierolf and Gregory Wyncoop were having coffee in the living room of her house and watching a television program. It was a Sunday night. They sat on the secondhand Victorian sofa, which she had bought at an auction and spruced up with linseed oil and upholstery cleaner, and they were holding hands. It was a murder mystery, but not so interesting as most of the others they had watched in the same series.
    Jenny stared unseeing into the screen. She was thinking of a book she was reading, Dostoevski’s
The Possessed
. She did not understand Kirilov, at least not his last speech, a long one, but there was no use asking Greg about it. Greg had read the book, he said, but the question she might have asked him, though clear before dinner, now seemed nebulous to her. But she had no doubt that when she finished the book, or maybe a few days after she had finished it, she would be sitting in the bathtub or washing dishes one evening, and it would all become clear and inevitable.
    “What’re you thinking about?” Greg asked.
    Jenny, embarrassed, sat back and smiled. “Do I always have to be thinking about something? You’re always asking me that.”
    “As long as you’re not thinking about this g.-d. house again, or worrying about it—”
    “Don’t say ‘g.-d. house.’”
    “All right.” Greg leaned toward her, closed his eyes, and pressed his nose in her neck. A booming chord made him sit up and look at the screen again, but nothing was happening. “Anyway, it’s an old house and all old houses have funny noises in them. The attic creaks because the whole top part of the house moves in the wind, in my