Different Seasons(189)

“You’re quite sure it wasn’t a reflex?” I heard myself demanding suddenly. “Are you quite sure—”

“Quite sure,” McCarron said imperturbably. “The first contraction, perhaps. But the completion of her labor was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not.”

“What about the baby?” Johanssen asked.

McCarron puffed at his pipe. “Adopted,” he said. “And you’ll understand that, even in those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.”

“Yes, but what about the baby?” Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a cross way.

“You never let go of a thing, do you?” he asked Johanssen.

Johanssen shook his head. “Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about the baby?”

“Well, if you’ve come with me this far, perhaps you’ll also understand that I had a certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child. Or I felt I did, which comes to the same. I did keep track, and I still do. There was a young man and his wife—their name was not Harrison, but that is close enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the child and named him ... well, John’s good enough, isn’t it? John will do you fellows, won’t it?”

He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon we would slip back into them ... and back into our lives. As McCarron had said, the tales were done for another year.

“The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at one of the two or three most respected private colleges in the country,” McCarron said. “He’s not forty-five yet. A young man. It’s early for him, but the day may well come when he will be President of that school. I shouldn’t doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and charming.

“Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty club. We were four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him. He has his mother’s determination, gentlemen ...

“. . . and his mother’s hazel eyes.”

III.

The Club

Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I said:

“I have a question I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.”

He smiled a little. “I suppose you should,” he said. “Christmas is a fine time for questions.”

Somewhere down the hallway to our left—a hall I had never been down—a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I could smell old leather and oiled wood and, much more faintly than either of these, the smell of Stevens’s aftershave.

“But I should warn you,” Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside, “it’s better not to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here.”

“People have been closed out for asking too much?” Closed out was not really the phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.

“No,” Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. “They simply choose to stay away.”

I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back—it was as if a large, cold, invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and wondered (as I had more than once before) exactly how many rooms there really were here.

“If you still have a question, Mr. Adley, perhaps you’d better ask it. The evening’s almost over—”

“And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?” I asked, but Stevens only looked at me impassively. “All right,” I said.

“There are books in this library that I can’t find anywhere else—not in the New York Public Library, not in the catalogues of any of the antiquarian book-dealers I’ve checked with, and certainly not in Books in Print. The billiard table in the Small Room is a Nord. I’d never heard of such a brand, and so I called the International Trademark Commission. They have two Nords—one makes cross-country skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There’s a Seafront jukebox in the Long Room. The ITC has a Seeburg listed, but no Seafront.”

“What is your question, Mr. Adley?”

His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his eyes suddenly ... no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the terror I felt had infused the atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock from down the lefthand hall was no longer the pendulum of a grandfather clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as he watches the condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not Thirty-fifth Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile horizon below which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.

Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his gray eyes.

Where do all these things come from? I had meant to ask. Oh, I know well enough where you come from, Stevens; that accent isn’t Dimension X, it’s pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in your eyes and stamped it on your face? And, Stevens—