In the years before illness had stuffed her unceremoniously in bed, she had professed fears of any room that could not instantly become a fortress! A houseful of women (son Robert rarely descended from his crow’s nest) needed swift defenses against the blind greeds, envies, and rapes of a world only a bit less feverish with lust in winter.
So ran her theory.
“We’ll never need that many locks!” Alice had protested years ago.
“There’ll come a day,” the mother replied, “you’ll thank God for one single solid Yale lock.”
“But all a robber has to do,” said Alice, “is smash a window, undo the sill locks and—”
“Break a window! And warn us? Nonsense!”
“It would all be so simple if we only kept our money in the bank.”
“Again, nonsense! I learned in 1929 to keep hard cash from soft hands! There’s a gun under my pillow and our money under my bed! I’m the First National Bank of Oak Green Island!”
“A bank worth forty thousand dollars?!”
“Hush! Why don’t you stand at the landing and tell all the fishermen? Besides, it’s not just cash that the fiends would come for. Yourself, Madeline—me!”
“Mother, Mother. Old maids, let’s face it.”
“Women, never forget, women. Where are the other pistols?”
“One in each room, Mother.”
And so the home-grown artillery was primed and set, the hatches dogged and undogged from season to season, year to year. An intercommunication phone circuit, using batteries, was wired upstairs and down. The daughters had accepted the phones, smiling, it at least saved shouting up the stairwells.
“Simultaneously,” said Alice, “why not cut off our outside phone? It’s long past time anyone called from the town across the lake to either Madeline or me.”
“Pull out the phone!” said Madeline. “It costs like hell each month! Who could we possibly want to call over there?”
“Boors,” said Robert, heading for the attic. “All of them.”
And now, on this deep winter night, the one single and solitary sound. The shattering of a windowpane, like a wineglass thinly burst, like the breaking of a long warm winter dream.
All five inhabitants of this island house became white statues.
Peeking in windows at each room, one would have imagined museum galleries. Each animal, stuffed with terror, displayed in a last instant of awareness; recognition. There was a light in each glass eye, like that found and forever remembered from a noon glade when a deer, startled and motionless, slowly turned its head to gaze down the long cold barrel of a steel rifle.
Each of the five found their attention fixed to the doors.
Each saw that an entire continent separated their bed or chair from those doors waiting, ready to be locked. An inconsequential yardage to the body. But a psychological immensity to the mind. While they were flinging themselves the short distance, the long distance to slide the bolts, turn the keys, might not some thing in the hall leap a similar space to crack the still-unlocked door!?
This thought, with hair-trigger swiftness, flashed through each head. It held them. It would not set them free.
A second, comforting thought came next.
It’s nothing, it said. The wind broke the window. A tree branch fell, yes! Or a snowball, thrown by some winter-haunted ch
ild, soundless in the night, on his way nowhere....
ALL FIVE MEMBERS of the house arose in unison.
The halls shook with the wind. A whiteness flaked in the family’s faces and snowed in their stricken eyes. All made ready to seize their private doors, open, peer out and cry, “It was a falling tree limb, yes!” when they heard yet another sound.
A metal rattling.
And then, a window, somewhere, like the cruel edge of a giant guillotine, began to rise.