Into the darkness, p.2
Into the Darkness, page 2
The crash of ’29 was not a disaster, but another stroke of luck for Daniel Mignot. Native conservatism had kept him from expanding his business; the capital he had saved was used to acquire, at bargain prices, the jewels of those who had been less cautious.
Not until the late thirties, when he had begun to expand, did he take time out to woo and marry a wife, a gentle, exquisitely pretty New England aristocrat. Her family, understandably skeptical of Mignot’s genealogical fictions, protested to no avail; lovely Mary Morgan had always gotten what she wanted, and for reasons that completely eluded her bewildered family, she wanted the brash, undersized nobody who was almost twice her age. Their first daughter was born in 1937; the second came howling into the world the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Daniel Mignot was among the first Americans to enlist. He claimed to have abandoned wife and children because of patriotic fervor, and who could prove he lied? Outrage and love of country moved thousands of Americans to do as he did. But in Mignot’s case one is entitled to wonder.
This time it was Asia, not Europe, to which he applied his philosophy of acquisition. He was rather vague about his activities, hinting at top-secret intelligence work; by some means or other he managed to make his way to India, and was stationed there when the war ended. For centuries the subcontinent had been the market for the gem dealers of Burma, Ceylon, and Kashmir. It was hardly a coincidence that only after its founder returned from war did the firm of Daniel Mignot gain international status, right up there with Tiffany’s and Harry Winston and the other giants of the jewelry business. Like them, Mignot had the big stones, the bright stones, the famous stones, but he specialized in design instead of concentrating on the gems themselves. As a designer he himself was second-rate, but he had an uncanny knack for spotting and encouraging new talent. He paid high salaries and was one of the first to list publicly the names of his top designers. By 1965 he had opened branches of his New York store in Palm Beach and San Francisco. His personal life was as happy as his business dealings were successful. Mary hated New York and disliked travel, so when, early in their marriage, she inherited the family home in Connecticut, he converted it into a mansion worthy of housing his most important gems, as he called them: his beautiful wife and his two daughters.
Then, in the space of a single night, the whole glittering edifice crumbled and fell. A year after the tragic scandal that destroyed his family Mignot retired from active management and sold the business to an international conglomerate. Even his enemies, and he had plenty of them, felt sorry for the beaten old man.
His friends pitied him too, but they knew better. Dan wasn’t beaten; like the hero of the old ballad, he would lay him down to bleed awhile, then rise and fight again. However, none of them could have predicted the form his recovery would take. Some years earlier he had opened a small store and workshop on Main Street in the small town where his wife had grown up, like her parents and grandparents before her. Doting husband though he was, he must have found the exquisite perfection of his home wearing at times; in the shop he could be as “messy” and “noisy” as he liked, smoke his nasty black cigars, swear and tell off-color jokes. The shop was his toy and his hobby, a place to which he could retreat in order to practice the skills in which he took such pride.
The store was more than a toy, however, and the critics who swore that Dan Mignot never did anything unless he hoped to make a profit from it were right. The growth of the small business was so slow at first as to be almost imperceptible; Dan ran it himself, with the help of a bookkeeper—who later became his son-in-law—and a series of antiquated but knowledgeable managers, all old friends and former employees. The basis of the business was antique jewelry, bought from people who heard Dan was offering good prices for that “old junk of Grandma’s.” He had been building up his stock for forty years, adding the best pieces to his personal collection and stockpiling the rest for the time he knew would come—the time when the inevitable cycle of fashion would bring the quaint, old-fashioned ornaments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries back into fashion. The garnet parures and heavy gold chains and multicolored jewelry of the Victorians were sneered at by connoisseurs and collectors; they hadn’t been sold because they were considered ugly and valueless, nor broken up for the stones, because garnets and peridots, topazes and alexandrites were worth so little in themselves—then. Mignot was one of the few to appreciate their worth, and to capitalize upon it, and when the catastrophe shook his life apart, his little hobby provided the emotional and professional foundation for a new career. Twenty years later Daniel Mignot Jewelers of Seldon had a reputation that extended beyond the boundaries of the state and the country, and old Dan bestrode the town like a genial colossus.
In the words of one of the sentimental old poems he often quoted, he had met with triumph and disaster, and treated those impostors both the same. There was no reason why he should not have lived to be a hundred. But when the virus invaded his body he was ninety years old, not eighty-two, and he had just made a discovery that shook him to the core of his cynical old soul. It is inconceivable that Dan Mignot would have welcomed death; he had been a fighter all his life. But his defenses had been shattered, and the enemy to whom all men must lose in the end took full advantage.
The coffin was open. Meg abhorred the custom, but she had not protested; it was what her grandmother wanted, what Dan himself had set out in his will. Besides, the townspeople would have been deeply affronted if they had been denied the chance to pay their respects in the good old-fashioned way. Once a scorned outsider, Dan had become one of their own. Never mind the corporate offices in New York and the expensive shops in glamorous cities like Palm Beach and Paris and Buenos Aires; to his contemporaries in Seldon, he would always be Dan Mignot who had run the jewelry store on Main Street. For twenty years Dan had opened it every morning nine o’clock on the dot without fail. Every weekday he had gone across the street for lunch at Kate’s Kafe, joining Mike Potter, who owned the hardware store, and Barb Bothwell, of Barby’s Beauty Shoppe, and the other merchants who had survived Seldon’s transition from a small country town to a quaint stopover on the tourist routes of New England. It was in large part due to Dan that the transition had been so painless for the small businesses and the people who operated them. They had come to mourn not only a friend, but the passing of a tradition.
On one level Meg acknowledged the tribute and found comfort in it. On another, more primitive, level she resented the intrusion of outsiders and the formal decorum their presence demanded of her. She had even bought a black dress, a color she never wore. Black was for death, black was for mourning. Glancing into the mirror that morning before she left for the church, she had recoiled from the ghostly image that stared back at her, its face white as ashes under the broad-brimmed black hat, another hasty purchase that at least had the advantage of shielding her face from curious or sympathetic glances.
Gran had not approved either. Studying the ensemble with a distressed frown, she had murmured, “Black should be a good color for you—or is black a color? I never understood about that…. Perhaps it’s because you’re so terribly pale. Anyway, it was a sweet thought, dear.”
Gran looked superb in black, and was well aware of it. The lace at her throat and wrists was the same snowy white as her thick, wavy hair. Her only jewels were the magnificent pearl choker that had once belonged to a duchess, and matching pearl earrings. She sat erect and dry-eyed, armored in the rigid dignity of her generation and social class. She was eighteen years younger than Dan, and she had known this day would come.
Meg knew she couldn’t live up to Gran’s sterling example, but at least her face wasn’t soggy with tears. So far she had shed none. It had all happened too fast for comprehension: first the telephone, jolting her out of uneasy and unremembered dreams and heralding the bad news by its very timing; then the hasty packing and frantic rush to the airport, and the need for composure and efficiency in the face of Gran’s initial helplessness. She seemed to be all right now, but the formality of a funeral had given her a framework in which to function. She’d do the right thing, the gracious thing, as long as there were rules of proper behavior. Were there rules of proper behavior for the dark hours of solitude, when a widow was alone with her loss? Perhaps dignity and decorum became habitual if they were practiced as long as Gran had practiced them.
Meg wished she could believe that were true. Her grandmother’s composure worried her more than frenzied grief would have done. She herself was behaving abnormally, and she knew it. She felt numb, armored not by dignity but by a queer detachment that enabled her to observe the proceedings as dispassionately as any journalist. Thank God for George; she could never have managed without him. She glanced sideways at her uncle, who sat between her and Gran. The word that came to her mind was “solid”; not just his six feet of bone and muscle, but his calm reliability. As if feeling her gaze, he turned his head and smiled at her over her grandmother’s devoutly bowed head. His eyes were redder than Gran’s. George Wakefield was Gran’s son-in-law, not her born son, as the town would have expressed it; in the same idiom, he was close as kin and as good to the old folks as if he’d been their own. Never married again, nor looked twice at another woman, and it’s been over twenty years….
Meg realized that the pastor was praying—that was why Gran had bowed her head. Hastily she ducked her own, but she was unable to concentrate on the words. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the hands of the man who sat on her left—long, brown hands, well tended, neatly manicured. Trust Cliff to have acquired a tan so early in the summer. And how could hands so demurely clasped convey an impression of contemptuous amusement?
It wasn’t his hands, it was what she knew of Cliff himself. She hadn’t seen her courtesy cousin—George’s son by his first wife—for many years, but when he had arrived that morning she sensed that he hadn’t changed. Physically, yes, of course; he was no longer the pimply, weedy youth she had last seen, but a grown man with all his father’s height and wiry build. His manners were smooth and courteous, his features as handsome as his father’s, his eyes the same bright blue. But their expression was the same as that of the mischievous boy who had teased the life out of her and aroused the wrath of the entire town by his pranks until his exasperated father sent him away to school. There was none of George’s warmth in Cliff ’s smile, only expectant amusement—as if he were hoping for a chance to laugh at someone’s stupidity or clumsiness. Well, he wouldn’t get his laugh from her. She was grown up too, no longer victim to his tricks.
Thickened by emotion, the minister’s voice droned through the long list of Dan’s charities to the town and the people who lived in it. Meg was unable to hold back a smile. Dan wouldn’t have smiled, he’d have laughed out loud at the aura of saintliness the pastor was weaving around his memory. He used to claim the only crime he hadn’t committed was barratry, and that was because he didn’t know what the hell it was. He hadn’t had much use for religion, either. Out of respect for Gran he had kept his opinions to himself, even when he discovered that the gentle, timid young pastor on whom she doted was unmarried and meant to remain so. He hadn’t been so reticent with his cronies, though; Meg vividly remembered overhearing his comments on the subject of a celibate clergy. “Any man who’s not interested in the most delectable object nature ever fashioned has a gaping hole where his…” At that interesting juncture he had seen Meg, and burst into a fit of coughing. “Where what is?” she had asked, brightly curious. “His brains,” said Dan.
A hand closed over her arm and pulled her to her feet. She scowled at Cliff, who closed one eye in a deliberate wink. His lips barely moved, but she made out the words: “Don’t laugh, it isn’t proper.”
“I wasn’t….” But she had been on the verge of laughing. The organ began to play, preventing the response she was tempted to make. She recognized the tune—“Rock of Ages”—and fought another burst of hysterical amusement. How Dan had hated that hymn! He didn’t mind the loud, cheerful ones like “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” but the lugubrious melodies and submissive sentiments of the other variety had offended both his ear and his pride.
Her eyes moved restlessly around the church, noting the many evidences of Dan’s generosity. What an old hypocrite he had been, she thought fondly, lavishing gifts on an institution he despised. But the gifts had really been for Gran; that wasn’t hypocrisy, it was the most disinterested form of love. The stained glass in the window behind the altar was one of Dan’s contributions. Its unorthodox appearance had divided the town into opposed parties, one that admired the work and one that wanted to smash it. Instead of saints and scenes from Scripture it showed a vast expanse of sapphire blue scattered with stars and galaxies. One had to look at it for some time before seeing that the sweep of light had the shape of a huge hand, shaking suns and worlds from its fingertips even as it gathered them into the protective curve of its palm.
Finally the service ended. George rose to his feet. He was one of the pallbearers, and it was not until he turned to offer his arm to Gran that Meg realized there was one last rite to be performed before they could leave the church. The thought of this one roused no amusement at all, it was the part she had dreaded most.
I can’t do it, she thought. I can’t, I won’t. It’s barbaric, it’s sick, it’s unfair…. Then she saw Cliff ’s hand move, and she reacted, as instinctively as a laboratory animal reacts to an electric shock, rising quickly to her feet. She had walked into the church on Cliff ’s arm, as Gran had insisted, but she was damned if she was going to let him share this final farewell, or observe her cowardly shrinking from what lay ahead. She had no intention of actually looking at the cold mask of what had been her grandfather’s face. She would rather remember him as she had seen him last—his deep-set, twinkling eyes, his wicked grin half-concealed by his bristly white mustache.
As she started to leave the pew, shaking with sentiments more appropriate to a fight than a funeral, she saw a face that reflected her emotions so accurately it was like looking in a mental mirror. Physically the face was as different from hers as a human countenance could be: a man’s face, not handsome or even particularly attractive. His features were too large for his long, narrow face—a jutting beak of a nose, a chin that matched the nose in arrogance, a tight-set mouth that bisected his thin cheeks. In the rock-hardness of his face only his eyes seemed alive; they blazed with the same fury of denial she felt, and they were staring straight at her.
Meg stared back. What was he doing there, in the front pew reserved for close friends of the family? She had no idea who he was; to the best of her recollection she had never seen him before. Though the church was packed, there were empty spaces on either side of him, as if the others who shared the pew shunned his presence.
Cliff poked her in the back. Meg forced herself to move toward the front of the church and the open coffin.
The rest of the proceedings passed with merciful quickness. At the grave site she saw the unknown man again; his harsh features stood out sharp as a cameo against the blur of other faces wearing identical expressions of grief. Only once, when he glanced at the white marble angel marking the family plot, was his angry look replaced by one that might have indicated mild derision. No one stood near him. When the brief service ended he was the first to leave, and people fell back, opening an aisle for him as if he were a king—or a leper.
Meg followed her uncle and grandmother to the waiting limousine, again ignoring Cliff ’s arm. He got into the front beside the chauffeur. That left four of them in the back—Gran, George, herself and Henrietta Marie, Gran’s spoiled, aristocratic Himalayan cat. Henrietta had her own jeweled harness and leash—set with topazes and carnelians and other stones in the warm brownish orange shades that complemented her seal-point coloring—and she accompanied Gran everywhere, with an air of lofty condescension that drove the family wild. Meg had ventured a weak protest when Gran carried the cat to the car, but Gran had insisted; and now, seeing how they greeted one another she was glad she hadn’t made an issue of it. Henrietta promptly climbed into Gran’s lap, and the old lady gathered her close, careless of the hairs that transferred themselves to her black satin lap. The tightness of her grasp betrayed her need for comfort, and for a wonder Henrietta Marie, who usually voiced her disapproval of rough handling in no uncertain terms, did not object. However, she turned her head to stare at Meg, and there was no mistaking the sneer on her furry face. She had never cared much for Meg. She didn’t care much about anybody except Mary and Dan, whom she apparently regarded as a useful appendage to her mistress.
Apparently she thought of George in the same light, for she allowed him to pat Gran’s shoulder. “Are you all right, Mary?”
Gran straightened. “Of course. I’m a little tired, that’s all.”
“And that mob coming to the house…” George shook his handsome silver head.
“It’s just our friends,” Gran said gently.
“Just the whole town, you mean.”
“Friends,” Gran repeated. “Dan didn’t want outsiders. All those people from New York, and the store managers—I hope I didn’t offend them by telling them not to come. But Dan was very firm about it.”
“Thank heaven for that much. I’ll make your excuses, Mary, if you’d like to lie down for a while. They’ll understand.”
Gran shook her head, smiling, and George turned to Meg. “Same offer goes for you, honey. Everyone knows how close you and Dan were. They will—”
