The proprietor of the shop had been a thin, wispish man with an effeminate walk, dressed like a country squire,' complete with weskit and leather-elbow-patched sports jacket. He had floated around among his rare pieces of china and cut glass, fluttering anxiously whenever Harriet lifted a piece of crockery. Eventually, they had got around to the grandfather clock. There were several clocks, and one was going for $573, and had been made in England, and was signed and dated by the craftsman who had fashioned it. It was still in fine working order, a stately, proud time-telling machine. Another clock had been made in America, and it was unsigned and undated, and it would probably need repairs-but it cost only $200.
When the proprietor saw that Byrnes' interest was in the cheaper clock, he immediately disqualified them as true
There was no comfort in the clock now, no comfort in the ordered, well-regulated spacing of its breathing. There was neither-and curiously-a sense of time attached to the clock. There was instead a desperate feeling of urgency, the hands advancing, the mechanism whirring, as if time-disconnected, separate and apart from the living universe, the clock would suddenly clasp its own hands and then explode into the hallway leaving Byrnes alone, waiting for his son.
The house creaked.
He had never before noticed how the house creaked.
There was sound everywhere around him, the sound of an old man with rheumatic joints. From the bedroom upstairs, he could hear Harriet deep in slumber, the sound of her even breathing superimposed on the dread tocking of the clock and the uneasy groaning of the house.
And then Byrnes heard a small sound that was like an ear-splitting thundercrack, the sound he had been waiting for and listening for all night long, the sound of a key being turned in the front-door latch. All other sounds vanished in that moment. He sat tensed and alert in his chair while the key twisted, and then the door swung wide, creaking a little, and he could hear the malicious gossip of the wind outside, and then the door quietly easing shut and snuggling into the jamb, and then the boards in the hallway creaking as feet fell upon them.
"Larry?" he called.
His voice reached out of the darkened living room, and fled into the hollows of the house. For a moment, there was complete silence, and then Byrnes was aware of the tocking of the grandfather clock again, his garden-variety clock complacently standing against the wall and watching life rush by, like an idler leaning against the plate-glass window of a corner drug store.
"Dad?" The voice was surprised, and the voice was young, and the voice was a little breathless, the way a voice will sound when its owner has come into a warm room after facing a sullen cold outside.
"In here, Larry," he said, and again the silence greeted him, a calculating silence this time, broken only by the steady punctuality of the clock.
"Sure," Larry said, and Byrnes listened to his footfalls as he came through the house and then paused outside the living-room door.
"Okay to put on a light?" Larry asked.
"Yes, go ahead," Byrnes said.
Larry came into the room, walking with the familiar skill of a person who has occupied a house for a long time, walking in the darkness directly to an end table and then turning on a lamp there.
He was a tall boy, much taller than his father. His hair was red, and his face was long and thin, with his father's craggy nose, and his mother's guileless gray eyes. His chin was weak, Byrnes noticed, nor would it ever be any stronger because adolescence had forged the boy's face, and it was set now for eternity. He wore a sports shirt and slacks, over which had been thrown a sports jacket. Byrnes wondered if he'd left his overcoat in the hallway.
"Doing some reading?" Larry asked. His voice was no longer the voice of a child. It sprang full-chested and deep from the long, reedy body, and somehow it sounded ludicrous in a boy so young, a boy hardly eighteen.
"No," Byrnes said. "I was waiting for you."
"Oh?" Byrnes watched his son, listening to him, amazed at how the single word "Oh?" could have conveyed so much sudden wariness and caution.
"Where were you, Larry?" Byrnes asked. He watched his son's face, hoping his son would not lie, telling himself a lie would shatter him now, a lie would destroy him.
