Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Retail
ISBN: 9780802123947
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2015-03-30T15:39:07+00:00

16 Tumbrel Place I

Soon after Irina’s departure I drove into Harbourton along our winding, narrow country roads. With a gentlemanly flourish I delivered the box of books to the library. Jody Harkness (the head librarian) wasn’t there but my presence created a flurry of interest among the other librarians who called me “Mr. Rush.”

“When is your next novel coming out, Mr. Rush? I hope soon!”

“Soon. Yes.”

At 6:00 P.M. it was still bright as midday though the sky had been overcast since morning. I realized that I’d forgotten to make dinner plans with my friend at the Harbourton Inn.

In Harbourton, where I’d grown up, I had many friends and still many more friendly acquaintances. Yet it was beginning to be unnerving, I seemed rarely to see any of them, any longer. (I did not want to think that my old Harbourton High classmates felt uncomfortable in my presence since I’d become something of a local celebrity. And it had to be awkward for them and their wives to invite Irina and me to dinner at their modest homes, after visiting us in Mill Brook House.)

I found myself driving slowly through Harbourton. Slowly, along Chapel Street in the direction of the historic district: courthouse, post office, red-brick Episcopal church and rectory, Tumbrel Square, cobblestone cul-de-sac Tumbrel Place. In this distinguished old residential neighborhood there were few pedestrians. During the day you were likely to see lawn crews, delivery vans, postmen; in this hour of early evening, all looked deserted. This was a neighborhood of large, dignified, once-beautiful old houses set back from the street—“stately homes” built in the 1800s. The oldest could be dated to pre–Revolutionary War times, when (it was not improbable) General George Washington had been a guest beneath its steep shingled roof on his way to the Battle of Trenton.

The residence at 88 Tumbrel Place was a large, gaunt, rather ugly Edwardian house of bricks so aged they seemed bleached of color. Here was a petulant sort of dignity. The roof was luminous-green, covered thinly in moss. Tall oaks surrounding the house had been maimed by storms and were missing parts of their limbs. Though I knew that the wild-white-haired Ms. Haider could not be home yet I felt a quivering of excitement imagining that she stood at one of the second-floor windows, gazing at me as casually I drove past the house to park my car a short distance away, by the Episcopal rectory.

You have immunity now. No one will believe her.

The curse must be exorcised.

I’d come to realize that it was so, there was a kind of “curse” on me since the shock of the summons in my mailbox. Since the sight of the wild-white-haired witch-woman who’d wanted to destroy me.

Yet oddly, it seemed to me that the “curse”—a sort of free-floating, lethargic malaise, like the dank smell of a toadstool brought too close to the nostrils, that made it all but impossible for me to concentrate on my work—had fallen upon me before the arrival of the summons itself.

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