The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Two months out of college and undecided on a career, Tom Hanauer answers an ad in the classifieds seeking a “night companion.” He discovers to his pleasant surprise that he will be more of a hired conversationalist and chess opponent than a caregiver and that his employer stays up all night and sleeps during the day.
As Tom adjusts to this nocturnal existence, he finds that his employer, the lady of the house, is in a kind of cold war with her estranged husband, a disgraced mycologist who, as a result of his ongoing experiments, has forced his wife and children to devise individual strategies to protect themselves. Tom gradually learns the reasons for the strange behavior of the Morhan family.
Chapter 2: First Conversation
I slept poorly, waking unrefreshed in the late afternoon. I spent an hour hanging old sheets over the curtains to make the room darker, took a walk at sunset, ate out, went to a movie, then drank coffee and read until it was time to go to work. The rusted gate swung to behind me, and my stomach fluttered as I turned the knob and went in.
The lamp in the foyer was on, illuminating a drab, neglected space devoid of plants and pictures, inhabited only by the hum of the refrigerator from the adjoining kitchen. Feeling like an intruder, I pushed the intercom button and spoke almost in a whisper: “Mrs. Morhan?”
Her voice, enveloped in static, filled the small room: “Tom? Come on up. My door’s open.” The light in the foyer faded quickly in the long hallway, and I walked through musty darkness with one hand on the wall and the other slicing the air in front of me. I found the sliding door, which gave onto the courtyard and the immense tree.
Groping my way up the stairs to the lighted hallway, I again noticed the pet shop smell and heard the TV blaring from the third room down. I knocked once and entered Mrs. Morhan’s room.
She was dressed in a black, ankle-length skirt and a white cotton blouse, and had brushed out her hair and applied just enough make-up to accent the elegance of her facial bones. I remembered Peter Fleming’s prurient speculations and couldn’t help wondering where her husband was. The air conditioner was still on, though turned down low, and the curtains were open to let in the moonlight, so I wasn’t altogether deaf and blind in this married woman’s bedroom.
“Coffee or tea?” she asked, gesturing to a silver service on the table between us.
“Coffee, please.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Just cream.” Leaning forward to take the cup, I smelled her perfume and wondered whether to compliment her on her appearance, and decided against it. “Very good,” I said of the coffee. “I’ll be needing plenty of this for a while. Until the body adjusts.”
“Bodies in their twenties adjust easily,” she said, looking at me thoughtfully over the rim of her cup. “Not what you expected, is it?”
“The job? No, not really. ‘To provide care and company for invalid’ had me thinking less in terms of coffee and conversation than... well, not so pleasant things.” Encouraged by her smile, I added: “Did you misrepresent yourself deliberately?”
Her gaze was friendly but direct. “So you don’t think I’m an invalid?”
“Disabled, maybe. Not an invalid.”
She smiled faintly, then opened a gold cigarette case and held it out to me. I refused. She tapped one and lighted it.
“May I save you the embarrassment of asking how I came to be ‘disabled’?” she asked, settling back in her chair. “It happened ten years ago, one of the more lasting legacies of my... well, I used to drink. And one blacked-out night I fell downstairs. Lower spinal cord. ‘You’d be surprised how common an injury it is,’ one doctor told me. As if that could make a difference. But I adjusted. Did my drinking sitting down after that.” She smiled. “No, not even paraplegia could make me stop. Nothing could have, but what did. My last drink was four years ago.” She drew on her cigarette and looked steadily at me.
I was impressed, not only by the nakedness of her confidence but by her apparent lack of self-pity. I also wondered if she was testing me in some way.
“And what made you stop?” I asked.
To my surprise, she made a dismissive gesture with her cigarette and shook her head. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said, looking at me with an amused defiance.
Feeling as if I’d fallen into a subtle snare, I sipped my coffee and returned her look, wondering how many days would pass before we began to bore each other, and immediately regretted the thought.
“I’m always intimidated by stories like that,” I said. “Like war stories, they make me feel as if I’ve never really lived.”
“But your generation has Vietnam,” she said. “Not to mention hydrogen bombs.”
“One induces a guilty relief for not having been there, the other an abstract terror which occasionally produces a nightmare. Story of my life: all roads lead to Vicarious. But not you. Not my parents. They lived through a very big Something.”
“So that our children could watch their wars on television. It’s better, believe me.”
I took the opening. “You have children?”
“Yes.” She ran a hand through her hair, looked at the ceiling. “There’s Roland, who’s just down the hall. He’s twenty. Catherine, who’s about your age. My oldest son, Patrick Jr., died four years ago.” An expression of absolute desolation, more terrible for being as brief and involuntary as a shudder, passed across her face, and then, almost before I had time to register the change, she was leaning forward, her face pale and composed, crushing out her cigarette until it fell apart in her hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Thank you. It shouldn’t... not after this long. He would be twenty-nine now. Older than you by — what? Three years?” There was a tremor in her voice.
“Four.” I began to feel sorry for her. “Your daughter,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name...?”
“Catherine.”
“Does she live here, too?”
“Her mail comes here. Sometimes she’s even here herself, for a week or a month. But mostly she travels. She meets men, and sometimes she brings them home. Americans, Europeans, Africans — I see them once, when she introduces them to me, seldom twice. My cave life isolates me. They stay, they leave. After a time she comes home again, but never with the same man. As I said, my daughter is nomadic.” She’d begun speaking with a quiet irony, but by the time she’d finished, her tone was bitterly sarcastic. Leaning back in her chair, the thumb of the hand holding a fresh cigarette pressed against her temple, she said coldly: “Who knows? You may meet her one of these evenings.”
“And that would be bad?” I asked as lightly as I could.
“If you meet Catherine, you’ll eventually meet my husband, and I don’t want that to happen.”
“Why not? Will he shoot first and ask questions later?”
She frowned. “No. But sometimes a thief is worse than a murderer.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“I hope you won’t have to.” She turned and wheeled herself toward the door.
I held the door for her. “Does your son have a menagerie?”
“Ferrets. He must have a dozen by now.”
“Don’t know that I’d sleep well with a dozen ferrets in my room.”
“He has his reasons,” she replied.
The laughter and applause of the TV faded down the stairs. Watching her use the lift, it was clear that she’d misrepresented herself in her ad: she was no invalid. I’d been hired to provide company rather than care, which suited me fine, though I couldn’t help wondering how much company she wanted. She opened sliding glass doors and switched on lights, announcing in neutral tones: “The living room. The playroom.”
All the rooms facing the courtyard were big, cluttered, ugly, and had the musty air of abandonment. Furniture, paintings, bookcases, a pool table with the felt ripped, an empty fish tank — every object was unrelated in style or period to anything else, but exhaled a common neglect. “I’m curious why you built this addition,” I said cautiously. “Or did you buy it like this?”
“You don’t have to be circumspect, Tom,” she said, smiling. “I know how awful it is. It was my husband’s idea, like everything else around here. In ’62, during the Missile Crisis, Patrick became paranoid, obsessed with surviving the coming nuclear holocaust. He built a bomb shelter in the back yard, and organized drills, rousting us out of our beds at three in the morning with a siren hooked up to the intercom. When he began to feel that destruction was not so imminent after all, his ideas changed. Privacy became the new watchword. That’s when he built this horror. The Morhans were not like other people, he would tell us. Here we could flourish uncontaminated, away from prying eyes. Guests would be carefully screened, and his wife and children would be protected from damaging influences. That is, any influence other than his own.”
We descended a wooden ramp and followed a tiny path that wound among the flowers. Sometimes she would stop and smell a gardenia, closing her eyes with pleasure.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.
“For what?”
“For pouring so much talk in your ear. It feels odd, saying all this to a stranger. Do you mind?”
“Do I mind being paid to talk to an interesting person? How could I? But let’s go inside soon. Mosquitoes have a thing for me.”
“Yes, let’s.”
“May I ask you a question, Mrs. Morhan? Where is your husband? Right now, I mean?”
She stopped and looked intently at me. “He’s wherever sleeping people are. A hotel in Tampa, maybe, or a motor lodge in Texas, anywhere in the country or out of it. He comes and goes like Catherine. He lives up there.” She pointed to the room over the garage. “My husband is ill. Except when Catherine is here, his own home is poison to him. I shun him, Roland is neutral, but both of us have our defenses.”
“Defenses? Is his illness contagious?”
“Yes. But not in the way you mean.”
She seemed disinclined to elaborate, and after getting a terse response or two, I let the subject drop. We played chess. After checkmating me for the sixth time and clearly disappointed with my weak game, she said, squinting through cigarette smoke: “You will improve, I’m sure.” It was 5:30 by then, and I felt as if my bones were dissolving.
“I’m earning my pay now,” I blurted, too exhausted to care.
“I’m tired, too,” she said, looking remarkably fresh. “Why don’t you go home? I’ll see you tonight.”
“Take care going up those stairs,” I said.
“My son is here if I fall,” she replied. “Sleep well.”
I watched the rising colors of dawn with poignant distaste, wanting only to be asleep before the sun came up. Something is lost if one fails to beat the sun. It’s like missing the Night’s last train.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
