After puzzling over Cynthia's spirit's moving fingers in "icicles," in
the final acrostic, I returned to the second paragraph from "The Vane
Sisters"
"In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll...I had
stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a
frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind
them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But
they were not. The roof jutted too far out, perhaps, or the angle of vision was
faulty, or, again, I did not chance to be watching the right icicle when the
right drop fell. There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dripping that I found
as teasing as a coin trick. It led me...right to the house where D. used to live
...And as I looked up at the eaves of the adjacent garage with its full display
of transparent stalactites backed by their blue silhouettes, I was rewarded at
last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be described as the dot of
an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to glide down very fast—a jot
faster than the thaw-drop it raced. This twinned twinkle was delightful but not
completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits
of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to
transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's
socket."
Cynthia's shadowy reference to icicles seems
important in retrospect. If, at first, they seems to
be trivial indicators of a path leading to D's house
- and to the information about Cynthia's death, when we discover them
as otherwordly signs, this initial reference to unseen
shadows may have an additional meaning. These very real dark
effects had been invisible because they lacked a proper background,
the right drop wasn't spotted .or "the angle of vision
was faulty."
I wonder if the readers are thereby invited to look for such a
background or proper angle, but then...what for? Their function (to lead
towards D's house) has been accomplished (unless the innocent reference to
unseen shadows serves an indirect warning
about the acrostic).