Crying Child (4 page)

My first impression of Jed was that somebody was kidding me. This wasn’t a real man, it was a caricature of a Down East type that might have appeared in a bad novel, forty years ago. Tall, lanky, with stooped shoulders and a face like that of an elderly bloodhound, he spoke in a slow drawl. He wore overalls, the kind with the metal buckles on the straps.

It was Jed who interrupted us just after Mary’s astonishing speech. Later I realized that I should have been grateful to him; God knows what I might have said, or done, in my first shock. As it was, I could let out my feelings on him, spinning around with a start and a stifled shriek that echoed the creak of the floorboards.

“Oh,” I said. “You startled me.”

Jed put the suitcases down and straightened up to his full height, which was considerable. He smiled at me. It was an effective smile, considering its extent, which barely cracked the surface of his cheeks. Despite its melancholy, his was an affable face. It was also amazingly expressive. Each feature seemed to be capable of independent movement, and he could convey as much emotion in the twitch of his nose or the lift of a sandy eyebrow as other people could in a long speech. I assumed that he had developed this talent be
cause he didn’t get a chance to talk much. I was wrong; but certainly in that first meeting Mrs. Willard talked enough for both of them.

She was right behind him, and she practically filled the doorway. I never thought of her as fat, though. She was massive, all over, from her shoulders, broad as a man’s, to her big, solid feet. Even her hair was abundant; the bun at the back of her head would have bent the neck of a lesser woman. She wore gold-rimmed glasses, which enlarged her eyes. They were beautiful eyes, as blue as cornflowers, but they were lost in the vast pink expanse of her face.

“I’m Miz Willard,” she announced. The tone of her voice turned the words from a statement into an inalterable law. “This is my husband, Jed. You must be Mary’s sister. It’s good you’ve come. She needs company. The Good Lord knows I don’t have time. This is a big house. Not that I can’t handle it. I’ve never seen the house yet I couldn’t handle. But it don’t leave much time for sitting and talking. I like a house to be nice. If you got a job to do, do it right, that’s what I say.”

Wordlessly I put my hand out, and she took it. She moved well for a woman of her bulk, not gracefully, but with neat efficiency. The blue eyes were as shrewd as they were beautiful. I saw them darken a little, as if with concern, as she glanced from my face to Mary’s.

“I come up to see if you were ready for some coffee. I just made it fresh. Some hot doughnuts, too. Mary needs fattening up. I suppose you’re on a diet, like all the girls, but you just forget about that for a while. You could stand some flesh yourself. Ran said if he wasn’t back by seven we should go ahead and eat, but that’s a long while from now. Never mind about them clothes, I’ll put ’em away for you later. Come and drink your coffee while it’s hot.”

She swept Mary off, and I followed them down the stairs, half hearing Mrs. Willard’s voice as she talked about the doughnuts, the menu for dinner, the prospect of Ran’s arriving in time to eat it, the weather—heaven only knows what other subjects she covered. I was preoccupied with my own thoughts. Among them was relief. God knows what I might have blurted out but for the fortuitous appearance of the Willards. This was worse than I had imagined. This was bad, so bad that it had to be handled with infinite care. A surge of anger rose up as I thought of William Graham. Why hadn’t he warned me of this? And how could he possibly mistake an obsession of this sort for spoiled petulance? Even I could see how dangerous this was. And I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to respond to it. I had to know more. I had to talk to Ran.

But as the day wore on, I began to have sec
ond thoughts. Was it possible that Dr. Graham didn’t know of Mary’s delusion—that it was a new development? For the rest of the afternoon her behavior was absolutely normal. She was edgy and easily tired; it would have been obvious even to a stranger that she had been ill. But there was not the slightest suggestion of serious abnormality. If I hadn’t known better, I might have wondered whether I had imagined that single, shocking speech. But I knew I hadn’t imagined it.

The behavior of the Willards confirmed my uneasiness. They were omnipresent. When we went outside to look at the flowers, Jed hovered—raking, pruning, picking up twigs—always within sight. When we went back in, there was Mrs. Willard suggesting a tour of the house. It was logical that she would be the guide; she had been with the family for years, whereas the house and the family history were almost as unfamiliar to Mary as they were to me. And yet…

Mrs. Willard confirmed my hunch about the age of the house. And it was then that I first heard the name that was to assume such ominous meaning to me.

“The Captain built it real handsome,” she said. “They tore a lot of the carvings off, later on. Why, they say in his day it was as pretty a house as that Wedding Cake House over to Kennebunk.”

I caught Mary’s eye and managed to keep my face sober.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I remember seeing a picture of the Wedding Cake House.”

I remembered it; no one who had ever seen it could possibly forget it—much as he might like to. The Kennebunk house had been reproduced in my art-history textbook as a horrible example of American Gothic run wild. But I wasn’t about to explain that, not when Mrs. Willard so obviously admired the style, and she took it for granted that I remembered the house because of its beauty.

“It was the Captain’s son that did a lot of the damage,” she said. Her tone was so actively resentful that it came to me with a shock that the Captain’s son must have been dead for almost a century. “They do say he even wanted to tear down the tower. But the builder warned him the whole middle section of the roof might fall in if he did.”

“What a shame,” I said. “That he—er—damaged the house. But surely this part wasn’t built by the Captain? It must be older.”

We were on the second floor of the central section, looking down the hall from my room. The major bedrooms were on this corridor and the cross-corridor that connected with it. There were eight bedrooms, and I knew by their proportions and the shapes of the mantels, as well as the beau
tiful old hand-pegged floors, that they had been built in an earlier and more beauty-loving era than the Captain’s.

“Yes, this was the Old House,” Mrs. Willard agreed. “The Captain bought it in 1826, after he made his fortune. He had it rebuilt for his bride. She was a Barnes from Boston and she had to have a fine house.”

To my shame I had never heard of the Barneses of Boston, but I gathered from Mrs. Willard’s tone that they ranked up there with the Cabots. So I nodded, looking impressed, and Mrs. Willard, encouraged by my interest, continued her lecture.

“He had these rooms furnished much nicer than they are right now. The master bedroom—that’s the one Ran and Mary have—had a beautiful big carved wood mantel. They took that down in 1930, when old Mr. Max did a lot of remodeling.”

I could imagine the kind of overmantel which old Mr. Max had scrapped, restoring the beautifully simple Adam-style mantel with its carved bas-reliefs and French tile facing. It was clear that the house owed its present charm to Mr. Max. He had torn out many of the Victorian embellishments and put back into use the older furniture which his ancestors had relegated to the attic.

“He must have been quite a guy,” I said.

Mary nodded.

“He was Ran’s grandfather; Ran remembers
him quite well. I knew you’d like the house, Jo. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it.”

“I never knew Ran owned this place.”

“He didn’t until recently. His great-aunts lived here. The last of them died in March. There was some kind of silly family quarrel, something to do with his mother’s remarriage—the aunts didn’t approve. Ran never expected to see the place again after he and his mother left. But the old lady repented on her deathbed and left him the house as a way of healing the feud.”

Mrs. Willard said briskly,

“And high time, too. Such nonsense…Now down this way is the wing the Captain built on. We don’t use it, but I give it a good turning out every six months when my niece comes up.”

Mary was beginning to droop a little. Mrs. Willard noticed it, and hurried us through the next eight bedrooms, which were in the Captain’s “new” wing. I remember very little about them—only a conglomerate impression of rooms somber with drawn drapes and most of the furniture swathed in dust covers.

There was one thing I particularly wanted to see, and when Mrs. Willard said she had better go down and start dinner, I protested.

“We haven’t seen the tower. I have a strange weakness for towers.”

“It’s too much for Mary,” Mrs. Willard said. “All those stairs.”

“I think I will lie down for half an hour or so,” Mary said. “But you go ahead, Jo. I know you love exploring. You can’t get lost.”

I didn’t exactly get lost. At any point I could have retraced my steps. But there were times when I’d have been hard put to it to explain exactly where I was. The place was like a badger’s warren.

And there was an additional element, one that made the ensuing hour a time I’ll never forget. It was a Looking-Glass feeling, a sensation of having stepped through into another dimension or another time; as if there were two houses on that same spot, existing simultaneously, yet separated from one another by an indescribable gulf. The rooms on the lower floors were lovely, charming, warm—habitable rooms, where real people talked and ate and slept and did all the normal, real things. The upper floors were cut off by more than a flight of stairs. Up there it was hard to imagine that there was life anywhere for a dozen miles.

I found a ballroom on the third floor—the biggest, dustiest, most echoing vault of a room I had ever seen. Even my imagination, which is pretty good, couldn’t people that vast desolation
with laughing guests, with music or the swaying forms of ghostly dancers. The other rooms on that floor were good-sized, but not as elegant as the ones below. I assumed that the majority of them were extra guest rooms which had been used only when the family gave big parties. One suite was different. It must have been the children’s area—day nursery, night nursery, and the bedroom of the governess or nanny. There was very little furniture left in place anywhere on this floor, but the faded wallpaper in one room had a design of rabbits and ducks, and the battered condition of floors and walls suggested generations of pounding feet, bouncing balls, and crayon murals.

The sight of those rooms made me a little melancholy, and as I went on, still searching for stairs that would lead to the tower, I found myself thinking of the children who had lived in this house over its many years. Ran had been one of them. Surely they hadn’t put him up in those dreary rooms, not with the house so empty. Children of earlier eras had not had an easy life; to be seen and not heard was the rule, and upper-class parents made darned good and sure the little darlings weren’t even seen any oftener than was absolutely necessary. They lived apart with the servants; sleeping, playing, eating by themselves. Animal crackers and cocoa to drink, with nurse standing by; Mother and Daddy dine later,
in state. It sounded delightful—in the poem. Maybe it was. Maybe children really were happier out of the adult world with its incomprehensible demands and strict rules. But the poem hadn’t been written by a child, it had been written by a grown-up, under the effect of the useful amnesia that makes adults think of childhood as a happy time—forgetting the loneliness, the uncertainty, the fear.

The fourth-floor corridor was even drearier than the third. Here were the servants’ quarters and the vast attics. The drab paint on the walls had been cream-colored once; now it was mottled and stained by time, and the floorboards squealed as I walked along, leaving the prints of my feet in the dust. The electricity was working, but many bulbs had burned out and never been replaced. They were bare bulbs; no fixtures, not up here, where the lower classes lived. The light they cast was an ugly light, at once sharp and inadequate, leaving great hollows of shadow in between. That long, narrow, barren hallway with its rows of closed doors was a nasty place. I found myself wondering what might be hidden behind those doors.

When I finally found a small stairway going up from the fourth floor, I discovered that it led not to the tower but to the cupola. I had almost forgotten there was one, and I scrambled up the
stairs with renewed interest. The steps were narrow and steep but quite solid, and the room they led to was a curious place.

It was small, about ten feet square, and completely empty except for dust. The walls on all four sides were solid glass.

There wasn’t much to see outside, only the vast, encompassing darkness of the trees that surrounded the house. In the west the sunset spread bars of bright color across the sky, but the vault above was already filled with stars. There was no moon; it had not yet risen. I promised myself that I would come up again during the day. The cupola rose up above the trees like a lighthouse out of a waste of water; the view by daylight must be quite spectacular. Possibly I would be able to see beyond the island, out across the rolling water of the ocean. I wondered, romantically, whether the Captain’s wife had stood here watching for the first sight of his sails. There were widows’ walks in many of the big houses along this coast; this vantage point might have served the same purpose. With sea voyages lasting a year or more, they were lonely times for the wives who stayed behind. Sometimes the vigil never ended, as some woman watched for a sail that had gone down, unseen and without survivors, beneath the stormy waves of another ocean.