The Good Neighbor (9 page)

son, Lincoln—survivor of the runaway-horse incident—inherited the farm and house.

When Lincoln was put into the nursing home where he would witness the last significant event of his lifetime, he passed the house on to Helen, his oldest daughter, a beautiful woman with a taste for cruel men. Helen attempted to sell the old place several times, but she found, to her consternation, that she couldn’t. There was no explanation for it; her hand simply refused to sign the papers, time and again, until realtors and bankers began to re gard her as eccentric and manipulative. She couldn’t have known it was the pull of the old children’s cemetery, now forgotten and hidden by undergrowth, that prevented her. It still exerted its in fluence on all who shared Musgrove blood, like a small moon over a private sea. It would not be abandoned.

Instead, Helen had Adencourt remodeled. The house had never been glorious or beautiful; it had merely been new, once. She tried to recapture that state as much as she could, replacing rotted wood and shoring up the first floor from the basement, fumigat ing for termites, repainting, reroofing, adding drywall in some rooms, and modernizing the plumbing and electrical works that had been added around the turn of the century.

This, as it turned out, was the major task of Helen’s life. She would never accomplish anything more useful than this. She was not the marrying sort, though it took her several tries to find that out. She wasn’t the mothering sort, either. It’s pleasant to think that an angel came to Helen one night and whispered warnings in her ear, that if she procreated, her children would be violent and hungry, that they would be a plague on the world, and that as a result, she denied her urge to reproduce; but there are no indica tions that the world works this way. Everything seems to be a strange blend of free will and chance, and it was this heady mix ture that led Helen to make one last bad decision about a man who beat her to death in a SoHo hotel room one night. She was in her fifties then, near the same age her great-grandmother Marly

The Good Neighbor 61

had been when she was trampled.
She should have been home baking a pie and knitting, not lying in a pool of her own blood with a stomach full of Scotch
. This is what was said by one of the cops who helped lift her body, who noted in her a resemblance to his own mother, and was disturbed by it.

The year was 1975. For the first time in nearly a century and a quarter, the Musgrove house stood empty. It was not a showpiece house, but it was big. It was haunted by kind, anonymous spirits, the sort who merely watch, curious and lonely, never making a sound or disturbing anything. For a handful of years, the ghosts had the run of the place, until, like the old Captain, they began to grow bored, and slowly dissipated. The energy of the house and grounds experienced a brief surge whenever someone stopped to look, as though it were desperate to be lived in again. This was, in fact, the case. A house is like a person in this respect. It must be useful, or it dies. But finally Adencourt began to dim, like a candle drowning in its own wax, until the day the Harts showed up and peered in the windows. Francie thought she could almost cer tainly see things getting brighter inside before her very eyes, though she attributed that to the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Coltrane was already too busy calculating mortgage rates in his head to notice anything of the sort.

Part Two
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6
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The Prescription

C
oltrane and Francie did not prepare to leave New York until more than two months later. By then it was late November, and

the weather had turned cold, threatening dire punishment on faithful and faithless alike. The bank had accepted Colt’s first of fer for the Pennsylvania house, with no attempt at negotiation— even though he’d deliberately underbid. Colt was surprised by this, and even a little suspicious, but not so Francie.

“It’s proof the universe wants us to own it,” she said, delighted. “I knew it was going to work out like this! I just knew it.”

“It’s proof there must be something wrong with it,” Colt said. “Think for a minute. It’s been sitting empty for twenty-five years. Why wouldn’t someone else have bought it by now?”

“Because it was waiting for us,” Francie said. “Why do you al ways have to look for a reason for everything?”

“Because there
is
a reason for everything. Things don’t just hap pen by themselves, Francie. They happen because something made them happen.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sang. “It’s ours, and I love it.”

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OWALSKI

She looked around at the apartment that they had shared for the past nine years. It had grown so cluttered with things that it was nearly impossible for a person to move: a dining room table that was far too big for their dining room; a credenza; a highboy; an overstuffed leather couch and chair; endless shelves of knick knacks and boxes of books that were all Francie’s, that had nowhere to live because the bookcases were already crammed full. When Colt had lived here alone, she remembered, he’d owned a couch, a bed, a television, and a refrigerator—nothing more. Man furniture. The place had looked like a gangster ’s hideout.

These were all things that Francie had bought whimsically, but she could see now that they were destined not for the apartment but for some unknown dream home that she must have sensed in her future. At least, it seemed that way to her now. Finally, she thought, we will have
room
. To celebrate, she’d put on an old party hat and draped herself in a string of Christmas lights from the coat closet. She stood now, treelike, festooned in blinking red and green. “I should have looked it over more carefully,” Colt grumbled, ig noring her antics—although he had, in fact, hired a building in spector to go over the house with a finetooth comb. The inspector had found nothing wrong, at least nothing that wouldn’t be ex pected in a house as old as that. The wiring and plumbing were all up to code; the structural supports were sound. The basement didn’t leak and there were no termites. It was going to need a lot of cosmetic work, but there was no reason they couldn’t go live in it tomorrow, if they wanted to. In fact, said the inspector, he’d never seen a house of similar age in better condition, and he’d seen plenty much worse. All of this had only deepened Francie’s con viction that the place had been waiting for them all along; but Colt, his instincts honed on stone and whetted with blood, was

waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Come on,” she said, holding out another string of lights. “Put these on. Let’s have a party.”

“You look ridiculous.”

The Good Neighbor 67

“
You
look ridiculous. Sitting there as though something was wrong, when there clearly isn’t. A person would think you’re up set, after getting such good news.”

“I can be upset if I want to.” “But what are you upset
about
?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to put on any damn Christmas lights.”

“Fine,” said Francie, unplugging herself from the wall. “Be a party pooper. Be a big old bucket of poo. All I care about is we got it, Coltrane. We got it!”

“Yes,” said Colt. “We got it, all right. The question is, what did we get?”

❚ ❚ ❚

Next day, Francie went furniture shopping for their new place, armed with a handful of sketches of what she wanted. This was something she was good at, picking out furniture. She had the ability to look at an empty room and envision it as it should be, sketching blank walls and filling them with interesting shapes, and then filling the shapes with furniture. It was almost as satis fying as writing a good poem, as long as she tried not to think about what a pathetic substitute it actually was. She went to a department store and purchased couches, coffee tables, chairs, a credenza, knickknacks, and a glass-fronted case to hold them. She bought an oversized wingback reading chair and a duvet cover. Af ter much wrangling, she succeeded in hiring—”bribing” was more accurate—the store’s deliverymen to bring everything all the way out to Pennsylvania, since there was certainly no room for any of it in New York. She was told it would arrive “soon.” In the lingua franca of furniture deliverymen, this meant sometime before all parties concerned were dead of old age, though there were not even any guarantees of that. Yet Francie knew it was best not to press for details, lest the deliverymen grow spiteful.

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ILLIAM
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OWALSKI

Colt was in favor of waiting for everything to arrive at the new house before they went back to it, since otherwise, as he pointed out, there wouldn’t even be anything to sit on. But Francie com plained that the walls of the city were beginning to close in on her. Besides, she was too excited. She didn’t think she could wait any longer, she said; they should take the extra furniture from the apartment out there now and get set up.

“Yeah, but to tell the truth I sort of saw this as a summer place,” Colt said. “To hang out in during nice weather. I mean . . . well, it’s gotten cold out.”

“Oh, I don’t see it as a summer place at
all
,” Francie said.

She was going through the receipts of her purchases, but she paused now, horrified at the thought that she might have to wait until spring to go back. Already she’d had dreams of herself out there in the wilds; she’d filled a notebook with drawings of the liv ing rooms, the parlors, and the den, all furnished in ten different styles apiece, from Louis Quinze to modern Scandinavian.

“Colt, are you serious? I thought... I mean, I
know
I could finally do some really good writing there. It’s such a... I don’t know, a
rich
place. Just thinking about it makes me feel productive!” she said.

“Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost to heat it? Houses like that are totally inefficient. Old windows. Bad insula tion,” Colt said.

“But . . . Colt!”

“Well, I’m just saying, is all. What are you so worked up about? That house has been sitting there for a hundred and fifty years, Francie. It’s not going anywhere before spring.”

How was she to explain it to him? In the short time the house had been theirs, ideas had started to come to her again. The well was beginning to fill once more. She could sense it, and for the first time in years she was beginning to get that old feeling again, the one she hadn’t had since her Golden Age. It was, quite simply, the feeling of being inspired, and that was not the kind of thing you put on hold until it was warm outside.

The Good Neighbor 69

“I sort of want to live there,” she said. “All the time, I mean.” Colt looked at her as if she was mad.

“You never said that,” he said.

“Didn’t I?” She was surprised at herself; it must have seemed so obvious that it hadn’t needed mentioning. “Colt, we . . . we
bought a house
. What did you think we were buying it for, if not to live in? At least part of the time?”

“A
vacation
place, Francie, for God’s sake,” he said. “For summer weekends and stuff. And to have people out there for parties.”

By “people,” Francie knew Colt meant “work people”: the tall, brittle men of finance and their brassy-voiced wives. She had a vi sion of the graceful driveway filling with expensive city cars, and of herself standing on the porch steps, a mink stole around her shoulders, a glass of bubbly in her hand, welcoming all with air kisses. Weekends of lawn bowling and adultery and feuding among the servants, ending with a good murder or two. No. More likely it would be loud alcoholic dinners and houseguests who didn’t rise before noon, with Colt bragging all the while about this and that to anyone who would listen and Francie hiding in her room with a book until everyone went home again. God, what a fate, she thought. With her unerring sense for compromise, she came up with a rapid plan on the spot.

“Let’s just go out there and get settled,” she said. “Clean the place up and organize everything. Spend a few days. Celebrate. Then we can come back to the city. This is a big deal, Colt. You’re due some vacation, aren’t you?”