Читать книгу Dream House - Catherine Armsden - Страница 9
ОглавлениеMake a place in the house...which is kept locked and secure; a place which is virtually impossible to discover...a place where the archives of the house or other more potent secrets might be kept.
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
By the end of Tuesday, Gina’s parents’ fifteen-year-old VW station wagon was fully packed for the dump. Gina loaded the skunk between the centerboard from a long-gone family boat and several faded bolts of paisley cloth, vintage 1970. She had just put the key in the ignition when Cassie popped out of the house and said, “Damn, the skunk!”
“Tuesday’s dead animal day,” Gina said.
“Yeah, but I just remembered the dump closes at three-thirty on Tuesdays.”
Gina dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She’d slept only five hours last night and was vibrating with fatigue and frustration. After a few moments, she climbed out of the car and gazed up at the promising blue sky. The weather had no rules, she thought; there could be a sudden thaw, and she would be able to bury the skunk.
Back in the house, Gina stood above the two-foot-by-two-foot opening in the attic and lowered down boxes covered with dust and bits of tar from a sloppy roofing job to Cassie. At least thirty of the boxes were filled with photographs and negatives from their father’s commercial photography business that he’d operated from home; others held the artifacts of their childhood. Cassie and Gina carried them down to the living room, leaving a trail of black behind them.
“Check this out,” Cassie said, pulling something framed from a box. She turned it for Gina to see. “My junior year French award. And...” She reached her other hand into the box. “Ta-da! The Miss Andrews Academy Award.”
“Pretty hot stuff,” Gina said.
Cassie laid the documents back in the box. “Yeah, well, I remember Mom told me back then not to have them out for people to see because it was too braggy.”
“I’m sure. But she bragged about us to other people.”
“Only when we weren’t around to enjoy it. Remember how she’d say, ‘Don’t let it go to your head’? Have you ever, even once, said that to one of your kids? She called it ‘being modest’, but I think she was just jealous.”
Cassie’s insight was knife-sharp. Their mother was impossible—not just volatile, but childish and manipulative. Gina had always been reluctant to share achievements with her. Now she wondered: how could a mother feel competitive with her children? She’d always hoped that Esther and Ben would surpass her in feeling fulfilled in life.
“Not to mention,” Cassie said with a snicker, “she hated that boys liked us.”
A foghorn blew. “Nubble Light, five o’clock,” Cassie said. “Time to drink.”
She went into the kitchen and called, “Damn! I wanted to pick up some wine.” Gina heard the jangle of bottle openers that hung on the door of the tiny liquor cabinet in the bottom of what had once been the water heater closet. “Vodka, gin, scotch, and vermouth. How about a martini?”
“Sounds good,” Gina answered, though she didn’t like martinis. She was beginning to feel as if her older sister was the host and keynote speaker of a days-long event at which Gina was a guest.
Gina stood and shifted to the living room window that framed the cove and harbor. The window! She’d forgotten, during these brooding, interior days, the escape it offered. Their mother had dreamed of replacing the one double-hung sash with glass doors. But Gina had always thought the narrow window made the experience of viewing the waterscape more intimate and poignant because, when standing at it, there was only room for one. The tide was high, and in the late afternoon light, the cove was a gloomy gray. Trees on the shoreline hadn’t yet leafed out, but already someone was sailing a small boat from the harbor. Gina wished she were that sailor, but she was lost on a sea of boxes in a house that seemed far from home.
With Cassie still distracted in the kitchen, she decided to take her phone into the piano room to sneak in a call to Paul.
“I have a call to make before my next appointment, so I can’t really talk,” Paul said, when she reached him. “We’re all fine. Esther’s quiet but seems engaged with school again. Check in later if you want to talk to her. You okay?”
Gina reported that she was and said goodbye, missing her kids even more than before the call.
In the kitchen, Cassie gave Gina’s arm a playful pinch. “You’re such a helicopter mom! You have to stop this before your kids are teenagers. All the attention you give them might backfire.”
Cassie had hit a nerve—Paul, too, often accused her of hovering over the kids. “Do you eavesdrop on your kids, too?” she said, regretting that she’d taken Cassie’s bait. She opened the refrigerator and looked at the date on a bottle of green olives. “The olives expired a year and a half ago.”
“Olives never go bad,” Cassie said.
Gina chose to believe her about the olives. But while Cassie finished making the martinis, she plucked old jars of mayonnaise, mustard, jelly, pickles, ketchup, marmalade, salad dressing, chutney, and capers out of the refrigerator door and set them in the sink. “Do we have to recycle all these, or are we exempt, under the circumstances?”
“Save the skunks,” Cassie said, pointing to the garbage can.
She handed Gina the martini and they returned to the living room where Cassie took stock. “Well? There are the portraits and the Civil War weapons, books, and some good silver here that would be more valuable melted down. Not all that much.”
Silently, they continued sorting through boxes; for Gina, the martini created a pleasant haze between her and their situation.
When the landline rang, it startled them both. Cassie jumped up to get it.
“Annie!” she said into the phone, “Yes, we’re buried. Okay, sure, thank you—we’d love to. See you soon.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go to Lily House,” Gina said, thinking, I certainly don’t.
Cassie slugged the last of her drink. “I’ve had a martini. Things look different.”
Gina and Cassie drove past the stone wall built by the Historical Society to buffer Lily House from the road. At the end of it, a modest sign hung from a post.
Lily House
Home of Sidney Banton
Built 1785
Open to the Public
(By appointment only)
In her mind, Gina saw her mother shake her head at the sign with disapproval.
Cassie sighed as she pulled into Lily House’s driveway. Though it was more than a hundred years older than the rental, it was evident that the generous-sized Georgian colonial, with its bright yellow clapboards, black shutters, and welcoming wide porch, had been much better cared for.
As the sisters climbed the porch steps, Cassie asked, “When was the last time you were here?”
Gina tried to answer but her breath caught in her throat.
“Cassie! Gina!” Annie beamed when she opened the door. “Lester? They’ve come!”
Annie wrapped an arm around Cassie and then Gina, reeling each of them in for a hug. Gina felt small and limp next to her. At five-foot-nine, Annie was eleven inches taller than Gina’s mother, and Gina always imagined those inches balanced the power in their friendship. When Annie pulled back from them, she wiped tears from her eyes. “Oh, you girls,” she said.
Lester appeared at the end of the hall with a broad smile. “Well, well! Cassie and Ginny! How wonderful!” He made his way toward them on one metal crutch, his companion since childhood polio.
“Gina,” Annie corrected Lester. “She hasn’t been Ginny in years.”
Cassie grabbed Gina’s wrist and squeezed. “Wow, it’s exactly as I remember it!” she exclaimed, stepping into the living room ahead of Annie and Lester.
The darkness that had enveloped Gina all week suddenly deepened. The last time she’d been in Lily House was thirty-five years ago, the day her Aunt Fran committed suicide here. That the arrangement of furnishings had been frozen in time by the Historical Society seemed macabre. She tried to maintain the slight blur from the martini to keep her mind skittering along the surface of things.
But Cassie’s big eyes widened. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “I think I remember every single thing in here. The Shaker chairs . . . the gorgeous tea set? It was Martha Washington’s.” She ran a finger along the belly of the teapot. “And the lolling chair that George Washington sat in when he came here,” she said, her hand brushing the velvet seat. “We never got to sit in it because it was always ‘Fran’s chair.’”
“Welcome to your family museum!” Lester said. “We’d love to entertain you here in the living room but it’s off-limits, of course—no sitting allowed.”
They followed him into what Gina remembered her mother calling the “piano room,” though now it was clear to her that it had been built as a library. “This is Annie’s and my living room.”
“So which rooms can you and Lester actually use?” Gina asked.
Lester explained they used the piano room, the large kitchen, and as their dining room, the sunroom. They slept in the “summer ell,” an addition off the kitchen that originally had been built for summer guests but had since been winterized.
“How about a glass of wine?” Annie offered. Gina was about to say, no, thank you, but Cassie said, “We’d kill for a glass of wine!”
Cassie winked at Gina, and Gina resigned herself to whatever Cassie had in mind. At least she’d always liked Annie and Lester. When she was young, she’d recognized them as unusual: a mother with a profession playing violin in the Maine Symphony, a father who worked as a high school guidance counselor. Both tall, they filled a room, and in their frequent visits to her family’s house, Gina felt their physical presence like old, comfortable furniture as much as family friends. She’d memorized Annie’s big, arty necklaces and her perfume, Lester’s tweedy sweaters and his penny loafers—exotic, because her father had never owned a pair—and their party drinks: Annie—gin and tonic, Lester—Michelob beer. They’d loved her father’s puns and her mother’s cheese soufflé. Their two sons, now in Alaska and Boston, were quite a bit older than Gina and hadn’t been around much when she was growing up.
“Dearies, how’s everything going over there?” Annie asked when she returned with the wine. “You poor things. Is everything set for the funeral? What can we do to help?”
“It’s an unholy mess!” Cassie said. She described the house cleaning in detail, including the adventures with the dead skunk, but not, Gina noted, the discovery of Martha Washington’s hair or George’s cloak piece. While Cassie chattered, uneasiness rolled through Gina as she imagined memories, nested wasp-like in these walls, ready to swarm.
“Gina?”
Annie stood over her with a wine bottle. Gina looked at her wine goblet and seeing it was empty said, “No, thank you.” Annie refilled Cassie’s glass.
“There’s something different about this room,” Gina said.
“Wow, the architect speaks!” Lester laughed. “You don’t miss a trick. We moved the piano some. In the summer, the sun coming in that window was murder on the instrument.”
Below the bookshelves, under the piano, were panels that Gina knew were actually secret cabinets where toys had always been kept. She thought about those toys now: wooden animals, small sailboat models, an old doll with one arm missing; her fingers itched to touch them. She stood, realizing the alcohol had gone to her head. “Would it be okay if I ...” she laughed. “I just can’t resist.” She ducked under the piano and slid on her knees to the wall where the panels were. She knew just how to press them to make them slide open.
“What the heck, Gina?” Cassie said. “Oh, are you looking for the toys?”
Gina opened each of the three doors and peeked inside: empty. “They’re not there,” she said, feeling ridiculous.
“Your ancestor Banton was a secretive guy,” Lester said. “That’s not the only hiding place he had.”
Cassie gasped and jumped from her chair. “Did you find the Washington letters?” she shouted.
Mortified, Gina crawled out from under the piano, bumping her head as she tried to stand. Did Annie and Lester know about the Washington letters? she wondered. Their mother had always told them they were a secret. As George Washington’s private secretary, Sidney Banton had supposedly hidden some important letters of the first president’s in Lily House.
“No, no,” Annie said. “Good heavens! You’ll be the first to know if we find the Washington letters.”
Cassie’s flushed face sagged with disappointment. As if possessed, she walked the perimeter of the room, pressing on the panels of the wainscoting.
“Over here,” Lester said, squeezing behind the piano bench. “Take a look.” Placing both palms on one of the wall panels, he easily slid it to the side, revealing a cavity about eighteen inches wide.
Cassie and Gina peered into the compartment. “This must’ve been where Sidney Banton hid all the important stuff he had of George Washington’s,” Cassie said when Lester had closed the panel. “How come Mom never told us about it?”
“She said she didn’t know it was there,” Lester explained. “I think it must’ve been because the piano was up against it all those years. The Historical Society people knew about it, though.”
“And Sid dropped in maybe six months ago, and he knew about it,” Annie added.
“Sid Banton?” Cassie said. “What was he doing here?”
Sid, Fran’s son, was Gina and Cassie’s only cousin, eight years Gina’s senior.
“He’s thinking of moving back to Whit’s Point. I would imagine he was interested in checking in on the house where he grew up.”
Gina detected sarcasm in Lester’s remark, and no wonder. She and Cassie must have seemed more than a little drunk—off the wall. In the awkward silence that followed, the angry voices of Gina’s mother, Sid, and Fran pushed into Gina’s head; she nearly turned to see if they’d come into the room.
“Fran and Sid must’ve taken everything in that hiding place,” Cassie said, as if she, too, had heard ghosts. “Including the Washington letters.”
Lester smiled. “Well, now that’s funny, because Sid thinks you two must have those letters,” he said.
“What?” Cassie’s face looked ready to pop. “He’s so full of it! The Bantons were all liars and loose cannons!”
Gina touched Cassie’s arm to stop her from unleashing more. She felt the constriction of memories, of night pressing in, of wishing and wanting for things that couldn’t be had.
“Will you stay and have some leftover chicken?” Annie asked.
Gina raced Cassie to answer. “Thank you, Annie, but we’ve got a lot to do at the house before the funeral and should get going.”
As the four of them walked to the front door, Cassie’s eyes swept over the room and she sighed. “Mom always wanted to live here,” she said.
“Oh no,” Annie said. “I don’t think that’s true. Not always.”
Lester opened the door, and Cassie and Gina stepped out. “Listen, you two,” Annie said, “I want you to come back, anytime. Don’t be strangers.”
In the driveway, Gina took the car keys from Cassie and had the thought that this was another last: the last time she’d be at Lily House. Like all the other lasts this week, she put it in a box that would sit until she dared to open it.
When they got back to the house, Gina put some water on to boil for pasta, and they went back to work, numbly sorting through the things from the attic.
“Did you see Sid’s stuff?” Cassie pointed at a box, and Gina reached over and pulled out a model airplane labeled “WW2 P 51.” Underneath it were more boy toys—a book about military uniforms, a filthy baseball, and a photograph of their mother beaming at a young Sid, holding the tiller of their O Boat. In his smiling boyish face, she saw the flash of hurt she remembered about him, the long dark eyebrows so arched they could suspend a bridge. She held up the picture for Cassie to see.
“Mom was obsessed with him,” Cassie sneered.
Gina knew that after a couple of drinks, Cassie wouldn’t be able to let the subject of Sid drop; she couldn’t stand him. Their mother had adored Sid as a little boy. He was two when she became pregnant with Cassie, and she was so sure she was carrying a boy that she’d never picked out a girl’s name. She let this bit of information slip in front of Cassie when she was thirteen, establishing a life-long resentment.
“Sid lived with us for a while, you know,” Cassie said. “But Mom never told us why. She taught him to sail, not me, because he was a boy.”
“Cass, he looks like he was about nine. She taught him and not you because you were, like, six.”
“Right. Do you suppose he’ll show up at the funeral?”
Gina shrugged. “Probably. They were his only aunt and uncle.”
Cassie groaned, and Gina filled with dread too; she had her own awful memory of Sid. She was ten when she last saw him at Fran’s funeral, where he was cloaked in black and Banton enmity. “You must speak to Sid,” her mother had coached her, squeezing her hand. But after everything that had happened, Gina couldn’t bear to even look at him.
“I can’t believe he had the gall to tell Annie and Lester he thinks we have the Washington letters,” Cassie said. “It can’t be a coincidence that he got into the antiques business in New York—he probably funded it by selling family stuff from Lily House.”
The thought that family fighting over things like the Washington letters could go on for another generation made Gina’s stomach hurt. “You never know,” she said. “Maybe Mom’s the one who was lying about who had what.”
“Well we know she wasn’t above lying,” Cassie said.
Gina felt suddenly that her time with Cassie at the house, taxed enough by grim circumstances, was churning into a downward spiral. She resolved not to entertain any more negative commentary about their mother or any other family member.
Reaching into a bag full of Christmas tree ornaments, she pulled out a box containing an angel made of glass with a delicate halo and lacy wire wings. Every year, the girls had taken turns climbing up to place her at the top of the tree. Gina was about to remark on its loveliness when Cassie crowed, “Look! It’s the angel with nine lives! Veteran of Christmas wars! God! Mom found a way to ruin every Christmas! She just had to have a fight with somebody. Fran. Or Dad. Or me. Whoever.” She began to laugh. A soft, gurgling laugh that slowly swelled to a whoop.
Her laughter seemed impetuous and was so forceful, Gina felt an almost physical sensation of being pushed away. “Cassie, you’re drunk!”
Cassie slapped Gina’s knee. “Imagine just canceling Christmas on your kids! It’s so awful it’s hilarious!” She laughed harder, rocking back and forth on the rug, tears streaking her cheeks. “Was that the last time you were at Lily House? The year of the Christmas-that-never-was? Or did you forget—remember your wall-of-forgetting?”
Gina felt the strength drain out of her. Cassie was right—that was the last time Gina had been at Lily House. But it was Cassie who seemed to have forgotten—maybe because she’d been away, happily skiing with a friend—that the canceled Christmas had come on the heels of Fran’s suicide.
Cassie was still tittering. “Stop!” Gina yelled. “Please stop!” She flushed with heat as if she were wrapped in plastic. “We need some fresh air in here!” She lurched to the window and flung up the sash. “Shit!”
“The storm windows are still on,” Cassie said. She slumped onto the couch. “I’m sorry. It’s because of all the work fixing the shed roof. I was up here fifteen weekends this year, and we only got the ones upstairs off. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing!” Gina snapped. “It doesn’t matter—it’s not our house!”
“Oh,” Cassie said, “It’s just that . . . you’re hardly ever here and now there’ll be no reason for you to come east.” To Gina, Cassie looked a lot like their mother right now, her body sunken into the couch cushions, tears that turned her big eyes into glittery martyr jewels.
“Don’t be silly! I’ll come to see you in Providence.”
“It’s just not the same. Here . . . now . . . without the house.”
“Cass, stop! What’re you saying? You’ve always griped about coming to Maine. And anyway, we were miserable here. Admit it. You’re as finished with the house as I am.” Her eyes stung with the uncertainty of this stern pronouncement.
The ship’s clock chimed, followed by the groan of a lighthouse and for the first time, Cassie didn’t announce which one. She stood and slinked into the kitchen.
With a shaking hand, Gina carefully laid the glass angel in its wooden box. When she heard Cassie draining the pasta, she joined her, and they sat down and plowed through their dinner, topping it off with Fig Newtons. After they’d washed the dishes, Cassie fell asleep on the living room couch. At nine thirty, Gina, hardly able to keep her eyes open, dragged herself upstairs to bed.
As on previous nights, she felt utterly alone in her father’s bed. She pictured Esther and Ben, reassuring herself that somewhere, she still belonged to someone, and reached for her phone on the nightstand. She had to tell Esther that she’d never again leave her in her time of need, if she could possibly help it.
“Aw, I forgot she was going to have dinner at Julia’s,” Paul said, when Gina asked to speak to Esther. “How’d the rest of the day go?”
Gina described their visit with Annie and Lester, but her conversations with Cassie felt too convoluted to talk about. “I wanted to prepare Esther for the funeral,” she said. “I’m afraid she’ll feel . . . I just . . . I hate not being there with her now.”
“You can’t be in two places at the same time,” Paul said. “Esther knows that. And I’m here.” He took a breath. “Gina . . .”
In his protracted pause, Gina heard everything he wanted to say: you worry too much . . . you don’t have to be the perfect mom . . . it’s okay for them to grapple. Things he’d told her over and over again, but she didn’t buy.
“You need to worry about yourself,” he said now. “Right? If you’re very anxious, how about taking the Xanax I gave you?”
She was too exhausted to call him on his paternal tone. “No,” she said. “Whatever. Just tell Esther she can get ahold of me anytime if she wants.”
After they’d hung up, Gina thought about how attending to her children always made her feel strong. Now, feeling small and vulnerable in her childhood room, she realized that comforting her children soothed the confused and inconsolable child within herself. Was there something wrong with that? With her? Maybe Paul was right: she needed to find a different way to ease her anxiety
She lay awake for an hour, listening as Cassie locked the front door and thumped upstairs to bed. When the house was silent, she tossed in her father’s exile bed for a few more minutes until she could stand it no more. There was no way self-comforting was going to happen in this bed, in this room, in this house!
She jumped out of bed, shivering with a violence a blanket wouldn’t fix, and crept into Cassie’s room. “Can I sleep with you?” she asked.
Cassie slid over in the double bed, and Gina climbed in beside her as she had so many times before.
“You’re shaking,” Cassie said. “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to sleep in there?” She caressed Gina’s shoulder, and they were both quiet for a while. Finally, Cassie said, “I’m sorry about earlier. You know, it’s different for me, being in this house. I couldn’t have spent so much time here if I hadn’t had a couple of blowouts with Mom. It’s why I can laugh about it all and you can’t.”
Gina rolled onto her side, her back to Cassie. Since they were very young, the sisters had bonded over struggles with their mother; now, the distinction Cassie had made caused Gina to feel even more isolated. The defenses she’d been keeping up for days were weakening. But she wouldn’t let them; there was still too much to get through. When Cassie hugged Gina close and cried, her warm, minty breath puffing into Gina’s back, Gina sensed that although her sister claimed to have “let it go,” her shuddering was not just about the sudden death of their parents—though that would be enough—but also a mourning for what had come before, here in the house.
In the sagging bed, Gina was alone on an island in the dark, dreary night with the one person who understood.
Cassie stopped crying and rolled over. Soon, her icy cold feet found their way to Gina’s calves, as they always had when they slept together as girls.
Gina folded the pillow over her head. When Cassie said something, she peeled it away. “What?”
“You haven’t cried the whole time we’ve been here.”
Gina had felt the tears, swelling inside her. What Cassie didn’t know—because Gina hadn’t yet found the words for it—was that even before their abrupt and monumental loss, something else had been stealing from her, something more insidious and stealthy. “I can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
“You still always sleep with a pillow wrapped around your head?”
“Yup.”
“I’m sorry you ended up with the bedroom next to Mom’s.”
“It’s not your fault.”
