And so it had proven over the years, with Tamara and, even more so, with Petra. Tamara had never given Rae an opening; that relationship was apparently beyond recovery. Petra, however … Within weeks of her birth, Petra became the battleground for a grim and completely unacknowledged struggle between an amused Don and a desperate Rae. Tamara, to give her credit, stayed out of it, but Don had mastered the art of using Rae’s love for the child to keep his mother-in-law in her place.
Tamara’s rigid spine and Petra’s waving arm on board the Orca Queen said it all. And for that wave, Rae would give everything.
The new resident of Folly looked down and realized that she had continued picking up garbage unawares, and that her glove was currently gripping a flaccid, mud-caked condom. With an exclamation of disgust she flicked it into the bag, then stripped off the glove and threw it in after. With fastidious fingers she tied shut the top of the bag, dropping it in the lee of the lumber pile, and went back to the fire to scrub her hands with a lot of soap. Then she returned to her interrupted meal.
The chili was scorched into the bottom of the pan.
As Rae scraped the edible portions onto a plate, her awareness of how alone she was continued to grow. She began to feel like a pea on a platter. As she turned to carry her dinner over to the chair, the corner of her eye caught on a motion and she jerked upright—but it was only the wavelets on her beach, no cause for her heart to race so wildly. She sat with her back close to the tent wall and picked at the scorched red mess, feeling invisible eyes crawling up and down the back of her neck like some many-legged creature. Or like a man’s fingers. She put her head down, forced her hand to lift the fork, forced her attention to remain on the food, demanded that her mouth eat it and her stomach receive it. Most of it. She was scraping the uneaten remnants into the flames when the dish slipped from her nerveless fingers into the coals; in snatching it up, Rae brushed her hand against the searing metal grill.
With a sob of fury she hurled the plate into the bushes and cradled her hand to her chest, eyes tight shut. The drugs in her knapsack called to her, but she had other plans for them. Instead, she rummaged furiously through the boxes of equipment piled near the tent until she came to the heavy leather brush-clearing gloves. With her blistered thumb in her mouth and the gloves in the undamaged hand, Rae stalked up the hill to her foundation.
Two
Desmond Newborn’s
Journal
June 27, 1921
There are times, rare and precious times, when we lowly creatures are vouchsafed a glimpse of Providence at work, the sure knowledge that there is a machinery connecting the disparate fragments of our lives, binding ugly to lovely, despair to rejoicing
How else to explain the train of events that brought me here? Overheard snatches of conversation in a bleak railway yard, my very presence there traced directly back through the events in Boston to the hell of the Western Front, and before that the strange urges that drove me to uniform in the first place: all linked, all the decisions, foolish, well intentioned, and wicked alike, all the accidents, both the sweet and the bitter, leading me in a most circuitous pathway to this place.
I stood today with my boots planted on the rocky entrance to a piece of land rising from an amiable sea, and I began to feel a most peculiar sensation, as if I were waking following a long and terrible dream. Or it may be that I am, in truth, sinking into a midsummer night’s dream on an enchanted isle.
If that be so, I pray God I may never wake.
Three
The house that had once stood on these stones was built by Rae’s great-uncle in the 1920s. Desmond Newborn, younger son of a wealthy Boston family, had read the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, embraced their romantic idealism of protecting England from the Kaiser, and sailed off to London in the summer of 1915 to enlist in the British Army. He even went as a common foot soldier, without the officer’s rank his education and privilege would have bought him. He survived nearly three years of the carnage to be shipped home, alive but profoundly damaged, at the age of twenty-seven years. He was by then far, far older in spirit.
Rae was nine when she discovered that Grandfather William had once possessed a younger brother.
Had somebody merely told her, she would have laughed aloud at the very idea—a person might as well suggest that God had an auntie. Instead, Rae had compiled the unavoidable evidence on her own, beginning one morning when she was, as Cook called it, moping around the house. As often on days when she was left to her own devices, this spindly girl with sleeping problems and a habit of silence, she was drawn to Grandfather’s study. The warm, busy life of the house, particularly for a solitary child, might lie in the kitchen, but the true center of power was Grandfather’s study. If Rae were to be caught there, she knew the punishment would be severe, but it was worth the risk to stand in possession of that room, with its smell of cigars and strong drink and William himself.
It was not that there was much to do or see in the study. The books on the shelves were too thick to be of interest, the papers on the big desk incomprehensible, the two paintings dull. But climbing into Grandfather’s leather-upholstered desk chair was so daring it sent her heart racing, and a glimpse of the world from his side of the desk made her see herself differently.
Usually, she just touched his pen (careful never to move it), dandled her feet for a minute, tugged automatically at the locked drawers without expecting them to open, and crept away again.
Only this day, one of the drawers was open. Not much, just enough that the desk’s central latch had not caught it. Rae shot a glance at the door, then dropped to her knees to ease it all the way out.
More papers. How disappointing—but wait. Underneath the files was a lump, and lifting the edge of a slim ledger she saw a wood-handled revolver and a flat leather box. The gun she left in place, but the box was too intriguing to ignore. She took it out to lay it on the carpet, fiddled with the latch, and swung back the hinged top.
The box held a piece of metal with some faded ribbon attached, the sort of thing she’d seen Grandfather’s friends wear on their uniformed chests in the Veterans Day parade. And folded small, a piece of paper, some kind of official form, with spidery writing and the word “Enlistment” at the top. None of the words meant much to her other than “Boston, Massachusetts,” but she was greatly puzzled by the name it bore: Desmond Newborn.
There was nobody by that name in the Newborn family.
Studying the paper gave no further clues, so after a minute she folded it away, closed the drawer as it had been, and slipped out of the room.
Through judicious questioning, she found out from Cook what Enlistment meant, but there was only one way to learn who Desmond Newborn was. Years later it occurred to Rae that, given a more normal home life, she would have asked her parent; at the time, she never even thought of approaching anyone but Grandfather; William Newborn was, after all, the source of all power, every decision, all authority. And if the question was as important as she felt it might be, everyone else would consult William before answering her anyway.
She knew the risks, or thought she did. It was never an easy matter to approach Grandfather, no knowing if he would respond with his standard brusque but dutiful paternalism or something darker or more violent.
In this case, his reaction was violent indeed; in fact, she had never seen him react as he did to her innocent question. No sooner had she pronounced the strange name than William rose to his terrible height and stormed around the desk to roar down into her face, lashing her with a fury of words more terrifying than any blow from his hand.
“Desmond, is it? Who the hell’s been blabbing to you about that worthless ne’er-do-well? Who? Tell me, girl!”
She pressed back into her chair, as if to make as small a target as possible against his wrath, her body rigid with shock. He continued shouting. “My God, I have no respect in my own house. It was the servants, I suppose, chattering about something that’s no business of their
s.
“Not that it’s your business either, girl. Desmond Newborn was my brother, a shiftless good-for-nothing who went off and volunteered for somebody else’s war, got himself shot up for his pains, came back here and lived off my sweat until he could walk, and then to show his gratitude took to the road like some damned hobo. In and out of jail, never a job. The last I heard of him was a letter two months before the Crash, and that’s the last I ever want to hear of him. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
Rae seized this crescendo as a command to depart. She scuttled from the room with as much dignity as her nine-year-old self could muster, wrapping pride around her like armor until she had reached the safety of her bedroom, at which point she crawled into the bottom of her bed and let go, sobbing until she hiccoughed at the terror and fury, the outrage and injustice of Grandfather’s response. I was just asking a question, she whispered to herself over and over. I just wanted to know. By the time Cook came to look for her, Rae’s young mind had settled on righteous indignation. She did not speak to her grandfather for two days (which he actually seemed not to notice) and never again dared ask him about his brother, but the sheer unwarranted force of William’s reaction guaranteed that Desmond Newborn became a permanent resident in Rae’s young mind. Once she had recovered from the shock, she found Desmond lurking in the background, a curiosity and an enigma. He became a sort of imaginary friend, confidant to her secrets and problems, unseen protector and bulwark against God’s wrath. He helped Rae keep her chin raised whenever William blew up at her, helped her look her grandfather in the eye when she wanted to crawl away and tremble. By her tenth birthday, Rae desired nothing better than to be a ne’er-do-well herself. Whatever that was.
She never again approached William about the subject, never saw the leather box again until she inherited it, but over the years she pieced together a few facts about her secret companion. She chose her informants cautiously, relatives and family employees who would not instantly report her interest to William, and discovered that there had been an earlier war than the one in which Cook’s son had died and the young gardener had fought: Desmond’s war. When she was twelve she found a book in the public library about the terrible conditions of the soldiers in the First World War, but it only puzzled her the more. Given what she learned, she would have thought that the nobility of Desmond’s voluntary enlistment, followed by honorably received wounds, would have made him a shining legend throughout the generations. Instead, before Rae was even born, the family’s collective memory had shied away from Desmond, retreating into that vagueness that signals extreme discomfort. His Croix de Guerre was locked away in William’s drawer, his injuries referred to so obliquely that, as a child, Rae had believed it to mean that his face was horribly disfigured; as an adolescent, she concluded that he must have lost his genitalia. Only as an adult, after poring over the diary kept by William’s wife, Lacy—which was, unfortunately, little more than a laconic record of family events and household expenses—had Rae glimpsed the truth: that what Desmond left on the Western Front was a portion of his mind; that was the shame for which his family could not forgive him.
After Desmond had recovered from his body’s wounds, convalescing in the chilly family mansion near Boston where Rae had spent most of her own childhood, the ex-soldier, as Grandfather had said, took to the road. Desmond Newborn would appear on the doorstep of one or another of his widespread relations and roost with them for a few weeks, usually in the cold months when pneumonia or just bronchitis laid hold of his weakened lungs (a legacy of the trenches). Then he would pack up his rucksack and disappear again, quartering the country, heading gradually west. Buried among Lacy’s dutiful recording of weather and health, the baby’s milestones and monies spent on dresses and gifts, William’s wife would note an occasional sum wired to her brother-in-law in Louisville or Chicago or Boise. Once, without comment, her copperplate handwriting recorded that bail had been provided on a vagrancy charge near Houston. Later, in early 1921, more jail monies were provided, only this time not as bail. Rae had never found out why Desmond had spent six months behind bars, but she knew that Lacy had sent money and a parcel of warm clothing, with no information in her diary other than the address of the Yakima jail.
Then, the following summer, the wanderer had washed up in the San Juan Islands in the state of Washington, about as far from Boston as a person could get without crossing a sea or a border; here Desmond Newborn found a home at last. Here he bought an island (a transaction not recorded in Lacy’s diary, so it must have come under William’s jurisdiction) and built his folly, an oddly elegant little wooden house nestled between two highly idiosyncratic stone towers, here on this string of cold, remote, and at the time sparsely inhabited islands on the crumbling edge of a continent. And here he lived, with the seabirds and the orca whales for company, until the wanderlust grew up again and took him off a few years later. At some point—no one seemed to know just when—the house caught fire and burned to the stonework, and both the island and Desmond Newborn’s shadowy legend were absorbed back into the family pool. Since that time the island had remained uninhabited, temporarily deeded to the state as a wildlife sanctuary, with the ownership and Desmond’s medals coming to Rae on the settling of her father’s estate five years before.
It was this strange, bereft remnant of a house, more than any other thing, that had anchored Rae’s climb from madness. Last May, five months after the accident and four after the attack, Rae’s mind had begun with great reluctance to unfurl from its tight retreat. In spite of herself, she started to take notice of her surroundings—the noise and disruption of the hospital, the tyranny of the drugs, the press of people and walls and cigarette smoke: a turmoil as great as that inside her mind. She began to seek out the quieter corners of the hospital grounds, craving solitude as a desert traveler thirsts for water. And like that traveler, Rae had eventually glimpsed solitude and, more faintly, purpose—a tool in the hand and the ability to concentrate on its use—flickering and wavering in the distance, as ethereal as a mirage and every bit as compelling. Except that the thought of returning home, the very idea of stepping into her fragrant and expectant workshop attached to a house that reverberated with emptiness, made her shiver with a mixture of desire and terror.
Into this tangle of inchoate yearnings and inexpressible fears had dropped a book, one of those strangely assorted and badly worn paperbacks abandoned by patients or donated by the carton to places such as mental hospitals. It was missing its cover and the first dozen pages, but the remainder fell into Rae’s confused and heavily sedated mind like a seed into loam.
A man had built a house. An untrained and remarkably incompetent man (who would have reminded Rae of her first husband, David, except that this man was so cheerful about admitting his incompetence) had made for himself a shelter: a roof, four walls, a floor. In the incestuous manner of writers, his purpose seemed to be not so much the creation of shelter as the opportunities the building process gave for self-reflection—and, it went without saying, the publication of a book about both building and self-reflection—but in reading it, Rae saw only the dream given form, the creation of House out of Thought. She read and reread the book until it went to pieces. She could still recite long passages from memory.
Like a seed—or a lifeline.
Great-uncle Desmond’s skeletal home came to her as in a dream. In truth, during those months most things came to her as in a dream, but this one did not fade. Instead, it blossomed swiftly into full potential: She would pull herself together, she would go and rebuild Desmond’s house, she would lift his walls and dwell within them quietly all the rest of her days. Everything that House was lay there waiting for her to take it up: House as shelter, House as permanence, House as a continuation and a legacy, comfort and challenge, safety and beauty, symbol and reality joined as one. While Rae’s body wandered the hospital halls and grounds, her mind walked through the rooms she had known: the coldly formal dining room of her childhood home and the warmth of
its nearby kitchen; the oddly shaped attic room of a bed-and-breakfast she had stayed in near Oxford and the gilded ceilings of the palace at Versailles; the tracery of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the cramped door frames of Wright’s workshop in Scottsdale. She pictured herself in each one, saw herself in the process of hanging that dining room’s awful wallpaper, troweling on that attic’s plaster, building those rooms, and eventually, as a logical end point, the remembered and the imagined merged: Desmond, the mysterious lost relative who had intrigued her youth, stood beside her as she laid board upon board, making the house on Folly anew. Desmond, the family’s other black sheep and the shadowy companion of her childhood, returned now to muse with her: How to get that roof up, all on her own? How to stand those walls, mount those windows, lay those shingles? Desmond, of whom William had disapproved almost as ferociously as he had Rae, walked with her through Folly, until she could envision each step of the rebuilding process, one following another, no flaws. Desmond, fantasy guardian and companion, would be with her.
It had seemed so simple at the time.
Now, standing at the edge of a Pacific Northwest jungle with the painful throb of a burned finger to distract her, just pushing her way through to Folly’s derelict front steps looked to be a challenge. Rae had no intention of beginning the ground clearing at this hour, with the first intimations of darkness gathering in, but she also did not want to go to bed without having at least glimpsed the foundation. Gingerly, painstakingly, she threaded her boots through the wet vegetation—most of which seemed to have thorns—wading her way up the low slope until her toe hit something more solid than stems. She plunged a gloved hand deep into the greenery and tugged blindly. The rich odor of broken plant and torn soil rose up, and she pulled again, and again, until there they lay, looking like a stairway leading through the jungle to a Mayan temple: Desmond Newborn’s front steps.
Folly Page 3
