The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Earl cracked a grin and then laughed. He slapped his knee with the hand that wasn’t holding his beer. After a moment Brian grinned and joined in, laughing alongside his grandfather. Shane smiled but didn’t laugh.

  “Put it out of your head, did you?” the old man wheezed. “I just bet you did. Good for you.”

  “Well,” Shane replied, still smiling but feeling a little piqued. “I was just taking your advice if you recall.”

  “Oh, I recall what I said. I’m just not used to other people listening. Not at my age.” Earl drew a deep sigh and let it out, still grinning. He took a swig of his beer, emptying a third of it.

  “Truth is,” Shane went on, “I’m a little surprised to see you out here. I had the impression you’d be happy never to see the place again.”

  Earl shrugged one shoulder. “Oh, I never minded the cottage. It was the house I hated. Now that that’s gone, I expect the rest doesn’t matter. I thought about it after you left. Decided I’d been a little too testy with you, maybe. Truth is, I changed my mind. I decided a little knowledge might actually do you some good. Forewarned is fore-armed. That’s what we used to say during the war.”

  Shane nodded slowly. “Fair enough, I guess. I don’t want to shake any skeletons out of any old closets or anything, if that’s what you were worried about. This is my home now. I was just interested in learning about its past.”

  Brian swirled his beer and laughed ruefully. “You mean besides the insanity stairs and the bottomless pit?”

  “Hush, boy,” Earl said quickly. “Can’t you see he don’t know about all that stuff? Let the man enjoy his bliss awhile. We’ll come to that, if he wants. Leave it up to him.”

  Shane glanced between the two of them. “Bottomless pit?”

  Earl closed his eyes and shook his head, not dismissively, but impatiently. “Fool’s talk, that’s all. The poor Missus had her… let’s call them her fetishes. When she got older, some of the furniture in her mind started coming loose and sliding around. Like I said, we’ll get to that if you want, though I’ll warn you, I don’t know any of it first-hand. You’d have to talk to Stambaugh to get any real dirt on those years, and if you remember him, you’ll know his days of giving interviews are long over.”

  Shane did remember Stambaugh, remembered him slouched almost double in a wheelchair, being fed tapioca in dribbling spoonfuls. It was an unpleasant memory. “Tell me what you do know, then,” he said. “Whatever you want. I’ll just listen.”

  “Heh,” Earl chuckled humorlessly. “Problem’s not what I want to tell you, but what it’s safe to tell you. But like I said, I’m probably just being old and foolish. Wouldn’t be the first time. The house’s gone now, chopped down to a hole in the ground. Good riddance…”

  His voice trailed off and his eyes roamed out over the river. “Good riddance to bad rubbish. That’s another thing we used to say during the war. I wasn’t in the war, of course. Bad back and crummy eyesight. Most of my friends went, though. A few of them even came back. That was later, though. When the war started and everyone left, that’s when I first came out here. It was the spring of forty and I’d just turned twenty four. The Great Depression was ten years old by then and work was still hard to come by. That’s what brought me out here that day. Word around town was that Wilhelm had lost some of his groundskeepers to the draft. I came out here and lied about why I wasn’t going to the war myself. I was afraid if he knew about my back and my eyes, he’d never hire me. I told him I’d been granted a special circumstance because I was the last boy in my family and my mother was on her sickbed. Truth was, I had four kid brothers and my mother worked ten hours a day at the textile mill downriver, but Wilhelm didn’t check out any of my story. He was barely listening. He just pointed to a group of men working on a stone wall around the back of the house and told me to go help them. He said to me, ‘If you’re still upright at the end of the day, and those men say you’re worth my dollar, I’ll start paying you tomorrow. Today, you prove yourself.’

  “I worked like a mule until sunset, and my back was singing the Spanish aria by the time I was done, but I never let on. The next day, I came back and started it all over again. I was never officially hired, but no one ever told me to go home. At the end of the week, Wilhelm gave me twelve dollars fifty, and that was my pay for the next two years, until he went ahead and promoted me to chief groundskeeper. I think he suspected I had troubles with my back, although I never once complained.

  "As chief of the grounds, I had a lot less to carry with my back, but a lot more to carry with my mind. I was up to it, though, and that’s when I really started learning how things worked in the house. That was when I first formally met the Missus, and started understanding the gears that that marriage turned on. They weren’t happy gears, let me tell you. Maybe that’s true for most families, when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, but it’s still an ugly thing to see up close. I learned a lot more than I wanted to, but back then, secrets were a thing we kept. Back then, what a man did in his house, even a man as famous as Gus Wilhelm, well, that was his business. We saw it all, but we didn’t really see any of it, if you know what I mean. Loose lips sink ships. Heh. I bet even Brian here remembers that one.”

  Shane watched the old man as he spoke. Earl seemed to sink into the words as he said them, as if he was reconstructing the memory around him, settling deep into it. Shane’s artist’s mind could easily imagine Earl Kirchenbauer as that young man of twenty-four, thin and tan, his glasses stuffed into his back pocket so no one would see them. Mentally, Shane erased the wrinkles, thickened the white hair and turned it glossy black, straightened the back and neck. Earl went on, and even his voice sounded younger, less raspy, void of that old man’s gruffness. Even Brian seemed entranced.

  The sun slowly lowered into the trees. The river turned first golden, and then deep copper. And on the patio, rapt and intrigued, Shane listened.

  Chapter Ten

  “The Wilhelms first came to the valley in the summer of thirty-three. I remember it was in the paper. Famous artist and his wife were coming to live among us, and they were bringing their artsy friends and all their money with them.

  “We all had mixed feelings about it, but not too mixed. Like I said, those were the days of the Depression, and anything that looked like work was welcome. Those were the days when men rode the rails from town to town, looking for anything they could do for a buck. Paint fences, hoe gardens, lay bricks, anything.

  “My own father took that road, and we never saw him again. He left on a Monday morning when I was seventeen, walked down to the train yard with his friend Clete, each one carrying a lunch pail and a change of clothes wrapped in a bindle. They said they’d find some work and send home what they could. We never did see any money come in the mail, and we never saw my father again, neither. My brothers were just kids at the time, but they were wise to the ways of the world. They thought father had just run off, but they didn’t know him like I did. I didn’t think he’d just run off. I thought something bad had happened to him, out there in the hobo camps and Hoovervilles.

  “People say things are bad nowadays, what with people shootin’ one another over a pair of hundred dollar shoes, but things were a different kind of bad back then. Back then, people’d kill each other for a pair of leather boots, not because they wanted to, but because they were desperate. That was the real ugliness of it. Half the time, you couldn’t even hate the people who’d done the crime. Half the time, you were only one step away from being them yourself.

  “When Wilhelm and his caravan came into town, we didn’t throw any parties, but we didn’t throw any stones either. We just watched.

  “He’d picked himself out that lot down by the river, already had it cleared so he could set about building his house. He hired mostly local fellows to do the construction, but the foreman and the crew leaders were all New Hampshire men that had come with him from up north. He’d hired them to come down and stay while the place was built.

>   “The first thing they built was this very cottage, and they used it as a dormitory while they finished the main building. Wilhelm had planned it all out. In the beginning, the cottage was the anchor, holding everything together while they built the house, and in the end, the cottage was still the anchor, so far as he was concerned. It was his studio, where he did all his work, where he even slept two, three times a week. For Wilhelm, this was the real heart of the place. This cottage was his real home. The manor house was his showpiece, the thing he presented to the world to prove he was one high and mighty lord of the earth, but this cottage was his true castle. This was where he holed up, where he fortified himself.

  “When he was working, no one else was allowed inside, except for his models, when he wanted them. Even when he wasn’t here, he had a general rule that no one was allowed inside without his specific instruction. That went for the Missus as well, and she abided by that rule, oh yes. That was the tragedy of the place, if you ask me. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me back up.

  “Wilhelm met the Missus back when they were still in Washington. She was one of his models, when he was still struggling to get a name for himself, before he got famous and rich and arrogant. Well, truth was, he was always arrogant, according to the stories. Arrogance is free, after all. Back then, I suppose that’s about all he could afford.

  “He was doing portraits for some senators and local politicos. Sometimes he painted the families, but more often than not, it was usually just the women, the wives and mothers. Wilhelm was doing them for next to nothing, just to get his work out there. I think the men who hired him did it as much to shut their wives up as they did it for the paintings themselves. Wilhelm had a way with the ladies. He could get them excited about him and his work, and they’d go to their husbands, talking him all up, begging to get family portraits made.

  “Problem was, the men that hired him knew Wilhelm was a charmer. They didn’t want their wives sitting with the fellow for hours and days at a time while he painted them. Wilhelm promised he’d only need one quick session with the ladies, though. He’d sketch them in their homes and paint them later in his studio. There, he’d more often than not hire girls to come in and pose for the portraits, painting their bodies with the other ladies’ faces on them.

  “Sometimes he’d hire prostitutes for the job, other times local teenagers eager for any sort of work that didn’t require them to get on their knees, either for scrubbing floors or… well, you get the picture. Marlena Havelock was one of those girls. According to the old ladies that used to run the museum at the house, she fell in love with Wilhelm immediately, but I have my doubts about that. I watched them together over the years I worked here, and I’ll tell you what I saw.

  “Wilhelm was a man who was used to being adored and admired. He very nearly commanded it from people. And the funny thing was, most people wanted to give it to him. There was just something about him that made you want to get on his best side, made you feel that if he liked you, approved of you, that some of him would rub off on you. Even the workers here at the property, they used to cuss him up one side and down the other when he wasn’t around, but whenever they were in his presence, it was another thing entirely.

  “It was like he was made out of something other than plain old flesh and bone, like his blood had something magic in it, something from the old stories about the Greek gods and goddesses. You wanted to get some of that for yourself, or at least be near it. That was the effect Wilhelm had on people. Like they always say: women wanted to be with him, and men wanted to be like him.

  “But Marlena was different. I don’t think she loved him right away. I couldn’t tell you how I knew that, since I wasn’t there when they met and courted and got married, but I saw them later. I saw the way she looked at him, and the way he didn’t look at her. Marlena was a proud woman, tall and pretty and severe, but when he was around, she went soft. He’d beaten her. Not with his fists, mind you. I never once saw him raise a hand against her, or anyone else, for that matter. Wilhelm didn’t beat people with his fists. Sometimes I think it’d have been better if that was all he’d done.

  “I think when she first met him, he disgusted her. I bet you a million dollars that she thought he was one uppity son of a bitch the first day she saw him, there in his rented room in the city. I bet she did the job all right. I mean, how hard could it have been? All she’d had to have done was sit still for a few hours. He wasn’t even painting her face, so she coulda looked out the window the whole time, or closed her eyes and daydreamed, anything she wanted. But I’d bet my right eye that when it was all over, she took his dollar and left without hardly a word.

  “And I’ll raise that bet with another: I’ll bet that that annoyed the ever-loving hell out of Wilhelm. Because like I said, he was used to being adored. He thrived on it. He didn’t paint all those portraits for the money, after all. The money was just a fringe benefit. Wilhelm painted so that people would love him and tell him how almighty great he was. It was like a drug to him. I think Marlena wasn’t impressed with him, and it made old Wilhelm crazy. I think, for a fellow like Gus Wilhelm, if the praise isn’t unanimous, it doesn’t count. If the rest of the world cheers and one person boos, the boo is all he’d hear. I think he pursued her from that day on. Maybe it was love. Maybe it was as close to love as a guy like Wilhelm could ever get. Even so, deep down, I think his love for her was never really anything more than misdirected love for himself.

  “So he chased her. He chased her all the way to New Hampshire when her family moved her out there. Up and left his Washington art career in the same way that he’d left his New York art career a few years earlier.

  “Of course, by then, he was finally beginning to get the renown he’d always dreamed of, and his reputation started following him around. In New Hampshire, he vowed to Marlena that he’d win her love with a major contract. He made her promise him that she’d marry him if he could take care of her in the way that she deserved. She agreed, and I think by then she really was falling in love with him. Women will do that, you know. They’ll fall in love with the worst bastard in the world sometimes, if he’s around long enough, and persistent long enough. Hell, sometimes I think being a bastard is the best way to get women to flock to you. If I’d have known that when I was a young man, I might have fared differently myself. Heh. Maybe not, but it’s the truth no matter how you slice it. Worst thing about most women is the men they choose to hitch themselves to.

  “So Wilhelm went out and got himself that contract. Like I said, his reputation had followed him. The New Hampshire art world was a lot easier to break into than it was in Washington, and Wilhelm got himself in good graces with enough of the right people that he got an appointment with the governor. The governor took one look at Wilhelm’s work, especially a portrait he’d done of President Wilson, and hired him to do a whopping huge portrait of the whole family for the state capital. Wilhelm insisted on painting them outdoors, the governor and his wife and their three young kids. There used to be a big print of it in the main house, in the days when it was a museum. Wilhelm had even included the family’s dog in the picture, a pissant little ratty thing with eyeballs that looked like marbles jammed into the sides of its head. When he finished it, the portrait was twelve feet tall, and so far as I know, it still hangs in the New Hampshire capitol building to this day. That cemented Wilhelm’s career, not only in New Hampshire, but all over the country, at least among certain people.

  “Soon enough, he went back to Marlena, this time with a ring. She was as good as her word, and they were married in the summer of twenty-nine, when she was only nineteen years old. Wilhelm was nearly thirty by then, but nobody cared about such things back in those days. Back then, that was pretty much the norm. He was older and established. He could take care of her. Her family was happy to approve of the marriage. Wilhelm and Marlena moved into a big house in the country, all built out of solid New Hampshire granite, and the old ladies in the museum said that the
two were happy there, at least for awhile. And who knows? Maybe they really were. I doubt it, though. By that time, Wilhelm had beaten Marlena. Not with his fists, like I said, but that didn’t make it any better. She’d finally loved him. He’d beaten her by making her fall for him, making her finally give him her heart and her adoration. By then it was too late for her to realize that that was all he’d ever really wanted from her. Not to accept her love, but just to be offered it, just like everyone else always did. He never really wanted her affection. He just needed her to want to give it. Once she’d done that, he was done with her. She was beaten.

  “Trouble was, love was a one-way street for her. She was like that blasted old model A truck Wilhelm bought for the grounds crew. She didn’t have any reverse. Once she’d fallen in love with him, she was stuck there. It didn’t matter what he did with her love. Most of the time, what he did with it was nothing. But she just kept offering it. She was helpless not to. It was a sad thing to watch. It was almost a perversity. I’ve seen plenty of women in my time willing to offer up their bodies to men who didn’t care, and that was bad enough. To watch a woman, especially a woman as strong and beautiful as Marlena Wilhelm, offer up her heart to a man who just didn’t care… who didn’t even invest enough time in her to scorn her, who just ignored her straight up… well, that was almost like a blasphemy.

  “She stayed in New Hampshire while Wilhelm came out here to build the new house. He called it the River House and he’d designed most of it himself. It had been his idea to move out here from the beginning. He said he wanted to build ‘a community of the arts’. A place where artists of all kinds could come and stay and create. What he really wanted, I expect, was to be adored by an all new group of people. He’d won over the art buyers, the important men in high places, and now he wanted to win over his fellow artists as well. He came to Missouri because it was right in the middle of the country, easy to get to by anyone from anywhere. I suppose he picked the river valley because it was pretty. Not that he thought so himself, mind you, but because he thought everyone else would.