The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  “Land was cheap enough then, and he bought up this whole plot south of the river, from here right up to the city limits. Once he finished the cottage and the house, Marlena finally came down to join him. She moved in and started to set up housekeeping. Wilhelm was fussy about the outside of the place, about the grounds and the trail, the gardens and the main barn, and especially about this cottage, but he left the inside of the main house to her.

  “She was an artist herself. Not many people remember that, but it’s true. She painted sometimes, even did a little sculpture, but once she moved into the house, it became her canvas. She decorated it all herself. She’d go on long shopping vacations, picking up bargains and treasures all over God’s green earth. She’d be gone for months at a time, and when she’d get back, she’d be accompanied by whole truckloads of things, especially at the beginning. She was smart, though, and never paid more than she had to. Hell, half the time she barely paid anything at all. The trick back then wasn’t finding the bargains, it was getting to them, and having the wherewithal to carry them back with you. She was good at that, and shrewd as the devil. Never really stopped working on the house, from the day she moved in.

  “She hired workers to come in and make little changes and additions, to put in doorways here, close them off there. And she always watched them work, watched them like a hawk. Most of the men I worked with assumed she watched just to assure herself she wasn’t getting ripped off, but I thought different. I thought she watched because she wanted to know how the work was done, almost as if she wanted to learn how to do it herself. She was that shrewd and careful with the money. If she could do any of the labor herself, she wasn’t above getting in there and doing it, even if it meant getting dirty and looking unladylike. Of course, in the end, that was a big part of the problem. That didn’t come until much later, though. We’ll get to that in good time, if you decide you really want to hear it.

  “I was working out here by then, of course, but even before I got to being here full time, I’d heard the rumors. They flew all over town. The Wilhelms were the richest and most famous thing to happen to Bastion Falls in forever, and they were always the juiciest gossip, even if we all knew most of it was only half true, at best.

  “Plenty of crazy things did go on out here, especially in the summers, when Wilhelm opened the house and property up to his gaggle of artist friends. ‘The Wanderers’, they all called themselves. They’d come out and stay for weeks and months on end, living in the house, or in rented canvas tents when the weather allowed it. They’d drink and smoke and whoop it up all night long, and sleep until noon more often than not.

  “Not Wilhelm himself, of course. That man probably did sleep sometimes, but I never knew right when he did it. He had a bed upstairs in his studio, and I expect he took naps sometimes, when he wasn’t using the bed for other shenanigans. He painted all through the night, though, often enough. He was one hell of a night owl, that man.

  “Once I became the chief groundskeeper, I was expected to stay late on some nights, especially when the parties were in full swing. Wilhelm thought of me as something like his right hand man on those nights. It was my job to keep the barrels filled with ice and beer, to manage the cook and make sure none of those dandy ladies and gentlemen guests of his wandered off drunk and dunked themselves into the river, or capsized Wilhelm’s prissy little rowboat, or got lost in the woods. Most of the time I had my hands plenty full, just keeping tabs on everyone, keeping the bonfire going, carrying loads of dishes and tureens from the kitchen to the patio and back. Wilhelm had brought his own cook with him from New Hampshire, an old colored woman named Clara, and she cooked from sun-up to dark those days just trying to keep up.

  “They were wearisome times, but they were also kind of exciting, truth be told. Somehow, we all knew that we were seeing something not many people saw, watching a lifestyle most other people could only dream of. Those artists were some of the most self-centered, strange, empty-headed people one would ever expect to meet, and at the same time, they were some of the smartest, saddest, most generous folks I’d ever known as well.

  “One time, a fellow by the name of Clearwater took me aside and told me he needed to be sick. He said it as if he was telling me it would soon be half past two in the afternoon, as calm and debonair as you please. He’d been smoking something and drinking heavy and could barely keep his feet under him, and yet he talked like he was giving a speech in front of Jesus and the saints.

  “I led him to the downstairs bathroom and Clearwater bent at the waist as if he was going to bow. He was sick in the commode, wiped his mouth, and turned to me with tears in his eyes. Next thing I know, he falls into my arms and starts a-bawlin’ on my shoulder, just as free and shameless as a baby. He just keeps saying the same name over and over. I remember it to this day. ‘Wendy’ he says, again and again, just sobbing and crying, his nose running and mixing with his tears.

  “I was a little disgusted, but mostly I was just sad for him. I didn’t know what it was about, not then and not now, but when he was done, he straightened, blew his nose and sat down on the commode, shivering a little.

  “ ‘Do you have a daughter,’ he asks me then. I didn’t, but I had a boy, Sammie, Brian’s uncle.

  “ ‘Do me a favor someday, will you?’ Clearwater says to me. And he reaches into the pocket of his jacket and hands me a gold watch on a chain. ‘Give this to him,’ he says to me. ‘Don’t tell him where it came from. Tell him you found it somewhere. Tell him you got it for him special. Tell him to keep it forever. Will you do that for me, Earl?’

  “I could tell he meant it, and that it really wasn’t a gift he was giving to me, or to little Sammie. That watch was probably worth more than I made in six months, and yet I knew by the way he asked me that he wasn’t just being nice to me. It was me doing him the favor. I could see it in his eyes, red and swollen as they were. I didn’t balk. I took that gold watch and put it in my pocket and I promised Clearwater, as truthful and honest as I knew how, that I would do exactly as he asked. He nodded and shuddered and a minute later he shook my hand with both of his. Next thing I knew, he was outside again with his friends, laughing and whooping it up with the best of them.

  “Fourteen years later, on Sammie’s graduation day, I did give him that watch. I told him it was a gift from me and a family friend. That’s all he needed to know. Brian here knows the truth now, but I trust him to keep it a secret. After all, since Sammie never had himself any kids of his own, that watch might go to you someday, boy. Fact of the matter is that it’ll probably mean more knowing where it really came from. But if you tell your uncle, I’ll whup you good. Don’t think I can’t still do it, either.

  “Lot of rumors flew around town during those summers. Some of them were true, a lot of them weren’t. A few, even I didn’t know for sure. Some people said that Wilhelm himself was a dandy, that he’d married Marlena to keep it a secret, but that he and his male models had themselves a little hanky-panky up in the studio sometimes.

  “If that was true, all I know is that Wilhelm was the original equal opportunity employer. He had his share of ladies up there, too. Most of them were models. He hired them just like he did back when he first met Marlena, only by then he was doing it to create his own art, not portraits.

  “None of the stuff he did for himself was ever as good, or as famous, as his portraits, but by the time I was working out here, that was most of what he was doing. He painted those women and men in the nude more often than not, usually draped on the furniture in his studio with a bunch of cloth pinned up behind them and the sun falling all over them from the open window over the stairs. Sometimes he had several models up there at once, and posed them altogether. Disgusting, a lot of the men I worked with said, and I suppose it was, but I never said so myself. He was the boss, and as his groundskeeper and occasional right hand man, it behooved me to keep some semblance of loyalty out in the open. After all, once the men started seeing me bad-mouth the boss, it was only a
matter of time before they’d start bad-mouthing me as well. When that happens, everything else goes pretty much straight to hell.

  Marlena knew about Wilhelm and his affairs. He wasn’t particularly secretive about it, really. She hated it, but what was she going to do? Once, for her birthday, Wilhelm had the gall to give Lena—that’s what he always called her; Lena, never by her full name—he had the gall to give her a little painting of one of the girls he’d been diddling with.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what he was thinking. Honestly, I don’t think it even occurred to him that she might be offended by it. Maybe he was arrogant enough to think she didn’t even know. The end result was that she hurled that picture right out the front door on the day he gave it to her. I found it myself in the middle of the driveway, the frame broken and the glass all shattered. I tried to give it back to Wilhelm, but he told me to throw it away. I didn’t. I kept it myself, and sold it a few years later, to an art dealer in downtown St. Louis. I suspect that if Wilhelm had ever found out I’d done it, he’d have fired me for sure, but he had his own distractions by then, and I had a good idea that my time there was nearly done anyway.

  “The thing that finally brought everything to a head was the baby. Wilhelm wanted a son from the beginning, but Marlena hadn’t been able to give him one. She’d gotten pregnant once, early on, while they were still in New Hampshire, but it hadn’t taken. She’d miscarried the baby in the first few months, according to the old ladies who ran the museum. By the time they lived here, they’d begun to argue about it. I used to hear them sometimes, we all did, upstairs in the house. Wilhelm claimed that that was the only reason he was messing around with those other women. ‘I’m just looking for someone to give me my son, Lena, someone to carry on after me,’ I heard him say one of those times. ‘If you can’t do it, someone has to.’ He said that if she was any kind of wife, she’d help him look for the proper substitute, like Sarah had done for Abraham in the Bible. Marlena begged him to keep trying with her. He said he would, but insisted it was no use, and he was getting too old to wait much longer.

  “And that’s when the ugliness really started. Word got around town that Wilhelm was looking to have a baby with whoever could give him one. Like I said, even though the depression was a decade old by then, those were still desperate times. For a lot of the girls in town, and even some of their families, the prospect of getting attached to Gus Wilhelm was close to what winning the lottery might be today.

  “Women started showing up at the house, ostensibly looking for work as maids and cooks, but obviously trying to catch the eye of the man of the house, trying to hook his attention. Problem was, Marlena was in charge of interviewing the house help. She found herself in the very position she’d most detested. She might have been questioning a girl about her ironing skills and her ability to darn socks, but she also knew, on some level, that she might very likely be choosing the mother of her husband’s child.

  “She turned most of the girls away out of hand. After all, the house wasn’t that big. There were only so many cook’s assistants and maids the place really needed. But they did hire one local girl. Her name was Madeleine Cross, and I remember her very well because she grew up on the street behind my house. She was young and pretty, plump by today’s standards, but that was considered the style back then. She was quiet, though. Quiet and serious, with black hair and dark skin—so much so that some of us thought she might have had a colored father, although none of us ever knew for sure, since he was long gone by then; run off, as far as any of us knew.

  “Madeleine was hired as a maid, and she worked in the house exclusively. Marlena saw to that. Not that it did any good, though. Wilhelm liked the girl straight off. We all saw it. He wasn’t especially subtle about it.

  “I honestly don’t know if Madeleine came out to the house intent on becoming Wilhelm’s mistress. She was too quiet to ever let on one way or another. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and even now, I can’t say for sure. I think maybe she just got carried along, like a log on the river when it’s in full flood. Either way, once Wilhelm had set his sights on her, there wasn’t much question that things would turn out any different than they did. Wilhelm was used to getting the things he wanted. Madeleine became one of those things.

  “From that day on, nothing was ever really the same in the Riverhouse again. When Wilhelm started his affair with Madeleine, that was when the place started to die. We all felt it, and knew that the days of midnight parties and tent dormitories were almost over. Once Wilhelm started up with Madeleine, he didn’t have a mind for much of anything else.

  “In August of nineteen forty-four, Hector Wilhelm was born. It happened over the weekend, right there in the house. None of us ground crew were there that day. Clara was there, of course, since she pretty much lived there, and Madeleine was there, too. The first any of us knew of the baby was when we were coming to work on the following Monday. When I saw him, he was being held on the front stoop, crying his fool head off, that little squall that all babies have when they’re still brand new. He had a bunch of black hair, even then, and a little red face and tiny fists the size of walnuts. And he was being held by Marlena. She was smiling. That was the thing that struck me most about the scene, even more than the baby himself. That smile on her face as she looked down at that baby, and then up at us who were coming in to work that day, and then down at the baby again.

  “I didn’t see Madeleine at all that day, and we all just assumed she was still getting herself together after the birth. After all, that’s how it was all supposed to have worked out, why she’d come out to the house in the first place, regardless of whatever job she’d interviewed for.

  “But that’s where things start getting really hairy in this story. Because none of us knew for certain that Madeleine had been pregnant. Sure she’d put on a little more weight in recent months, maybe even enough to start some rumors, but you could hide an awful lot under those horrible maid uniforms and aprons. Fact was, none of us ever really could tell for sure. And to further complicate matters, both Wilhelm and Marlena claimed that that baby was their very own.

  “I had to think back on it. The fact of the matter was that Marlena had been travelling an awful lot over the past months. None of us had hardly seen a wink of her. When she’d gotten back, only three weeks earlier, it had been late at night, and she had apparently been ill. She’d been in her bed most of the time since then, and none of us could even remember seeing her once during that time. Crazy as it sounded, it began to seem entirely possible that Marlena had been pregnant, at exactly the same time that the scuttlebutt had been going around about Madeleine being pregnant. For her part, Madeleine never said anything. Only person who ever had the gall to ask her about it was one of the gardeners, a young pup named Pickering. I wasn’t there when it happened, but apparently Madeleine slapped him, almighty hard, right on the cheek, but standing there just as calm as a frozen pond. She told him she’d never been pregnant at all, and either way, she said, it was none of his cotton-picking business.

  “I thought about asking Clara the cook, but I never did. If anyone in the house knew the truth, it was her. Hell, she’d probably mid-wifed that baby into the world with her own two hands. I had a feeling that she wouldn’t admit to anything, either way. She was as loyal to the Wilhelms as paint is to a wall, and truth be known, she gave me the heebie-jeebies just a little bit. I know that sounds crazy, but there’s no sense denying it. I never did ask her, and she never did tell.

  “Hector got big fast. He was a strong baby, crawling by the end of his first year, babbling like a brook most of the time, shaking his rattles and tootin’ his toy horns.

  “Wilhelm loved that boy like he’d never loved anyone else in his life. He used to play records for the boy on the old Victrola in the den, cranking it up so loud that the whole house could hear. Wilhelm would dance around the living room and make that baby just cackle. It was sweet to see, in spite of everything, and for a littl
e while, I’d begun to wonder if maybe everything was going to be all right after all.

  “Marlena seemed happy enough, raising Hector, feeding him and reading to him, even though Madeleine had been appointed to be his nanny. Wilhelm had even begun sleeping in the house most nights, instead of staying out to all hours up at the cottage, painting and carousing.

  “My boys and I had just finished putting in the new rose garden out back, and were getting ready to start shutting the house up for the fall, putting up the storm windows and getting the woodpile chopped and cut to length. There was even talk of inviting the Wanderers out for the summer again the next year, something that hadn’t happened for two years in a row. They had scattered like dandelion seeds in the years since, like they always did whenever they weren’t camping out in the front yard or in the woods between the house and the cottage, but I had no doubts they’d come back next spring if Wilhelm sent out the invitation.

  That never happened, though. And the fall of forty-seven was my last year there at the Riverhouse. That was the year of the big spring flood, and the year that everything finally fell apart at the place. It took a long, long time for that damned house to finally die, but that was when the fatal blow fell, believe you me. And it happened right here, right in this cottage.

  “Wilhelm had asked Madeleine to be Hector’s nanny, like I said. It was a strange arrangement, we all thought, and yet Marlena herself seemed pretty much all right with it. The truth is, I think she thought she’d won after all. Whether or not that baby was really hers, she thought that the baby had brought Wilhelm back to her, that she’d finally captured his love. She believed that Madeleine was no longer a threat. Either Madeleine had failed to produce the baby Wilhelm had wanted, and Marlena had, or Madeleine had performed the service she had really been hired for, giving them the baby and allowing them to present it as their own. In either case, I think Marlena believed Wilhelm was done with that younger girl. Keeping her there was Marlena’s way of proving, both to herself and everyone else, that she really had come out on top of the whole thing. She had helped Wilhelm get the son he’d so desperately pined for, and in so doing, she had captured his heart once and for all.