The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Something had marked them. It had marked Stephanie for death, and had marked Shane for… for what? What part was he meant to play? Had he played it? He had a terrible, harrowing suspicion that he had done exactly what had been expected of him, willingly and with wild abandon. He had painted. He had brought the Riverhouse back to life, given it back its story and made it new again. Now, it was too late. The circle was very nearly complete. The Sleepwalker was the key that had brought it all finally together.

  Shane leapt to his feet and turned. He flung himself back up the steps, his heart hammering in his chest. Outside the upstairs window, it was finally beginning to rain. Cool droplets blew in through the window screen, belling the curtains and making them damp. Shane shoved them aside and reached for the wall switch. It clicked on and the room flooded with light. Shane stopped and boggled at the painting on its easel.

  He had meant to come upstairs and destroy it. If it was the key to everything, the keystone bringing the entire ugly story together, then he would simply undo it. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. He could burn it, or rip it to shreds, or even douse it with turpentine and watch as the thick paint bled away into chaos, obliterating the image. He didn’t do any of those things, however. Suddenly, astonishingly, the painting made sense. In the sterile light of the studio overheads, he saw it, saw all of it, and it shook him right down to his heels. It was like finally reaching to scratch a nagging itch, forgetting everything else in the bliss of relief.

  Shane walked slowly toward the painting, his eyes wide, soaking in the image, wondering how he could have missed it all before. The purse was the keyhole, just as he had always known it would be. The reason he’d never seen it before was simple: it wasn’t Steph’s purse. It never had been.

  It was Madeleine’s.

  Shane thought of the portrait of Marlena, the one currently sequestered in the sunroom. “Dear M” the letter in her white hands had begun. Suddenly, he remembered painting that salutation, even though he had been sleep when he’d done it. He remembered drawing the letters carefully with brown paint and a number two sable brush, mimicking Wilhelm’s neat cursive handwriting. But Wilhelm had never called his wife M. He hadn’t even called her Marlena. He’d called her Lena, always and without fail, ever since the first time he had met her. Lena. The letter in Marlena’s hands, the one that had caused her so much anguish and endless misery, the one that had sent her off into decades of madness—it hadn’t been addressed to her. It had been written to the other M in his life—Madeleine, Wilhelm’s lover.

  “You discovered it in Madeleine’s purse,” Shane said aloud, speaking to Marlena’s ghost. She wasn’t there, of course, but he spoke to her anyway, or maybe just to her memory. “You were snooping. You couldn’t help yourself. Gus seemed so suddenly happy with you, with you and baby Hector, but you were worried that it was too good to be true. You found Madeleine’s purse on the sofa, and you thought it couldn’t hurt to peek. If it had been any other day, things might have ended differently. But you looked on that day, the day he’d planned to run off with her, telling her in that letter when and where to join him. Telling her to bring her things along to the cottage that night, and to bring the baby as well, the one that she was paid to nanny, the one that everyone believed was hers anyway. Baby Hector.”

  The realization was like a floodgate, opening and letting everything through. It came with perfect clarity, shockingly bright and brilliant. Shane continued to step forward, approaching the painting, drawn toward it.

  “Everyone thought Hector was Madeleine’s baby,” he said wonderingly. “They didn’t know the truth, and wouldn’t have believed it if they did. Hector really was your baby. You had born him for your husband, believing it would make him finally love you. But now you knew that he didn’t. He loved Madeleine instead. He allowed people to believe that the baby was hers. And when they ran off together, he meant to forget the truth himself. He meant to pretend the baby was theirs completely. He meant to convince himself that you had never even been.”

  Wet wind pushed through the screen, more insistently this time. It rattled in the pictures tacked on the wall, made the M. C. Escher quote knock and sway. It riffled Shane’s hair as he reached for the painting, his fingers trembling, curling around the edges of the canvas. He touched the painting, and the cottage seemed to sigh around him. At the same time, as if from some distance away, carried along on the stormy wind, another sigh sounded. It came from the Riverhouse itself. When Shane touched the painting, when he heard those twin sighs, he knew everything. He held the painting a moment longer, not lifting it from its easel but just cradling it between his palms, steeping in it.

  The note had not been meant for Marlena. It was not Wilhelm’s announcement to his wife that he was leaving her. It was an explanation of his plan for Madeleine, telling her what to do and where to go. Marlena had found it after Madeleine had read it, but before she had carried out its instruction. Marlena had found the note before they had even left.

  Shane finally let go of the painting. He turned and went downstairs again, quickly and purposefully. In the hallway, he approached and opened the cellar door. He clumped down the wooden steps into the darkness, not needing the light to find his way. It flipped on of its own accord, and then flipped off again. Shane ignored it, moving toward a set of old shelves attached to the far wall. The light flicked on and off again, almost like a warning.

  “Ding dong,” Shane muttered to himself, scanning the shelves. “The show’s about to start. Everyone find their seats.”

  The light flicked on and off once more, and then on again. This time it stayed on. Shane found what he was looking for. He wrapped his hand around it, hefted it, and carried it back across the cellar floor. The faded drawing beneath his feet seemed to move with his passing, like a movie seen through a curtain of gray fog. “Ding dong,” Shane said again, huffing as he tramped up the steps, carrying the long object in his hand. He rested the heavy end on his shoulder.

  He climbed the stairs back up to the studio and stopped again, looking at the painting of the Sleepwalker. No wonder he hadn’t recognized the picture of Marlena in the center. Her hair had been matted with rain at that point, plastering it to her head. Her wet dress clung to her, hiding her shape. He could recognize her now, however. Now, he understood everything.

  Shane lowered the head of the sledgehammer from his shoulder, plopping it into his free left hand with a meaty smack. He moved toward the painting of the Sleepwalker, and then past it. He positioned himself in front of the wall behind the easel, spreading his feet and bending his knees a little. Finally, somewhat reluctantly, he raised the head of the sledgehammer again, heaving it back over his right shoulder, both hands gripping the haft of the handle. He coiled his strength, took a deep breath, and swung.

  There were bricks underneath the old plaster. Shane wasn’t at all surprised.

  Chapter Twenty One

  The plaster cracked and shattered away easily, sending up puffs of thick white dust, but the bricks were remarkably solid. Shane struck them repeatedly, aiming low, trying to hit the same spot. On the ninth hit, one of the bricks broke away. It knocked sideways in its old bed of mortar, pushing partly through into the space beyond. Shane aimed for the same brick and struck it squarely. It shot through the hole and clattered into darkness, thumping distantly. Shane listened to the sound, his hair prickling at the base of his neck. He’d known that there had to be some forgotten, sealed-off upstairs space—the secret round window on the east side of the cottage demanded it—and yet somehow he’d never fully believed it. Hearing the brick hit the floor of that forgotten room made it suddenly very real. He didn’t want to see what was there, and yet he knew he had to. Grimly, pressing his lips into a thin line of resolve, Shane raised the sledge hammer again.

  The bricks around the small, rectangular hole gave way much more easily. Each hit loosened a few more. Shane worked as quickly as he could, and as he swung, breathing in the thick plaster dust and listening to the some
how satisfying sound of the bricks cracking beneath his blows, the story came fully alive in his mind.

  When Marlena found the letter in Madeleine’s purse, Madeleine herself had, of course, still been in the house. Wilhelm’s plans had not yet been carried out. Marlena took the letter—and Madeleine’s purse as well—and fled the Riverhouse, running out into the rain, without coat or umbrella, intent on confronting her husband at the cottage.

  Marlena was a strong woman. Earl had been right about that. She had only one weakness: she believed in the power of her love for her husband. She believed it had the ability to soften him, to transform him, to make him see the mistake he had very nearly made. She ran along the path, and Shane watched her, watched the vision of her in his mind as he swung the sledgehammer, shattering the brick wall one blow at a time. He saw the rain as it sheeted through the trees, beating the grass and weeds into submission and turning the path slippery with a thin coat of mud. He watched Marlena as she reached the stream that cut through the clearing nearest the Riverhouse. The water had risen enough to make the stepping stones appear insubstantial, like lily pads that would collapse immediately under her weight. She didn’t pause, however, but ran nimbly over them, holding her wet skirts up to keep them out of the way.

  The angel statue loomed over her, its arm raised in benediction. Marlena ran past it, Madeleine’s purse clutched in her hand, the letter rammed back inside, growing damp as rain leaked in. A stitch formed in Marlena’s side. She pressed her free hand to it but didn’t slow. The sky was growing very dark, even though it was barely five o’clock. Up ahead, a point of light flickered—a candle, high in the east window of her husband’s studio. Marlena moaned to herself, a pathetic, aching sound of abject betrayal. She slogged forward on the path, slipping once, going down on one knee and dropping the damn purse. She collected it again, righted herself, and went on.

  Finally, the trees opened before her. The meticulously neat yard of the cottage welcomed her, but coldly. This was not her place. She had barely set foot here before, and had only been inside the cottage on a handful of occasions. Never without her husband, of course, and never uninvited. She went around to the back of the cottage, her boots clacking on the flagstone patio, and reached for the door. The knob was slippery with rain: locked. Gus had apparently given Madeleine a key, yet he had never given one to his own wife. She pounded on the door, rattling the glass and crying out incoherently. She glanced around, eyes wide. There was a small pile of river rocks in the corner of the patio, smooth and round, collected probably by her husband. She lunged for them, grabbed one that fit easily in her right hand, and turned back to the cottage. She brought her hand up and then down again, ramming the large rock against the window set into the back door. The pane over the door knob shattered, cutting her fingers. She barely noticed. With her left hand, she reached in through the jagged glass, found the bolt latch, turned it. A moment later, she was inside the cottage, breathing hard, leaving the back door hanging open. Rain and leaves blew in behind her.

  “Gus!” she screamed, her voice cracking.

  His voice came almost immediately, echoing in the stillness of the cottage. “Up here, dearheart,” he called. The sarcasm was unmistakable.

  She followed the sound of his voice, her eyes wild, her fingers welling blood where she had cut them. Madeleine’s purse was in her left hand now. As Marlena climbed the stairs into her husband’s large, airy studio, she held the purse out, open, knowing she didn’t need to say anything.

  He was packing when she found him. A small suitcase was open on the narrow bed, filled with neatly folded clothes. Paintings cluttered the studio, canvases of all sizes leaning against the walls, often three or four deep. Very few of them had sold. Few people seemed to be enthralled with Wilhelm’s more esoteric works, the nymphlike naked people, the gods and goddesses lounging indolently, looking like angels with consumption. The only works people seemed to be interested in were the portraits, the kings and queens, the presidents, the super wealthy elite who formed the backbone of the unofficial American aristocracy. Wilhelm had done fewer and fewer of the portraits in recent years, however. He wanted to prove to the world that his art was more important than the mere notoriety of its subjects, and yet the world hadn’t agreed.

  Marlena had known how this galled her husband, and had tried to comfort him, to commiserate with him. As a fellow artist, she understood, perhaps even more so than he did, the fickleness of the art buying public. After all, she painted in the abstract. She loved the simple ballet of color and shape, relieved of the draconian demands of the literal. Wilhelm had rejected her comfort, however, perhaps because he didn’t feel it was necessary. He simply could not accept that people did not care for his own works, despite the evidence of the unsold canvases all around him. He persisted in believing that he would eventually be recognized for the genius that he was, like Michelangelo, and Da Vinci, and that “drunken Spaniard”, Pablo Picasso, whom Wilhelm had never met but hated tacitly. Picasso’s works, after all, were a lot more like Marlena’s than his own. Was it possible that he resented her comfort because he was jealous of her? Marlena refused to consider such things. As temperamental as he was, as occasionally spiteful, cold and self centered as he was, she loved him. She always had, ever since he had first won her heart, even if it was often—as it had been then—against her own better judgment.

  Besides the narrow bed and the small suitcase, the studio was cluttered, crowded with props: trunks and boxes covered with huge hanks of muslin, a few upholstered chairs and lounges, a pile of easels looking like dried skeletons, and Wilhelm’s huge paint table, covered with paint pots, brushes, palettes, jugs of thinner and wads of rags. Wilhelm himself was standing in front of a low dresser. He looked up as Marlena stood at top of the steps, holding the purse with its damning letter inside. He slid a drawer shut and shook his head.

  “Don’t act surprised, my dear,” he said, approaching the suitcase on the end of the bed. “You should have known something like this was inevitable. You did, didn’t you? Otherwise you never would have been sneaking around, spying us out.”

  “You made me believe you were happy,” Marlena said simply. In the vision, Shane could see that her face was still wet with rain, but there were tears there, too; tears of frustration and anger as well as sadness.

  “And you believed me,” Wilhelm said, shaking his head and smiling a little. “I hope those are good memories. Those were the memories I wished to leave you with. Grant me that, at least. I wanted you to remember us as happy.”

  “It was a lie.”

  “So many of the beautiful things in life are lies, Lena,” Wilhelm said airily, not looking at her. “Happy little lies. Useful lies. We tell them to ourselves to make life bearable. And this is as it should be. I tell myself the happy lie that Madeleine loves me, and yet, deep down, I cannot know this. It is, of course, far more likely that she loves my money, and my fame, and the egotistical thrill of believing that she has won me. And yet I persist in my belief that she truly does love me. Why? Because it pleases me. I need to be loved. I need to be adored, Lena. You know this, of course.”

  “I love you,” Marlena said, but weakly. “I adore you. Why is that not enough?”

  “It’s not you,” Wilhelm said, smiling indulgently. “Comfort yourself with that. It doesn’t matter who it is. Madeleine is who I love now. Will I love her forever?” He stopped, and looked aside, as if seriously considering the prospect. “I was about to say ‘probably not’, but do you want to know something amusing? Maybe I am simply getting old and sentimental, but I think I very well might. I truly do love her, you see. Unlike I have ever loved anyone. She is… different. She is special. You, my dear, are common. I’m sorry to say it, but it is not a bad thing. Nearly everyone in the world is common. That’s what gives the word its meaning. I am not common, of course, thus we were never a good match. New wine in old wine skins and all that. You see that, don’t you?”

  “I bore you a son!” Marlena sa
id, advancing on him now, tossing the purse onto one of the nearby chairs. “After the doctors said I would never be able to. After you yourself had sought out that damned whore to give you what you believed I couldn’t. I did it, not her.”

  Wilhelm nodded, his face reddening a little at the word “whore”. He drew a deep breath. “This is why I am leaving all of this to you, Lena dear,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “I will be taking a substantial share of the money, of course, but all of this, the cottage and the Riverhouse, it is my debt of gratitude to you. Hector is indeed the desire of my heart, and you gave him to me.” It seemed to gall him to admit it. His face had grown hard, his eyes dark. Outside, the storm grew, bringing a fresh torrent of rain with it. Thunder grumbled and banged in the distance. Lightning flickered, highlighting the side of Wilhelm’s stern features.

  “Don’t do this,” Marlena said. Her voice was calm now.

  “It is already done,” Wilhelm said, turning away from her, approaching the bed again.

  “It isn’t. Your lover is not here yet. She comes, but it isn’t too late. You can keep her as your lover if you wish, if you truly love her. But don’t leave. Please, Gus.”

  He ignored her as she followed him across the room. He bent to shut the suitcase.

  “Gus,” Marlena said, but he interrupted her, wheeling on her, towering over her.

  “You damn, stupid woman,” he said, his voice low and terrible. “You don’t understand anything. You believe you know what is best? You believe that the world is on your side and that I am the bad one? You are a simple-minded fool; a mere sheep, responding only to some primitive, instinctive concept of morality. This is why I cannot abide you. This is why you are unfit to be my wife. And this, more than anything, is why you are unfit to raise my son. I won’t have him growing up believing he must be constrained by your pathetic concepts of obligation, your stupid notion of blind duty.