Fallam's Secret

by Denise Giardina

  Uncle John’s study was nestled at the top of the house beneath the eaves. Lydde loved the way the roof sloped and caressed the windows. She wasn’t allowed in the study while Uncle John was working. But fifteen minutes before supper was ready she would be sent to call him. She would charge up the stairs and then play in the secret room behind the little door, or explore the study while Uncle John put away his work. Papers and books were always stacked on every flat space, the overflow from a massive file cabinet and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at one end of the room.

  The wall opposite the bookshelves held several frames. The centerpiece was a large print of a painting by Salvador Dalí—Christus Hypercubus, or Jesus Christ crucified on a tesseract. Uncle John said a tesseract was an unraveled hypercube.

  “Dalí’s trying to visualize the fourth dimension,” he said.

  Lydde thought of height, width, and depth. “What’s the fourth dimension?”

  “Time.”

  The Dalí looked to her like a neon cross she’d seen outside a Pentecostal church near Lafayette. She liked the word tesseract and the way Jesus looked like he was floating in air and might just fall off the cross instead of being stuck on.

  Below the Dalí painting was a photograph of a circular hole blasted from ribbed rock. A small man stood beside the opening to show scale. Hawks Nest Tunnel, read the caption. Hawks Nest was just two miles downriver from Roundbottom Farm.

  Beneath this was an antique print of an English church. Old St. Pancras Parish Church, Norchester. Lydde thought Pancras was a silly name.

  And finally there was the print of Batts and Fallam discovering the New River in 1671.

  The prints were flanked by a framed pair of quotations done up by Aunt Lavinia in calligraphy, one of her hobbies.

  Magic is any sufficiently advanced technology.

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  And—

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

  —William Shakespeare

  Lydde learned later that each object on the wall had a purpose, and each was connected one to the other.

  LYDDE was a dreamy child, stubborn and independent, happier entertaining herself than hanging out in a group. She played sandlot football and baseball. She had a handful of friends, mostly boys who treated her like a sister, and she seemed to require no more. Aunt Lavinia dutifully enrolled her in Girl Scouts and guitar lessons, and drove her to youth meetings at the Episcopal church. There were intermittent enthusiasms—Appalachian clog dance lessons, chess—that Lydde pursued for a time and then dropped. Sometimes the three of them would turn off the television and act out scenes from Shakespeare, Lydde playing Hamlet or Henry the Fifth while Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia held down all the supporting roles. But she liked best to curl up with a book or walk in the gorge with Uncle John.

  They never went to the clamshell rock. Uncle John owned everything up to the highway right-of-way, and he had erected a plywood barrier around the cave. Lydde forgot the outcrop and ignored the site as she made her way up Fallam Mountain to the ruins of Montefalco. The cave was left untouched, as Uncle John wished, for twenty years. But the New River Gorge was gaining a reputation for tourism, drawing visitors for whitewater rafting and rock climbing, and Uncle John was afraid someone would stumble onto “his” cave and tear down the makeshift barricade.

  By then Lydde had graduated from college and was living abroad, leaving Uncle John and Aunt Lavinia to reinvent themselves. Uncle John decided to build on top of the clamshell cave as a way of keeping people out. This made sense to Lavinia. If the cave’s entrance was covered by a building and only Uncle John had the key, the skeleton would be undisturbed. What she didn’t understand was why the building must be what she referred to as a “tourist trap.” For Uncle John had decided to build an attraction for paying visitors that would defy gravity.

  “Why spend your time on something like that?” she asked one morning over breakfast.

  He shrugged. “It will bring in a little extra cash,” he said.

  “Not enough to even notice.”

  Uncle John sipped his coffee. “I think it would be fun,” he said. “The only bad thing about living here at Roundbottom is we don’t get many visitors. And with Lydde away it’s awful quiet. Besides, it would be inspiring for my work.”

  Aunt Lavinia snorted. “Fleecing tourists would inspire your work?”

  “Not fleecing tourists. Observing people as their sense of reality is confounded. Demonstrating over and over that what we think we experience is not what’s real at all. It would get my juices flowing, the way writers take walks in the woods to get their creativity jump-started.”

  Aunt Lavinia shook her head. There were times, she realized, when she didn’t understand her husband at all. But she enjoyed humoring him, so she watched good-naturedly as the Mystery Hole took shape.

  Uncle John had tenure and no longer taught summer term. He hired some of his students to help with his new project. They took a backhoe to the site between the highway and the clamshell cave, and dug all one summer, then poured concrete. By the time school started, the building, an old Quonset hut reinforced with a frame of logs, was up. Uncle John worked on the interior during his spare time that winter. No one helped with that part, and he sometimes worked alone into the night. In May of 1971 the Mystery Hole opened for business.

  At its heart the Mystery Hole was a simple room built foursquare into the bedrock of lower Fallam Mountain. But Uncle John had designed the room so that it appeared to defy gravity. It was turned on its side so that what should have been the floor appeared to be a wall, and furniture had been nailed to a wall so that it appeared to be the floor. Exposed to the light, the secret of the Mystery Hole would have been simple, an architectural version of Donald O’Connor dancing on the walls in Singin’ In The Rain. But underground, with nothing to help with orientation, the Mystery Hole did indeed seem to defy gravity. A warning, perhaps, against taking things out of context.

  The Mystery Hole became something of a cult favorite and was open at Uncle John’s whim only, so that part of its charm was in bragging that one had actually gotten in. Visitors reached the underground room by filing past the “Rules of the Hole”—NO SMOKING NO SHOVING NO RUNNING—and along a passageway that twisted and turned until it was hard to say which way was up and which way was down. When people finally stepped inside the chamber, they were ushered to a bench and urged to sit cautiously. Except the back of the bench was what would have been the floor and what appeared to be the floor would have been the far wall aboveground. The “walls” were decorated with a variety of black light posters and the lights were doused for a time to allow for a few minutes of glow-in-the-dark and Rolling Stones music.

  Then the lights came up, a red door opened, and Uncle John popped out, trying not to show how carefully he was walking. He performed a variety of gravity-defying feats such as pouring water up into a cup, and placing a ball at the foot of a ramp and letting it go to roll uphill on its own. When the show was done, the disoriented visitors heaved themselves from their seats with great difficulty and staggered against gravity up the exit ramp.

  Uncle John accumulated the Hole’s decorations over the years. Unusual hubcabs, shined to a fault, covered one outside wall, and metal pie tins, each bearing a brightly colored letter spelling MYSTERY HOLE, were nailed to the entrance. A life-sized plastic gorilla, arm upraised and fangs bared, crowned the roof. A hand-painted sign above the door proclaimed, SEE THE MYSTERY HOLE, and another along the porch railing added,

  SEE FOR YOURSELF

  NATURE’S BEAUTY SEEMS TO HAVE GONE AND

  LOST ITS BALANCE

  Down from the building, the gorge plummeted out of sight past a rock cliff, and beyond the River continued to complain in a low moan as it gnawed its way through rock.

  LYDDE played Ado Annie in her high school’s production of Oklahoma! and was hooked on acting. She went to Duke University on scholarship with a
double major in history and theater. In her happiest moments she stood in the wings waiting for her entrance, so charged with nervous energy that she bounced on tiptoe as though on the end of a diving board, then launched herself onstage, plunging through heavy air into another dimension, a parallel universe of dust-mote light with a black sky above and scuffed wooden boards for a ground.

  Her senior year she was off to London for an exchange program in Elizabethan theater. Aunt Lavinia and Uncle John took her to meet the train for New York. She sat between them, wearing jeans, Keds, and a white Duke T-shirt. All her belongings were stuffed into a long canvas duffel bag, for she had not yet begun to accumulate things and still possessed the turtlelike freedom of the young and the homeless. A thick white fog filled the Gorge and muffled the sounds of rushing water and birdsong.

  Lydde climbed aboard the train in the West Virginia dawn after hugging her tearful aunt and uncle, and read Howards End in paperback and dreamed out the window at passing mountains and fields and city neighborhoods dense and tiny as scale models, dozed through a New Jersey night until she woke on cue to black-and-gold Manhattan soaring on the horizon. There she boarded a plane for London, and her new life.

  LONDON in those days was a dowdy city, despite Carnaby Street and the British music revolution. Lydde liked it at once. People were not stylish, their houses were small and cold, with radiators that clanked and windows that rattled when the wind blew. The popular new restaurants were those that badly mimicked American diners; there people sat with knife and fork in hand, cutting properly away at burgers in buns. Greasy fish-and-chip papers blew about in the wind and the gutters were littered with fruit peels and cigarette butts. It was fine by Lydde. She would have been put off by neatness and intimidated by glitz.

  By day she attended classes. Most nights she went to plays, cheap standing-room-only tickets. She memorized the names of the theaters and made a litany of them to recite on her solitary walks—

  Adelphi Albany Aldwych

  Duchess DukeofYork Garrick

  St. Martins Strand Wyndhams.

  Best of all, the Royal Court. They were musty, most of them, some with atrophied balconies once for the nobility and now unused, others plain. In nooks and crannies of the basement and upper stairwells, glasses of wine were served at dark oak bars that reminded her of the altar rail and communion cup at All Saints Episcopal Church back home. Gielgud and Richardson and Olivier, Bates and Schofield, Dench and the Redgraves passed like a parade of the hallowed. She watched them over and over, studying their gestures and intonation, went back to her room and jotted down the details in a notebook.

  At the end of the year, Lydde auditioned at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and was accepted. When she called home with the news, Aunt Lavinia wailed, “You’ll never come back.”

  Lydde cried as well. She had not seen her aunt and uncle, or the mountains, in nine months. But she wanted to stay in London.

  “Can you call Duke and have them mail me my diploma?” she asked. “And could you ship my books?”

  “Won’t you miss the mountains?” Uncle John asked in his turn.

  “I already do,” she said. “And I miss you. But the theater here—I can’t explain it. If you want to be a priest, this is the Vatican.”

  “America has theater,” he stubbornly insisted.

  “I know,” Lydde said. “But I want something that can’t be taken away.”

  “They can’t take the mountains.”

  “No,” Lydde agreed. “But you know what I mean.”

  He did. More than anyone he knew how it had hurt her to see her father come and go. And all the rest. It was Uncle John who found Lydde up the hollow, by herself, scraping through burned ruins with her stick.

  Thirty years later, when he went to England for the last of his periodic visits, he told Lydde he had been wrong about the mountains.

  LYDDE was never famous, nor wanted to be. She was a character actress, no Judi Dench or Vanessa Redgrave. She liked the smaller parts, cozy and warm as a pair of bedroom slippers. While the leads carried the burden of the reviews and the audience, Lydde lounged in the dressing rooms reading magazines, gossiping. For a few moments suspended in time she plunged onstage, and now and then she stole the show.

  She started out in improv with Joan Littlewood in the East End. But she left after a time, drawn to Shakespeare. Two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, a year at the Young Vic, parts in the West End, but as much time spent in Hammersmith, Reading, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol. Anywhere to pay the bills.

  Actors, like athletes, have superstitions. On Lydde’s first opening night she began a habit she never relinquished. Before going to the dressing rooms, she walked the interior of the theater in street clothes. She went to the top of the dress circle and walked the length of the rows, one after another, like a labyrinth, then down to the stalls, and finally back to one of the wings and onto the stage, where she stood a moment staring up at the top of the dress circle from whence she had begun her pilgrimage. Lydde learned later that Aborigines in Australia go on walkabout, singing the stories of their Ancestor, and that’s something of what she felt she was doing, walking the story into existence so she could then inhabit the part properly. All she knew was it worked.

  LYDDE’S first and biggest break came early in 1974. She was facing eviction from her Clerkenwell flat. The hot young director Phil Dunleavy was mounting a production of Henry IV Part One at the Royal Court and talking all around about spitting in the face of the Shakespeare establishment.

  “The only reason to keep doing Shakespeare,” Dunleavy told the Guardian, “is if you can find a way to subvert him.”

  Bullshit, Lydde thought, then checked the pitiful state of her bank-book, toted up the number of failed auditions she’d had recently, and wondered how far Mr. Dunleavy was really willing to go.

  In West Virginia she had been a tomboy, which was easy there. You didn’t find many little girls into frilly dresses and patent leather shoes. In the days before the audition she dreamed herself back to the New River, climbing rock faces, launching herself off the side of Fallam Mountain while clinging to a gnarled grapevine, wrestling boys to a draw. Scrabbling around burned ruins with a stick in her hand.

  She cut her hair short and strode into the audition wearing jeans, an oversized sweatshirt, and her best hillbilly swagger.

  Dunleavy looked startled, then amused, as she stood in front of him. He left his seat and came up onto the stage. “Err—but aren’t you a woman?” he finally asked.

  Lydde raised her chin and stared him down for a moment. Then she said, “‘Do not think so; you shall not find it so. And God forgive them that so much have swayed your majesty’s good thoughts away from me.’” She leaned closer. “‘I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, and in the closing of some glorious day be bold to tell you that I—am—your—son.’”

  His eyes narrowed and he stood still, wondering whether to laugh or to tell her to stop wasting his time. Then he looked down at his script and said, “Act One, Scene Two. ‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’”

  Lydde found the place and replied, “‘Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.’”

  He smiled and said, “You’ve got a good rich voice. You could almost fool me. But really—”

  “‘The fico for thee then,’” she interrupted, and thrust her finger in an obscene gesture so abrupt Dunleavy took a step back.

  He waved at the AD standing nearby—“Get a sword over here.” And when she had it in hand—“Draw on me.”

  Lydde did, and set the point neatly at his throat. “‘Thou owest God a death,’” she said with venom.

  Dunleavy turned abruptly and left the stage, followed by the AD. They stood in the front row arguing and Lydde stepped downstage to listen.

  “Innovation is one thing,�
� the AD was saying, “but this would be a joke.”

  Lydde yelled, “Do you know how old Hal was?”

  They turned and looked at her.

  “He was fourteen,” she answered her own question, “when he fought in that battle.”

  “Pardon me,” the AD said, “but we’re having a conference here.”

  “His voice was just changing,” she persisted, ignoring the AD and focusing on Dunleavy. “He wasn’t an irresponsible prince, he was a kid fighting for his life. Acting goofy sometimes, but then so damn charismatic he couldn’t help but rally the troops. You’ll never get a guy in his twenties to pull that off.” She pointed the sword at the AD. “‘Think not, Percy, to share glory with me any more.’”

  He threw up his hands. “Right, Phil, do you want to see the rest of them or not?”

  “Of course,” Dunleavy said. He gestured Lydde offstage. “Someone will call you.”

  She wavered a moment, leaning on the sword, then dropped it and sauntered offstage, unable to let go. When she was just out of sight, he called her back.

  “Just curious,” he said. “Are you American?”

  “You bet.”

  “I thought so. Only an American woman can walk that way. So bold it’s almost heartbreaking.”

  A week later he called to tell Lydde she had the part. And he asked her to dinner.

  The relationship only lasted a couple of months. Lydde realized quickly that Phil, a tall lanky man with a wisp of red beard, liked her better as Hal than as Lydde. When Lydde told him they wouldn’t work as a couple, he told her she would have made a great lesbian.

  “Too bad,” she said. “I’ve never had the remotest interest in women.”

  But Lydde wasn’t doing so well with men either, she had to admit. She wasn’t sure if she had an incorrigible independent streak toughened by abandonment or if she was just too picky. She ran from safe, sweet guys because they seemed boring or wimpy. But she let herself be swept off her feet by jerks who turned out to be sleeping with two other women at the same time. She fell hard for gay men, and fended off married men, who seemed to find her intriguing because she wasn’t like their wives, but who were clearly not ready to leave those wives, and wouldn’t really have wanted her if they were.