But other large houses in the neighborhood were being chopped into apartments for student housing or torn down. Rachael attended town-council meetings to fight proposed zoning changes as downtown Boulder crept nearer.
The Garretts wanted children but as the years passed they began to give up hope. The doctors couldn’t tell them why they remained childless. Rachael blamed her mother’s advice on that night before her wedding.
“Nonsense,” Brandy said on one of her visits. “You’ll have one child. A daughter. And with your writing and obsession with this house, one will be all you can handle.”
“When?” Rachael asked defensively. “Since you know everything.”
“Nineteen-fifty-eight,” her mother replied. “Which reminds me. I haven’t seen the Orient yet.”
“Mom, don’t you think you should settle down?” Brandy would be seventy-five on her next birthday.
“Far too much time for that. The nursing home looms.”
Brandy was in Hong Kong when the triumphant letter reached her. “The baby’s due in early May,” Rachael wrote.
Huh-uh. May 23. That’s one date I remember for sure. Brandy sat on a high-backed rattan chair in her hotel lobby and stared at the letter. This baby I’ve got to see. It ought to be interesting. There’ll be two of us.
She planned to arrive on May 22, but due to a missed plane connection in Hawaii, Brandy’s taxi drove up to the gate of the Gingerbread House about ten-thirty on the night of the twenty-third. It was dark and locked but she found the hidden key on the porch and had the driver carry in her bags.
“Must be at the hospital having me,” she said to the quiet house. Carrying her cosmetic case and leaving the other suitcases in the hall for Jerry to bring up when he returned, she mounted the stairs. She was too old and tired to carry suitcases anymore or to travel either, she decided. This last trip had about done her in. But still pretty spry for seventy-eight, she thought with satisfaction. There’d even been an article in Time magazine last spring with her picture, entitled “The Amazing Traveling Grandmother.”
Brandy flipped the switch inside the door of the guest room. She sat on the bed with a grateful sigh to remove her shoes.
Rachael had redecorated the room again. A rocker that had been broken and in the attic for years sat beside the bed, repaired and refinished. New paint and carpet. “That girl, honestly.”
As she turned her head, something burnished glowed at the corner of her eye. “Oh, no …”
She rose slowly to face the wedding mirror, polished and dusted, proudly displayed beside the wardrobe. “Rachael … it’s always Rachael …”
Brandy’s body shook but she straightened Brandy’s shoulders. “We may be old and travel-worn, you ancient hunk of ugly garbage, but we’re still fit and a long way from any stroke, so …”
The mirror didn’t reflect her image. Instead it showed her a moving picture of Rachael writhing on a table, her sheeted knees drawn up and parted.
A ripping sound exploded in her head as the glass of the wedding mirror cracked in a jagged diagonal line across the top.
At that moment, some ten blocks away, Rachael give birth to Shay Garrett in Community Hospital.
Jerry returned later that night to find the Gingerbread House lighted and unlocked, suitcases in the hall and his mother-in-law unconscious on the floor of the guest room. When he couldn’t revive her, he carried her out to his car and raced back to the hospital.
Rachael’s delight over her new baby was diminished by her mother’s stroke.
Completely paralyzed at first, Brandy Maddon was removed to a nursing home, where in time she regained the use of her muscles. But her speech did not return and her eyes looked on the world with a blank disinterest. She would walk when led, eat when food was set before her, dress in clothes that were handed to her. Sometimes she’d smile as if a happy memory had floated past. On Sundays Rachael would bring her to the house for dinner so she could have some contact with her mother even if it was only physical.
When Rachael had unpacked Brandy’s bags she’d found a parcel wrapped in brown paper, and written across the wrapping, “For Shay Garrett on her wedding day.”
“She even knew the baby’s name.” Rachael shivered and put the parcel in the bottom drawer of the buffet that Thora K.’s family brought from Cornwall.
Rachael redecorated the guest room again, as if to erase what had happened to Brandy there. The wedding mirror returned to the attic.
Shay Garrett entered kindergarten the year someone assassinated President John F. Kennedy. She was attending Boulder High School when the war ended in Vietnam and when Nixon was pardoned for the Watergate scandal. And in the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Shay enrolled as a freshman at the University of Colorado.
Several times as she was growing up and happened to be in the attic with her mother, Shay uncovered the mirror and asked about it.
“A wedding present from your great-grandfather to my mother. It’s very old,” Rachael would say in a reverent voice, and cover it up again so it wouldn’t get dusty.
With the end of World War II the mines had closed in Nederland. The town subsisted on summer visitors and eventually developed into a bedroom community for people working in Boulder and Denver who desired to live in the mountains. A ski area opened to the west of it and provided additional income in winter.
The cottage Hutch Maddon built on the site of the Strock cabin deteriorated with years of careless renters and in 1973 Jerry Garrett had it torn down. In its place he erected an A-frame cabin as modern and as different from the Gingerbread House as he could devise.
By this time tourists and fire had eradicated almost all signs of the short-lived town of Tungsten below the dam.
Shay’s twin uncles and her aunts, their families grown and gone, returned to Colorado to retire because California had grown too crowded. They moved into condominium apartments near a country club and its golf course. And so they were on hand when Shay met and eventually announced she would marry a man named Marek Weir.…
Part III
Brandy
1
The Gingerbread House stood aloof on its hill at the edge of town. Moonlight sat in puddles among its gables and along the miniature widow’s walk. It traced the intricacies of the wrought-iron fence in shadow patterns across the irrigation ditch.
A carriage drawn by a skittish horse approached on the road beside the ditch and turned to descend the hill. It brought a drowsy whinny from the pasture next to the house.
And then all was still once more … a silence made up of the mere brushing together of leaves and the peace of sound that is so familiar it isn’t heard, doesn’t disturb. A brief rustling from the hen house. The far-off chirp of a prairie-dog sentinel. The background clatter of crickets. A breathy hiss from a prowling housecat.
All color drenched in the softness of moonlight and shadow. All scent muted by the spice of drying prairie grass and sage.
Brandy McCabe poured steaming water into the dishpan.
Nora clanked plates against the metal sink. “Don’t know what you young folks expect nowadays.” She made a clucking sound to show her disgust.
“The time has long since passed, Nora, when fathers choose marriage partners for their children.” Brandy kept her voice controlled so the shaking inside her wouldn’t show. But most people don’t have John McCabe for a father.
“Well, at least Mr. Strock is young.”
“Nora –”
“You could’ve married Tom Trevors or the Arnett boy before that. What do you expect your father to do, now you’ve waited so long?” Nora slipped a plate into the dishpan of rinse water.
“I don’t wish to discuss this any further.” Brandy picked out the plate and dried it by feel, her eyes on the night silhouette of mountain range outside the kitchen window. Her own rigid reflection and the dim globe of the light from behind her looked pasted onto the landscape.
Brandy tried to ignore the murmur of the argument
still waging in the dining room, the occasional outburst …
“But, John, you’ve not even given us time to see to a trousseau.”
What possible need would I have of a trousseau living in a miner’s shack in Nederland? Brandy knew her mother was trying and she was grateful. But she had little hope that Sophie McCabe could dissuade her husband from a course he’d set his mind to.
Brandy, unlike her mother, had always been able to reason, cajole, tease or flatter him into at least considering her wishes. She’d held out these last two weeks and through Mr. Strock’s interminable visits in the parlor, assured that she could delay and eventually cancel the wedding planned for her in the morning. But Brandy’d realized at the table tonight this time her father was determined she should not have her way.
She clearly had no choice but to carry out her half-formed plan. After wiping the last kettle, Brandy hung the dish towel to dry and removed her apron. I just pray I’m brave enough to carry it through.
As she stepped into the hall, John McCabe exploded from the dining room. “That’s my last word,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll hear no more of it, woman.”
Then he saw his daughter and added, “Or from you, miss. Tomorrow at this time you’ll be Mrs. Corbin Strock.”
Brandy, holding her head as proudly and defiantly as she dared, lifted her skirts and ascended the staircase without answering him.
She had no real power to oppose him and would probably have none with a husband. As if she’d been nothing but a pampered slave all her life and just discovered the fact.
“Bran?” Her brother stepped out of the shadows of the upstairs hall.
“Oh, Elton.” She clutched his arm and for a moment wanted only to be weak and cling to him.
“Listen, I have a plan. I’ll talk to Pa. Convince him you’re not sane. He couldn’t let you marry then. I’ll remind him of every crazy thing you’ve said lately and make up a few to boot. It’s worth a try.”
“Thank you, Elton.” For all the good it will do, beloved brother.
“I’d have said something before now but I thought sure you’d be able to talk him out of it. He always used to listen to you.”
“Be careful, Elton.” She raised on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and turned into her room.
Brandy stood on her toes again to reach the switch above the light bulb and caught her reflection in the mirror that stood next to her writing desk. A wedding veil of fine lace hung from a bronze hand on one side of the mirror’s frame.
“You. This is all your fault,” she whispered.
If she’d never seen the intriguing pictures in its glass, she might never have had the lofty idea of attending the university without any conception of what she wished to study.
“I feel unformed,” she’d told her father when she’d backed out of her betrothal to Mr. Trevors. “I want to learn … anything, everything. There’s so much we don’t know, cannot imagine.”
“Nothing unformed about you, girl. You’ve got the figure of an hourglass. Only women up there are them that’re too ugly to get themselves a man,” John McCabe answered. “Or too dumb to want one. A man, that’s what you need. And babies. They’ll settle you down and make you forget all this nonsense.”
Brandy touched a cold hand on the mirror’s frame. “If you’re so magic, help me escape this abominable marriage.”
If she’d never spoken of the pictures she’d seen in the mirror, there wouldn’t be such malicious rumors about her floating around the town. And other beaux would have called at the Gingerbread House. Her father wouldn’t have been forced to pounce on the rough miner from Nederland to wed his only daughter.
“There’ll be sleek and powerful machines racing across the nation on ribbons of paved roadways,” she’d told Mr. Heimer at the baker’s shop when he’d joked about the concept of the horseless carriage. “Horses, even the trolley and locomotive will be replaced by machines that’ll fly and glide and hover and carry people wherever they wish to go. I’ve seen it. I know.”
Or at the dinner table, in a fit of euphoria, she’d broken out with, “I’ve seen men walk on the surface of the moon and under the seas –”
“So have I,” her father said. “At Werely’s Saloon. Sophie, the girl’s got into the liquor.”
But Brandy didn’t tell where she’d seen these fantastic things, of sneaking up to the attic to see if the wedding mirror was in a mood to perform its magic, of waiting hours before it – sometimes with a candle in the middle of the night. Until Brandy figured out that it worked only during electrical storms or if its frame felt warm to the touch.
When there was no storm but the hands felt warm, the pictures in the glass were of a different nature. Always of one figure. A young woman with pale hair and darkened skin, in a strange form of dress that was often more a state of undress. Embarrassed, Brandy’d wanted to look away but couldn’t.
She’d cautioned herself not to speak of these things – of giant animals browsing on trees, a primitive people tearing meat from bones with their teeth.
But every now and then she’d forget herself. And that was enough to seal her fate.
She knelt with her elbows on the hard lid of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Dear Lord, give me the courage to do what I must do tonight. And please forgive me for …
Brandy’s eyes flew open. Could she really expect help from that quarter? The Lord, after all, was another man and the Bible spoke clearly of obeying one’s elders and “cleaving unto” a husband and then obeying him.…
Our Father, who art in heaven – just this once Brandy wished God was a woman. There might be more understanding of her plight in heaven if that were the case. But she finished the Lord’s Prayer for good measure and went to sit by the window.
She’d have to wait until the house was quiet and everyone slept. She leaned out to breathe in dry cool air, hoping to regulate the alarming spasms of her heart beat.
The carriage horse stood, a motionless shadow, near the open-ended shed that sheltered him in unpleasant weather. He was no saddle horse but both she and Elton had ridden him bareback around the pasture when their father was away.
Tonight Brandy would attempt to ride him to Denver. Not by the road, but along the tracks of the interurban where she’d be less easily seen. With only the moon to light her way. Astride a carriage horse with her skirts drawn up, shamelessly exposing her limbs. Why hadn’t she provided herself with a riding costume that had a split skirt?
Because she was no horsewoman. Hadn’t needed a costume. She’d probably fall off and break her neck. Or lead the horse to step into a prairie-dog hole.
Her plan was mad. But she had no other.
When she arrived, if she did, Brandy would throw herself on the mercy of Aunt Harriet Euler, plead to be hidden until she could make further plans. Brandy was a favorite of her aunt’s and Harriet Euler disliked John McCabe to the point of hatred. Since she was a spinster there’d be no added male interference.
The thought of marriage and the intimacies implied by “cleaving unto” held nothing but terror for Brandy. Largely because she didn’t understand the nature of those intimacies.
They must be nasty because they were never discussed.
Her observations of animals at certain periods of the year did not reassure her.
Curiosity had led her to examine her body in the bath, using her fingers to feel what she couldn’t see. The result had led more to confusion and guilt than to illumination.
Scarcely aware of the high-pitched but quiet hum at her back, Brandy went on with her tortured reasoning.
Were the strange sensations that sometimes attacked her body connected to this cleaving? Did they happen to others or just to her?
How could these experiences she feared be so terrible when many timid women went through them calmly, happily?
There were times when certain gentlemen seemed most attractive to Brandy …
But not Mr. Strock. And not in a forced marriage. This was
the twentieth century, if only the beginning, and …
The hum grew in intensity, broke into her thoughts.
Brandy turned to see the wedding veil float to the floor in a billow of lace. She bent to pick it up, realizing the mirror was preparing to do its magic.
Standing back to look at the glass, she saw not her reflection but dark gray twisting clouds that made the entwined hands surrounding it glow faintly green.
Brandy didn’t understand. It wasn’t storming.
She dropped the veil and put her hands over her ears as the humming tried to pierce her head. It had never seemed so loud before, or so threatening.
Brandy started to back away, but the clouds seeped from the base of the mirror to swirl across the floor and imprison her.
A sickness worse than the typhoid clamped upon her body.
A cracking sound ripped the air and she was thrown down, submerged in the horrid cloud. There was no floor beneath it.
Brandy fell into a blackness filled with the sound of harsh guttural screams.
2
The awful screaming ended. Brandy knew she had died.
She rose through silent layers of black. Sickness heaved inside her. Was she rising toward heaven after all? She’d imagined it to be a more pleasant experience.
She whirled in slow sweeping circles that stopped suddenly. Had she arrived?
No. The web of the wedding veil’s lace lay in a jumble around her face. Brandy pushed it away and gagged.
Why would a veil go to heaven? Perhaps it was an angel’s gown.
Perhaps she’d merely swooned and imagined the rest.
But she lay on a cushion of some kind with red and pink figures that her blurred vision couldn’t identify.
Brandy raised herself on her hands. Nearby on the cushion lay a long crumpled shape. She blinked and focused on the wizened face of an ancient woman … with the sightless stare of death in her eyes.
The Mirror Page 24
