“Mrs. Harbinger!” he calls as he comes up the front walk. “How are you?”
Confusion gives way to relief. He’s mistaken me for Helena! That’s fine, that’s just fine—so long as they don’t come back from the graveyard before he leaves.
“Hello, Justin.” I’ve assumed my most grandmotherly intonation. “Would you like a glass of lemonade?”
“That’s very kind of you, thanks,” he says as I pick up a clean drinking glass that wasn’t there a second ago and fill it to the brim.
He seats himself on a wicker chair opposite me and I expect he’ll ask if I’m home, and if not, where I am, but he throws me for a loop. “I’d like to talk to you about Eve,” he says.
“What about Eve?”
“What I want to say is—I think she’s it.”
“Pardon me?”
“Well. You know,” Justin says, growing considerably red in the face. “The one.”
Oh dear. Oh no.
“I was hoping you could give me some advice, Mrs. Harbinger. And maybe you could arrange for me to meet her parents?”
“Her parents are dead.” As I say these words I wonder for the first time what my mother might have thought of him. She’d never have approved, I know that much—just as she’d never have approved of Jonah. What surprises me most is that he’s given me no inkling this was coming; he’s never expressed any desire for me to meet his parents.
“Oh. I guess I should have known,” he says slowly. “She never mentions them.”
I steel myself for the words I wish I didn’t have to say. “Will you take my advice, Justin?”
He nods.
“I know that you and Eve have been enjoying each other’s company very much over these last few months—”
“Nearly a year.”
“Pardon?” (He’s been keeping track! There’s a thrill.)
“We’ve been dating nearly a year. That’s a lot more than a ‘few.’ ”
“Just so. But, Justin, you mustn’t talk of marriage.”
“But she loves me. I know she does.”
“It isn’t a matter of love. She simply isn’t free to marry.”
“Not free to marry?” He stares at me. “What, is she married already?”
“It isn’t that.” I’m growing rather exasperated here. “But you must trust me, Justin. Enjoy her company, but don’t ask for any more than that.”
“I don’t understand you, Mrs. Harbinger. I thought you approved of me.”
“My dear boy, it has nothing whatever to do with you. But you must understand: oftentimes there are obstacles in life that we simply cannot surmount, no matter how determined we may be to live a happy life. I regret that I cannot explain further.” I reach for the pie knife with trembling fingers. “Now. Would you care for a slice of cake?”
JUSTIN LEAVES soon afterward, hurt but trying not to show it. I wander inside and pour myself a dram at the parlor sideboard, though I can’t bring myself to drink it. I just stand there for a few moments, trembling and teary. Uncle Hy has moved on to the Irish Renaissance and is too engrossed even to notice I’m in the room. Nor does he notice that one of the jujus hanging from the mantelpiece is struggling to get down.
“I told you it would all end in tears, didn’t I?” The summer covention is technically over, but Auntie Em does tend to stay longer than the others.
I plop into the armchair by the fireplace and hide my face in my hands. “Kick me while I’m down, Auntie—that’s real classy.”
“Oh, Evelyn,” she says, now with a bit of sympathy. She’s managed to free herself from the hook, and with a considerable amount of clonking and squeaking of hinges, she seats herself beside me in the chair and pats me on the knee. “You know I only ever want what’s best for you, don’t you?” I glance up at the fireplace, where my mother’s juju has hung lifeless since the day we put it there, and a wave of despair leaves me in full-blown tears.
“I know you think you know what’s best for you,” Auntie Em is yammering on, “but you don’t and you never have. Never in my life, nor after it, have I known a girl so reckless as you. No, you’ve only known what’s best in the present moment—but as a wise dame once said, ‘The ephemeral pleasures of life grow more fleeting by the hour.’ ”
I shake off her little wooden hand. “Oh, shove it.” Then I pretty much lose it, and to her credit Auntie says no more. I’ll take her tiny wooden shoulder over none at all.
BY THE time the girls have returned I am back on the porch swing and more or less recovered. Helena clasps the tin measuring cup full of grave dirt in both hands as she comes up the steps. If you didn’t know better you’d think she’d just hit up a neighbor for some extra coffee grounds. (Ugh, coffee grounds! This whole business makes me want never to drink another cup as long as I live.) Dymphna says she will return at a quarter past nine for our rendezvous with the hysterix.
“Wouldn’t we all be more comfortable doing it here at home?” Rosamund asks as they file through the front door. “Her sitting room could hardly fit us all.”
“It isn’t a matter of comfort, dear,” Morven explains as they disappear into the house. “It’s just that unwanted company is harder to get rid of when it’s your own kin.”
Someone takes the cup from Helena to stow for safekeeping, and she sits down beside me on the porch swing as Vega pours her a glass of lemonade. Once we’re alone, I consider asking her why she told us she never used that spellbook when everything we saw in the View-Master proved she had.
But truth be told, I don’t really want to know. So instead I say, “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not looking so good. You don’t have to go, you know.”
“All will be well,” she replies, though it seems like she’s only trying to convince herself.
All is not well, as it turns out: when Dymphna arrives at a quarter past nine, mad-cow Lucretia is with her. Morven puts a restraining grip on my arm. “With all due respect, Dymphna, I’m not sure Lucretia’s presence is appropriate,” she says. “This matter is so sensitive that I would be afraid any tension among our group would have an adverse effect on the outcome tonight.”
“That is a fair point,” Dymphna replies. “But I am willing to risk it. You all should know that I asked Lucretia to be here. This way the matter can be thoroughly laid to rest.”
Some of us walk and some of us take the loo. “Oh,” says Clovis as we file first out of her powder room, then through her front door. “There are even more of you this time. It may be a little snug.” She leads us into her dining room, where the candles are already lit. There aren’t enough seats around the table so Lucretia has to sit in a spare chair in a corner, half-hidden by the bulk of a china cabinet, and her scowl would put any gargoyle to shame.
Helena’s daughters place Henry’s belongings at the center of the table—comb, cuff links, fountain pen, grave dirt—and Helena unfastens the glass locket and lays it down with exaggerated care.
“Are we ready to begin? Now. I want you all to close your eyes and fix in your mind the face of Henry Dryden. If you did not know him, just visualize any photograph of him that you may have seen.”
After a minute I open an eye. I haven’t been to many of these, I’ll admit, but this first part never gets any less boring. Clovis jerks her head and looks at me and I quickly shut it again.
“I summon the spirit of Henry Dryden,” she intones in that very old language, “from the far reaches of the Unknown, so that we may learn the truth of his demise. In this way, we hope to lay his spirit to rest at last.”
From the darkened sitting room beyond come a mechanical-sounding pop and a blue flash of light, as if the television has been switched on. We open our eyes. A shadow approaches the doorway between the rooms, and when it reaches the dining room threshold it grows lighter, comes into focus.
“Hallo, Henry,” I say. Everybody gasps. He gazes at Helena and she looks positively terrified. There are soft cries of “Daddy!” and more than one of us begin to weep.
His physical presence is a little hard to describe. Let’s just say he looks like a bad photocopy, only three dimensional. We can see straight through his waistcoat and tie.
“Spirit of Henry Dryden,” Clovis says. “We humbly ask that you tell us if you died by the hand of another and, if so, that you name your killer.”
Without taking his see-through eyes off Helena, Henry opens his mouth and begins to speak … but we can’t hear a word!
We just stare at him in bafflement for a few moments. Then somebody says nervously, “There’s no audio!”
Dymphna turns to the hysterix. “Is there any way to fix it?”
“I seem to have misplaced the remote control,” Clovis replies tartly.
Then we hear a second popping noise, this time right above our heads. A wheel takes shape out of a ball of unearthly light, then another, then a chair, then a person inside the chair. And she, like my unfortunate brother-in-law, doesn’t take notice of anyone else in the room. “Henry! Oh, Henry, how I’ve missed you!”
The girls turn away from the image of their father and eye the newcomer in consternation. “Who is that?”
Helena regards the apparition with distaste. “Belva Mettle.”
“How did she get in here?”
Good grief—the hag knot! I’ve got to get rid of it. But she might not go away if I only make it vanish out of my pocketbook into the nearest trash can; I’ve got to undo the knot, separate the stone from the cord. Nothing good can come of an interview with Henry’s dead mistress.
Aside from the glowing blue permanent and a rather impressive wattle, Belva doesn’t look much altered from the scene inside the View-Master. “Oh, my dear, dear Henry!”
Henry, meanwhile, doesn’t even notice Belva in her spectral wheelchair hovering above the dining table. It’s like the spirits in the room are on two different channels. He holds his hand out to Helena, lips still moving, looking at her mournfully all the while.
Belva holds out her skinny bird-claw hands, waving frantically. “Henry! Henry! Can’t you hear me?”
“We can hear you,” Vega mutters. “And we wish you’d go back to whatever circle of hell you’ve just sprung from.”
The ghost of Belva slowly swivels to look at my niece sitting at the table next to me. “How like a Harbinger,” she says slowly, “to invite a gal to a party and once she’s there make her feel like she’s crashed it.”
“Nobody asked you here,” Vega retorts. I’m fumbling in my pocketbook for the hag knot while maintaining the picture of innocence above the table. Clovis shoots me a look but says nothing.
“Somebody asked me here, or else I wouldn’t be here. Why are you all so heartless? Isn’t it enough that I’ve had to live and die without my Henry? Why show him to me now, why make him blind and deaf to me?”
“He’s not your Henry,” Helena replies. “And he never was.”
I slide my fingernail under the knot, loosening it little by little. Belva glowers down at my sister, her wattle quivering with animosity. “You’ll be sorry, Helena Harbinger.”
I’ve almost got it now, but I can’t help laughing out loud. “What are you going to do to her?”
Belva ignores me, wagging her finger at my sister like she’s reprimanding a small child. “You may be a beldame, but you’ll pay for your sins just like anybody else.”
“Like you’re paying for yours?” my sister replies as I finally manage to get my forefinger through the slackened hag knot and pull it out of the stone.
Belva’s eyes widen, and as she holds out her hands to the specter of Henry it’s like some cosmic vacuum is pulling her back to wherever she’s come from. She gives a small shriek as her wheelchair hurtles backward, vanishing into the picture window. Lucretia jumps up from her perch in the corner and peers out into the night.
We turn back to the apparition in the living room doorway. Henry is still talking, still holding out his hand to his wife. Helena sits frozen in her chair, her eyes locked to his. “Read his lips!” somebody cries, but the apparition fades before we can even try.
Lucretia turns away from the window with a frown. “I find it very perplexing,” she says, “that we inadvertently called the spirit of Belva Mettle. How could this possibly happen?”
Dymphna turns to my sister. “Perhaps Belva gave your husband one of the objects you brought tonight?”
Helena shakes her head. “I gave him all those things.”
It’s a mystery to everyone but me, though naturally Lucretia is the only one unwilling to let it go. As we rise to leave she gives my sister a look almost as mean as Belva’s. Cut from the same cloth, those two.
Tonight didn’t turn out at all the way Lucretia hoped it would. Helena got the last word, and that’s got to count for something.
I go with the party taking the long route home and bring up the rear. This way I can throw what’s left of that stupid hag knot into an overgrown azalea bush without anybody seeing.
* * *
LATER THAT night Morven and I go back to Cat’s Hollow and walk the old streets in the moonlight, chuckle at the bawdy jokes traded among the revelers outside the Dutch tavern, and buy a carton of milk to feed the strays. I’m restless when we get back to the apartment, picking up novels and puzzle books and casting them aside again with heavy sighs. Morven is working on yet another charity blanket with her supersonic crochet hook, seemingly unperturbed by the events of the evening.
I clear my throat and Morven pauses. “I’ve come to a decision,” I say.
“Regarding?”
“Justin.”
“Oh.” Morven puts down her hook and folds her hands over the mound of wool in her lap. “Well? What is it?”
“I’ve got to end it.”
Another pause. “I think that’s wise.”
“And well overdue, I’m sure you’d like to say.”
My sister shrugs. “How will you do it? And when?”
“Soon. Next week.” I pause. “There’s just one thing.”
Morven sighs. “You want your last hurrah, is that it?”
I nod a trifle sheepishly. “I keep telling him we’ll go to Europe for a long weekend,” I venture, and Morven rolls her eyes. “I’m not even asking for a weekend though—just a night. Only one night.”
“And what happens once you’ve had your one big night?”
“I won’t see him again. Cross my heart.”
“How will you explain your reasons?” Morven gives me a sharp sidewise glance as she resumes her crocheting. “You will break up with him properly, won’t you?”
With a forefinger I draw an X across my bosom. “And after that,” I say sadly, “it will be easy enough for me to disappear.”
Morven picks up the View-Master off a stack of old Life magazines on the end table, puts it to her face, and clicks once, twice. She puts it down again and gives me a long, sad, pitying look. “All right. I’ll help you. But if you don’t keep your word, I’ll kick your took.”
AT TEN past seven the following evening I knock on the front window at Fawkes and Ibis. Justin looks up from his neat piles of personal checks and fifty-dollar bills on the counter, grins like a schoolboy, whisks the money into the safe, and comes to the door to unlock it for me. When he kisses me I don’t want to think that the times our lips will meet in the future are numbered.
No sooner am I through the door than I catch sight of a new item on the casket table by the window and gasp. “Where did you find that lamp?” It’s a strange piece: a gnome crouching under a toadstool in cast iron with a faded green lampshade, the cord—with a clunky British plug—dangling off the edge of the table.
“Which lamp? Oh, the one with the dwarf? Estate sale. Why?”
“Where? Where was it?”
He gives me a funny look. “Upper East Side. Why?”
“How much is it?” I murmur as I lift the price tag. “I want it. I’ll buy it right now, in fact.”
Justin laughs, though I can see he’s a little discon
certed. “You can buy it in the morning, if you like it that much.”
He stares at me curiously for a long moment, until finally I feel compelled to say, “It has sentimental value.”
He laughs again. “How can it have sentimental value when it’s never belonged to you?”
“I only mean that it reminds me of someone—something.” Tell me you remember it. Tell me you remember your mother switching it off every night when you were small.
“It’s a little creepy, don’t you think?”
I turn away from the lamp and throw my arms round his neck. “If I thought it was creepy, do you think I’d want so badly to buy it?”
He kisses me once, twice. That’s two kisses less. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “I stopped trying to figure you out a long time ago.”
Now seems like a good time for it: “Let’s go away this weekend.”
“Yes! Where to?” He leads me into the ersatz parlor and flicks on the opera lamps, then approaches the old globe in the corner. “Should I spin it?”
“If you like,” I say. “But the world has changed quite a bit since that was made.”
“Some lines have been redrawn, but the continents are all in the same places.” He spins the globe half a dozen times but every time it stops his finger is pointed someplace entirely unsuitable, like Siberia or the Indian Ocean.
I drop onto the chaise lounge and catch sight of a woven basket on the end table crammed with old postcards. “Oh. Are these new?”
“Uncle Harry’s been collecting them for years. There are some really old ones in there.” I pluck a card, a hand-colored etching of Notre Dame circa 1900, and when I turn it over I find the postmark is still crisp enough to read.
When I pick up the basket to flip through it on my lap I notice the tag marked $5/each. “Five dollars! Hah! Have you found anyone foolish enough to pay five dollars for a used postcard?”
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