The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  In the years that Helen was occupied with Ki Mien, motorcars came to Mt. Airey. Their staunchest supporter was George “Flash” Garde, Simon and Helen’s son and only child. “A damned fine looking piece of American beef,” as a visiting Englishman remarked. Whether boy or man, Flash Garde could never drive fast enough. His custom-built Locomobile, all brass and polish and exhaust, was one of the hazards of Olympia Drive. “Racing to the next highball and low lady,” it was said at Bachelor’s Point. “Such a disappointment to his mother,” they sighed at Baxter’s. In fact, his mother seemed unbothered. Perhaps this was because she had, quite early on, arranged his marriage to Cissy Custis, the brightest of the famous Custis sisters. The birth of her granddaughter Julia guaranteed the only succession that really mattered to her.

  3.

  In 1954, on the evening of the last day of summer, Julia had supper in Old Cottage kitchen with the Eders. Mrs. Eder made the same comforting chicken pie she remembered. The nursery up at Joyous Garde was vast. On its walls were murals of the cat playing the fiddle and the cow jumping the moon. It contained a puppet theater and a play house big enough to walk around in if you were small enough. But some of Julia’s strongest memories of Mt. Airey centered on Old Cottage. The most vivid of all, began one high summer day in the early 1920’s. Her grandmother, as she sometimes did, had taken Julia out of the care of her English nurse and her French governess.

  When it was just the two of them, Helen Stoneham Garde raised her right hand and asked, “Do you swear on the head of Ruggles the One Eared Rabbit, not to tell anybody what we will see today?”

  Time with her grandmother was always a great adventure. Julia held up the stuffed animal worn featureless with love and promised. Then they went for a walk. Julia was in a pinafore and sandals and held Ruggles by his remaining ear. The woman of incalculable wealth wore sensible shoes and a plain skirt and carried a picnic basket. Their walk was a long one for somebody with short legs. But finches sang, fledglings chirped on oak branches. Invisible through the leaves, a woodpecker drilled a maple trunk. Red squirrels and jays spread news of their passage.

  Up the side of Mt. Airey, Helen led her grandchild, to the silent white pine grove that overlooked deep, still waters. The Cabin itself was all odd angles, gray shingles and stone under a red roof. It was Julia’s first visit to the place.

  Years later, when she was able to calculate such things, she realized that the dimensions of Stoneham Cabin did not quite pan out. But only a very persistent visitor would note that something was missing, that one room always remained unexplored.

  That first time, on a sunny porch, visible from no angle outside the Cabin, Helen Garde set down the basket, unpacked wine and sandwiches along with milk and a pudding for Julia. Then she stood behind her granddaughter and put her hands on the child’s shoulders.

  “Julia, I should like you to meet Alcier, whom we call the Rex.”

  The man in the doorway was big and square-built with dark skin and curly, black hair. His voice was low, and, like Mademoiselle Martine, he spoke French, though his was different. He wore sandals and a white shirt and trousers. The priest bowed and said, “I am happy to meet the tiny lady.”

  He was not frightening at all. On the contrary, morning doves fed out of his hand and he admired Ruggles very much. When they had finished lunch, the Rex asked her grandmother if he could show Julia what lay inside.

  The two of them passed through a curtain which the child could feel but couldn’t see. She found herself in a round room with doors open in all directions. It was more than a small child could encompass. That first time, she was aware only of a cave opening onto a snowy winter morning and an avenue of trees with the moon above them.

  Then Alcier faced her across a fire which flickered in the center of the room even on this warm day. He put on a silver mask that covered his face, with openings for his eyes, nostrils and mouth, and said, “Just as your grandmother welcomed me to her house, so, as servant of the gods, I welcome you to the Shrine of the Twelve Portals.”

  But even as gods spoke through him, Julia could see that Alcier smiled and that his eyes were kind. So she wasn’t a bit afraid.When it was time to say good-by, the Rex stood on the porch and bowed slightly. A red tailed hawk came down and sat on his wrist. Because of Alcier’s manners, Julia was never frightened of the Rex. Even later when she had seen him wiping his machete clean.

  As a small child, Julia didn’t know why her grandmother made her promise not to tell anyone about the hawk and the invisible curtain and the nice black man who lived up in the cabin. But she didn’t.

  Children who tell adults everything are trying to make them as wise as they. Just as children who ask questions, already know why the sky is blue and where the lost kitten has gone.

  What they need is the confirmation that the odd and frightening magic which has turned adults into giants has not completely addled their brains. That Julia didn’t need such reassurance she attributed to her grandmother and to Alcier. On her next visit, she learned to call the place with the flame, the Still Room. She found out that it was a shrine, a place of the gods, and that Alcier was a priest, though much different than the ones in the Episcopal church. On the second visit she noticed Alcier’s slight limp.

  Her grandmother never went inside with them. On Julia’s next few visits over several summers, she and Alcier sat on stools in the Still Room and looked out through the twelve doors. The Rex patrolled each of these entrances every day. He had a wife and, over the years, several children whom Julia met. Though she never was told exactly where they lived. Soon, she had learned the name of what lay beyond each portal: jungle, cypress grove, dark forest, tundra, desert, rock-bound island, marsh, river valley, mountain, cave, plains, sandy shore.

  At first she was accompanied up the mountain by her grandmother. Then, in the summer she turned twelve, Julia was allowed to go by herself. By that time, she and Alcier had gone through each of the doors and explored what lay beyond. The hour of the day, the climate, even Julia came to realize, the continent varied beyond each portal. All but one, in those years, had a shrine of some kind. This might be a grove or a cave, or a rocky cavern, with a fire burning and, somewhere nearby, a body of water still as a mirror. The plains, even then, had become a wasteland of slag heaps and railroad sidings. Julia did not remember ever having seen it otherwise.

  If she loved Alcier, and she did, it was not because he spared her the truth in his quiet voice and French from the Green Antilles. Early on he showed her the fascinating scar on his left leg and explained that he was an escaped slave, “Like each Rex past and to be.” He told her how he had been brought over the wide waters when he was younger than she, how he had grown up on a plantation in the Sugar Islands. How he had been a house servant, how he had run away and been brought back in chains with his leg torn open.

  Julia already knew how one Rex succeeded another. But on that first summer she visited the cabin alone, she and Alcier had a picnic on the wide, empty beach on the Indochina Sea and she finally asked how it had happened.

  Before he answered, Alcier drew the silver mask out of the satchel he always carried. Julia noticed that he hardly had to guide it. The mask moved by itself to his face. Then he spoke.

  “Where I lived, we had a public name for the bringer of wisdom And a private name known only by those to whom She spoke. When I was very young, She sent me dreams. But after I was taken beyond the sea, it was as if I was lost and She couldn’t find me.

  “Then, after I had escaped and been recaptured and brought back to my owner, She appeared again and told me what to do. When I awoke, I followed Her command.

  “With the chains that bound my hands, I broke the neck of one who came to feed me. With that one’s knife, I killed him who bore the keys. With the machete he dropped, I made the others flee. My left leg carried me well. My right was weak. I did not run as I once had.

  “In the forest, hunters chased me. But the goddess drew me into a mist and they passed by
. Beside a stream, a hare came down to drink. I killed her and drank her blood. That morning, hunters went to my left and to my right. I slipped past them as before.

  “Then it was past mid-day. I stood in shadows on the edge of a glade. And all was silent and still. No leaf moved. In the sky directly above me, the sun and a hawk stood still. And I knew gods were at work here. I heard no sounds of hunters. For I was at the heart of the forest.

  “I saw the lodge made of wood and stone and I knew it was mine for the taking. If I killed the King of this place. I said a prayer to the goddess and let her guide me.

  “Not a leaf moved, not a bird sang. Then I saw the silver mask and knew the Rex was looking for me. My heart thumped. I commanded it to be still. The head turned one way then another. But slowly. The Rex was complacent, maybe, expecting to find and kill me easily. Or old and tired.

  “My goddess protected me. Made me invisible. Balanced on my good leg and my bad, I stood still as the Rex crossed the glade. I studied the wrinkled throat that hung below the mask. And knew I would have one chance. Just out of range of my knife, the priest hesitated for an instant. And I lunged. One great stride. I stumbled on my bad leg. But my arm carried true. The knife went into the throat. And I found it was a woman and that I was king in her place.

  “The shrine has existed as long as the gods. Along one of the paths some day, will come the one who succeeds me,” he told her. “When the gods wish, that one will do away with me.”

  The Rex could speak of his own death the same way he might about a change of the seasons. But some time after that, on a visit to the Still Room, Julia noticed derricks and steel tanks on the rocky island. When she asked Alcier about the destruction of another shrine, he seemed to wince, shook his head and said nothing.

  4.

  At night in Old Cottage years later, Julia looked out the windows into the dark. And saw Mount Airey by daylight. The cabin and the grove were gone. The bare ground they had stood on was cracked and eroded. She told Mrs. Eder that she was going to visit Stoneham Cabin next morning. Falling asleep, Julia remembered the resort as it had been. As a child, she had learned to swim at Bachelor’s Point and heard the story of Mount Airey being spun. Men tamed and in trunks, women liberated in one piece suits, swam together now and talked of the useful Mr. Coolidge and, later, the traitorous Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  When she was fifteen, her father died in an accident. Nothing but the kindest condolences were offered. But Julia, outside an open door, heard someone say, “Ironic, Flash Garde’s being cut down by a speeding taxi.”

  “In front of the Stork Club, though, accompanied by a young lady described as a ‘hostess’. He would have wanted it that way.” She heard them all laugh.

  By then, cocktail hour had replaced afternoon tea at Baxter’s. In tennis whites, men sat with their legs crossed, women with their feet planted firmly on the ground. Scandal was no longer whispered. Julia knew that her mother’s remarriage less than two months after her father’s death would have been fully discussed. As would the decision of this mother she hardly ever saw to stay in Europe.

  Julia’s grandmother attended her son’s funeral and shed not a tear. Her attitude was called stoic by some. Unfeeling by others. No one at Baxter’s or Bachelor’s Point had the slightest idea that the greatest love of Helen Garde’s life had, over their twenty years together, given her hints of these events yet to come.

  After her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage, Julia visited the Rex. From behind the silver mask, Alcier spoke. “The gods find you well. You will wed happily with their blessings,” he said. “The divine ones will shield your children.”

  Much as she adored Alcier, Julia thought of this as fortune-teller stuff. She began, in the way of the young, to consider the Rex and the Shrine of the Twelve Portals as being among the toys of childhood.

  That Fall, she went to Radcliffe as her grandmother wished. There, the thousand and one things of a wealthy young woman’s life drove thoughts of the gods to the back of her mind. They didn’t even re-emerge on a sunny day on Brattle Street in her senior year.

  Julia and her friend Grace Shipton were headed for tennis lessons. At the curb, a young man helped a co-ed from Vassar into the seat of an MG Midget. He looked up and smiled what would become a well-known smile. And looked again, surprised. It was the first time he had laid eyes on the woman he would marry.

  Before this moment, Julia had experienced a girl’s tender thoughts and serious flirtations. Then her eyes met those of the young man in the camel-hair jacket. She didn’t notice the boy who watched them, so she didn’t see his mischievous smile or feel the arrow. But in a moment of radiance her heart was riven.

  When Julia asked Grace who the young man was, something in her voice made the Shipton heiress look at her, “That’s Robert Macauley,” came the answer. “The son of that lace curtain thug who’s governor of New York.”

  Julia Garde and young Robert Macauley were locked in each other’s hearts. All that afternoon she could think of nothing else. Then came the telegram that read, “Sorry to intrude. But I can’t live without you.”

  “Until this happened, I never believed in this,” she told him the next afternoon when they were alone and wrapped in each others’ arms.

  Robert proposed a few days later. “The neighbors will burn shamrocks on your front lawn,” he said when Julia accepted.

  She laughed, but knew that might be true. And didn’t care. Polite society studied Helen Stoneham Garde’s face for the anger and outrage she must feel. The heiress to her fortune had met and proposed to marry an Irishman, A CATHOLIC, A DEMOCRAT! But when Julia approached her grandmother in the study at Joyous Garde and broke the news, Helen betrayed nothing. Her eyes were as blue as the wide Atlantic that lay beyond the French doors. And as unknowable.

  “You will make a fine-looking couple,” she said. “And you will be very happy.”

  “You knew.”

  “Indirectly. You will come to understand. The wedding should be small and private. Making it more public would serve no immediate purpose.”

  “Best political instincts I’ve encountered in a Republican,” the governor of the Empire State remarked on hearing this. “Be seen at mass,” he told his son. “Raise the children in the Church. With the Garde money behind you, there’ll be no need to muck about with concrete contracts.”

  “There will be a war and he will be a fighter pilot,” Helen told Julia after she had met Robert. Before her granddaughter could ask how she knew, she said impatiently, “All but the fools know a war is coming. And young men who drive sports cars always become pilots.”

  It was as she said. Robert was in Naval Flight Training at Pensacola a month after Pearl Harbor. The couple’s song was, “They can’t take that away from me”.

  Their son, Timothy, was not three and their daughter Helen was just born when Robert Macauley sailed from San Francisco on the aircraft carrier Constellation. Julia saw him off, then found herself part of the great, shifting mass of soldiers and sailors home on leave, women returning after saying good-by to husbands, sons, boyfriends.

  On a crowded train, with sailors sleeping in the luggage racks, she and a Filipino nurse cried about their men in the South Pacific. She talked with a woman, barely forty, who had four sons in the army.

  Julia felt lost and empty. She reread the Metamorphoses and the Odyssey and thought a lot about Alcier and the Still Room. It had been two years since she had visited Mount Airey. She felt herself drawn there all that winter. Early in Spring, she left her children in the care of nurses and her grandmother and went by train from New York to Boston and from Boston to Bangor. She arrived in the morning and Mr. Eder met her at the station. They drove past houses with victory gardens and V’s in the windows if family members were in the service. A sentry post had been established on the mainland end of Wenlock Sound Bridge. The Army Signal Corps had taken over Bachelor’s Point for the duration of the war.

  The bar at Baxter’s was a
n officers’ club. On Olympia Drive, some of the great houses had been taken for the duration. Staff cars, jeeps, canvas-topped trucks stood in the circular drives.

  It was just after the thaw. Joyous Garde stood empty. Patches of snow survived on shady corners of the terraces. The statues looked as if they still regretted their lack of clothes. Julia found a pair of rubber boots that fit and set off immediately for Stoneham Cabin. In summer, Mt. Airey was nature in harness, all bicycle paths and hiking parties. In Mud Time, dry beds ran with icy water, flights of birds decorated a gray sky, lake-sized puddles had appeared, the slopes lay leafless and open.

  Julia saw the stranger as she approached the cabin. But this was her land and she did not hesitate. Sallow faced, clean-shaven with the shadow of a beard, he was expecting her. When she stepped onto the porch, he came to attention. She knew that sometime in the recent past he had murdered Alcier.

  “Corporal John Smalley, Her Britannic Majesty’s London Fusiliers,” he said. “Anxious to serve you, my lady.” In the Still Room, when they entered, Julia looked around, saw wreckage in the desert shrine, smashed tanks on the sand.

  Dead animals lay around the oasis and she guessed the water was poisoned. The murderer put on the silver mask and spoke. His voice rang. Julia felt a chill.

  “It’s by the will of the gods that I’m here today. By way of a nasty scrap in the hills. Caught dead to rights and every one of us to die. Officers down. No great moment. But the sergeant major was gone. A spent round richoted off my Worsley helmet and I was on me back looking up.

  “I lay still but I could hear screams and thought it was up and done with and I would dance on hot coals for as long as it took. For cheating and philandering and the cove I stabbed in Cheapside. And I prayed as I’d never done.

  “Then He appeared. Old Jehovah as I thought, all fiery eyes and smoke behind his head. Then He spoke and it seems it was Mars himself. I noticed he wore a helmet and carried a flaming sword. He told me I was under His protection and nothing would happen to me.