by Jane Langton
Mary took another glass out of the kitchen cupboard. “More wine, Homer? What was I going to say? Something about—oh, I know. What does all this have to do with the woman named Frieda? Why on earth did she have that strange video in her coat pocket?”
“Damned if I know,” said Homer. “And we don’t even know for sure that the coat was hers.” He turned scornful. “Love at first sight! The man’s off his rocker.”
“It’s a lovely thought just the same,” said Mary wistfully.
“What is?” growled Homer. “You mean love at first sight?”
“Of course I mean love at first sight. But it’s totally irrational, of course. Completely and utterly irrational.” Mary sighed, feeling a little tipsy. “Too bad.”
28
Reading the death notices in the Globe a week later, Mrs. Winthrop ran her eyes swiftly down a list that included the name of Edward Fell. The name meant nothing to her until the day of his interment.
Then, peering through the trees once again, she saw a parade of cars on Beech Avenue. This time they were not moving up the hill, they were slowing down and stopping.
She watched eagerly as a casket was trundled among the trees. Why, good gracious, they were coming this way. Leaning over the edge of the slope above Narcissus Path, Eloise saw to her astonishment that flowers had been heaped near Patrick’s little grave. It must be a family burial for someone related to the dear little boy.
She scrambled to her feet and felt her way cautiously down the grassy hill, teetering and clutching at twigs. At the foot of the slope she scurried across the grass and stood behind the tall monument marking the last resting place of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, one of the most distinguished of Zach’s neighbors.
Oh, yes, it was surely a family interment, because here again among the mourners was the baby’s mother, the good-looking woman who cared for Patrick’s little grave so tenderly. Eloise was shocked to see that only a few other people had come to honor the deceased. And the display of flowers was really rather pitiful.
She watched as Patrick’s mother dabbed at her face with a handkerchief. It was obvious that she was not really crying. It was just a polite show of grief, a courtesy to the dear departed, whose name—Mrs. Winthrop could just catch the words of the minister’s kindly homily—was Edward Fell.
She vowed to look again at the most recent obituary pages. Probably Mr. Fell had been terribly old and ill, and therefore his crossing of the bridge between life and death could be called a blessing.
As her own would be. To cross the bridge and be with Zach for all eternity! Eloise had already written the instructions for her burial. Her inscription would be added to his stone just below the ringing list of his honors and accomplishments—
And his wife
ELOISE CREECH WINTHROP
1921—
29
Leonard did not witness the interment of Edward Fell. When he crept up the hill next day to take another look at Patricks grave, he was merely checking the letterbox. Had any more messages been mailed to the Great Post Office in the sky? It struck him that communications addressed to a dead baby were no more absurd than his own latest letter to—
Ms. Frieda X
The House of Stairs
If undeliverable at this address please forward to—
Another World
or try—
The Belvedere
But as he trudged up Beech Avenue Leonard forgot about his mission and made a detour on Linden Path to pay his respects to the octahedron.
So far in Leonard’s explorations of the cemetery he had found a magnificent polished sphere and a tall flat triangle. Somewhere, he knew, there was a cube balanced on one corner, as though to symbolize the transcendance of the spirit, its freedom from the physical laws of gravitation and bodily decay. But the octahedron was the best.
It wasn’t really an octahedron, it was an insanely multifaceted polyhedron of polished hornblende gabbro dedicated to various members of the Smith family. Behind it, as though the octahedron had laid an egg, was a child’s grave in the shape of a tiny pyramid, a sad but witty afterthought.
Was the bereaved person who had designed this fantastic monument a crystallographer? One like himself, for instance? If he, Leonard, were to invent an elaborate geometrical tombstone for himself, what shape would it be? A tetrahexahedron? A pentagon-trioctahedron? Or a ditetragonal dipyramid like the crystals of rutile?
Shivering, he turned on his heel and tried to find his way back to Beech Avenue, but the paved road failed to show itself. Instead he was treading a nameless little lane, and here beside the path was the tomb of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What was he doing here? Poets shouldn’t jump around in this bewildering way long after they were dead and gone.
Oh, God, he was lost. The place was a labyrinth. And, Christ, here was the octahedron again. He was going around in a circle. Or maybe on a Moebius strip. Maybe he was trapped in a loop with a single repeating surface.
Therefore Leonard was not surprised when the melancholy procession with the miniature casket appeared again, marching silently toward him. He slumped against a tree while it floated by. Would it reappear? Yes, here they were again, ascending and descending like the people on Escher’s miraculous staircase.
This time the grim lady at the head of the parade glanced at him as she passed by. Through her veil he could just make out a piercing stare.
Leonard pulled himself to his feet and shambled after the last of the crouching figures with the little casket. Maybe they knew where the hell they were going. He certainly didn’t.
Yes, here was Narcissus Path, just where it ought to be, and beside it was the burial plot devoted to little Patrick and the family Fell. The procession climbed noiselessly away, mounting the sharp ascent to Willow Avenue, but Leonard stayed behind, astonished to see a heap of withered flowers next to Patrick’s little headstone.
It was a new grave. How strange! It had never occurred to Leonard that another Fell might join the rest. He had not been aware that any part of this piece of mortuary real estate was unoccupied. Who was the new resident?
He would ask at the administration building, where all the sepulchral information would be entered neatly on a little card. But first—warily Leonard opened the dismal mailbox behind Patrick’s grave to see if there were any more letters from the madwoman to her dead son.
Yes, another envelope lay in the box. Leonard stared at the limp pale square, not wanting to read it, wishing it would disappear. Nervously he thrust his fingers into his hair, trying to push it sideways and smooth it down. Instead it bounced up like so many springs and flopped back in the wrong direction.
With reluctant fingers he opened the envelope. The new letter was crazier than the last—
Patrick dear,
I know how eager you are to talk to me, to tell me everything.
I’m trying, dear heart, I’m doing my best. But that Madame Ronda was no good at all. She told me to find other interests, as if there could he any other interest in my life but reaching you at last!
Your loving Mother
At the counter in the Administration Building Leonard was greeted politely by the pink-cheeked woman who had helped them before. This time she introduced herself. Her name was Lydia Thompson, and she was the archivist for Mount Auburn. She knew its entire history. She was acquainted with the lives and genealogies of all its most famous occupants, from Edward Everett to Mary Baker Eddy and Buckminster Fuller.
Leonard asked his question bluntly, “Can you tell me who was buried recently on Narcissus Path?” For a moment Mrs. Thompson looked blank, and he added, “Or is it none of my business?”
She smiled and said, “Of course I can tell you. Just a moment.” She turned to her desk and consulted a calendar. “It was a sixty-eight-year-old gentleman. His name was Edward Fell.”
“I see.” Leonard thought a minute. Mrs. Thompson looked at him expectantly. “Can you tell me in what way he’s related to the other peo
ple buried there?”
“You could ask his niece Eleanor Fell. She was the one who handled it. No, I’m wrong.” Leonard was surprised to see the plump kindly face turn a little sour. “I should have said, Eleanor Oliphant Fell. Our genealogist has been trying to help her with possible regal connections in her ancestry.” Mrs. Thompson’s tone was carefully formal, but there was a slight mocking emphasis on the word regal.
He asked another intrusive question, not sure how far his inquisitiveness could go. “Tell me, how do you know whether there’s room underground for another burial? Do you have any sort of—what do you call it—a plot plan?”
“Of course.” Mrs. Thompson went to a cabinet, shuffled through her files and plucked out a sheet of paper. “We call this a lot card. This one is for the Gardner family mausoleum. It’s a famous hillside tomb, right there on Auburn Lake. Isabella Stewart Gardner is buried there.”
“Oh, right. I’ve seen them, rows of buildings set into the hill on both sides of the lake.” Leonard looked at the plan, which showed only two rows of small rectangles inside a larger rectangle, and he thought at once, reflective symmetry. “Expensive properties, they must have been,” he said, greatly daring.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they were. Good Boston Brahmins, all along there. Coolidges, Cabots, Lodges, Higginsons, Kirklands. It’s like another Beacon Street.”
Leonard smiled. “They were just moving from the best address in Boston to the best in the cemetery.” He asked his last nosy question. “Might I see the lot card for the Fell family plot?”
But Mrs. Thompson had come to the end of her permissiveness. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to ask Eleanor Fell. No, that’s wrong.” She laughed, and they said it together, “Eleanor Oliphant Fell.”
“May I have her phone number?”
Mrs. Thompson seemed to feel that as the representative of a prestigious institution serving the grieving survivors of the dead, she had already gone too far. “I suggest you try the telephone book,” she said gently, and retreated to her desk.
30
There’s another letter,” muttered Leonard into his pocket phone. He was standing beneath the Egyptian gate, staring out at the traffic light on Mount Auburn Street. At once it turned green, and fifteen cars gathered speed and zoomed past him, heading east into Cambridge or west to Belmont and Watertown.
What did you say?” said Homer. “Speak up, Leonard.”
“I said,” croaked Leonard, “she’s written him another letter.”
“Who do you mean, she? Oh, she? You mean it’s another letter to Patrick?”
“Right. Wait a sec. I’ll read it to you.” Leonard fumbled in his pocket, unfolded the letter with difficulty and began to read it aloud.
A truck thundered by, racing to make the green light. A second truck, a third.
“Leonard, stop,” roared Homer, “I can’t hear a damn thing. Listen, we’re coming. We’ll be there in a jiffy.” Leonard could hear him bellow something to Mary, and for a moment there was silence, and then Homer shouted into the phone again. “Sure, sure. Half an hour, Leonard. We’ll be there in half an hour.”
It would be their second visit to his attic apartment. The last time had been at night, and the grubbiness of various corners hadn’t mattered. Now the afternoon sun was pouring in.
Leonard threw himself into the job of making his bed and washing a heap of dirty dishes. When he heard feet thumping up the stairs he snatched his pajamas from the back of a chair and stuffed them under a pillow. On his rush to the door he kicked a shoe out of the way and nearly fell over the brimming bucket. Shouting, “Just a minute,” he hoisted the bucket into the sink, poured it out with a rush of dirty water and shoved it into a closet.
But Homer and Mary were charmed by his light-filled attic. “Wow,” said Homer, admiring the display of prints tacked to the slanting ceiling. “It’s like the Escher exhibition. Oh, say, I like this one, the dragon eating its own tail.”
Mary went to the window and looked out. “Oh, Leonard, it’s really nice here. Such a classy address. I wish we could find something like this.”
Leonard was surprised. “You’re moving to Cambridge?”
Mary glanced at Homer, who merely looked back at her gloomily. “It’s the river bank, you see, Leonard,” she said nervously, as if that summed the matter up.
“The river bank?”
Homer growled something indistinct, and Mary hastened to explain. “In the wintertime, you see, Leonard. I mean, that’s the trouble. Listen, Leonard, there’s this steep hill and it’s really ghastly in January, so we really have to move, no question about it.” Slapping her hands briskly, she turned to the window. “But we’ll never find anything as nice as this.”
“I was lucky,” said Leonard gravely. He picked up the letter he had found at Patrick’s grave. “Would you like to see—?”
But Mary was lost in contemplation of the rooftops and chimneys and back gardens and outbuildings and garages of the neighboring houses on Sibley Road. “You know, Leonard, it’s hard to put into words, but there’s something unique about these old Cambridge houses. What is it exactly, Homer? We’ve talked about it before.”
Homer cheered up at once. “Everything dark brown, the Colosseum in faded sepia, the ruins of Pompeii.”
“The complete works of Sir Walter Scott.”
“Marble busts, Dante and Shakespeare.”
“Hatracks and umbrella stands. Cuckoo clocks.”
“Invalid aunts in darkened bedrooms.”
Astonished, Leonard made a shy objection. “Well, sure, that’s perfect for Mrs. Winthrop’s house downstairs, but I don’t know about the others—down the street, I mean.”
“Oh, well, of course.” Mary laughed and turned away from the window. “They’re not dark brown any more, of course they’re not. They’re apricot, I’ll bet, with giant paintings on the wall, you know the kind, all red with one yellow stripe.”
“But the ghostly presences,” insisted Homer, “they’re still there, I’ll bet, all over the place. Old ectoplasmic professors seeping through the wallpaper. It’s a known scientific fact that you can’t get rid of ectoplasmic professors behind the wallpaper. They stay right there and peek out from time to time.”
Leonard waved his letter feebly, but Homer was in full flight. “Or maybe it’s the lay of the land around here. Think of it, all those nineteenth-century people had to climb the same steep hill, gasping for breath, and probably those old gasps are still here, circulating up and down and around and around, and of course the birds are just the same and the sun sets in exactly the same direction.”
“Not exactly,” murmured Leonard, “because of the precession of the equinoxes.”
“What?” said Homer. “Oh, that.” He shuddered, and sank into a chair. “Actually, the truth is, I’ve had my fill of ghostly presences. I mean, like all those phantoms floating around over Mount Auburn Cemetery. Enough’s enough.”
Leonard too was afflicted with ghosts. He looked down at his feet, shifted the toes of his shoes to line them up with the edge of a floorboard, and said nothing.
31
At last Mary and Homer stopped trying to define the character of Leonard’s neighborhood. They sat down and looked lac the new message from the dead baby’s lunatic mother.
“She’s talking about some kind of spiritualist,” guessed Mary, “this Madame Ronda.”
Homer shook his head. “What a fruitcake.”
“And there’s something else.” Leonard picked up a folder and emptied its contents on his desk. A shower of scraps fell out. “Snapshots, cut to pieces. They were on the floor in Frieda’s apartment. Look.” He began putting them together like a puzzle.
Homer and Mary watched as the puzzle turned into people. Four people. There was a gaunt woman with grey hair, a grinning child with yellow pigtails, a good-looking woman with her blond hair swept stylishly back, and a grave young woman with yellow hair cut unstylishly short.
Leonard tapped the face of th
e young woman and said, “Frieda.”
Mary leaned over the pictures and said, “Oh, Homer, look. I recognize this other one, the glamorous one. It’s Edward’s niece. I told you, Homer, remember? We think she killed her uncle by shoving his wheelchair down the stairs. I mean the head nurse and I, that’s what we think. We saw it happen. And afterwards you and I decided she must have been the babysitter.”
“Edward’s niece?” Leonard was confused. “You mean Edward Fell? But I saw his grave just now. He’s just been buried next to Patrick.”
“Well, of course, that figures,” said Homer. “Edward Fell was Patrick’s father.”
Leonard’s head was reeling. He gaped at Mary. “You mean you saw his death?”
Mary explained about the nursing home. “I visit a friend there. One of the other people was a senile old man in a wheelchair. I saw him there several times, Edward Fell.”
Leonard was bewildered. “A senile old man was the baby’s father?”
“Senile and old now,” said Homer kindly, as if explaining to a child, “but not twelve years ago. And anyway, you’re always hearing about hundred-year-old geezers dandling babies on their knees.”
“And I also saw his niece,” said Mary, pointing to the puzzle pieces. “There she is in person. And I could swear she was responsible for his death.”
Leonard gazed at the disconnected fragments. “You mean,” he said slowly, “she’s Edward’s niece, so in other words she’s Patrick’s cousin, so you think she was once the babysitter? But that means”—he pointed at the little girl—“could this be the same woman as a child? At the time of the accident that killed her cousin? The young babysitter herself?”
Homer stared at the puzzle pieces. “Then maybe this older woman was Patrick’s mother, Edward’s wife. But doesn’t she look too old to have a child?”
