The House on Tradd Street

by Karen White

We parked in the same place we had when we’d been there for our date, then raced into the restaurant. Several waitresses turned and gave Jack a greeting, which he apparently didn’t see or didn’t care to acknowledge as his eyes swept the patrons in the bar area. We spotted my father at the same time, sitting at a wooden table in the far corner under a Ford Motor Company neon sign. The middle of the table was occupied by a burl walnut humidor, and next to my father’s right hand sat a full glass of gin, straight up, the way he liked it. I knew that because he’d taught me how to measure two shots for him when he was too drunk to hold the bottle steady. Being a military man, he always had to have it measured precisely, regardless of the fact that drinking from the bottle would have been equally as effective.

  Jack pulled two chairs from another table, and we sat down. My father didn’t once look up at us, preferring instead to stare at the clear promise of oblivion offered by the glass of gin.

  “Daddy?” I said, not realizing until after I’d said it that I’d reverted back to the old name I’d called him when I was little. “Are you all right?”

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how something so small can take all your troubles away while at the same time making them so much worse?”

  I traded a worried glance with Jack. “You shouldn’t be here, Jim,” Jack said.

  My dad didn’t move his head, but his eyes looked up at Jack. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “How much have you had?” I was proud that my voice was steady, as if I were making a real estate offer on behalf of my clients.

  He turned his eyes to me and I saw that they were clear. “Not a drop. Yet.”

  I sat back but without any relief. He’d turned his fixed gaze on the glass again.

  Jack also sat back, feigning a relaxed attitude while both of us watched my dad and the glass like a cat would watch a mouse hole. We didn’t say anything else, as if we both realized that my dad needed to talk first, regardless of how long that might take. A waitress appeared—an older woman who apparently didn’t know Jack but was still taken with his charms as she made sure to lean down enough to show off her ample cleavage. We each ordered Cokes, then returned to silence as we waited for my dad to speak.

  We were halfway through our Cokes before he spoke again. Without looking at either one of us, he said, “What is it with mothers leaving their children? Can there be anything more devastating to a child?”

  I felt every muscle and bone go rigid in my body, feeling like a riverbed that had suddenly been sucked dry of water. We didn’t talk about my mother’s absence. Never. After she’d left, I’d have a screaming fit if anybody mentioned her name. And as I grew older, it began to seem as if she’d never been there at all, and my father and I were content to pretend it was true.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to talk about that now. This is about you, all right? Jack and I are here to help you.”

  “But that’s it, don’t you see? My drinking, and your mother’s disappearance, and you—it’s all related. There can’t be one without the other.” He laughed softly. “There I was, in the spare room where I keep all the junk I’ve accumulated over the years, holding that box and seeing what was inside of it, when it just hit me.”

  “What, Daddy? What are you talking about?”

  He rubbed his eyes with his hands, still avoiding looking at me. “I don’t think I can kick this thing if we can’t go back to that one thing that changed our lives.”

  “Daddy, I don’t . . .” Jack’s hand over mine made me stop.

  “I need to tell you a few things, Melanie. Things that won’t be easy to hear, but things you need to hear, nevertheless. I can’t help but think that once I get all of it out of me, this compulsion to destroy myself with gin might not be as strong.”

  “And you figured this out by looking inside this box?” I heard the dismissive tone in my voice and cringed, but neither Jack nor my dad said anything. It was almost as if we were all in agreement that I was due a bit of skepticism and recrimination.

  “Yep. I did. We’ve got two stories of missing mothers. And I can’t help but think that if we figure out one, we can figure out the other.”

  Jack squeezed my arm and I looked between him and my father, feeling like a Catholic in the confessional, and not at all sure if my penance would be easier to bear than the weight of my sins. I couldn’t speak, but simply nodded, then checked for the nearest exit just in case I had the urge to run away as fast as I could.

  “When you and your mother first moved in with your grandmother, it was because of me. We were . . . arguing. It was stupid, really, because it was about your imaginary friends. I didn’t think it was healthy but your mother seemed to be encouraging it. But it wasn’t really about you at all, you see? Ginette was growing away from me. Her career was starting to take off, and she was getting all sorts of publicity. I wasn’t comfortable with that at all, and I made her suffer for it by picking fights and telling her that she wasn’t a good mother.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I blamed her for socially isolating you by encouraging your reliance on these imaginary friends that existed only in your head.”

  He stopped to swallow hard, and I glanced at the back door that I’d spied before, gauging how long it would take for Jack to catch up to me if I ran.

  “But she was a good mother, you know. She loved you more than anything. More than her career. More than me. And I was okay with that because I loved you, too. You were a sweet child, Melanie.” He turned to Jack. “As hard as you might find that to believe, she really was.”

  I sent my dad a reproachful look. “Sorry, Melanie, but I just want to make sure Jack is on the same page with us.” He continued. “But that night, when we were arguing . . .” He shook his head. “I’d been drinking. I’d always been a social drinker, never really had any trouble keeping in control. But that night I’d read an article about your mother in the paper, about how Charleston couldn’t contain such a talent anymore and that it was time for her to spread her wings and show the world what she could do. There was a picture of her. With her manager. I knew there was nothing to it, but the gin got to talking so that by the time she came home there was nothing she could do or say that would make me think otherwise.”

  He touched the glass for the first time, and began spinning it in a circle on the table. Neither Jack nor I took our eyes off of his fingers as the glass made its etching sound on the wood. “I loved her, you see. Maybe too much. But I didn’t want to share her with the rest of the world when all I ever wanted her to be was mine.”

  He stilled the glass, both palms pressing against its sides. “We fought and said some ugly words to each other. And then . . .” His chin dropped down to his chest. “Damn. I don’t . . .” He looked back up at us and his eyes were wet. I’d never seen him like this before. It was honest, and pure and undiluted by alcohol, and I wanted to crawl up in his lap and lay my head on his shoulder as I’d done when I was a little girl.

  He took a deep breath. “I told her to leave. To go away. That we didn’t need her anyway.” He shrugged. “So she did. But she took you with her, and that was the biggest heartbreak of all.”

  Jack tapped my arm and handed me a paper napkin. I touched my cheek, unaware that I’d been crying and embarrassed to have been caught.

  “And then, just when I thought we were working things out, she . . . left. Just left. Leaving you with me.” He let go of the glass and leaned his forehead against the heels of his hands and was silent for a long moment. “What I’m trying to say is that her leaving was about her and me—not about you. And that you shouldn’t blame her for what she did. I told her that we were better off without her and maybe something happened that made her believe it. I don’t know. I never gave her the chance to explain.”

  “You never talked to her? You just let her go?” For the first time in my life, my loyalty was divided evenly between my parents.

  He returned his focus to the glass of gin. “She tried to
talk to me, to call me. I wouldn’t see her, and I wouldn’t take her calls. I was too angry, too hurt. She’d made up her mind, and it didn’t matter what I wanted. And I’d started drinking more. Not enough that anybody would notice but enough that I couldn’t feel the pain anymore.”

  “But why didn’t she call me? Why didn’t she come to see me?”

  My dad’s eyes met Jack’s before turning to me. “She did.”

  “What?” I stared back at him, incredulous. “Then why did I never see her again or speak with her?” My words slowed like a child’s ball that had reached the bottom of the hill, as I realized I’d known the answer before I asked it.

  I stood abruptly, ready to leave, but neither one of them made a move to stop me. It was almost as if we all realized that maybe I had finally grown up, and it was time to face the truth.

  “I told her you didn’t want to see her because it upset you too much. And when she called, I told her the same thing. After a while, it became the truth—remember? Remember how you’d scream if anybody mentioned her name? So then it seemed to me that I wasn’t lying anymore. Not that it mattered because I was too busy medicating myself with gin to see how much you must have been hurting.”

  Stiffly, I sat down again. “How long did she keep trying?”

  My dad looked down at his hands, unable to meet my eyes. “Until you went to college. I guess she figured you were adult enough then to call her yourself.”

  Somehow, Jack had managed to move his chair close enough so that he could put his arm around me. I was too numb to even try to pull away, much less to remember why I wanted to. I indelicately blew my nose into the napkin and then crumpled it into one of my balled fists. “She . . . she tried to reach me. To see me. And you wouldn’t let her.”

  His shoulders slumped as his hands slipped to the edge of the table. “We acted like children, and not like the parents you needed. We wanted to hurt each other—not you. But it seems like that’s what ended up happening.” Leaning forward, he took both of my frozen hands in his, the skin callused from his months of digging holes and laying bricks. “Never—not ever—did either one of us stop loving you. We never did.”

  I didn’t pull away, but sat feeling my father’s work-roughened hands, imagining each brick and each plant he’d placed in my garden as a sort of penance for a sin committed long ago. I wasn’t ready to forgive him; I wasn’t sure if that was what he was even asking. But maybe, under all of my hurt and loss, I owed him my understanding.

  “She still left me. Does it really matter why?”

  He shook his head. “She told me she was doing it for you. And that’s the last time I allowed her to try and explain anything to me.”

  I shook my head. “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  Slowly, he let go of my hands and slid the humidor closer to him, which at the same time shoved the gin glass out of his direct line of vision. “Because it occurred to me—this whole house thing, and the disappearing mother and the son who never forgot her—I think it all ended up in your lap for a reason. Losing a mother is a horrible thing—not ever knowing the truth is worse still.” He rested his hands on top of the polished wood box. “Maybe, in finding out the truth about Louisa Vanderhorst, you might find some understanding of your own past.”

  I sat back in my chair, feeling the hard wood against my back. I pressed into it, concentrated on feeling the hardness that grounded me to the chair. Because without that, I felt that I might float away, leave that person I had always known as Melanie Middleton, abandoned child, because I no longer thought that I knew her.

  “So you don’t believe Louisa ran away,” I said, staring at the humidor.

  He shook his head. “And neither do you. There’s too much evidence to the contrary from what Jack has told me.” He turned the box around so that I could see the front and the splintered wood where he’d broken the lock. “But we’ll never find out unless you allow us to keep looking.”

  Jack pressed a glass of ice water into my hands. I hadn’t been aware of him asking for one, and I think I thanked him for it. I pressed the icy-cold glass against my cheek before taking a long drink. “And what if I find out that Louisa did just leave with Joseph?”

  “Then we’ll know the truth. But I think, if we dig deep enough, we’ll find out that things aren’t always what they seem. That maybe people act in ways contrary to what they are because they don’t think they have any other choice.”

  I reached toward the box and pulled it to my side of the table, touching the smooth wood under my outstretched palms, feeling as if I were being presented with a gift—a gift not just for me but for my father as well. Thirty-three years was a long time to be paying penance. “I’ll consider it. But first, you need to promise me three things.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I need you to promise that you won’t come back here. And that if you feel the urge to drink, I want you to call me first and then Jack.”

  “Deal,” he said. “And what’s the third?”

  Locking eyes with my dad, I said, “That you won’t make me work with Jack on this.”

  He smiled his old smile and I relaxed a bit. “Only if you want to. But he’s the one with all the research connections and the know-how. I think it would be foolish to exclude him.”

  I refocused my gaze on Jack and was silent for a long moment. “I’ll let you work on this with us only if you promise to stay away from me as much as possible.”

  He had the audacity to not even look offended. Instead, he gave me his back-of-the-book-cover smile and saluted. “Yes, ma’am. You’re the captain, and I’m the sailor, and I will take orders from you without meeting your eyes.”

  “Whatever,” I muttered before turning back to the box, tapping my fingers against it.

  “Go ahead and open it, Melanie,” my dad said gently. “I’m not sure what any of it means, but maybe the three of us can put our heads together and figure it out.” His eyes met mine and he added, “For Nevin. And Louisa.”

  Without allowing myself to think, I lifted the hinged lid, the aroma of old cigars and something else wafting out of it. I sneezed twice, then peered inside the box. Scattered throughout were dried rose petals, detached from the stem most likely from movement of the box. Nestled amid the petals was a canister of old 120 roll film and beneath it an ivory envelope, still sealed. After hesitating briefly, I reached in and pulled it out, breathing in deeply when I saw the underlined name on the front, written in the bold handwriting of a male. Nevin, it read. And then, in the bottom right hand corner, was the date January 15, 1931.

  I glanced up at my dad, not even sure how to formulate my question.

  “I’m thinking that maybe Nevin’s father gave this to my father for safekeeping.”

  “In case anything happened to him, perhaps?” Jack pulled his chair closer. “But I thought they had a falling-out shortly after Louisa disappeared in 1930. This is dated a year later.”

  I nodded. “They did. They even dissolved their law practice. So why would my grandfather have this in his possession when he died?”

  We all looked at each other. Finally, Jack said, “Open the letter, Melanie. Maybe that will answer our questions.”

  I looked at my dad for confirmation, and he nodded. “All right,” I said. “I suppose when Mr. Vanderhorst left me his house, he was bound to expect that I’d have access to his personal effects.” With a deep breath, I slid my finger under the flap and began to tear. The letter was folded in half, the ink now browned with age. I cleared my throat, my eyes sliding from my dad’s face to Jack’s, then read out loud.

  My precious son,

  You are too young to read this now or even to understand all that is contained in this box. That is why I’m giving it to my friend, Augustus Middleton, in case something should happen to me before you are old enough to know the truth of things.

  Be vigilant in all that you do, and be secure in the knowledge always that you were greatly loved by both of your parents
and all who knew you. Remember what your mother used to call you, and never have any doubt. Cerca Trova.

  Your Loving Father,

  Robert Nevin Vanderhorst

  “How cryptic,” I murmured, feeling the soft ivory vellum between my fingers.

  “ ‘Cerca Trova’?” my father asked.

  Jack frowned for a moment. “Seek and ye shall find. And that’s weird because I know I’ve seen that recently. It’ll come to me.”

  I read the letter again to myself. “But why didn’t Robert get the box after Gus died?”

  “They died within hours of each other, probably without realizing the other was gone,” said Jack. “I found that in my research.”

  My dad took the letter from me and read it to himself. “I’ve never even gone through his things. My father died when I was pretty young, and I was raised by an aunt. I’ve had his stuff in storage ever since I was first sent to basic training camp. I never thought . . .”

  I touched his arm. “It’s not your fault, Daddy. Nobody could ever have suspected that Grandpa Gus was hiding anything like this. At least you kept it and didn’t throw it all away.”

  Jack was examining the rose stem. “Something tells me that this is a Louisa rose.”

  I took it from him, feeling the frailness of the dead flower as if the stale air of the old box was being transferred to me like the air from an ancient tomb. “I’ll ask Sophie if she knows anybody at the college who could identify this for us.”

  My dad reached in and took out the roll of film. “What about this? Is it even possible that the images might still be developed?”

  “My dad is good friends with Lloyd Sconiers,” Jack said. “He buys and sells old cameras and equipment in his store in North Charleston. He’s a bit of an oddity but really knows his stuff. I could take these to him and see what he says. Might even be able to develop them himself.”

  “Great,” I said, trying to keep my growing excitement in check. “First thing, I’m going to go see Sophie and bring the rose. What time does Mr. Sconiers open his shop?”