Flustered, he reached into his jacket. I expected a gun. Shoot me, I thought. I stopped right in front of him and opened my arms.
He pulled out an envelope. “Are you Harriet Wolf?”
“Who wants to know?”
“If you’re Harriet Wolf, your father is dead. He has a will. You have some things coming to you.”
“My father’s dead?”
“Are you Harriet Wolf?”
“My father’s dead.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Great Expectations of George Tarkington
Ruth
Two nights after I trespassed on my father’s lawn and talked to him over a chain-link fence, I’m in the kitchen with Tilton, the two of us getting ready to meet George at the Howard House, a restaurant in downtown Elkton, Maryland.
Eleanor insisted on doing the dishes. She’s sudsing the swirled glass knob of an orange juice squeezer. “I hope you don’t intend to drive with that convertible top down,” she says. “A lidless sardine can. It’s a good way to get decapitated.”
“I’m really not expecting decapitation,” I say.
“What are you expecting?” Tilton asks. She’s patting the dogs, who lie on the linoleum with their hind legs kicked out, trying to stay cool. Tilton looks elegant. She’s wearing a vintage dress from the 1920s or ’30s, fitted and blue, modest with a high collar and a shawl. She found it in Wee-ette’s closet. Tilton shares Wee-ette’s narrow waist, boxy hips, dainty ta tas, and reedy arms and legs. I wanted dainty ta tas. Even as thin as I am now, my breasts seem weighty, keeping me down, gravitationally speaking.
“I wouldn’t expect much from George Tarkington,” Eleanor says. “He got out while the getting was good.”
This isn’t true, as I now know. He didn’t want to “get out.” Yes, he gave up too soon and too completely. But that’s something I understand. Someone tells you what’s best and you believe them. I think of the strawberry-scented letter from Hailey in my wallet. Perhaps it was really an invitation to fight for her and I misunderstood. I let my mother’s comment slide. “Okay, get your pocketbook, Tilton. We’re ready.”
“I don’t have one,” she says.
Eleanor wipes her hands on a towel draped over the handle of the oven door and pulls a canvas bag off the back of a kitchen chair. “Here,” she says, and hands it to me. When I peek inside I see that it’s filled with medications, an EpiPen, an inhaler, and ointments. “There’s a set of instructions too,” Eleanor says, “explaining how to use everything.”
“She doesn’t need any of this,” I say.
“Indulge me,” Eleanor says, stiffening her arm and rattling the bag.
Tilton grabs it, rolls it up as tightly as possible, and shoves it under her arm. “I’m ready.”
“You look beautiful,” I say.
“Very nice,” Eleanor says, grudgingly.
“You know that Mrs. Gottleib can stay with you,” I say to my mother. “She volunteered.”
“Please God, no.”
“Okay,” Tilton says, agitated. “Let’s go.”
Eleanor reaches out and touches a wisp of Tilton’s hair, tucking it behind her ear. “Just don’t get your hopes up. Your father will never love you like I do. He doesn’t have it in him.”
“Can we not sour the whole thing before she even leaves the house?” I say.
“Just stating a fact,” Eleanor says.
“In the past three minutes alone, you’ve told her she might be decapitated, suggested that if she somehow survives she’ll probably die anyway, facedown in the restaurant due to imaginary allergies, and if by some miracle she survives that, her father will break her heart.”
“You of all people should know by now that motherhood isn’t all gin and roses!” Eleanor says. But she must read something awful and raw in my expression because she stops and turns away.
“You’re upsetting Pim and Pom,” Tilton says quietly. She closes her eyes, covers her ears, and starts whistling—not a tune, but strange little birdcalls.
“You’ve completely derailed her life,” I say. “For some reason, you can’t let her go. Me? Oh, I was fine. You let me live under the dining room table for weeks! You didn’t once even try to talk me out of it! You left plates of food on the floor, but never came to drag me out! To you, I was gone! So be it.”
“This is about you, then. Not Tilton at all. Right? Selfish. Always were. Just like your father!”
I clasp Tilton’s wrists and pull them a few inches from her ears. “It’s time to go.”
“She’s in no condition!” Eleanor shrieks. “She’s reverted to bird language!” Then she slams her fist on the table so lustfully that, for the first time in my life, I think, My God, my mother’s had sex. “Just go!” she shouts.
I stiffen. Eleanor is terrifying. One of the reasons I ran away was because my mother scared me.
But I usher Tilton to the kitchen door and out we go, into the humid evening air, as Tilton flutters her arms and says, “Flight!”
Chapter Twenty-six
Loose
Harriet
My father’s death meant that I could go home. I was the only surviving child. The house was mine.
I walked into the Wildwood cottage and lay down in my bed with the large envelope on my chest, and I stared at the ceiling. But I didn’t want to go home. I was waiting for Eppitt to tell me the truth. I would swell, and he would see me on the street, and he would know the baby was his and we would run away together.
I saw my father in my mind’s eye—walking into the administration building, his mustache, his useless cane an affectation. Father of a girl genius—but that had meant nothing to him.
The next evening, at around six thirty, there was a knock at the door. It was a breathless teenager, skinny and tan, his jawline dotted with pimples. “Dobish sent me,” he said. “I’m his nephew. He wanted you to know that Tuffy escaped. He got loose!” The boy looked over his shoulder quickly. “Can I come in?”
I opened the door. He took two quick strides inside, and I locked the door behind him. “Start at the beginning.”
He told me that Dobish was going to feed Tuffy, as always, at 6 p.m. sharp. But the lion was gone. Some thug was there instead. “He was shaken up, said somebody wanted to scare some sense into somebody. My uncle asked who. And he said some name he never heard of. And my uncle said, ‘Who’s that?’ And the guy said the girl who rides the motorcycle.”
And then I knew that word had gotten back that I wasn’t going to cooperate, that I was demanding to see Eppitt. Had Isley told Ramagosa’s men that I needed to have some sense scared into me? I imagined someone suggesting that they cut me up and feed me to the lion. Maybe just using Tuffy to scare me was considered a compromise. “Where’s the lion?”
“He killed a hawker and dragged the body under the boardwalk. The fella was getting into a car, foot on the running board, and Tuffy came up and dragged him off by the neck. There was a kid in the car with him, just some ten-year-old—his father owns the auction house. The kid saw it all. He got out and sat on top of the car, crying. Then they shot Tuffy. He’s dead.”
I must have staggered a little because the boy reached out and grabbed my shoulder.
“You all right?”
I imagined Tuffy’s mane, his ribs and backbone, the softness of that coat. His teeth and claws. Majestic. The way he looked at me. Those eyes were now glassy with death. The hawker, dead. I thought of the boy frozen on the hood of the car.
“My uncle thinks maybe somebody was going to put Tuffy in your house, loose him in your yard or worse. Sorry I have to say all this, but Dobish told me to.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“He’s all broken up about it. But my uncle told me you should go. He hopes you’ve got people somewhere. He said you never talked about family, but he’s hoping you’ve got somewhere to go to, Miss Shipley. You got people?”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Vultures
Eleanor
I sit at the table a moment. My daughters are gone and the house is quiet, but my heart is loud and, for the first time since the heart attack, it feels bullish. Ruthie. I remember her under the dining room table, of course. She was only eight years old. She’d stolen a couch cushion, taken the pillow and sheet from her bed, and set up house, hidden by the white tablecloth with its yellow flowers. She had a flashlight, a few books, a small stack of Wee-ette’s plain white paper, and pencils wrapped in a rubber band. This was shortly after we’d come to live at Wee-ette’s, after I’d given up on George’s return. My mother had warned me not to trust George, but I was pretty sure she didn’t trust any men. My missing father was clearly untrustworthy. And Harriet had never said a kind word about her own father—not an unkind word either, mind you. The only information I had to go on was from Weldon and Daisy’s lives of eternal melancholy and miracles. My mother needed me, and I think, early on, George had needed me. Maybe I confused neediness with love. A heady young man, George once said, “You mellow me, Eleanor. You make me feel like I’ve got my feet on solid ground.” In retrospect, what we had wasn’t love at all. It only sometimes mimicked it. Plane crash or not, we were doomed. I think I knew early on, but couldn’t confess it to myself.
When I called my mother to tell her I was coming home, that George was gone and had been for some time, my mother whispered something I barely heard and never really understood. “It got you too.” Did she mean love had gotten me? The best of me?
My mother fired the help she’d set up after my wedding and we settled into a routine—Harriet helped a little with Tilton and Ruthie, and I did all of the interacting with the outside world, including the literary world, once again. Although I was heartbroken, the arrangement was working fairly well.
And then Ruthie decided to live under the dining room table. Kids do things like this. It’s normal. Ruthie wanted to run away and this was as far as she could go. The problem was that it lasted a full day, and then two. My mother told me to go under the table and drag her out, but I refused to. George had left me. I couldn’t grovel for my daughter. Emotionally, I let Ruthie go, and I know it seems impossible, but she knew it and she never forgot it. I let her live under the table for two straight weeks. Part of me knew that all she wanted was for me to fight for her. I was just too stubborn. Tilton became my only hope for the love I craved.
I stand and walk to the stairs. I take them slowly, using the handrail like a rope to pull myself up. Midway, I stop to catch my breath. My heart—the ramming bull. I soldier on. At the landing, I walk into Ruthie’s old room and to the box marked “Ruthie—Random.” I set it on the bed, pop the cardboard flaps. I find the folded fabric quickly and pull out the white tablecloth, its small yellow flowers having faded some.
I hold it to my chest and walk out of the room, down the stairs again—taking them slow and easy. I rest at the foot of the stairs, where I’m met by the little puffy white dogs. How small their brains must be.
I stride to the dining room, feeling sturdy, and lay my hand on the rich dark wood of the mahogany table. In the shine of the varnish, I see the faint reflection of my own face—the pouches at either side of my mouth, the drooped skin of my neck. I wonder about my granddaughter, this Hailey. Does she look like us? Is she troubled? Has she already broken my daughter’s heart? I open the cloth and spread it over the table, inching it—all slippery—one way and then another to get the hems even on both sides.
Ruthie.
I never should have let her go. My eyes sting. The tears surprise me. They slip down my nose and dot the cloth. I’m not a crier. My mother wasn’t either. In fact, I saw my mother cry only one time—during a signing for her second book, the last signing she ever did. They’d already become circus events. Once, a man had stolen her sweater, cut it up with scissors, and sold the pieces. This time policemen stood on either side of her to keep order. But in the middle of the signing, she got up, grabbed her coat, and walked out. This was in New York City. I went with her everywhere; she had never left me behind like that. I ran after her into the street, clumped with gray snow. My mother was leaning against the pole of a street sign, crying breathlessly.
“What happened?” I asked.
She wouldn’t tell me. She just shook her head. “Ghosts,” she whispered.
This was when I started to hate my mother’s readers and her books too. If my mother went crazy—her eyes skittering off into the sky like Daisy’s eyes—and she never looked at me the same again, the readers and the books would be to blame.
Now I feel unsteady. I pull out a chair and sit. I remember Ruthie on the night of the plane crash in her helmet with her sweaty bangs, how she arched and slammed against the seat.
I grip the cloth and then release it, edging off the chair to my knees and crawling underneath the table to sit with my back against one of its legs. It reminds me of a white tent. From the kitchen door comes a knock. Gottleib? Vultures? For the first time in my life, I don’t care. Let them come and peck away. I lie down, kicking my legs out from under the table, the cloth, and stare up into the table’s underside—its paler wood beams. The knocking comes again, and this time the dogs start yapping. This is what I should have done back then—not try to drag Ruthie out, but join her.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Home
Harriet
I took a bus, and then a taxi. The rain came and went. When I finally arrived, my old house looked small, hunkered against the gray sky.
I walked up to the front door, covered by the small jutted dormer. I put my hand on the door. I turned the knob. The door was unlocked. Inside, the air was stale and cold and smelled vaguely medicinal. I didn’t know how my father had died or how long he’d been dead, but now I thought it might have been a lengthy illness.
Room upon room seemed filled with bulky ghosts—white sheets covering armchairs, couches. I ripped them off and left them in a pile in the kitchen, which was bare. I thought of Brumus where I’d last seen him while I was ironing a ding made by my father’s ring on the lowboy. Maybe Brumus was dead now too.
I moved to the stairs, expecting to see bodies moving—the nurse, at least, tidying. I saw new water stains on the ceiling as I climbed upstairs to my old bedroom. It was stripped of everything but a bed, nightstand, chest of drawers, oval standing mirror. For a long time, I stood there with my eyes closed, smelling the slight tang of glue.
Looking in my full-length mirror, I turned to my side and pressed my skirt to my pelvis. There it was. A belly. A baby. Undeniably true. I was going to be a mother. When my mother was dying, she mistook me for her own mother. Mother and daughter—did the difference really matter?
Down the hall, I opened the door to my mother’s room and stepped inside. That tall bed—where she had birthed her dead babies, where she had birthed me, dead too, or so the story went, and where she herself had died. I climbed onto it and curled up. I had once lived as an orphan, but now I suddenly was one, truly.
This is my room now. My bed. It’s where I, too, will die one day. I knew it in that moment. When I die, will I mistake one of you for my mother—Eleanor, Ruthie, Tilton?
This bed is mine—my first bloody sheets and my last. Home.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The Mongrel King Who Came Back for His Heart
Tilton
Ruthie drives to the restaurant with the top down. The music is very loud. A woman is singing about broken hearts, which reminds me of my two hearts and how two is not enough. I put my hand on the rolled-down window and smile at myself in the small mirror. I barely recognize my own face with my hair whipping around it.
Ruthie shouts above the radio and the wind, There’s something I want to ask you!
I shout, What?
And she shouts, Why did you cut my hair when you were little, that time I was sleeping? I looked like an idiot!
I was trying to grow a tree, I say, using your hair as seeds in the backyard!
She looks at me.
Do it! she shouts.
And I think about it and then I do it. I curve my hands down and they pop back up. Ruthie takes one hand off the wheel and throws it toward the sky. She sings loudly along with the music. I don’t know the words but I don’t have to. It’s not that kind of song. I sing too. When the song ends, I pull my hands in. People do get decapitated in convertibles. I remember the decapitation photograph at Isley Wesler’s and then the mongrel king’s heart. Isley Wesler said the mongrel king was going to come for us, and I held on to the name Eppitt Clapp forever.
I say to Ruthie, You know how I ate the heart of a mongrel king?
I do remember that weirdness, she says.
He came to the house one day, I say.
The mongrel king? she says.
He knocked on the door, and Eleanor opened it, and I was there behind her like usual and you’d already run away. Wee-ette was in her room, sick by now. In fact, she died pretty soon after this. He said he was there to see Harriet Wolf.
I close my eyes with the wind churning up my hair and picture him in my head. He was old, wiry, and kind of nervous, like people who came to the door asking for Wee-ette always were. He had a hat in his hands.
He didn’t look like a mongrel king, I tell Ruthie. And he lied about it too. When Eleanor asked him if he was a Wolf scholar, he said he was. But he wasn’t anything like the Wolf scholars who came with notebooks and copies to get signed and mini cassette players. When Eleanor told him to shove off, he said, Just tell Harriet that Eppitt Clapp is here. Just tell her that. The name sprang up from my mind like a jack-in-the-box.
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