The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  She shook her head. “I don’t know—it’s less than two weeks away and the papier-mâché is soaked. I left the barn doors closed, but they somehow got opened during the storm.”

  “Maybe the wind blew them open.” I looked doubtfully at the heavy wooden doors with their thick iron latches. Sunny followed my gaze toward the doors and gasped. Jess had appeared, looking like one of the scarecrow puppets with his hair standing up in tufts and his long stick brandished like a spear.

  “You might have forgotten to latch them,” he said, inspecting the doors.

  “I always latch the doors when I’m going away,” she spit back. “I’d never leave my children alone at the mercy of the elements.”

  I saw Jess’s lip twitch at children and glared at him over Sunny’s head.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t,” I soothed, stroking her arm. “Could someone have come over to work on the puppets when you were gone? One of your volunteers from the college maybe?”

  “That girl Noelle maybe,” Sunny said, darting her raccoon eyes back at me. As soon as her eyes were off him, Jess twirled his finger by his ear. “She means well but she’s forgetful, like many artists.”

  “Well, what can we do to help?” I asked, shooting Jess another stern glance. “Should we untangle them?”

  Sunny looked up at the puppet she was holding. There were two puppets, actually, a skeleton and a blue-haired witch, their limbs intertwined as though they had held each other for comfort during the storm. She gingerly peeled a skeleton arm away from the witch’s waist. A layer of silver and blue foil came with it, like sunburned skin peeling off. I winced as if it really were damaged skin.

  “We can try,” she said. “If we untangle them all now while they’re still wet and let them dry I might be able to repair them.” I could hear she was trying to keep from crying.

  “Let’s get to work, then,” I said, giving Jess an imploring look when Sunny went to get a broom to sweep away the mud and water.

  He crossed his eyes at me but said in his most charming voice, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend the day disentangling zombies and witches. It will be just like my freshman dorm Halloween party.”

  WE SET TO work separating the puppets from one another. It was a little like a scene from one of the wilder Bailey parties (there had been one I chanced upon of drunk naked freshmen playing Twister), only here the limbs we pried apart might dissolve in our hands. It was excruciating to feel an arm coming loose from its wire socket or hear an ankle plop wetly to the barn floor. I had to keep reminding myself that they were not people, but Sunny had done such a good job painting their faces that, even damaged as they were, they felt like they had personalities. They certainly did to Sunny.

  “Be careful of Griselda,” Sunny told Jess as he wrestled a witch free of a zombie’s embrace. “She’s very delicate.”

  “I can see that,” Jess said, holding up the puppet’s hand as though he were admiring her manicure. “Do they all have names?”

  “Yes,” Sunny confided shyly. “It helps me when I work on them to give them a story. Griselda, for instance, escaped the Salem witch trials and lived by herself in a cranberry bog for two hundred years—see her cranberry wreath?—before coming back to civilization to share her herbcraft with select acolytes. I based her on one of my teachers at Bailey.”

  I was afraid that Jess would laugh but instead he said, “It’s just like writing a book. Even the minor characters have to have their back stories.”

  “Yes,” Sunny said gratefully. “There really aren’t any minor characters, are there?”

  “No,” Jess concurred, “just minor writers.”

  I wasn’t sure Sunny would get the joke but she surprised me by laying a damp, gluey hand on Jess’s shoulder and replying, “No, my dear, we’re all just vessels for the sacred muse. There’s nothing minor about that.”

  I was afraid Jess would laugh or make another joke, but his face looked suddenly washed clean of levity. I knew that it was what he was most afraid of—that he was a minor writer, a one-hit wonder whose one hit hadn’t even been quite a hit, a mid-list author.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to be a minor writer than not to be a writer at all?” I had asked him once.

  “No,” he had answered without hesitation. “I’d rather never have written a word than be second-rate.”

  Now he swallowed and replied hoarsely, “That’s a good way of looking at it, Sunny. I think you may be right.”

  Sunny smiled back at him and turned around, leaving a gluey handprint on Jess’s jacket. Jess ducked his head and went back to work, delicately lifting each finger of Griselda’s hand from the boney arm of her zombie dance partner, his face as intent as when he wrote. I turned back to the wildman I was rescuing from the embrace of a lascivious scarecrow and said a little prayer of thanks. This was what Jess needed. To be out of the shark tank of New York and in an environment that valued process over product. It was worth losing the cottage to see Jess content.

  By midmorning we were joined by Noelle, the Bailey intern, who also turned out to be the yellow-aproned girl from the farm stand. She wailed and berated herself for not coming during the storm.

  “Don’t be silly, dear,” Sunny chided her. “I wouldn’t have had you risk your life for some lifeless puppets.”

  I noticed she didn’t accuse Noelle of leaving the doors open. Instead she asked her to get on the phone and call “the troops” to come help. By lunchtime we were joined by a dozen volunteers who came with hot coffee, food, and goodwill. Sunny marshaled them into order, explaining how to separate the puppets with the least damage and where to hang the recovered ones to dry. Even Monty came down for an hour to see what damage had been done and ask what he could do. He didn’t help with the puppets himself, but I saw him handing Sunny a wad of cash, which she tearfully accepted by throwing her arms around Monty’s neck and crying, “Bless you, Alden.” He left, giving Dale, who’d wandered over around noon smelling like pot and looking like he’d slept through the storm, instructions to haul the drying racks over from the old tobacco barn.

  When Dale came back with the drying racks Sunny ordered us to lay the broken limbs out on them and had Noelle start a system of identifying, labeling, and color coding the puppets and their lost parts.

  “Looks like Nam,” Dale croaked.

  The barn did look like a gruesome triage center, but the mood was cheerful and determined. I recognized a few people from town—CJ from the library (who smiled at me as if she hadn’t tried to scare me half to death with that awful story), Katrine, and Devon Corbett. I said an awkward hello to Devon, holding up my mucky hands to show I couldn’t hug him, but he hugged me anyway, crushing me against his broad chest. He was the youngest of the Corbetts but well over six feet tall. Being hugged by someone that tall reminded me of Dunstan, and when Devon held me out at arm’s length to look at me, I felt the prick of tears in my eyes.

  “Goddamn you look good, Clare! Mom’s asked about you. You oughtta come by and see her.”

  She had? “She must hate me,” I blurted out.

  Devon looked appalled. “No one hates you, Clare! You were young. We all knew when you went to Bailey you’d probably give Dun the boot eventually. You were always too good for this town. We knew you’d go off to the city someday and Dun . . . well, you know Dun. He’s a small-town boy. He’d never be happy anyplace but Concord.”

  I stared at Devon—little Devon whom I’d babysat and read Goosebumps to—amazed that the great drama of my life, leaving Dunstan Corbett for Jess Martin in my senior year of college, could be reduced to a question of geography. But he was right. Dunstan would have been miserable in New York City and moving to the city was all that I’d wanted back then.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  Devon twisted his mouth in a crooked smile and shrugged. “Practically running the town. Busy. You know he got divorced?”

  “No,” I said, furrowing my brow. I had tried to look Dunstan up on F
acebook, but in his Luddite fashion, he didn’t have a page. “That’s too bad. What about you, Devon? You look great. Still playing football?”

  He guffawed—something I hadn’t seen anyone do in years. “Fantasy football. I blew out my knee sophomore year at Ohio State. I’ve got a tree removal business and I help out with the orchard—we all do.” He gave me a sly look. “Noelle says you’ve been coming in for our Northern Spys. Your great-granddad planted those, you know . . .” His voice trailed off, probably embarrassed when he remembered that I was adopted—or that the Corbetts had bought the orchard from the Jacksons. “Anyway, I’d better get back to work before these things calcify.” He nodded at the puppets. “It’d be a shame not to have the parade. My kids always look forward to it.”

  Kids? When had little Devon Corbett gotten old enough to have kids? Before I could ask, he whipped out a cell phone and showed me a picture of two blond boys, their broad, dimpled faces just how I remembered Devon and his brother Derrick. Strong stock, my father used to say of them. As if they were apple trees.

  Then he gave me another crushing hug and shambled off to help Noelle bring in more drying racks. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing glue across my cheek, and looked around the barn to see if Jess had witnessed my reunion with Devon. But Jess was gone. I asked Sunny if she’d seen him and she said he’d slipped away an hour ago.

  “He had that look, like he had an inspiration and had to get it down on paper before it was gone. I told him to go, that I knew how he felt . . .” She smiled, her mascara and glue streaked face beaming. Her hair was speckled with bits of glitter (one of the main ingredients of the puppets, I’d learned) and shreds of paper. “When the muse calls, you must answer. Look at how she’s graced me today!”

  I looked around the barn at the wreckage, wondering what she could mean. The salvaged puppets hung in a row on one end of the barn, their faces as bloated as if they really had been garroted by the hangman’s noose, their limbs and costumes a motley patchwork. The witches wore bits of scarecrow, the skeletons had acquired the ectoplasmic glow of ghosts, fairy princesses were whiskered with werewolves’ fur. Only the zombies looked appropriately piecemeal. Even the volunteers were wearing bits and pieces of the puppets, their faces stained with glue and papier-mâché, their arms and clothes covered with paint and glitter and bits of paper. My own arms were so spackled with paper I could have written on them. It was as if we’d all become part of the parade—a great big installation art project. That’s what Sunny was beaming about. This was what she loved—the process of making art even more than the final product. I hoped that Jess had brought some of this fairy dust back to his writing desk.

  “I’m glad we could be a part of it,” I said. “But I’d better be getting back to the house—”

  “I didn’t even think to ask,” she cried, clamping a bony hand on my shoulder. “Where will you stay now that the cottage is gone? There’s room here at the barn—”

  “That’s sweet of you, Sunny,” I said, smiling to think how Jess would react to that. “But it’s okay, we’re staying up at the house.”

  “But just until you find someplace else, surely.” She looked puzzled. “You could build something—a yurt, maybe!”

  I laughed. “I don’t think Jess would agree to living in a yurt. No, we’re going to stay in Riven House. There’s plenty of room. Monty says we can have the whole second floor . . .”

  I stopped because her face had turned as white as paste. “You can’t live there!” she croaked in a hoarse foreign voice. My skin prickled at the sound. It was like someone else’s voice was coming out of Sunny’s mouth. Like she’d become one of her own puppets and a ventriloquist was speaking through her.

  “Yes, we can,” I said slowly, as if explaining to a child. “Monty says we can.”

  “But he’s never let anyone before.” Her voice was her own again, high and agitated. I understood now. She was jealous. Monty hadn’t asked her to stay in Riven House. She had stayed there once—back when she and Monty were lovers—but he’d banished her to the barn. He’d no doubt told her something about writers needing their own space.

  “It’s different, you see,” I said patiently. Hadn’t I been the victim of jealousy of the time Jess spent working, of the tattooed barista, of the newest fan? “With Jess and me being writers. We work the same, in quiet. It’s not like . . . this.” I gestured at the noisy, paper-spackled crowd in the barn. “It’s great that you can do this big collaborative thing—I’m sure that’s why Monty gave you all this space—but writers need quiet.”

  Sunny stared at me for a moment and then spoke slowly, as though I were one of her children—an insensate confabulation of paper and glue. “The reason you can’t live in Riven House is because it’s haunted. Why do you think I moved out? It was sucking the life force out of me. It’s an unhappy place. There’s a spirit there that begrudges the living their happiness. It will tear you and Jess apart. It will tear you apart.”

  Chapter Eleven

  In the days and weeks to come I thought about what Sunny had said and the story CJ had told. That figure I’d seen on the weir and the sound of the baby crying in the night were no doubt products of my overactive imagination (If you don’t use it, it will use you) but I did wonder whether some places were inherently unhappy. Riven House had surely been an unhappy place since Mary Foley had left her baby to die on its steps and Minnie Noyes had shot her husband. But maybe Jess and I could bring happiness back into it and in so doing, heal our marriage.

  I thought so in those last golden days of autumn. As the leaves fell outside we made Riven House habitable again, like squirrels building our nests for winter. Jess still took his walk in the morning and when he came back he found some desk or perch to write at through the afternoon. I wanted him to have a permanent study, though, so when I’d finished cleaning our new bedroom, I explored the other rooms on the second floor. Not the nursery; I had my own plans for that and Jess hated the color yellow. And not the other master bedroom with its massive furniture standing around like sentinels. Instead I picked the room on the south side of the house that was lined with bookshelves and empty save for an elegant writing desk.

  “Minnie’s morning room,” Monty told me when I asked. I thought he’d meant mourning room, imagining her in her widow’s weeds, haunting the house and grounds. He explained that it was the room that his mother “repaired to” after breakfast to answer letters and plan “menus and floral arrangements.”

  “Poor Minnie,” Monty said, as though she were a distant acquaintance and not his mother. “I don’t think she had very much to occupy her when she moved up here from the city. God knows what she did in that room except drink laudanum and cut clippings from the magazines for her scrapbooks. For heaven’s sake, put the place to some good use. Maybe Jess writing in it will shake out the cobwebs.”

  There was no lack of cobwebs in Minnie’s Mourning Room, as I still thought of it, but I sucked them all up with the fancy new vacuum cleaner Monty bought for me at the Target in Kingston. It was harder to know what to do with the scrapbooks. The very idea of scrapbooking—a pastime made popular by Martha Stewart and indulged in by crafters like my mother and her sisters—repelled me. And there were dozens of them—portfolio-sized tomes with tooled leather covers decorated with forget-me-nots and sentimental quotes. I wondered at first how Minnie had justified their cost when her husband had lost all the family money, then I noticed shadowy marks on the backs of the pages, little triangles pressed into the paper like some ancient cuneiform, and realized that they were the marks from adhesive corners that had once held photographs. Minnie had ransacked the family’s photo albums to make her scrapbooks. She had even used the photos themselves, severing heads from bodies and pasting them into fanciful collages. The hostility of the act piqued my interest. I knew Jess would be appalled by them, though, so I stashed them all in the closet, which I’d discovered had an adjoining door to the nursery so I could get to them when I was done
converting the nursery into my study.

  I’d found a small vanity table that fit into the window seat eave to use as my desk and a faience glass lamp painted with apple blossoms. I’d rescued one of the straight-backed chairs from the “chair room” and brought up one of the rocking horses so the room wouldn’t feel so empty. As I cleaned out the closets and attic, I rescued small relics and brought them to the nursery, like offerings to an altar—a silver picture frame, which I polished and emptied of its whiskered Montague ancestor and replaced with a picture of Mary Foley; a wreath of paper apple blossoms, which I perched on top of a phrenology skull I’d found in the attic; a chipped china baby’s cup painted with violets, which I filled with pens and pencils. Lugging a carton of paper into the closet I looked at the papered-over dumbwaiter, considering whether I could use it to transport heavy items, but something about that malignant lump in the wall made me reject the idea.

  One night while we were sitting around the fireplace I asked Monty why it had been papered over.

  He looked embarrassed for a moment and then said, “After Minnie had me she developed some strange ideas. The laudanum she took for her back only made her worse. We’d call it postpartum depression now, but they didn’t know about that then. The cousin who took me in after she died told me that she had delusions that I wasn’t really her baby, that I’d been stolen at birth and switched with an imposter.” He tried to laugh, but it sounded forced. “She said that on the night I was born they took me from her and then later she heard crying coming from the dumbwaiter. Perhaps the housekeeper had taken me into the kitchen to wash me, but Minnie believed that the fairies had come into the house through the dumbwaiter to steal her baby. And so later . . . she thought to get her real baby back she had to put me in the dumbwaiter. My father had to take me away from her. He gave her a doll to hold instead but she shoved that into the dumbwaiter too.”

  “Oh!” I said, appalled. I wondered if I should tell him about the bell I’d heard coming from the dumbwaiter, but decided against it. “That’s awful, Monty. I’m sorry I brought it up.”