The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  “For my hunky boyfriend?” I suggested, smiling for the first time this morning. The icy glare of Dunstan’s gaze softened into a summery blue. He believed me. And why shouldn’t he? I’d only told him the truth.

  “Yeah, that too,” he said, his voice hoarse. He shook his head. “You need to be careful, Clary. This damned house—”

  He was cut off by a sharp rap against the glass. His eyes flicked past me to my window. For a moment I had the horrible thought that when I turned I would be looking into the bloated face of Sunny’s ghost—but it was only Jess. He was leaning down, his face blurry through the glass. I lowered the window.

  “If you’re done with my wife, Officer, Mr. Montague is having chest pains and he wants Clare to go to the hospital with us.”

  A skeptical look crossed Dunstan’s face, but then, perhaps remembering that Monty was my father, he only said, “Yeah, I’m done with her.”

  MONTY ASSURED ME in the car that he wasn’t really having chest pains. “I only wanted to get you away from that police officer. Was he badgering you? What did you tell him?”

  When I admitted I’d told Dunstan that Sunny and Monty were married Jess groaned.

  “No, it’s fine, Jess,” Monty said. “Clare did the right thing. He’d have found out anyway. Better it come from a pretty girl.” Monty grinned. “What did he say, Clare?”

  He said half the girls in high school were jealous of me, I thought. He said to be careful.

  “Nothing much,” I answered. “I don’t think he suspects anything.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if he did,” Jess said. “We were all in the house last night. We can all attest to that.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence. Perhaps Monty and Jess were thinking that they couldn’t really attest to the others’ whereabouts in the middle of the night, but I was thinking about what Dunstan had said about half the girls in high school being jealous of me. How was that possible, I wondered, when I was jealous of all of them? And not just the girls. I was jealous of all the kids whose parents came to the games and plays and concerts beaming with pride at their progeny. Even the kids with drunks and meth-heads for parents. Even Charity Jane with her big chaotic family and hand-me-down clothes and her naked ambition to be the best. At least when Charity Jane burst into tears when I got the Bailey scholarship her mother was there to hug her. Trudy hadn’t even come to the assembly. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that I was the one going to Bailey in the fall. I already suspected that the kids at Bailey wouldn’t care if their parents showed up at Honors Assembly.

  And they didn’t. The Bailey students acted like they didn’t have families—or they acted like they despised them. But there were a host of other things they cared about that I knew nothing about: obscure foreign films, the best single malt scotch labels, the best New York City vegan bakeries, where to ski, where to intern, the post-grad programs to get you a job in publishing (never mind that they cost more than I made in a year working at the farm stand)—a whole new host of reasons to be jealous. But even there I’d used that jealousy to do better. I was the one who got into Monty’s senior seminar, and the one who got a job at Broadway Books right out of college, and the one who married Jess Martin, who sold his first novel only a year after we graduated.

  But even after I married Jess and we were living in the loft in Williamsburg, going to readings and book launches, I realized that what we thought of as a lot of money was nothing compared to what our classmates had in trust funds and inheritances. They might make a big deal of not living on their families’ money, but when they lost a job or didn’t get the next freelance assignment, they had something to fall back on. We didn’t. It was when our debts were piling up that I was most beset with envy—of the young mothers I saw lingering over coffee at the Williamsburg cafés, the interns clothed in boho chic Anthropologie dresses I could no longer afford, at our friends flying to Costa Rica for Christmas—a corrosive jealousy because there was no exam to take or scholarship to win to get what they had—the ease of being born into money. And that was the worst thing to envy: the warm circle of family protection when you were standing outside in the cold. Poor Sunny. That’s how she must have felt when she fled the house last night.

  I dropped Jess and Monty off at the front of the hospital. Watching Jess help Monty through the door I felt a surge of gratitude—and then guilt that I got to have a family while Sunny lay cold and dead in a medical examiner’s morgue. I supposed that guilt was the flip side of jealousy.

  When I was asking how to get to the cardiology department I realized that there was something I could do for Sunny.

  “Can you tell me what room Dale Cartwright is in?” I asked.

  Sunny and Dale had been close. I owed it to Dale to tell him what had happened to Sunny before he heard it from someone else. Monty would be fine with Jess—in fact, it was a good idea for them to spend more time together.

  When I got to Dale’s room I found out that I was too late. A woman in a long mauve tunic was sitting on the edge of Dale’s bed, weeping. Dale looked pale and stricken.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Did Sunny hang herself?”

  “It is,” I said, “but how . . . ?”

  The woman in the mauve tunic turned and I was startled to see it was the woman from St. Anne’s.

  “I heard from my cousin Garnette just now. She was one of Sunny’s volunteers. The police called up all the volunteers to ask how the puppets were left yesterday. She said . . .” She shuddered, her enamel cat earrings jingling like wind chimes. “. . . that the puppets were arranged in a circle around her. But that’s not how they were when Garnette left for the day. Sunny must have arranged them like that . . .” She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper meant to convey horror but that instead ended up sounding as if she were relishing the details. “. . . like for an audience.”

  “And what if she did?” Dale demanded angrily. “She looked on those puppets like they were family. If only I’d been there . . .” He flapped his bandaged arm like an injured wing and grimaced.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself,” I said.

  “I don’t!” Dale spit out between gritted teeth. “I blame that goddamned house. It doesn’t want anyone to be happy—it made old Mrs. Montague shoot her husband and kill herself. It made Jess fall on me and made me cut myself with my own chain saw. And now it’s taken Sunny. As soon as I get out of here I’m moving to Florida. If I were you”—he fixed me with a bloodshot eye—“I’d get out of there before that house tears you into little pieces.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We buried Sunny a week later in the Montague family plot of the Rhinebeck Cemetery. It took that long for the police to declare her death “self-inflicted” and release her body. Each day we had to wait seemed to age Monty a year. By the time of the funeral he could barely stand at the graveside without Jess and me on either side holding him up. I could feel him trembling through his heavy wool coat and hear the wheeze of his lungs.

  “He has congestive heart failure,” Jess had told me when we came back from the hospital. “He has to take those nitroglycerin tablets whenever he has pain and he’s supposed to avoid stress and extreme temperatures.”

  The last thing he should be doing was standing in the cold and damp listening to one of Sunny’s “coven” (as Jess referred to the dozen hearty women who had descended on Riven House to “usher Sunny to the beyond”) chant the seven verses of the Abhidhamma. But he had insisted he was well enough to stand through the graveside ceremony, just as he had insisted on having Sunny buried in the family plot.

  I looked around at the gravestones of Montagues dating back to the eighteenth century. They were mostly a long-lived clan, except for Minnie and Bayard, who had died in their twenties within six months of each other. I’d been surprised, passing their gravestones, to see them buried side by side. Beloved husband and father, Bayard’s stone read. No hint that Minnie had shot her beloved husband. Beloved wife and mother, her stone read.
No hint that she hadn’t been a mother—not really, since her own child had died in premature childbirth. She’d suffered delusions that Monty wasn’t hers. And she had been right. What everyone had thought was postpartum depression (although no one called it that then) was really grief over losing her own baby and anger at being saddled with her husband’s mistress’s baby. No wonder she’d gone out of her mind. And no wonder Monty had grown up feeling unloved. We’d both been raised by strangers.

  I put my arm around Monty and glared at the woman who was ringing a Tibetan mourning bell. I made eye contact with the minister and he nodded at the men waiting to lower Sunny’s coffin into the ground. The bell continued to peal as the coffin was lowered, muffling the sound of the electronic gears as the fog muffled the edges of the gravestones around us, both the fog and the chime of the bells drawing a circle around us mourners.

  Like Sunny’s circle of puppets.

  And now Sunny was surrounded for eternity by Montagues. As someday I would be, I realized, as we turned to leave the grave, my eyes coming to rest on Minnie’s gravestone. Would she see me as an intruder?

  But she’s the intruder, I thought, gripping Monty’s arm to keep him from stumbling on the uneven, icy ground. I’m a Montague. I belong here.

  I found myself, though, thinking of Minnie often in the weeks that followed the funeral. There wasn’t much else to do. An icy fog had settled over the valley, rising from the river, creeping up the lawn, erasing pond and garden, and even stealing into the house itself, where it settled into the rotunda, dim now under the iced-shut oculus, like an animal curling up in its winter den.

  “Does winter always come so suddenly up here?” Jess asked miserably.

  “I suppose,” I said. “I never really noticed. There was apple picking season and then winter. I was mostly glad when all the crops were in and the farm stand closed because I had more time to read. It’s kind of cozy.”

  Jess snorted. He was even more confined than Monty and me because his ankle still bothered him and made navigating the ice outside difficult. The lack of exercise made him restless. During the day he wondered aloud why we hadn’t moved someplace fucking warmer. At night I heard him walking in circles around the rotunda gallery, thump-dragging his injured foot. He reminded me of an animal scratching a hollow in its den. I remembered what Sunny had said about how lonely the house became in winter. It was enough to drive a person crazy.

  I could chart the progress of Minnie’s mental deterioration in her scrapbooks. The first one I looked through was ordinary enough, even banal. She’d started keeping them the year she came out—the year she met Bayard Montague. It was full of dance cards and invitations to teas and pressed flowers and bits of ribbons and feathers from her favorite dresses and hats. She’d cut out the newspaper notice of her debutante ball at the Sherry-Netherland and every clipping thereafter of her appearances in society. She’d pasted a photograph of herself in her coming-out ball gown and one of her and Bayard in beaver coats and muffs skating on Wollman Rink in Central Park. Looking at these made me realize that Bayard had been “courting” Minnie Noyes before he ran off with Mary Foley. On one whimsical page she had cut out Bayard’s head and mounted it on a drawing of a great stuffed grizzly bear and attached her own head to a drawing of a long-necked ostrich. Minnie and Bay go to the zoo! she’d written in loopy childish handwriting. The last page of the book was dedicated to her wedding in June of 1929—only a month after Bayard had run off with Mary. When I turned to that page I gasped aloud at the sight of Minnie in her wedding dress. In her white dress and flower wreath she looked like Mary Foley in her apple blossom wreath.

  But Minnie wasn’t nearly as pretty, and her wreath was made of hothouse orange blossoms. “The bride wore crepe de chine and orange blossoms,” the notice in the Times read. “After a whirlwind romance, Mr. Alden Bayard Montague and Miss Minerva Delano Noyes were wed at St. Bartholomew’s Church. The couple will reside at the Montague estate in Concord, New York, after a honeymoon on the Continent.”

  They’d moved to River House in the fall of 1929. Minnie started her next scrapbook with a collage of pine branches and pinecones surrounding a postcard of River House. The next page was dedicated to apple picking and featured photographs of Bayard and Minnie riding in an apple cart. Minnie had drawn an arrow pointing to her flat stomach and pasted a flying cupid shooting an arrow toward it. So she’d been pregnant by September—and still happy. She hadn’t known there was another girl bearing Bayard’s child living not a mile down the road. Had Minnie glimpsed her picking apples in her new husband’s orchards? Had she heard whispers of what had happened at the last apple blossom festival?

  October went by without any mention of the stock market crash. Minnie cut out pictures of roast turkeys and harvest cornucopias. There was a photograph of a servant dressed in a long black dress and white apron carrying a large platter, only Minnie had pasted a cutout of an apple over the servant’s face. It seemed cruel, but she hadn’t been much kinder to Bayard, over whose face she had pasted a pilgrim’s head. She had made herself into an Indian wielding an axe. A little repressed hostility there? I wondered. Had strains appeared in the marriage? Was Minnie feeling lonely and isolated up here in the country while Bayard stayed in the city, scrambling to save their dwindling fortune?

  I thought of her as I walked through the house, peering out the fog-bound windows at the gray and gloomy landscape. The house felt both bigger and more desolate and also smaller and more crowded with the cold bearing down on it. As if it were gathering up its energy for the long winter like an animal stores up fat.

  Our own Thanksgiving was a subdued affair. I roasted a turkey and made all the sides, but sitting down to such a huge feast with only the three of us felt gloomy. I’d cleaned out the dining room, polished the old table, and found three chairs that had been finished enough to sit on. I’d pushed the other chairs to the sides of the room, thinking I’d take a class in furniture restoration in the spring and learn how to fix them myself. The empty chairs surrounding us made our dinner seem lonelier, as if they were waiting for guests who hadn’t come. Even the champagne failed to lighten the mood, perhaps because it was the Dom Pérignon meant to celebrate Monty and Sunny’s renewed vows. Monty grimaced at each sip as if it reminded him of Sunny. Jess drank too much. When I reminded him that he shouldn’t mix alcohol and pain pills he said it was a time-honored tradition among writers to experiment until they found the right cocktail for their muse. This observation led to a lugubrious discussion of the various “cocktails” employed by famous writers from Coleridge’s opium to Hemingway’s martinis and Byron’s fondness for laudanum.

  “And what was laudanum after all,” Jess said, “but alcohol and opiates combined? Wasn’t that what Lily Bart drank in The House of Mirth?”

  “And died of it,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t be so literal, Clare,” Jess said, waving a glass of champagne. “Lily Bart died of society’s indifference to the plight of the intelligent woman, right, Monty? Isn’t that what you taught us in your class?”

  “Did I?” Monty asked, gazing into his unfinished glass of champagne. In the firelight the bubbles glowed like gold, like the cockled glass windows of Riven House in the autumn light. Would that sunlight ever return? I wondered. “Minnie drank laudanum. My aunts said she’d hurt her back while giving birth to me and started taking it for the pain, but now I wonder . . .”

  “If she drank it because she’d lost her baby,” I said, following Monty’s thought.

  Jess looked from Monty to me. “Is that what you two are writing in that book of yours? That Minnie went mad because she lost her baby and had a stranger’s child foisted on her?”

  “Jess,” I hissed warningly.

  “Sorry, Monty. I forget sometimes that it’s your story. Hearing Clare talk about it I think it’s something she made up.”

  “It’s Clare’s story too,” Monty said. “And as I always said in class, ‘We talk about the story, not the storyte
ller.’”

  “Of course,” Jess said, pouring himself another glass of champagne and holding up his glass in a toast. “Here’s to all the storytellers—and whatever they need to drink to get their stories told.”

  I’d begun to worry that Jess was getting more drinking done than storytelling. The sound of Monty’s typewriter had begun to drive him crazy, he said, and since he couldn’t take his long walks anymore he would drive into town “to find someplace quiet to write goddamnit!” When he came back, though, his breath smelled of beer and cigarettes and I suspected that his someplace quiet was one of the local bars. I worried about him driving on the icy, foggy roads and worried about him giving up on his book. Maybe Riven House was only good for him in the summer and fall. Maybe Riven House wasn’t good for anyone once winter set in.

  It certainly wasn’t good for Minnie. Her scrapbooks grew stranger through the fall. She’d found the picture of Bayard crowning the Apple Blossom Queen and pasted an apple over Mary Foley’s face. In another one she drew Bayard biting into an apple, drool dripping from his mouth, his face voracious as a cannibal’s. Clearly she had found out about his fling with Mary Foley and had come unhinged by jealousy. In her Christmas collage she’d pasted multiple photos of her and Bayard’s heads on a huge Christmas tree. In another the same black-garbed housekeeper—again with an apple pasted over her face—carried a platter with the baby Jesus on it. As if she were serving it to eat.

  After the explosion of Christmas collages there was a rather subdued New Year’s collage of champagne labels. When I turned to the next page I thought that the glue had come undone and loosed all the carefully cut-out magazine clippings and photographs into a chaotic mélange. Jumbled together on the page were magazine pictures of babies and nursery objects—baby bottles, cribs, stuffed toys and dolls, fanciful animals decked out in circus costumes . . . Looking from the book to the walls I saw that they were the circus animals from the wallpaper. Minnie must have saved a sheet of the wallpaper to use in her scrapbooks. In fact, as I picked at the layers of pictures—all covered with a layer of glue as thick as shellac—I made out the wallpaper underneath all the other pictures. She’d meant to use it as the background but then in her pain and grief over losing her own baby she had piled on dozens of baby pictures, as if she were looking for her own baby in the pages of all these magazines.