by Dale Peck
She put a hand on Chez Divine. “Why don’t you see if you can find us some rope,” she said, her voice not so much cold as helpless. She cleared her throat, spoke more loudly. “I think I remember some downstairs. Room three or four.”
By the time I got back she’d regained her composure, and she took the rope from me and secured it to the pillar. “Hemp. God, I’d like some of that right now.”
I snaked the free end of the rope down the shaft, swung one leg over the lip of the dumbwaiter, took a deep breath.
“Here goes nothing.”
The wood that lined the shaft was old and coarse, and my bare feet—smooth-soled sandals didn’t seem wise for such a vertical descent—gripped it easily. I let myself down foot under foot, hand under hand, slowly, less concerned about the distance I’d fall than landing on the lantern and splashing flaming oil all over my body. Still, it wasn’t a hard climb, and in less than a minute I was standing on the floor of the shaft. I stamped once; a solid thud vibrated up my ankle.
“Throw me my socks. It’s freezing down here.”
They fell on me in a little cotton and wool hailstorm, all six of them, and when one hit the lantern the flame flickered a little.
“Be careful, Claudia. You almost knocked over—”
“Can you get the door open?” Claudia called over me.
I looked up at her.
“Not me, Mr. Ramsay, the door.”
“Hold on.” I put my socks on, all of them, then held the lantern up to the doorway. With a little jerk, the lantern lifted from my fingers and swayed a few inches above my head, and I looked up to see Claudia holding it by its string; with her free hand she motioned me toward the door. I looked back down and saw that it had been sealed with three vertical planks. I looked for a hole to take my mother’s key, but there wasn’t one. I pushed at the planks, then pulled; they didn’t budge.
“It’s boarded over.”
“Well, kick it down. C’mon, Jamie, show some spunk.”
I forgot I wasn’t wearing shoes—forgot that if I had been wearing shoes I’d’ve been wearing sandals—and I kicked. Luckily the thrice-socked ball of my foot struck the wood or I probably would have broken a toe. As it was my foot twanged off the wood painfully and I muttered a string of curses.
“What are you saying, Jamie, I can’t hear you.”
“I said the wood’s pretty solid, dear. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to get a hammer or a crow bar.”
“Who the hell knows where Endean would keep something practical like a hammer,” said the woman who’d just spent five months using one to bang on the walls of the basement. “Hold on, I think I know what to do.” The shaft was plunged into darkness as the lantern ascended rapidly, and I looked up to see Claudia’s face disappear; it was gone only a moment before she returned. “Here. Catch.”
In the darkness I couldn’t see what she threw down on top of me, could only feel it writhing around my limbs with the heavy weight of a boa constrictor. I panicked: she’d trapped me in the pitch black confines of the dumbwaiter and the heavy weight of her snake coiled around my neck and arms and legs, tripping me, choking me. It was so dark I didn’t realize I was falling until my head smacked against the wall. I heard crashing noises, splintering, the snake’s scales scratched and scraped the skin of my neck like a noose and then there was a splash of water on my cheek and left shoulder, the top of my thigh, and I heard Claudia’s voice.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie, are you okay? Jamie? Answer me, goddammit!”
Light returned as the lantern descended like a shooting star out for a Sunday stroll, and I looked up to see the slick contours of Claudia’s face.
I took a breath. “I’m fine.”
“Fine? You were fucking berserk.”
“You sound surprised,” I said as I untangled myself from the rope she’d dropped on top of me.
There was a long silence from the top of the shaft. Then Claudia just said, “It is.”
“It is what?”
I looked up, but even before Claudia spoke I knew what she was going to say.
“A compulsion.”
I thought—but I resisted the urge to say it—who was I saving this time?
“Hey, Jamie?”
“What now, Claudia?”
“Shut up and turn around, okay?”
I shut up; I turned. And there it was. The door of the dumbwaiter. The three planks that had covered it were broken in half and hung loosely off their nails.
“Not quite open sesame, but it got the job—”
“Claudia! I see something.”
“Oh my God! What do you see?”
“I see a light.”
“Step into the light, Carol Anne.”
I giggled, but at the same time I was pulling the broken boards off their moors with trembling fingers. The rusted iron nails were so old they broke rather then bent. The lantern’s glow pushed into the room and stale air pushed back, stale musty frigid air, and something else too, something less light than glow, less glow than gray, a softening in the pitch blackness of the chamber, a single vertical fissure in a black field, faint, flickering, and when I leaned through the door of the dumbwaiter with the lantern thrust out ahead of me I could just make out the outline of the peg-legged box from which the glow emanated.
It was a television.
An old fashioned console TV, its tube nearly—but not quite—extinguished.
The two faint lights, the lantern’s and the television’s, illuminated shag carpet, a Barcalounger, a row of chintzy Dresdenesque figurines on a sagging particle-board whatnot.
If this was my mother’s treasure, she’d bought it at Sears.
four
IT WAS ALL IN THE TAG on the back of the television. “Serviced and/or repaired” on 10/12/82, 2/12/89, 8/8/97. Five years ago—not even—my mother had stood where I stood, my mother had flipped through channels with this clunky plastic knob and then she’d gone away. She’d left and she’d forgotten to shut the TV off, but she hadn’t been gone so long the tube had burned out. Almost, but not quite: it still emitted a sliver of light, a glow as portentous as a fissure between two dimensions. I felt I could stick my hand into that tunnel of light and somewhere on the other end my mother’s hand would grab mine and pull me to where she was—and it was there the fantasy broke down, because I didn’t know where my mother was, or when. I didn’t know if she belonged to my past or my future. Until I found that television I’d operated in a haze, lost in the idea that my mother had come to No. 1 in the middle of the last century. Had come to the building when it was new and grown up and grown old with it, had passed into history along with the dead gaslights still poking from the walls in the stairwell. It was such an old place, filled with such old things, its history should reach back just as far. And I suppose it did, but not the part I knew. What I mean is, the nails that had fastened the boards over the dumbwaiter’s door were square instead of round, rusted iron instead of galvanized steel. They were old, but they couldn’t’ve been hammered into place more than ten or twenty years before, and as I looked at them I realized the confusing haze wasn’t entirely in my head: my mother had had her own fuzzy relationship to time.
What did I do first? I turned on the lights. I didn’t plan to. I just walked from one darkened room into the next, and, out of habit I suppose, or conditioning, I performed one of those gestures that marks me as a member of the First World: I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. Light exploded into the room, from the ceiling, from the matching end tables on either side of the mold-spotted couch. And although I didn’t question the existence of electricity in the subbasement (after all, the TV had been on), I didn’t entirely trust it either: I kept my lantern with me.
I walked through the house, room by room. Because that’s what it was: a house. It wasn’t a finished basement, I mean. It was a suburban tract house with a living room and a kitchen and three bedrooms and two and a half baths, and it had been broken apart somehow, put back together
like a ship in a bottle. Except whoever had rebuilt it had done a terrible job. None of the rooms was square, they overlapped each other, cut each other off at corners. Escherlike, one faded into another. A study, its empty bookshelves angling into an otherwise rectangular dining room. A skewed parlor, its sofas and chairs covered in thick brittle plastic, a crooked kitchen filled with fifties appliances. The faucet coughed dry breaths for a second, then spewed a thin stream of rusty water, but the gas had either never been connected or had been turned off. There were coffee cups in the dishrack, a chess set on the card table, gaily printed curtains on every darkened window. A front door even, but when I pulled it open the only thing that greeted me was a wall of solid earth. There was a keyhole on the outside of the doorknob, but it refused my mother’s key.
It only took a moment to find the stairs. The door at the top was deadbolted, and I opened it and opened the door, tried my mother’s key on the outer lock; it didn’t work there either. There was a second door, wooden, thin. I ran my fingers around the edge till I tripped a latch and the door swung open and I found myself in Room 12 of the basement—and found Claudia waiting for me, breathless. I looked at her and she looked at me but what was there to say? Except: I closed the door to the subbasement and saw how its seams had been concealed by the paneling on this side of the room.
“I assume you tapped this wall yourself?”
Claudia stared into my face. “Oh my God. It was you. I thought it was Reggie, but it was you!”
I was confused. “Reggie?”
“When I first moved in. I thought Reggie’d been through my things but it was you. You found that map and you never said anything?”
I turned back to the door. “You really didn’t have a key? All this time? Even though you have a key to every other door in the building?”
“Oh, Jamie, forest for the trees: there’s only one key to No. 1. All the doors have the same lock.”
“Except for this one.” And, as if to prove I was as obtuse as Claudia had implied: “So why did you hide that map from Reggie?”
Claudia laughed, or snorted really, let out one bitter grunt. “The map I was hiding from you. It was the other stuff I was hiding from him. I used to do that sometimes, when I still gave a shit. But he always found it, or he’d just go out and cop some more.”
Claudia’s words sat between us as my confession about Cousin Benny had just a few minutes earlier, and then I shook my head and took her hand and led her downstairs, and instead of telling me about the drugs or Reggie, she told me what she knew about the house my mother had decided to hide in the basement.
“We all knew about it of course, but she never let anyone down here. Not even Endean. I guess she saw it Upstate. She used to go to all the flea markets and auctions and estate sales up there before she started going abroad. I guess she’d had her eye on it for a while because she left one morning and came back the same evening with the house on a flatbed truck, disassembled, every board numbered, every piece of trim, every fucking screw. It was amazing how small it was, how much of a house is empty space.
“I don’t think it took them a week to put it back together. And then the furniture. She had to have every piece of junk that had been in it originally. I think she read about it somewhere, or maybe she saw it at an estate sale. Some sob story about an old couple who built it as their retirement palace? Then the husband died right after they moved in? A hunting accident? The only thing she ever told me was that there’d been a second story on top of the original house and an attic on top of that, but all Ginny wanted was the first floor. It was all she needed, she said, but who can say why your mother did anything, or how for that matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: when she came back that day she was riding in the cab of that flatbed truck and she did everything but blow the driver a kiss when he left.”
We were in the house’s study by then, and Claudia’s voice broke in a gasp. I turned to her, then turned again, following her pointing finger. At first I thought it was some kind of trophy because it sat next to a bright red hunting cap, but then I realized: it was an urn.
“Parker?” she said, as though the urn might answer her. “Oh my God. Your mother—stole—Parker?”
She leaned on the desk with both hands, her mouth tearing breaths out of the thick air, and the only thing I could think to do was to go to the shelf behind the desk. It sagged under the weight of the bottled death it held, sagged even after I’d lifted the urn down. It was amazingly heavy, seemed made of inch-thick lead. It came down heavily—hollowly—on the desk, and at the thump Claudia looked up, her dusty face streaked with tears. When she spoke the words came in a rush but they still didn’t come easily. They felt pulled from her, in the same way she’d pulled the lantern up the shaft, from me.
“When Ellis and Parker died my father was so crazy he couldn’t pick their ashes up from the funeral home. So Endean went. But she brought them back here because Ginny—because your mother said she had these urns. She wanted to give them to my father.” She touched the urn now, experimentally, and when it didn’t shock her she left her hand there, let it cup curved lead as once it might have cupped Parker’s cheek. “That night there was something. We thought it was a break-in. A smashed window, the lock jimmied. They took the cash in the till and a bunch of little things. Costume jewelry and silverware and other things that looked like they might be valuable. And….”
“Parker?”
“And Parker.”
I looked at the urn. It was huge and dull and gray and…ugly. I looked at Claudia.
“But why?”
“Damn it, Jamie, does everything have to be but why with you? Can’t you ever answer a question without asking it first?”
John had said that too, and I was about to tell Claudia that but the stopper had been pulled from her throat and the revelations poured out like wine.
“She was fucking him, Jamie. Parker was your mother’s slice of jungle fever. An eighteen-year-old black kid from the ghetto the mysterious white lady would take up to her rooms. You want to know what ruined Parker? It wasn’t drugs—the fucking drugs came after. It was your bitch of a mother, Jamie. And look at the two of us. Even from beyond the grave, Jamie. Even dead she’s ruining our lives.”
And how do you answer that? How do you even keep up with it, stand up under its weight? I didn’t; I couldn’t. I just went back to our standby. I pointed to the urn.
“Is this what we were looking for?”
And Claudia laughed. “That’s good, Jamie. Real good. Jamie, look at that.” She too pointed to the urn, her finger shaking as if she were trying to hold up its leaden weight. “He’s dead. Why in the hell should I waste five months of my life trying to find him?”
“But he’s your brother.”
“That is not my brother, Jamie, any more than these goddamned shoes”—she pointed down at them as though they were farther away than her feet—“are the little black kid who taught you there are worse fates in life than your own.”
“Claudia—”
“No, Jamie, no more. I am sick and tired of this shit, sick and tired of the madness of this place. I’m beginning to think it’s something in the air. You, your mother, Endean, even me: anyone who spends any time here goes fucking nuts. I might as well have thrown in my lot with Reggie, or just stayed in my father’s house. He may be shriveled up like a prune but at least he’s not crazy like the rest of you.”
Panting for breath then, she reached for Parker’s urn. She pulled old death against new life, and the combined weight was almost too much for her to lift. She tried half a dozen times, finally had it in her arms. She held it like a baby, let it rest on top of her stomach. She turned slowly, carefully; I could hear Divine’s shoes squelch beneath the weight, but still, I made no move to help her. She walked away with a zombie’s slow blind steps, and I watched her go. I let her go. In my head she made it even, made it all the way up two flights of stairs, made it into a cab and all the way back to her father’s house and h
er father’s open arms, ensconced her disgraced brother on the family mantle with his good sibling and their dearly departed mother.
But my mother’s jigsaw house had a different plan. A half-rotted corner of rug tripped her before she’d gone six steps. There was a couch there, thank God—I don’t want to know what would’ve happened if her body had landed on thinly carpeted concrete—but Parker’s urn thudded on the floor and rolled toward a corner of the room.
I braced myself for the impact, as if when it struck the wall all of No. 1 would come tumbling down on us. But there was no impact, no collapse. There was just:
“Jamie.”
Something in her voice. I let myself take a step toward her.
“Claudia?”
“Jamie,” she said again. “I think you’d better get the suitcase.”
I HELPED HER UP TWO FLIGHTS of stairs, left her sitting on a wooden crate with the words “Product of Rhodesia” stenciled on its side; by the time I’d returned with the suitcase Nellydean was there.
“This is for after,” she was saying, handing Claudia a tear-shaped leather pouch the size of a parking meter. “This is for during,” she said, giving her a mason jar of green liquid. “Just small sips,” she said, “spoonfuls,” and she handed Claudia two polished silver spoons, one adult size, one hardly larger than a mustard paddle. “And this is for before.” She leaned close and kissed Claudia four times, on her right cheek, her forehead, her left cheek, her lips—counterclockwise, I noted, as if she could turn back time. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and reached a hand into a pocket of her dress and withdrew a golden rectangle of cloth, its borders edged with red and green embroidery. “This is for the baby. Don’t let the nurses tell you no. If a newborn can’t be with his mother he at least needs to have something of her with him.”
