A Stranger in the Kingdom

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “Can’t you be a little quiet—” He never finished the sentence. “Mister Baby Johnson! Who in thunder is this, James?”

  “It’s Claire LaRiviere,” I said, as though I’d known her for years.

  “This is my father,” I said to Claire. “Mr. Kinneson.”

  A puzzled frown appeared on the girl’s oval face. “He is not Monsieur Kinneson,” she said.

  My father looked at me. “Well, if I’m not, then I’ve been strangely mistaken for the past half century or so. The question is, James, who is this young woman and where is she from?”

  The girl continued to frown at my father. “You resemble the photo of Monsieur Kinneson perhaps a little. But most certainly you are not Monsieur Kinneson.”

  To judge from the expression on his face, my father did not seem pleased to be informed by a perfect stranger standing in his kitchen in the middle of the night that he was not who he had thought he was.

  “Do you know this girl, James?”

  “Well, not really,” I said, unwilling to admit where I had seen her before.

  “I will show you the photo,” Claire LaRiviere said.

  She set the huge black handbag on the table. Very deliberately, she began to remove the contents. “It will be right here, of course.”

  One by one the drenched girl took out several Hershey wrappers, an empty Good & Plenty box, a crumpled box of Dots, a broad pink comb with several missing teeth, three or four colored ticket stubs, and a timetable like the one on the counter at the railroad station in the Common—the detritus, I suddenly realized, of some kind of journey.

  In the meantime, my father pulled the belt of his bathrobe tighter around his waist; no doubt he was ill at ease to be caught out of his suitcoat and tie, even in his own kitchen at one fifteen in the morning.

  “Who is the little boy who greets me at the door?” Claire asked him out of the blue, without turning to look at me on the woodbox.

  “That’s my son James.”

  “And Monsieur Kinneson? Where is he?”

  Now my father, the two-fisted newspaperman who with good reason prided himself on getting a line on the shiftiest politician within five minutes of meeting him; who did not hesitate to tender detailed and ungentle advice in the form of open letters in the Monitor to governors, senators, managers of professional baseball teams, and even presidents; whose letters and columns were frequently reprinted by papers as far away from Kingdom County as Idaho and Louisiana; who had already served once and would twice serve again as president of the American Association of Independent Weekly Newspapers—my father, the reporter’s reporter and editor’s editor, was totally at a loss when it came to dealing with almost any crisis on the home front that could not be remedied by fixing someone a cup of java.

  So I anticipated what was coming next.

  “James,” my father said, beckoning me into the hallway. “Go get your mother.”

  “How distressing,” Mom said, without appearing to be especially distressed, when I woke her up and told her the news. “It’s that poor girl, I’m afraid.”

  She put on her robe and hurried down to the kitchen to set matters straight.

  Claire LaRiviere was still sorting through her bag.

  “Hello, dear,” my mother said. “There’s been a small misunderstanding.”

  “Oh yes,” my father said, retreating toward the bathroom.

  “At last!” the girl said, and held up a picture that looked as though it had been clipped out of a newspaper.

  In fact, it had come from a newspaper. It was tom almost in half and faded and smudged. Unmistakably, however, the man smiling out of the photograph at us was my brother Charlie!

  It was the photograph my father had taken of him, flanked by our two cousins, standing under the deer head inside the door of the Common Hotel several weeks ago, just after Resolvèd’s triumphant poaching arraignment.

  Someone—it was not hard to guess who—had cut Resolvèd and Welcome out of the picture and scrawled above my brother’s handsome face, “ME. RESOLVÈD T KINNESON.”

  “The man who is come to my rescue at the show, eh?” Claire said proudly.

  “You’re the girl Resolvèd sent away for in that silly magazine, aren’t you, dear?” my mother said. “I’m afraid that he’s played a very mean trick on you. Unfortunately, the man in this picture isn’t who you think he is.”

  Over more tea, after the misunderstanding of the picture was straightened out, Claire LaRiviere gave us a sketchy outline of her life in Canada. She had been born and brought up in Quebec City, the daughter of a boulevard mime and traditional French Canadian fiddler. She told us proudly that she had acquired much of her English from the movies, which she loved, and that from the earliest age she had longed to go to Hollywood and act in a movie herself. Her father, Etienne LaRiviere, had encouraged her in this ambition and had taken her with him from the time she was five years old to stepdance to his fiddle reels on the street corners and to mime celebrities. At this point Claire gave us several demonstrations of her talent, including one of Winston Churchill and one of Charlie Chaplin in City Lights that delighted my mother and me so much we clapped.

  Then a tragedy had occurred. Two winters ago Etienne LaRiviere had contracted pneumonia from working outdoors in the frigid Canadian streets and died. After Etienne’s death there had been a succession of men in their home, the most recent of whom had repeatedly tried to violate Claire’s honor.

  “Etienne LaRiviere carried a knife in his shoe, a knife made of the sharpest steel. He would have slit this fellow’s throat the first time he so much as glanced at me,” Claire said haughtily. “But Etienne, the most celebrated mime in all French Canada, was gone, poof!, like the cold wind that blow off the ice on the river and kill him. My mother is not a strong woman. What are we to do? We are at this bad man’s mercy!

  “So I make up my mind, me. ‘Claire,’ I say, ‘you must leave this house and this city.’ Fine. But where will I go? The States, most certainly. Holly-wood!”

  At about this time Claire had run across Resolvèd’s letter in the Montreal tabloid. She had responded, and to her surprise, Resolvèd had written back (probably with Welcome’s assistance), enclosing the spurious picture of himself from the Monitor and thirty dollars for bus fare to Kingdom County. On the day the letter arrived she gathered together her few belongings, including her colorful stepdancing dress, stuffed them into a paper sack, and caught the morning bus south to Sherbrooke.

  At this point in Claire’s tale my father reappeared, now shaved and fully attired in white shirt, suit, and tie. To his great embarrassment she immediately singled him out to address exclusively, much the way a cat in a roomful of people will jump up into the lap of the one person in the room who is uneasy with cats. This discomposed my father so much that he began vigorously polishing his shoes on the lid of the woodbox.

  Since the bus for Vermont and Memphremagog would not leave Sherbrooke until early evening, Claire had spent the afternoon watching Under the Big Top in a downtown theater. She sat through two complete showings, she said. Back at the bus station she discovered that she had made a miscalculation. After the movie, she did not have enough money left for her ticket to Vermont.

  Undaunted, she immediately started walking. After getting lost several times, she reached the Sherbrooke city limits about dusk, where she was picked up by the Paris Revue entourage, who offered her a ride to Vermont in exchange for a night’s dancing in the show.

  “I imagine this Revue is dancing only, like my performances with the celebrated Etienne on the boulevards of Quebec,” Claire told us.

  “In fact, it is a bad show with a very bad director. Who knows what might have happened to me if the Kinneson in the photograph and the police had not arrived.”

  After Mason’s raid Claire had run off the fairgrounds into the woods, where she’d hidden in an old maple sugar camp. The following night, tonight, she found the gool, but in the rain and darkness she missed my cousins’ turno
ff and walked far up the logging road into the gore before realizing her mistake. Retracing her steps, she mistook our light for Resolvèd’s.

  “Already it has been a long journey,” she said, shaking her head. “And yet I have come only a little way if I am ever to get to Hollywood. At times I begin to think I am watching myself in a movie. Or perhaps a dream. The kind of dream where one knows one is asleep but cannot wake up? To say the truth, I am becoming weary of all this traveling. Now I shall work as housekeeper for this man Resolvèd for a time before continuing my trip.”

  “I should think you might be tired, Claire,” my mother said. “You’re welcome to stay here with us as long as you like.”

  “Yes,” said my father. “If it hadn’t been for one of us, you wouldn’t be in this jam in the first place.”

  Claire looked gravely at my father. “So the man in the photograph is not the Monsieur Kinneson who writes the letter?”

  “Definitely not,” my father said. “Though they have a lot in common.”

  “Is all right,” Claire said, though it was obvious that she was very disappointed. “I must find the right one, then.”

  One by one she replaced the candy wrappers and ticket stubs and timetable in her gigantic handbag. Last of all she folded the mutilated picture of my brother and tucked it in with the rest.

  “I thank you, my friends, for the warm fire and the tea,” she said. “Now, this other Monsieur Kinneson, this Resolvèd—the one that sends for a housekeeper. He lives nearby?”

  “She can’t go up there, Ruth,” Dad said. “She doesn’t have the faintest idea what that place is like.”

  “My husband’s right, Claire. The man who sent you that picture isn’t who or what you think.”

  “He’s the worst outlaw in the county,” Dad said. “He lives in a pigpen with his lunatic brother.”

  “I’ll tell you what, dear,” my mother said. “I’ll make up the daybed in the spare room for you. Just for tonight. In the morning we’ll talk some more.”

  Claire looked at my mother carefully. Then she nodded. “Very well. But I prefer to sleep here by the stove. This is possible?”

  My mother said it was possible. She got a blanket and a pillow, but by the time she was back Claire had curled up on the woodbox in her multicolored dress and had fallen asleep with her head on her pocketbook.

  My father was getting into his topcoat.

  “Where are you going, Dad?”

  “To see your brother,” he said on his way out the door. “I don’t want him around here for a few days. Then I’m going to work.”

  It was two o’clock on the nose.

  I was exhausted, but once again when I got back upstairs I lay awake for a time, thinking about the mysterious daughter of Etienne LaRiviere, the girl who had learned English from the movies and fallen in love with my brother’s picture and come to Kingdom County with a show and who was now sleeping in the kitchen below me.

  It was broad daylight when I awoke. The sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky, and I knew even before going downstairs that Claire LaRiviere would be gone.

  I was furious with myself for missing Claire, who despite all my mother’s protests had left for Resolvèd’s an hour ago. I was tempted to sneak up there and check on her; but something told me not to. Instead, I got my fly rod and walked down to the river, hoping to while away a few hours on the stream until it was time to go to Charlie’s ballgame.

  The water was up a foot from the rain and the color of a freshly plowed field. Even the meadow pool was too fast to fish, so I started up the burn into the gore. The burn was high, too, and as roily as Huck Finn’s Mississippi. If the big trout were up here, they were already full and had stopped feeding. By the time I reached the brook’s source at the disused granite quarry, I was ready to quit.

  “Hello, James.”

  I froze. Suspended in midair, high over the natural ledge dam where the brook spilled out of the quarry, was a filmy white shroud, partially obscured by leaves dancing lightly in the morning breeze. Suddenly it laughed a genuinely amused laugh. “Here,” a voice said. “Down here.”

  Claire LaRiviere was sitting with her back against a gigantic yellow birch tree near the corner of the ledge dam. The “ghost” was her white slip hanging from a branch of the tree and drying in the sun. Her dress of many colors was spread out neatly beside her on the ledge.

  Suddenly I found myself extremely embarrassed because Claire was wearing nothing but her underpants and bra. I looked away fast and she laughed again. Only by degrees could I look back at her, and then only at her face. Nathan Andrews had teased me that I wouldn’t know what to do with a naked girl if I found one. To my chagrin, he had been absolutely right!

  Her hair was still slightly damp but no longer matted and stringy. She was combing it with her broken pink comb and it shone softly in the morning sunlight falling down through the small yellow birch leaves. It was the color of light maple sugar and her eyes were no longer the color of rain but of the burn on a summer day where it ran over a blue slate ledge a few hundred feet below the quarry. Her oval face was at repose. The fatigue and confusion of the night before were gone. And she did not seem at all self-conscious to be considerably more than half undressed with me six feet away, trying not to look at her.

  “Any luck?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  She laughed again. “The same for me, James. I have had no luck at all this morning.”

  I climbed up the bank, leaned my fly rod against the yellow birch tree, and sat down on a flat granite rock a few feet away from her. “Well,” I said, trying not to look at her slim white legs, “I guess you missed Resolvèd’s place again.”

  “By no means, James! I have met both him and the brother.”

  “And?”

  “It is not really so very bad there. At first it resembles to me a kind of farm. All the animals! The chickens, the fish, the raccoon, even. It makes me think of the farm of Ma and Pa Kettle, yes? In the comical movie?

  “I approach the house, thinking that Resolvèd Kinneson will still be sleeping. But no! The door of the kitchen is open and the Resolvèd and the brother are sitting at the table drinking red wine from a bottle. Also on the table, eating small pieces of grain from a dish, is a large red he-chicken. The brother is reading from a magazine. The Resolvèd is cleaning a long gun. The kind that resembles two guns made into one gun, which the coach drivers carry in cowboy pictures?”

  “A shotgun,” I said, trying to envision Ethan Allen Kinneson dining on the table with my cousins.

  “Certainly. When I see this shot-gun I am afraid to go inside. But to myself I say, ‘Claire, you have come a great way to Ver-mont. You must try this arrangement for a little while. At least until you repay the Resolvèd for the bus ticket.’

  “Very well! I enter. I announce my name. I make a polite curtsy. Are they surprised? No! The brother continues to read. The Resolvèd says only, ‘It has taken you long enough to get here. What held you up?’”

  Claire tilted her head and leered at me sideways, out from under an imaginary feed store cap. It was the best imitation of Resolvèd I had ever seen, even better than Charlie’s. Effortlessly, she had captured his pompous surliness, his broad accent, the entire outlandish absurdity about the man. Not only did I all but see Resolvèd there in front of me, I forgot all about my own embarrassment. In another year, or year and a half, this would not have happened. But from that moment on I might as well have been talking to my own sister, if I’d had one, or another boy my age, instead of to a nearly naked girl of seventeen or eighteen.

  “Now, James, this Resolvèd who writes the letters to me, he says he will present me to his household. “This is my brother,’ he tells me. ‘He has got a screw loose in his head.’ The brother continues to read. This is E. A. Kinneson,’ the Resolvèd says, and points at the he-chicken eating from the dish on the table. This is Duke, the poor man’s best friend,’ he tells me next. I look here, there, everywhere, for a
dog or perhaps a little cat. But no! He is holding up the bottle of red wine! ‘And this is Duke’s wife, Betsy,’ the Resolvèd says, and he aims the shotgun straight at my head and laughs like a crazy man.”

  Laughing exactly like my cousin, she drew such a convincing bead on me with an imaginary shotgun that I flinched.

  “How did you get away from there, Claire?”

  “Oh! It was not difficult. But first the Resolvèd instructs me to begin my housekeeping duties by cleaning the dishes. When the sink becomes too full for him to pee in, he informs me, it is time to ‘hoe out.’ Excellent! Here is something I can accomplish. I get a bucket and some rags. I make a fire in the stove. I heat some water. All the time, the Resolvèd is watching me. I inquire about soap. There is no soap. He tells me he will travel to the village for it and at the same time pick up some more of his friend the Old Duke. He says now he is ‘hot,’ but by and by he will drink himself cold sober and then we will sit down together and have a good long talk, and off he goes, with Betsy.

  “As soon as the Resolvèd is gone, the brother with the screw loose shows me a picture in the magazine he is reading. It shows a great flying covered dinner platter with tiny green mens climbing in and out. ‘Do you have these up in Canady?’ the brother says to me. But I have seen such strange sights only in the movies and I do not know what to reply.

  “I tell the brother that now I must go and wash my clothes, and I will be back soon. I take my pocketbook and come here and wash first my dress and slip, then myself. That is when you come, James. In the words of the celebrated Etienne LaRiviere concluding a performance on the great wooden promenade of Chateau Frontenao The end.’”

  She stood up and got into her slip and dress as unselfconsciously as though she’d been alone.

  “What are you going to do now, Claire?”

  “Well, I cannot go back to Quebec. That is out of the question. I must think. This Holly-wood, where the movies are made? Is far?”