The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  Daisy told us she’d given birth eleven years ago, not in the hospital but in her own bedroom with the aid of a midwife and potent herb teas—hence no birth certificate, no hospital documents. The midwife’s name was Mrs. Grey, Daisy explained, an old woman who lived in a little house on an island several miles up the Platte River. And there was a Mrs. Grey, we learned, and there was an island. But we were told by Mrs. Grey’s daughter that the woman had long since died, felled by a swift cancer, dead only weeks after receiving the diagnosis from her doctor. Mrs. Grey, though cosmic in disposition, had kept detailed records, but the daughter had burned them all one autumn, file after file, in a brick oven behind the house, to ward off the chill when she had outdoor parties, her neo-hippie friends coming down from Grand Island with red wine and marijuana.

  Soon enough, we discovered that the national reporters were extremely vulnerable to Lenore-inspired deception—the more absurd, it seemed, the more enticing. “Let me tell ya something,” a fifteen-year-old boy told a news program. “Lenore wasn’t so innocent. She and me used to sit in the ditch by her house and smoke cigarettes. She could smoke down more cigs than any other eleven-year-old girl I know. And it was beautiful, you know that? It was a thing of beauty to watch her smoke. When somebody really knows how to smoke, it’s something to behold. I mean, she didn’t do anything fancy—she didn’t have to do … well, you know … French inhales or nothing prissy like that. All she had to do was enjoy that cigarette, and she did. She took that smoke in deep, and she just blew it out slow, like she could care less how black her lungs were getting. I could watch that little girl smoke for days.”

  When dead birds showed up in the decoratively rusted cages so many had propped in their gardens that summer, people began to accuse Lenore. Some even claimed to have seen her slipping in and out of shadows with a leather satchel full of the corpses of swallows.

  And within one week, when you Google-imaged Elvis, the first on the list was not the king of rock-and-roll but rather the police artist’s sketch of Lenore’s presumed abductor. The sketch artist, a local, had been previously criticized for his elaborate portraits, his artistry overwhelming his work, creating images so detailed that all you remembered was the picture, not what lowly criminal the picture might represent. For Elvis, he practically stripped the man of all individuality, creating a blank slate we could endow with any number of distinguishing marks. We could see that face in nearly every man we met, and the sketch provoked all sorts of erroneous sightings.

  And our paper, the County Paragraph, conspired with our community, dignifying every slim possibility by weighing its potential for fact. Even the slightest bit of scrutiny managed to give the most unlikely scuttlebutt legs and longevity. People everywhere wanted news of Lenore directly from us—we gained subscribers from across the country and around the world, even in cities where they didn’t speak English. People trusted us for our folksiness—we seemed too good-hearted to traffic in lies. It was an absurd notion, of course; small towns historically have thrived on weaving tall tales—villages are easily taken in by sideshow promise and religious ecstasy. A potato with the profile of Christ bleeds from an eye, and the farmer who dug it up will go to his grave defending its holy implications.

  Though, as you already know, I never published Lenore’s obituary, my obituaries nonetheless developed what could only be called a cult following. People, no matter how far away, seemed to love to read about our local dead—they loved taking measure of such tiny lives and loved to think of me as a little old lady with a dark passion. They could just picture me in veils and ribbons and widow’s weeds, high on hemlock tea, it always winter out my window, my skeleton’s fingers rattling at my typewriter, writing my death sentences. I paraded before them a necropolis of folks who might’ve been worth their knowing: Mrs. Lacey Norris, the hospital volunteer who crocheted caps for years and years of newborns, who went ass-over-elbows down a long flight of stairs; Mr. Benjamin Lake, inventor of an innovative coyote trap, whose night sweats proved more dire than just the consequence of too many quilts on the bed; Mrs. Helen Law, glassblower, smoke inhalation; Mr. Weston Ansley, insurance, natural causes; Mrs. Geraldine Speck, Autoharp enthusiast, bone disease; Mr. E. A. West, organist, lungs; Mr. Nelson Barnet, grocer, kidneys; Miss Ellen Maxwell, jeweler, blood.

  And I’ve been condemned for having this career at all; I’ve been addressed, in letters, as Morticia and Vampira and Queen of the Dead. I’ve been accused of taking fiendish delight in mortality, capitalizing on loss.

  Who will write my obituary, and what will it say? How could it possibly be anything but superficial and inadequate? Don’t I deserve, for having written thousands of obituaries, to have one that’s better than any of those thousands I’ve written? Is it so much to want the last sentence of my obit to be written by someone of genius? I want my obituary to win awards, to be published in textbooks. I want future obituary writers to say, “I knew I wanted to be an obit writer when I read so-and-so’s obit of S Myles.” And when the writer of my obituary dies, I want her obituary to mention mine.

  · 21 ·

  With Lenore’s disappearance, Doc saw an opportunity for redemption, though he may not have thought of it in that way, exactly. In that terrible summer, there’d been not just tornadoes but fires as well. Sparklers, those harmless sticks kids lit and twisted around in front of themselves, writing their names in sputtering trails of silver light, had become the latest dangerous experiment—duct-tape hundreds of them together and you could blow things to smithereens, for amusement. A one-hundred-year-old building, a cornerstone of the historic town square, castle-like with cupolas and arches and wrought-iron spikes, had gone up in flames a few days before the fourth of July, a ragtag gang of twelve-year-olds having set off a sparkler bomb in the alley.

  There was a desperate need in the community to place blame. God took some of that blame, but not all that he deserved. Some of it went to my grandson, and our newspaper, as if we rewarded bad weather and bad behavior by writing about them.

  But no one could stop learning about Lenore. And we were mistrustful of the national news. The magazine and TV writers overindulged their fascination with the gothic, and we simply didn’t recognize ourselves in their reports. So our own people turned to the County Paragraph for the stories we wanted to be told, and Doc quickly earned a new respect. He became, in his charmingly affected linen suits and neckties and retro fedoras of various patterns, our Stage Manager, our Music Man. Our one-man Greek chorus. He was also the character you root for in a movie—we’d all been longing for him to step out of his father’s shadow and make something of that newspaper again.

  And he had to do so while our own family became more and more unfamiliar to us. Despite the fact that Ivy had been away from Tiff for years, her sudden reappearance made Doc feel like a bad parent. Ivy was everywhere now, almost always among us, and though she never said much, nursing one glass of red wine through a whole evening, her silence felt condemning. Ivy always looked puzzled by the family’s habits—when we ate, what we ate, when we went to bed, what we wore to bed. Our terms of endearment and other gestures of affection all came under scrutiny just by virtue of having a stranger among us. Ivy would furrow her brow at the drop of a hat, and Doc would instantly question his own judgment.

  “What?” Doc would sometimes say at the sight of Ivy’s accusatory squint.

  “Nothing,” she’d say. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Tiff was finally eating again, at least, though not without some coaxing. Doc, though busy with the newspaper, made it a point to join us every evening for supper, sometimes arriving after I’d served the salad and having to leave before I served dessert, but his presence was to assure Tiff that she couldn’t anymore starve herself away unwatched.

  Things overall seemed to be going fairly well, all of our tempers in accord with Tiff’s appetite. Nonetheless, there was a night that everything changed, you might say, if you were feeling particularly dramatic, and who in our town w
asn’t in those days? We were finishing up our pot roast when Ivy said, “Tiff, are you done eating?” Tiff, of course, was. “Would you go up to your room, please? I’d like to talk to your uncle about some things. Before he has to rush off again.”

  Tiff dropped her jaw and clucked her tongue. Usually that was her expression of mock teenage-y disgust, but this time it was authentic. She looked to Doc. “Why do I have to go to my room? I don’t have to go to my room, do I?”

  Doc took a deep breath. “Ummm,” he muttered, then looked at me. I straightened up in my chair and stroked my chin.

  “Well, Ivy,” I said, “we don’t really do that here. I mean, we’ve never sent Tiff to her room before. Have we?” I looked at Doc.

  “No, we kind of don’t do that,” Doc said, still looking at me, nodding. “We’ve just always talked about things in front of her. We’ve always liked to be open about things.”

  Ivy said nothing more until we both turned to look at her. She was smiling, but not unkindly. “I know,” she said. “I’m just hoping that, just this once, Tiff might leave us alone for a few minutes. She doesn’t have to go to her room, I understand that. If you don’t do that, we shouldn’t do that, we shouldn’t ask her to go to her room. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little privacy. Privacy isn’t a terrible thing. So if Tiff doesn’t want to go to her room, fine. Maybe we can go to your room,” she gestured toward Doc with her butter knife, then pointed the knife toward the window, “or across the street to Granny’s house.”

  “Maybe let’s just not make it such a big deal,” Tiff said, blessedly coming to everyone’s rescue. “I’ll go to my room. Can I go on the Internet, at least?”

  We all said yes.

  After Tiff left the table, Ivy lifted her wineglass. “Fill ’er up, please?” she said to Doc, and he poured her some more. “So, tell me,” she said, “what is Madame, um, is it Yamasaki’s Cabinet?”

  “Madame Sakaguchi’s Japanese Cabinet, you probably mean?”

  “Probably,” Ivy said.

  “It’s a magic act.”

  “It’s a magic act,” she said. “What does it entail, exactly?”

  “Well, it’s a cabinet, a beautiful red lacquer cabinet, with some trick doors.”

  “And you have one, right?”

  “Ivy,” Doc said, rubbing one of his eyes with his thumb, “can we … what are you … ?”

  “I’m just asking you questions,” Ivy said. “I’m not trying to be coy and obnoxious. I’m just asking because I don’t know. I don’t speak the family language, Doc. I don’t know the codes, I don’t know the references, I don’t know all the cute little words for things that you’ve all got. Yes, I’ve been gone for a long time, and yes, I should be punished unrelentingly for that, but—”

  “I’m not saying that,” Doc said.

  “Well, whatever.” Her whatever, however, was sharp with irritation. She rolled her eyes and stabbed at her potato skin with her fork.

  “Madame Sakaguchi’s Japanese Cabinet, yes, I’ve got one,” he said. “Tiff and I drove to Iowa City, probably, I don’t know, three years ago, was it?” He looked at me, but I’d sunk down into the chair, my hand covering most of my face, preferring the invisibility I’d mastered as a shy little girl. “It was on an auction bill. I paid too much for it because I was bidding against an interior designer who wanted it for some Asian decor she was doing someplace.”

  “And how does it work, exactly, if I can ask without you flipping out on me?”

  “Why don’t I show you?” he said with a sarcastic sweep of his arms in the direction of the kitchen. “It’s in the garage.”

  Ivy simply stood, lifted her glass, and walked toward the kitchen. Every night at dinner, Ivy at his table, Doc had been respectful and accommodating. He’d never lectured her, never staked any claims on Tiff’s future. And now, having asked Tiff to leave the room, Ivy dared to assume authority in his house. I was a touch miffed myself at this cryptic line of questioning. Behind her back, Doc mouthed the words Oh, my God at me, and I mouthed back I know, I know, but I did so while furrowing my brow, flinching a little, attempting to articulate that, though Ivy was clearly being difficult, he should be gentle with her for Tiff’s sake. He seemed to pick up on all that, and he nodded and took my wineglass from me for a sip.

  After we’d passed through the kitchen and into the garage, Doc lifted a blue sheet from the cabinet in the corner with a showy “Voilà.” It truly was a beautiful piece, its fiery-nosed dragon painted in gold leaf, its door lined with mother-of-pearl.

  “It’s a classic trick,” Doc said, “though kind of primitive. The girl gets in, the magician shuts the door, presto change-o, the magician opens the door, the girl’s gone, but she’s not gone because she’s hiding down here,” and Doc knocked his knuckles at the bottom of the cabinet. “These bottom legs are supposed to have a slanted mirror between them, to reflect the carpet or whatever and kind of give the illusion that there’s not a hiding place down there, but the mirror had broken off, and I’ve never replaced it.”

  “And you and Tiff do this act sometimes,” Ivy said.

  Doc sighed and started rubbing his eye again. “What is it, Ivy? You disapprove of Tiff taking part in a magic act? You think it’s Satanic, I suppose?”

  Ivy sighed herself and sat on the bumper of the car. She took a drink of wine. “Tiff told me in confidence, so I shouldn’t even be telling you this at all, but I’m telling you because I think you’d want to know, even though you’ll probably run right upstairs and tell her that I told you, because you’re all so open with each other, but she told me that the last time you did the act with the cabinet, she couldn’t fit in the bottom, and the act was ruined.”

  “It wasn’t ruined,” Doc said.

  “It wasn’t ruined,” I said.

  “We made a joke of it. That’s part of our act. Comedy’s always been part of our act. Tiff and I aren’t talented magicians, so we ham it up, and people love it. When she got stuck, it was cute, it was really cute. We were at a nursing home, for God’s sake. They ate it up. They thought it was adorable.”

  “But you haven’t done the act since, right?” Ivy said.

  “Well, no, but we haven’t really had many gigs since,” he said.

  “Tiff told me that she couldn’t fit into the cabinet anymore because she’s gotten too fat, and that’s why you don’t do the act anymore, and that’s why she stopped eating. She wishes she could still fit in the box.”

  Doc and I looked at each other, our mouths open, about to offer some sort of defense, some sunny alternative to the grim truth Ivy had just revealed, but then we shut our mouths and kept quiet. We all kept quiet, in the garage, drinking our wine, looking at the once coveted Madame Sakaguchi’s Japanese Cabinet in all its rapidly fading glory.

  · 22 ·

  Of course, Lenore became increasingly difficult to believe in, even for the believers. And those of us who turned skeptical found ourselves wishing Daisy had at least done a better job of inventing a child. She could’ve filled the room with stuffed animals, stuck puffy stickers to the headboard of her bed. She could’ve left on the nightstand a half-eaten licorice whip or a jawbreaker partly licked away. Daisy could’ve put an unfinished game of Clue on the kitchen table and placed muddy sneakers on the welcome mat. We all theorized how we would’ve done it, how expertly we could’ve kept people chasing shadows for years.

  Nonetheless, the mile up to the farm became riddled with pilgrims—station wagons and minivans were parked along the side of the road, and people filled the ditches with plastic memorial wreaths and framed photographs and stuffed animals, tributes to Lenore and to other lost children. Among the clutter were even childhood pictures taken in the 1950s, teens gone so long they’d long since grown old somewhere else.

  These out-of-towners ate in our restaurants, bought gas at our stations, booked up our motels, and frequented our shops, and though an old-fashioned country skepticism made us anxious for an easy, obvi
ous truth, we knew better than to dismiss Daisy as a fraud. To declare Lenore nonexistent would be to bite the hand that fed us. For the sake of a business-like practicality, we were determined to be impractical—fanciful, even. We even indulged unorthodox investigators: the psychics, the mind readers, the hypnotists, shipped in by news networks from as far away as Berlin. On TV, the supernaturalists stood among patches of overgrown weeds on the farm, speaking with certainty about their intuitions.

  One afternoon, a woman named Jane David came to town, a woman who read cracks in mirrors the way others read bumps on heads or the scatter of wet tea leaves. The practice was not evolved from French witchcraft or tribal shamanism but born of fiction, derived from the Miranda-and-Desiree books themselves, the fourth book, The Dead Weights of the Doll’s Head. A mystic in the novel made all her predictions based on how a mirror broke. In her coach, which was tugged through towns by a team of two donkeys, the mystic kept all the drawers in her vanity filled with hand mirrors. She presented one to Miranda, who paid a one-dollar fee, and Miranda looked into it for a full minute, then slapped the mirror against a brick. The mystic ran her finger along the resulting crack, her eyes closed, and from the crooked path of the break she envisioned the girl’s bleak future.

  In the many years since the fourth book, the reading of broken mirrors had taken shape—it had a name (glancing) and a professional association (AGAzE: American Glancing Association of Entrepreneurs) and even its own Dummies’ guide. Of all the glancing specialists, Jane David was the most famous, having had a short-lived reality show on the Discovery Channel in which she’d traveled the world to read broken mirrors—she read existing cracks and cracks newly made. She read cracks in mirrors in houses purported to be haunted, mirrors on movie sets, in the telescopes of stargazers.