Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  THEREAFTER, IN THE WEEKS and months following, Georgina and Mr. Guillemot were frequently seen together, alone, or in the company of Georgina’s father,—riding in the Judge’s handsome brougham, along Berwick Avenue, or the River Road, or through Juniper Park; in the sumptuous tearoom of the Winterthurn Arms, or amidst the quaint wrought-iron tables and chairs of the Charity Street Sweet Shoppe; at an open-air watercolor exhibit on Courthouse Green; at an acclaimed production of Lohengrin at the Grand Opera House in Vanderpoel. Less frequently, doubtless out of reserve, they were seen together as a couple at one or another of the season’s social events: the lavish Peregrine-Shaw nuptials, the Annual Strawberry Fête of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Corinthian Club, Colonel Westergaard’s fox-hunting weekend (at which, it should be hastily reported, very few of the guests actually rode horseback, let alone beheld foxes torn to pieces by impassioned dogs); Mr. Guillemot slender, pale, affable enough, yet distinctly reserved; and Miss Kilgarvan flushed with girlish pleasure, yet shy, it seemed, of being observed, by the parents of her students in particular,—as if she feared being criticized, or held up to contempt, or jeered at behind her back.

  Very odd it was, that, during even those halcyon months of Romance,—deemed to be Georgina’s first—the clotted and indecorous verse of “Iphigenia” continued to appear, in such divers publications as Hudson Valley Leaves, and Godey’s Lady’s Book: as the sport of editors, it was whispered by Georgina’s detractors; or as a consequence of actual bribery.

  THOUGH GEORGINA NEVER SPOKE of Malcolm Guillemot to Clarice Von Goeler, or to any of her female acquaintances, in any terms less than resolutely impersonal (as “Mr. Guillemot, the poet and translator”), it would have required no inordinately acute eye to discern that the Judge’s daughter was at last in love; and artlessly so. For was her complexion not touched with a rosy sort of warmth, and less sallow than anyone had ever observed?—was her gaze not bright, and direct, and less overshadowed by irony? Though held to be slightly stiff in Mr. Guillemot’s actual presence, or given to nervously fluttering her fan, like a very young girl, Georgina was, it seemed, blessed with new energy, in other contexts: for she taught her classes at the Parthian Academy with inspiration and zeal (as even those girls who hated her were forced to admit), and did her charity work with less ill-concealed impatience; and was one of the Winterthurn organizers in a course for ladies in “first aid,” offered by the local hospital. (It had struck Georgina with the air of a revelation that, by the adroit use of one’s fingers, one might actually do something to affect the well-being of another. Though professing, like all the ladies, an extreme horror of the very sight of blood, and a “weakness about the chest” aroused by any thought of physical distress, Georgina applied herself diligently to the instruction: learning emergency procedures to be followed in case of divers accidents and crises,—woundings, drownings, strokes, heart attacks, chokings, the breaking of arms, legs, etc., and childbirth. How deftly her long fingers worked, applying tourniquets, and gauze bandages, and splints; with what utter absorption she practiced cleansing wounds, and making injections; giving artificial respiration; learning even to induce vomiting; even how to give enemas, in theory at least. Long after the course was over, and the majority of the ladies had forgotten all they had learned, Georgina carried about with her, in her handbag, a compact kit filled with the paraphernalia of the trenches, so to speak: gauze strips, ammonia in vials, compresses of numerous sizes, bandages and bandage scissors, inoculation needles, etc. Sadly, she had no occasion to practice her new-acquired skill, so far as anyone knew,—save when pretty young Mrs. Shaw, pregnant with her first child, sank into a swoon in the midsummer airlessness of Grace Church; and was revived within minutes, by Miss Georgina Kilgarvan’s alacrity in breaking open a vial of spirits of ammonia beneath her nostrils. And even in so doing, poor Georgina risked censure, for the public nature of her “performance,” as certain persons—including her own father—called it: and for her conspicuous intrusion upon territory that might be said to have been reserved for Dr. Colney Hatch, or another gentleman physician.)

  GEORGINA KILGARVAN’S SPINSTERISH IRONY,—held in abeyance, as it were, for the duration of Malcolm Guillemot’s courtship—was to return with some grim ferocity after that gentleman vanished from her side: and the zealousness of her teaching at the Parthian Academy was to drain away, like water from out a cracked vase: and, not least to disappear was her handiness at proffering “first aid” in public,—though no one was to know whether she continued to carry her medical kit about with her, over the years, hidden away in her alligator handbag.

  A DECADE LATER Lucas Kilgarvan was to recall, with some poignancy, two enigmatical experiences of his, pertaining to his niece and her erstwhile “suitor” (this term requiring quotation marks, as no engagement, official or unofficial, was ever mentioned): each of which he was prevailed upon to recount to his youngest son, who begged him to tell all he knew of Georgina’s past, in the weeks and months following the initial tragedy at Glen Mawr.

  The earliest incident was of fairly little significance, involving, as it did, Lucas’s failure to draw Malcolm Guillemot out in commonplace conversation, and to establish some sort of congenial masculine rapport between them, on the late-morning train to Nautauga Falls, one winter’s day. After having introduced himself as the younger brother of Erasmus Kilgarvan, and the somewhat youthful uncle of Miss Georgina (there being but seven years’ difference in their ages), Lucas inquired warmly of Mr. Guillemot whether he would like to join him in the club car for a cigar; or, somewhat later, for lunch in the dining car. Would he, at the very least, like to share a hackney cab at the Falls—?

  But the watchful young gentleman was too shy for such abrupt camaraderie; or too shrewdly valued his privacy to allow Lucas to intrude (he made it a point, it seemed, to keep his place in his book of Longfellow’s verse, while Lucas spoke with him); or,—so Lucas reasoned afterward, with a flush of humiliation—he knew very well the strained relations between himself and Erasmus, arising primarily as a consequence of Lucas’s opposition, in his late teens, to the “justice” of the notorious Hester Vaugh case. (Ah, the brashness of youth!—for not only had Lucas quarreled with Chief Justice Erasmus Kilgarvan over the finer points of Miss Vaugh’s guilt, and the law’s definition of infanticide: he had also gone about town denouncing his brother: and had even penned an intemperate letter to the Gazette, which the Goshawks had, all surprisingly, published. Erasmus was never to forgive him, and never to forget,—and, it seemed, Malcolm Guillemot was privy to this knowledge.)

  “To be snubbed by ‘Malcolm,’” Lucas hotly murmured, “—why, it is like being thrown off course, mounted upon a stallion, by a mere butterfly.”

  As to the second, and more complex, episode: this transpired one Sunday evening in June of the following year, near the end of Mr. Guillemot’s friendship with Georgina, as it turned out (though no one knew at the time,—indeed, an “official announcement” was generally expected, amongst the Kilgarvans’ social set). The setting was Juniper Park, near the splendid old band pavilion: the time, not long past dusk, when fireflies had made their first tremulous appearance of the night; and many a child had at last fallen asleep in his mother’s lap; and the Winterthurn Marching Band,—some thirty-odd gentlemen, livened as much by jovial high spirits as by musical skill—had temporarily laid aside their instruments, to allow for a half-hour’s intermission in their concert. Lucas Kilgarvan, a new straw hat rakishly set atop his head, had been sent by his wife to fetch ices for herself and the boys,—Xavier being but five and a half years old at this time—and had, all by accident, been detained by the milling crowd: with the unforeseen, and, indeed, sincerely unwished, result that he chanced to overhear snatches of a decidedly queer conversation, between a husky-voiced young woman and her male companion: the very voices, Lucas gradually realized, of Georgina and Mr. Guillemot.

  As their words were sporadic rather than even, and seemed at times to drop away altogether into
silence, Lucas could not have vouchsafed that he heard what it seemed he heard; nor could he have sworn whose voice, amidst the general merriment of the crowd, was whose,—for Georgina’s oft-times inclined toward the low, the dry, and the sardonic; and Mr. Guillemot’s, toward the thin and high-pitched.

  Fired by a melancholic urgency as they were, were these words not, at the very same time, touched,—ah, so cruelly!—by the comical?

  “. . . soon, then. For it is my . . .”

  “. . . cannot. You know I cannot.”

  “Indeed, please!”

  “Nay, I beg of you: please.”

  “. . . a matter of . . .”

  “You are cruel.”

  “. . . stubborn.”

  “. . . a matter of expediency.”

  “You know it cannot be.”

  “Until such time as . . .”

  “But you know he will not.”

  “Yet it is my . . .”

  “. . . beg of you, please!”

  “And of you . . . !”

  After a pause of some awkwardness, during which time Lucas felt his face heat with the guilty ambiguity of his position,—for was he not, in truth, eavesdropping?—at last Georgina said, in a tone of resignation: “How much more merciful if one were a brass instrument, all noise and confidence, and no contemptible creature of mere flesh . . .”

  By the time Lucas could make his escape undetected, to return to his youthful family on the far side of the pavilion, his ices were badly melted; and his mood grown sober, with pity for his unhappy niece.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN EARLY AUTUMN that it was belatedly discovered that Miss Georgina’s “gentleman” had not been glimpsed for some weeks; and, of a sudden, tongues began to wag; and female relatives made discreet inquiries at the Manor, as to Mr. Guillemot’s availability for one or another social occasion. Georgina was confined to her room with an illness, declared to be minor, and requiring no solicitude: then again, it was said that she planned an ambitious journey abroad, to Paris, Florence, and Rome; and would be leaving presently. Crueler still, and quite without foundation, were rumors that the Judge’s daughter had been precipitately jilted; and that Erasmus’s chagrin was such, he would seek revenge through the courts, directing a “breach of promise” suit on behalf of his wronged daughter—! So ubiquitous, and so slanderous, was this persistent rumor that Henry Peregrine, the Kilgarvans’ chief attorney, saw fit to refute it upon several occasions in Winterthurn drawing rooms: yet did poor Georgina no especial favor by angrily declaring that “the abused young lady had suffered heartbreak and humiliation enough, without such nonsense being noised about.”

  A yet more pitiless rumor, and equally without foundation, was that, like the specter of Crazy Eliza of old, the Kilgarvan heiress wandered about her ancestral home in a shamefully disheveled state, barefoot, unwashed, her hair loosed to her hips, and tangled with leaves and burrs. Singing such mournful and near-tuneless little songs, it was said, as “My Love’s A-roaming,” and “The Ghostly Swain,” and “Shall You Come Home Again, Michael O’Meara?” she braided her hair with willow straw, and affixed, to her meager bosom, such wildflowers,—bluets, anemones, tiny asters—as, it seemed, most enhanced her waxen pallor. In this, she was closely watched at all times by both a nurse and a manservant, sworn by the Judge to absolute secrecy: for, ah! would it not have been scandalous indeed, if such things were generally known—?

  The “Little Nun”

  Poor Thérèse Kilgarvan—!

  It could not have failed to escape the sensitive young girl that, of late, careless persons had begun to distinguish between her and Perdita by speaking of the “Plain One,” and the “Pretty One”; nor that she was sometimes called the “Little Nun,” in contradistinction to the “Blue Nun,”—both terms being inexcusably cruel. It was natural that Thérèse, motherless as a child, should have turned gratefully to God for solace; natural too that, like many another Winterthurn girl of her age and station, she should have been drawn to goodness. Thus, how unfair, to be spoken of so slightingly behind her back—!

  “Can you guess what they call us when they imagine we cannot hear?” Perdita once asked Thérèse, with a sly creasing of her brows; but the elder wisely turned away, with a prim admonishment that, as such things were not for their ears, why should they condescend to hear? “For, dear sister,” Thérèse said, with a trembling lip, “I do not wish to think evil of others, any more than I wish to hear evil of myself.”

  Thérèse was not yet four years of age when her mother died; and it was her and her sister’s lot to be reared, in the main, by her half-sister Georgina, their elder by some twenty-eight years. (“What a pity it is,” Mrs. Lucas Kilgarvan frequently observed, “that relations between the two houses are so blighted! For Thérèse and Perdita are good, sweet girls, clearly lonely, if not starved for female companionship,—other than that of Miss Georgina’s, I mean. And I, who have sons but no daughters, should have dearly loved to ‘mother’ them!”)

  Though a “little nun” in a sense, in her Christian behavior, Thérèse was hardly immune to ordinary schoolgirl sentiments. So far as Georgina allowed, she participated in divers harmless activities at the Parthian Academy; and, though not overly popular with her classmates, she was, in general, not disliked by them,—until very recent times. Now, though the proud young girl never acknowledged whisperings and innuendos, and the rude stares of certain of her classmates, it did not escape her that she and Perdita were singled out for censure: sometimes pitied, and sometimes contemned, for being Kilgarvans and dwelling at Glen Mawr.

  “Let them mock us, and say what they will!” Perdita said fiercely. “They will pay for it all, one day—!”

  “Nay, nay, dear sister,” Thérèse replied at once, “you must not speak in such desperation!—surely it is a sin!”

  BEING A MAIDEN of tender years, and yet more tender passions, Thérèse was quite ashamed to discover herself, at her father’s very funeral, staring for long unwavering minutes at her cousin Xavier,—the youngest son of the detested Wycombe Street Kilgarvans, of whom, all her young life, she had heard such disagreeable things.

  Yet, ah!—was Xavier not handsome?—and fresh-cheeked?—and innocent in his bearing?—and quite oblivious, it seemed, of the ignominy borne by his father?

  Xavier was not truly a cousin of Thérèse’s, but a sort of half-or quarter-cousin; for his father, Lucas, was but a half-uncle of hers, and descended from the D’Ivers side of the family. (Which is to say, by way of Phillips Goode’s second wife, Miriam D’Ivers,—who, as family legend had it, was the distant descendant of an unsanctioned liaison between a French settler of wayward inclinations and an Indian woman.) In his youth, Lucas had been interested in breeding and racing horses; then he had studied law,—until, it was rumored, Erasmus’s great success discouraged him; for a year or so he had attended the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut; he had married too young, against his father’s wishes; he had borrowed recklessly on the strength of his future inheritance, to set up a foolish sort of business,—a toymaking workshop!—scarcely a profession for one of his social stature. “A contemptible failure,” Erasmus Kilgarvan oft murmured, “and a traitor to his heritage beside.”

  (Yet Thérèse and Perdita soon learned that toys from the Wycombe Street carpentry shop were greatly prized by children, and remembered with especial fondness by those on the brink of growing up: the lovingly crafted dollhouses with their miniature furnishings, and tiny inhabitants; the custom-made rocking horses, designed for individual children; the ingenious jigsaw puzzles limning familiar Winterthurn scenes; the Noah’s Ark with its procession of charming animals, all in pairs, save the phoenix; the trains, boats, wagons, galleons, turtle-seats, and sleighs for dolls; most famously, the “Bonnie” doll that blinked, and stared, and slept, and woke, to issue a most human mewing cry, very like an infant.)

  At Glen Mawr, Lucas Kilgarvan was known as a common perjurer as well: for, it seems, he had done that most unforgivab
le of things,—he had lied in court, under oath. Neither Thérèse nor Perdita knew a great deal about the case, as such matters were kept private amongst the adults; yet it was no secret that their grandfather had, on his very deathbed, repented of his leniency toward the ne’er-do-well amongst his sons, and struck him from his will: with the consequence that Erasmus and Simon Esdras were then the sole heirs; and Lucas, acting out of both greed and desperation, and, no doubt, a craven desire for revenge, contested the revised will up to the State Supreme Court, with no success. Georgina, who rarely condescended to comment upon such activities, as she called them, of the Lilliputian “Big” World, once said of their despised young uncle that he quite deserved his fate for going his own way so wantonly. “One knows not whether to pity him as a fool, or abhor him as a monster,” Georgina said, “for marrying, and setting up shop, and whelping four,—or is it five?—sons, on the gossamer strength of a future inheritance.”

  Yet, during the funeral obsequies, Thérèse had been struck, quite against her inclination, by Lucas’s somber, stricken, kindly visage: and the hint of a tear gleaming in his eye: and the grief that seemed to announce itself in his very posture. And how intently he had stared at the handsome ebony casket, as the pallbearers bore it to the mausoleum: a look of such appalled bewilderment, and childlike loss, it might have been that he mourned his brother after all.

  Briefly, Thérèse considered Mrs. Kilgarvan, whose semblance of warmth and maternal solicitude, Georgina had warned, might not be trusted; and the several husky sons,—Bradford, Roland, Colin,—great hulking louts, as Georgina called them; until her eye fell upon the youngest, Xavier,—and quite hooked, and snagged, in sudden girlish sentiment.

  “But I must wrench my gaze from him,” she thought, “for, surely, my feelings verge on sin; and Father will never forgive me, if he but suspects.”