An Exaltation of Larks

by Suanne Laqueur

  Rog turned the locks on the heavy front door and opened it slowly, a waft of oven-hot air coming through the screen. Two officers were on the porch. This was Guelisten, so of course the Larks had gone to high school with one of them and been pulled over by the other.

  “Hey, Mark,” Roger said. “What’s going on?”

  Mark Ritofsky. Once GHS’s basketball king and top chick magnet. Now one of Guelisten’s finest. Twenty pounds heavier and his hair starting to recede. “Hey, Rog,” he said quietly.

  Val’s stomach tightened and the walls of her chest lurched inward. Trelawney moved closer, her hand creeping into Val’s.

  Sgt. Bradshaw, the other officer, crossed his arms. “Can we come in?”

  No, you can’t, Val thought. Her breath trembled in and out. Trelawney’s fingers were ice cold in hers. Alex hadn’t come off the stairs and his knuckles were white around the banister. He didn’t like doorbells and he didn’t like uniforms.

  “Come in,” Roger said, gently stepping past Val, putting himself between her and whatever was now entering their house. “Mark, what is this?”

  “Rog,” Sgt. Bradshaw said, stepping inside. “Son… There’s been an accident.”

  Roger backed up a step. Val put both arms around Trelawney. Alex came down a tread. The front door closed, slicing off the sunlight.

  “It’s bad, Rog,” Mark said, putting a hand on Roger’s arm.

  The Adam’s apple in Roger’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “My folks?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bradshaw said. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  The Larks sat. Val and Trelawney on the floor, Alex on a step. Roger backed up until his heels hit the bottom of the stairs and he sat, pressed between Alex’s knee and the newel post.

  The driver of the pick-up truck wasn’t drunk, Bradshaw told them.

  “They think it might’ve been a seizure,” Mark said. Whatever the cause, the driver had flown unconscious through the intersection, Tboning Roland Lark’s car and essentially cutting it in half. They found Muriel twenty yards from the impact. Paramedics were quick to agree she’d died instantly. Roland was dead on the scene. Meredith had a faint pulse and one EMT had contorted himself into the wreckage to do chest compressions while the fire department worked with the Jaws of Life to pry her out. She died in the ambulance on the way to Hudson Bluffs Trauma Center.

  Trelawney was sobbing in Val’s arms. Val stared open-mouthed over her sister’s head, unable to comprehend what was happening. Her dry eyes flicked around the foyer, lost and looking for landmarks. This was her home. The pegs where she hung her jackets, the table where Alex and Trelawney stacked their library books. The banister Roger jumped and the chandelier he once broke. The front door they went in and out of tens of thousands of times, to the hello and goodbye of their parents.

  She looked back over her shoulder to the dining room. They’d all sat there last night, laughing over dinner. The siblings had cleared the table and cleaned up the kitchen before they went out for the night.

  Had she kissed her mother goodbye? Did she hug her father last night?

  I didn’t know, she thought. How was I supposed to know? Nobody told me…

  Bradshaw made a gesture toward the door. “We need you to come to the hospital. So you can identify…”

  Roger stood. He’d gone down a boy but now rose up a man. Tall and shirtless on the step, his broad shoulders straight, his casted arm like a mighty weapon.

  “Let me get some shoes,” he said.

  Alex stood, too, and put his hands on Roger’s shoulders. “I’ll come with.”

  Val couldn’t cry. She kept waiting for the breakdown, the flood of tears and a long, hard jag. Her parents were dead. Her beloved grandmother gone. Trelawney cried. Alex cried. Even Roger crumpled and wept.

  Val’s throat ached and an intense, dizzying pressure buzzed behind her eyes, but the tears wouldn’t let down. Like a sulking teenager, the grief dug in its heels and refused to come out of its room.

  Trelawney came in to sleep with Val almost every night. “They’re together forever,” she said. “They’ll never be parted. Never have to see each other decline. One will never have to live without the other. Oh my God, I’m so fucking selfish. I really mean I’ll never have to see one of them miss the other.”

  “You’re not selfish,” Val whispered in the dark. “It’s the truth. We’ll never see Mom miss her mother, either.”

  But we’ll never see her again, she thought. She and Dad won’t see us married. They won’t see their grandchildren. We won’t see their faces seeing us in our adult lives.

  “I wish I’d accomplished something before he went,” Roger said, forcing words through a tight jaw. “I hate that Dad went when he was still so fucking disappointed in me.”

  “Rog, he adored you.” Val got arms around her brother but he held himself stiff and unyielding, holed up in a private fortress of shamed misery.

  “I couldn’t even give him a college graduation,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse. “I had a life handed to me and I either broke it or pissed it away. I can’t even build a fucking playhouse without breaking an arm.” He pulled from Val’s embrace and slammed out of the house, heading for town, for the river, for Lark House, for anywhere he could find answers.

  “Stand with Roger,” Val said to Alex at the wake. “Stay close to him, he needs you.”

  In what had become a familiar gesture, Alex stroked her cheek, then brought her forehead against his. “What about you?”

  She pressed her lips together hard and drew in a powerful breath. “I’ll be all right.”

  He hugged her to him. “You’re so strong.”

  His praise gave her courage. Alex was no stranger to tragedy. He’d always been transparent and wide-open, his cards played at arm’s length from his chest, yet he had the uncanny ability to reduce in a crisis. He squared off tight into a thick solid brick for Roger to lean on. They all leaned on Alex those first few days and under their combined weight he didn’t budge.

  The intense week of mourning gave way to a mountain of logistical and legal matters to sort out. Roland’s vet practice. The house on Courtenay Avenue. Muriel’s house on Tulip Street. And the Lark Building in town, with Lark’s Pharmacy, Meredith’s dollhouse gallery and Muriel’s tailor shop.

  “Burn it,” Roger frequently mumbled. “Burn it all.”

  Alex came to every meeting. He couldn’t make final decisions on the estate, but he was always there, taking notes, making lists, remembering the details while reminding them to keep their eye on the big picture.

  “We’ll get through it,” he said.

  “Will we?” Trelawney said. She was completely drained of what little color she had. Beneath the bangs of her nearly-white hair, the swollen red-rimmed eyes made her look like an albino.

  Val didn’t have to look in a mirror to know her own eyes were cut beneath with deep circles. The accident had come smack in the middle of production—she was designing costumes for the revival of An American in Paris. This was her Broadway debut and the stakes were triple what they’d been for Cinderella. This could mean a Tony Award nomination. In between lawyer meetings, she was calling her team to field questions and handle emergencies, or jumping the train back into the city to do what only she could do.

  “I’m exhausted,” Val said one evening. “I cannot make one more fucking decision.”

  “Dad would say to take a bank holiday,” Roger said, getting a finger underneath the edge of his cast to scratch. “And I’m speaking for Dad. All Larks will take a Valium and go to bed. Tomorrow we’re doing nothing estate-related. Everyone go play.”

  The next day, after twelve hours of sleep, Val put on shorts and sneakers and pulled her hair back in a ponytail. She went out the front door and stretched a few minutes on the porch before heading up Bemelman Street at a brisk pace. She passed houses she knew by heart, noting—despite years of absence—a tree had been cut, or a fresh paint job finished. A new fence, a new gazeb
o, a new roof.

  The grade grew steeper. Val leaned into the incline, breaking a sweat, arriving at the cul-de-sac winded. Here the terrain leveled out in a magnificent vista and revealed the former estate of Val’s great-grandparents. Great-aunt Billie Lark converted it to a private group home in the 1930s. On paper it was the Mid-Hudson Juvenile Resident Facility. In conversation, it was Lark House.

  Val wandered down to the grove where the new multi-level tree fort was being built. Roger waved to her from the middle of construction. Shirtless, a bandanna tied around his head, he was supervising a small gang as they built a spiral staircase up to the main deck anchored between three big oaks. An octagon structure and safety railings had been roughed out here, along with a stepped ramp to a smaller house on an adjacent maple. When finished, the fort would be more like a village in the trees. Swinging walkway bridges and platforms connecting the grove in a lofty, mystical universe. The kids chattered from the bases of trunks and up in the branches, amidst hammering, sawing, drilling and a background of music from someone’s boom box.

  “It’s going to be magnificent,” Val called to her brother.

  “I know,” he yelled back, and Val took an extra moment to study him. He was a happy creature by nature, but something about this work at Lark House had set him afire.

  “Goddammit, Roger, you carry on as if your home were in a tree,” Meredith always said when she was exasperated with her son’s restlessness.

  Maybe, Val thought, heading off the grounds and back down Bemelman Street, Roger carried on because he wanted his home to be in a tree.

  Guelisten jealously guarded its Main Street culture. Zoning laws were strict in this little town. The populace would burn the business district to the ground before any golden arches were allowed. When a gas station just outside the village limits added a Dunkin Donuts franchise, it was as if a local chapter of the KKK had hung out its shingle.

  With the keys she’d been given as a teenager, Val unlocked the door of Deane Fine Tailoring—Muriel Lark’s dress shop.

  Muriel taught Val how to sew, how to build the foundation pieces of a wardrobe and how to recognize good workmanship in thrift store garments. In her teens, well-schooled in her grandmother’s knowledge, Val took over the meager costume room of Guelisten High’s drama club and transformed it into a department.

  Her shoestring budget stretched through flea market stalls, vintage shops, fabric warehouses and the Salvation Army. She let out seams, took in jackets, turned fabrics inside out for interest and cut it on the bias to make it drape like a dream. She could make an eighteen-gored skirt or construct an authentic whale-boned bodice with a set of hoops. She worked miracles with trimming and buttons and knew how to boost the confidence of the most awkward freshman boy in the back row by making him look like a six-foot superstar.

  When she wasn’t sewing for others, Val was ripping her thrift store finds apart and altering them. No seam was safe. No button permanent. Clothes were power. Clothes were in her blood. Clothes made the woman and a woman’s best friend wasn’t a diamond. It was her tailor.

  A frantic knock on the shop window broke Val out of her reverie. A woman with hands cupped around the glass peered in. Looking for her tailor.

  “We’re closed,” Val mouthed.

  The woman clasped her hands together in a gesture of begging. Val sighed and unlocked the door. The woman came in, apologetic and distraught. The zipper on her best skirt was broken. She had a job interview in an hour.

  “Give,” Val said. “I’ll fix it.”

  “Oh, thank you. I’m Nadine, I’ve been coming here forever and I’m so sorry for your loss. The town is just devastated.”

  “Thank you.” Val found a pincushion, threaded a needle and sat in the wingback chair by the front window. She had the zipper anchored and was about to take the first stitch when she stopped and peered closer at the skirt.

  “This is a Christian Dior,” she said.

  “Yes,” Nadine said happily. “It’s my lucky skirt.”

  “But this is an original.” Val turned the garment in her hands, examining the seams and the lining. “Where on earth did you get it?”

  “It was my grandmother’s. It was part of a suit. She got married in it.”

  “Christ,” Val said softly. “Where’s the jacket?”

  Nadine made a face. “My sister got it.”

  “Between you and me, you got the better deal,” Val said. “You can do anything and everything with the skirt. The jacket only looks good when it’s with the skirt.”

  “That’s exactly what your grandmother said. She was so knowledgeable.”

  “I’m sorry,” Val said, putting down the skirt. All at once, her family history and the combined wisdom of her ancestors was pressing her from all sides. The Lark Building put arms around her and breathed. Its heart beat in her veins.

  I want to go home, she thought.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  Nadine pressed a tissue into Val’s hand. “Don’t be.”

  “It’s so much.”

  “Yes,” Nadine said. “I know.”

  A balloon was swelling in Val’s throat and she squeezed her lips and teeth tight against the storm. Her eyes and the inside of her nose began to smolder. She finished the zipper and once Nadine was gone, Val locked the shop and went running home. Her lungs dissolved along the incline of Bemelman Street. By the time she turned onto Courtenay Avenue, she was sobbing.

  Inside, Alex sat on the steps, tying his sneakers, Walkman at his side as if he were about to go for a run. As Val burst through the door, his green eyes widened in alarm, then immediately downshifted into understanding. He opened his arms and Val threw herself on the step between his feet.

  “It’s all right,” he said against her hair. “You don’t have to be strong anymore.”

  She pressed her face into his chest, crying her heart inside-out. An ocean of loss flooding the foyer, lapping at her ankles. Alex rocked her in his arms, his body warm and solid under her cheek. He stroked her hair, caressed her head, then let go just long enough to fish his handkerchief out of his pocket and tuck it in her hand.

  “Poor baby,” he whispered. Something she normally would’ve found cloying, but from Alex it fell soft on her shoulders. A bittersweet truth: she wasn’t anyone’s baby anymore. She’d been left bereft. Her value diminished. She was poor.

  Alex led her upstairs and got her a cold washcloth for her face. She lay down on one side of her bed and Alex stacked the pillows high on its other side, leaning back with a book.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, resting his palm on her head. “I’ll be right here.”

  And I’ll be home, Val thought, slipping away beneath his touch.

  The Lark children took the pieces left to them—the dining set, the leather chairs, the walnut credenza. China, crystal and silver. The heirlooms and bequests went into storage. The auction company had come and gone. Now all that was left was stuff.

  Jesus Christ, the stuff.

  The possessions, the objects, the things, the junk, the clutter and the paper, good God, the amount of paper a house accumulated over a lifetime was enough to make you scream. Val did scream. Privately. Into a pillow. Several times.

  “Burn it,” Roger kept saying. “Let’s torch the place like a Viking funeral ship. We’ll take the insurance money and build a community garden on the lot.”

  “Do it,” Val said.

  “Make it so,” Trelawney said.

  “Who’s got a match?” Alex asked.

  They sighed together, then turned around and went back to the desks, dressers, shelves, closets, boxes, folders and drawers.

  They expected their grandmother’s house to be a nightmare, having had more years to collect minutiae. Instead, Muriel had put her affairs in immaculate order (“This attic is empty,” Val cried. “Whoever heard of an empty attic?”). They had her house sorted out in two days. Roland and Meredith turned out to be the secret hoarders.

  At f
irst, they systematically picked through the items, stopping often to sigh over a memory, or scream over a class picture. Belly-laugh at the nursery school drawings and the elementary school book reports. But as the days went on and little dent was made in the mountain, they grew increasingly ruthless and unsentimental.

  “Do you want this?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t even look—”

  “No.”

  “You think maybe the Smiths would—”

  “No.”

  “Burn it.”

  “Get rid of it.”

  “Give it to Goodwill.”

  The garbage bags bulged. The siblings started jettisoning things from second story windows into the dumpster in the driveway, hooting and laughing.

  “Keep the memory, let go of the thing,” Trelawney kept saying.

  Clothes were cruel in their resistance, grabbing onto the closet doorframe as they were dragged from the rod. Val, who typically went over a garment like she was undressing it for sex, culled the wardrobes blindly, ignoring the screams for mercy from beloved cardigans and wool sweaters and slippers.

  Keep the memory, let go of the thing.

  They weren’t entirely heartless. “I’m saving Mom’s cashmere for us,” Val called to Trelawney.

  “Duh,” her sister said, laughing as she separated the books she wanted.

  “Rog, I put Dad’s Harris tweed jacket aside for you.”

  “I don’t want it,” Rog said, going through Roland’s vinyl collection.

  “You want it. You just don’t know you do. Trey, you should take Mom’s camel swing coat.”

  “That old thing?”

  “That old thing is a Halston,” Val said.

  “Oh my God,” Roger said, pulling out an album. “Tony Orlando and Dawn.”

  “You put that on and I will kill you,” Trelawney said.

  He put it on, and they sang “Knock Three Times on the Ceiling” as they hauled and stuffed and chucked and tossed.

  Worst were bathrooms. All the prescriptions and toiletries, the cures and remedies for the ailments, aches and pains of an aging body. So intimate. So personal. Val averted her eyes as she swept bare the medicine cabinet and vanity drawers (“Keep the Valium,” Trelawney yelled.). For a wild, hysterical moment, she wanted to take hairs out of father’s comb. Have something to touch. To set on a shrine and revere. She unscrewed a bottle of his aftershave and waved it under her nose.