EDITOR’S NOTE:
AS ARBITER OF THESE ENTRIES, AFTER MUCH DISCUSSION WITH MY PUBLISHER, IT WAS DECIDED THAT THE SPECIFIC REFERENCES (1 APRIL 1917) WERE FAR TOO GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING TO BE PRINTED HERE, WHERE READERS MORE INTERESTED IN THE HISTORY OF ROSE RED SHOULD NOT BE MADE TO BE BURDENED WITH THE PERSONAL EXPLOITS (AND EXPLOITATION!) OF THE AUTHOR. WE HAVE, AS A CONCESSION, MADE THIS, AND (A FEW) OTHER EXCERPTS AVAILABLE ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB AT THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS: WWW.BEAU MONTUNIVERSITY.NET. USERS FAMILIAR WITH THE WEB WILL NOTE THERE IS NO “LINK” TO THESE EXCERPTS FROM ANY OF THE WEB-PUBLISHED PAGES. YOU MUST THEREFORE TYPE IN THE URL GIVEN HERE (EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN) IN ORDER TO REACH THIS PRIVATE LIBRARY OF ELLEN’S MOST PERSONAL MOMENTS. A FURTHER WARNING: SOME OF THE CONTENT THEREIN IS EXPLICITLY SEXUAL, AND IS NOT INTENDED FOR PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN.
IN POINT OF FACT, ELLEN RIMBAUER APPARENTLY BECAME OBSESSED WITH RECOUNTING HER NEARLY NIGHTLY BEDROOM ACTIVITIES OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL MONTHS, WRITING ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT HER HUSBAND’S INCREASED ADDICTION TO THESE EVENTS AND THE ELABORATE ACTS HE CONCEIVED FOR BOTH HIS WIFE AND HIS WIFE’S BEST FRIEND AND SERVANT. THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO ENTRIES OTHER THAN THESE (OFTEN REPUGNANT AND DEGRADING) UNTIL EARLY IN 1918, AN EDITORIAL TIME JUMP I READILY MAKE IN ORDER TO SPARE YOU, THE READER, THE SORDID DESCRIPTIONS OF THE DEBAUCHERY TO WHICH JOHN RIMBAUER STOOPED. THE ONLY ELEMENT YOU LOSE BECAUSE OF MY RED PENCIL IS THE GROWING FRUSTRATION ON THE PART OF ELLEN AND SUKEENA AT BEING USED IN THIS WAY, TO HAVE WHAT WAS ONCE A PURE LOVE BETWEEN THEM CORRUPTED AND POISONED BY A MAN WHO COULD NO LONGER FIND ANY SATISFACTION IN LIFE. EVEN PHYSICAL PLEASURE NOW ROBBED HIM OF ANY VICTORY OVER THE SENSES. HE WAS CONSUMED IN GRIEF, HE FELT HIMSELF A FAILURE, AND THE DEEPER HE SANK, THE MORE BIZARRE HIS REQUESTS, THE MORE DESPERATE THE TWO WOMEN BECOME. (THERE IS EVEN AN ACCOUNT OF A LATE NIGHT SPENT IN THE BARN!) BY THE TIME WE JOIN BACK UP WITH ELLEN IN THE PAGES TO COME, THERE HAVE BEEN HINTS OF A CONSPIRACY FIRST FORMING, AND THEN GROWING, BETWEEN THE MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE AND HER MAID. ELLEN WILL NOT ALLOW THE SPECIFICS OF THIS CONSPIRACY TO REACH HER PAGES, FOR FEAR OF HER DIARY’S DISCOVERY, BUT IT IS QUITE EVIDENT THAT JOHN RIMBAUER IS THE TARGET AND THAT PLANS HAVE ALREADY FORMED TO SET INTO MOTION JOHN RIMBAUER’S DEMISE.
—JOYCE REARDON
9 MARCH 1918—ROSE RED
To look back at the entries herein, it is quite obvious to me how nothing has affected me quite so much as the late-night encounters with John and the disturbing nature of his demands upon the women of this house. The events of this day finally are cause for reflection on the larger nature of the problems with Rose Red and her apparent need of “fuel,” both in terms of her physical expansion (her continued construction) and whatever spiritual needs she has.
To-day, she killed again.
The coroner will put the death of George Meader down as an allergic reaction to a bee sting. But that bee sting came inside the Health Room [Editor’s note: Health Room = Ellen’s term for the Solarium, post 1917] and that room did burst with color upon his death, the same way it exploded with color on the tragic night of April’s disappearance and Sukeena’s confrontation with the policeman there.
Meader, a railroad executive who has stayed the week with us, was a big drinker, and clearly a womanizer. He flirted with many of the staff and may have had relations with more than one. It was the attention he paid poor Sukeena that may have led to his untimely demise. More than once he cornered her. (For she tells me everything that happens in this house.) More than once he attempted to grope her. (Who knows if John had a part in any of this? I cannot see John sharing stories of our “alliance,” our triad, but I put little past the man.) For her part, Sukeena finally arranged for George to meet her in the Health Room at the stroke of midnight.
George appeared, quite drunk, but on time. Alerted to Sukeena’s plans, I kept watch of the Health Room from above, alert to any lights coming on in various hallways or the Kitchen. If I saw any such activity, I was to switch the lights of my room repeatedly. Sukeena would be able to see my chamber’s windows from inside the Health Room.
All went according to plan.
George showed up in the Health Room, and Sukeena immediately began dancing in a most fluid, provocative and suggestive manner. Even distanced as I was, I felt the power of that dance. No man could fail to respond to those hips, the loose-jointed nature of her body as it expressed itself. I could see George Meader reach for his collar (for the Health Room is considerably warmer than the rest of the house, even without Sukeena dancing) and attempt to unbutton it. He slipped off his coat—perhaps at Sukeena’s instruction. Only moments after he had removed his coat, Sukeena sank to the floor, her legs crossed, and apparently set her mind to prayer, or whatever it is she does exactly. Barely seconds passed before I saw George Meader swat his arm—the bee had stung him, summoned, I remain convinced, by Sukeena’s substantial meditative powers. Sukeena waited only briefly for George to sink to his knees. Then she slipped quietly into the garden, and through the Pool House returned by the south stairs to her rooms.
Meader died without so much as a sound. Upon his death, the first blooms of red roses appeared, vines wandering and growing and extending themselves before my eyes. Within minutes, I could no longer see inside the Health Room, overgrown as it was by the wandering vines.
Nothing was found of George Meader for several hours, except that coat he had removed. Only the next day, as the vines impossibly receded and returned to their previous state, was the body found. (The flesh was torn by thorns as if he’d been rolled in a bed of roses.)
John instructed the stable boys to cart the body downtown, knowing I would refuse the police entrance into my home for anything but outright murder, and even then only with the proper documents.
Was it Rose or Sukeena who took George Meader from this world? Does it matter any longer? I feel half crazy with it all. (More than half, if you believe the staff.) I have nearly abandoned my own suspicions of the Indian burial ground, and yet Indian artifacts continue to surface in the house—and one, an earthen ceramic bowl shaped as a beehive, did find its way into the Health Room, as I recall!
Perhaps the mysteries of this place will never be solved. Perhaps some scientist will come along in future generations to explain what I, sadly, cannot. Who’s to tell? One thing is for certain: I will continue to build Rose Red until the day I die—or until I myself am claimed—even with my own hands when necessary (as I continue to construct the Tower). I will continue to attempt to negotiate a longer life for myself that I might outlive my husband—this I pray for more than anything. That I might find my child still alive. (Adam is barely a part of my life, as John will not allow him to return to this place—I know my son only through letters, and these letters are less frequent each year.)
Another has died. I barely mourn the loss. Rose Red has her needs. Sukeena and I must protect ourselves. Arthritis has found my fingers, I am in excruciating pain, and I fear my entries here in your pages, Dear Diary, shall be fewer and farther between.
What more is to be said? I live in a world, condemned. Made into someone I am not by night, in my husband’s desperate attempts to find satisfaction, reduced to prayer and silence by day. Sneaking off to build with my hands what this house demands of me. “The Tower,” she whispers at night. My little April.
Soon, our reunion, as I have ordered the exterior of the Tower to be built, my stairway nearing completion. A year or two at most, I’m told, following on the heels of projects already planned. A golden cherub has been ordered, cast in Italy by artisans in Florence. This cherub will stand high atop Rose Red and lord over our property. Perhaps over Rose Red herself.
Plans are taking shape. My daughter is coming home.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
ALTHOUGH THE SUBSEQUENT LACK OF DIARY ENTRIES IS ATTRIBUTED TO ELLEN RIMBAUER’S ARTHRITIS, THERE IS SOME EVIDENCE THAT THIS PERIOD PROVED TRAUMATIC TO HER AND THAT SHE SUFFERED AT LEAST ONE BREAKDOWN. WITH THE DOCTOR’S RECOMMENDATION SHE ATTEND “A CLINIC” (SEE
16 NOVEMBER 1921) IN SWITZERLAND, ELLEN RIMBAUER REFUSED TO LEAVE ROSE RED AND HER BELOVED SUKEENA. RECENTLY RECOVERED DOCUMENTS (THE DIARY OF TINA COLEMAN, FOR ONE) PROMOTE THE IDEA THAT JOHN WAS BEHIND ELLEN’S “ILLNESS,” AND THAT SWITZERLAND WAS HIS ATTEMPT TO REMOVE HER FROM ROSE RED ONCE AND FOR ALL. THIS PLAN FAILED, REGARDLESS OF ITS SOURCE. ON 17 OCTOBER 1920, A SERIOUS FIRE CLAIMED AN ENTIRE WING OF ROSE RED. THE CAUSE OF THAT FIRE HAS NEVER BEEN NAMED. IT MUST BE CONSIDERED AS A POSSIBILITY THAT ELLEN SET THAT FIRE HERSELF IN PROTEST TO JOHN’S ATTEMPTS TO BE RID OF HER.
A STUDY OF THE CONTRACTOR’S NOTES AND PLANS SHOW NO WORK ON THE TOWER SCHEDULED FOR NEARLY TWENTY MONTHS. ANOTHER THEORY BEHIND THE FIRE AND ALL THEIR RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS WAS THAT ELLEN FOUND OUT JOHN WAS PURPOSELY DELAYING WORK ON THE TOWER. REGARDLESS OF DISAGREEMENTS, CONSTRUCTION ON THE TOWER BEGAN IN EARNEST IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1920. TO THIS DAY, THREE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS REMAIN SURROUNDING THE PERIOD 1918–1920: (1) ELLEN’S MENTAL STATE; (2) THE “ACTIVITY” OF THE HOUSE (E.G., THERE ARE REPORTS OF NEARLY A DOZEN DISAPPEARANCES IN THIS TWENTY-FOUR-MONTH PERIOD); AND (3) JOHN’S GROWING FEAR OF HIS WIFE; HIS WIFE’S MAID, SUKEENA; AND THE HOUSE THAT TOGETHER THE RIMBAUERS CONTINUED TO BUILD, AND REMODEL, AT AN ALARMING PACE.
THERE ARE WRITINGS (THOUGH NO SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE) THAT SUGGEST IT WAS JOHN, NOT ELLEN, WHO HAD LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY, AND THAT DURING THIS TIME HE BECAME BADLY ADDICTED TO LAUDANUM, SPENDING DAYS AT A TIME IN THE OPIUM DENS SOUTH OF THE CITY AND AWAY FROM THE MONSTROSITY OF A HOUSE HE HAD COME TO FEAR.
—JOYCE REARDON
19 JUNE 1921—ROSE RED
Sparks. I see robins outside my window. Twiddle-dee, twiddle-dum, I smell smoke in the auditorium. Where have I been? I ask myself, looking back at your pages. Is it possible I have not written my thoughts down here, except once in a blue moon? I feel as if I write here every day, but perhaps that is just my imaginings. I have been overcome with fever quite regularly. In truth these fevers always seem to follow my nights spent in the company of my husband—a pleasant way to write down here what is not often pleasant at all. For several years now he has included Sukeena in our … participation. I’d rather not say. Twiddle-dee, twiddle-dum. Sparks. The servants are out testing explosives for our annual Fourth of July party. I watch from my window, singing songs I recall from my childhood. How can childhood seem so far away, a part of another person’s life, surely not mine? Sparks. Boom, boom, boom. If once I held any innocence, it has burned away like the gunpowder in these displays I watch. No innocence in the bedroom. No innocence at the window (at least not the night I helped Sukeena wrap George Meader in thorny vines). No innocence inside my head, where I spend an increasing amount of time trying to foresee my husband’s maneuvers to remove me from this place. I’ve hidden from him—up in the attic, still working on the stairs to the Tower—for days at a time. John wandering the house calling out, perhaps secretly hoping Rose has claimed me once and for all. Me, waiting. Waiting. Letting him wet his whistle on this notion, letting his heart beat with excitement at the possibility I’m gone forever. And then I waltz into the Breakfast Room, as if not away from him for more than a few minutes. I watch his face sag. I smile enormously and greet him with bright, rested eyes and good humor. Later, he stews. Angry. Alone. I like him that way: angry and alone. I want him to pay for all the innocence he has taken from me. From us.
I talk to Rose openly now. No longer afraid. I tell her I want to see my daughter. I offer myself to her walls. But she asks strange things of me. We have remodeled an upstairs hall to become the Perspective Hallway: it diminishes in the same fashion as train tracks, one end to the other. It’s in honor of the late George Meader and his rail company, but this is a hall—and the deeper you enter it, the lower the ceiling, the tighter the walls. It is not unlike my life itself—the longer I have lived, the more confined I feel by my surroundings. (At thirty-four, I feel more like eighty years of age.) I have hidden doors off the Perspective Hallway, in the same manner my husband has hidden his viewing rooms throughout this palace. Some go nowhere. Others lead to mazes of hallways. (In one such secreted hallway I hung a great nude on the other side of glass, just to annoy my husband should he stray inside. Life imitates art, they say. Or is it the other way around?)
To-day marks the grand opening of the Tower. (Our friends, I hear tell, are referring to my endeavor as “the tower folly.” Be that as it may, I’m quite proud of the addition.) It includes the stairs that lead from the attic to a single room of generous proportions offering a full, panoramic view of all of Rose’s wings, our property and its forests, as well as the commanding sight of the city and Elliott Bay beyond. It is the most beautiful, most important addition to our grand home, and is certain to take its place as one of my favorite spots. Now that it is open—complete with the lovely Venetian glass window and the twenty-four-karat gold-plated Italian cherub that adorns the peak of its roof—I feel as if I have a retreat of sorts, a place to hide, a place to pray, a place to seek my missing daughter.
John has not been in favor of the Tower. (He fears I put too much faith in the Tower helping me to locate April, and I admit here that he is quite right about that—my faith, that is—but our beliefs differ so greatly that John also trusts that there is little or no hope of any such physical structure providing a conduit, a medium that might reconnect us with our missing April, a fallacy in him I strive to correct!)
My mind wanders so frequently now, led as I am in so many directions. My “wonderings” come with more frequency and last longer. I see the staff steer clear of me in the hallways, shaken by my pale face, no doubt, or my unsteady walk. They have never lost a child, as I have. They have never compromised their existence as I have, obeying my husband and tolerating untold embarrassments in order to remain in the house of my child’s disappearance. (To leave John would certainly mean leaving Rose—and that is even more unthinkable now than it was before.) Sukeena and I have agreed to meet at midnight (providing John does not call for our services) and, with the completion of the Tower, attempt to summon sweet April. We will climb and listen for the winds that have instructed me for these past several years, my hands bloodied with my efforts as a carpenter. It seems to me I shall always be putting finishing touches on my attic stairway, which ascends, through three turns, to the Tower. It will never be perfect, will always require attention—but so does a child, of course. This Tower is my child, just as my child is this Tower. How could I ever neglect it for even a single day? But alas, I am late for my rendezvous with my maid.
Sukeena and I meet in the upstairs hallway, alongside the panel that I had discovered previously, and let ourselves in. I carry a battery-powered flashlight, heavy as it is, and lead the way along the now familiar route, past the guests’ quarters, up and into the attic. We stand at the base of my stairs, where the early work of my carpentry is seen for what it is: crude and poorly done. Through the door, the bottom stair is crooked, as are the next three, those in lessening proportions. The wood is still raw and untreated, as I have much work yet to do and will not allow any of the workers to touch a thing here. We climb slowly, to cries and complaints of the poorly assembled stairs, and I shine the light on Sukeena as she lags behind. Even she appears frightened. I take this as a good sign and encourage her on. I certainly must look a bit ghostly myself, drained of color as I am of late, standing there in my sheer nightgown, the yellow light flashing around unsteadily as I wave the flashlight unintentionally in my right hand, directing her. Perhaps Sukeena is more afraid of me than this Tower. I shouldn’t be surprised, everyone else seems to fear me and my condition.
Now, as we approach the second turn, I finally hear what it is that has frightened my dear friend, what she has heard that I did not—the creaking of the stairs no longer sounds like lumber rubbing on lumber, nails straining against nails—increasingly it sounds like a voice, a familiar voice, a child’s voice. April! The higher we climb, the more the creaking goes to wind, the wind to voice: “Ma-ma …” it calls, and I hurry my ascent, climbing al
l the faster. Sukeena, protective perhaps, is nearly running to keep up with me. “Miss Ellen!” she calls, the condition of warning carried in her tone. It is as if she fears that the door at the very top of these stairs, a door that grows larger by the moment, will lead not to the panoramic view I anticipate but to some dark, foreboding place, where young April is kept hidden. And those who enter, along with it.
Alas, as I burst through the upper door and out into the brisk night chill (the Tower is not heated) I am bathed in colorful light. For a moment, I feel as if I’m in the “light of God,” and I wonder if indeed Rose Red has not claimed me and is in the process of transporting me to wherever April lives. (I always think of April as alive, but in another place; my motherly ways will allow no other consideration.) Then I see Sukeena circling the Tower in front of me. It is the moon and the stained-glass window that have poured this light across me.
“April,” I call out, the wind rushing up the stairs below and encompassing me: “Ma-ma, ma-ma.” I feel dizzy. My child is so very close. I can smell her. Taste her sweet cheeks as I kiss away her tears. I fall to my knees, trembling. I am pointing. Sukeena misunderstands, believing I am pointing to her. Then, she slowly looks around behind her, in the same direction as my finger is aimed.
She, too, falls down onto her knees. She lowers her head and kisses the boards we kneel upon—the floor to the Tower. The Temple, I shall think of it from now on. I ordered that stained-glass window of the rose more than a decade earlier, while on my honeymoon with my husband, before the birth of Adam, before the birth of April. And yet here, backlit by the full moon as it is, the sound of my daughter’s voice swirling through the rotunda, so clear, and crisp and young, this multicolored window does not depict a rose at all. The tones and patterns have shifted in this shimmering light, the moon playing tricks on the eyes—or so some would say.
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer Page 20
