They sailed in early, just as I’d finished clearing off Mr. Gosling’s table, Helene Baum in her butterfly eyeglasses and bright yellow chiffon dress, the doctor in a black turtleneck, and all six of them drunk as lords. Seven of them, really, for Mrs. Davidow was steaming in at their head, rouged and corseted and reminding me of those carved ladies riding high on the bow of a ship, like the one in the John Wayne movie I’d seen not long ago. Mrs. Davidow often more or less invited herself to sit down with guests she’d been having cocktails with, wedging in her own filet and chair to make one more at the table.
Vera was looking really disapproving, her nose rising nearly off her face because they were too far gone to appreciate her superior table waiting—mostly, though, because Dr. Baum might forget to leave an extra-large tip. I was afraid she’d change her mind, seeing that I was free, and press me into service.
So, to make sure that didn’t happen, I disappeared.
NINETEEN
It was seven o’clock by the time I drew close to the boathouse, and the three of them were standing there, waving at me. The Woods had on their heavy black peacoats. Mr. Root was wearing only a thin denim jacket, but I bet he had on long johns underneath his clothes. Up here in the mountains at five thousand feet it could still get cold after the sun went down.
Ulub had a flashlight and a pair of rusty old scissors, for some reason. Mr. Root was carrying one of those old oil lanterns that had me imagining him walking along railroad tracks, swinging it to signal a train. Both flashlight and lantern reminded me that night would fall. I looked up at the sky, as if looking up there would somehow change the quality of light nearer the ground. It looked to me like daylight, though I would have to say not like full daylight. Gradations of light were pretty much lost on me; I was more attuned to ham pinwheels than to nature. Mr. Root also showed us the box of kitchen matches he’d brought, in case we ever wanted to make a fire—another unpleasant reminder that we could be out after dark. He also had one of those curved knives that I think is called a Bowie knife; it was pushed down in a leather holder which he wore rather importantly on his belt. Ubub was wearing a backpack. I wondered what he had in it. Before we set out, we all turned and looked reverently at the house over there, mist-colored, black windows like eye sockets.
We walked the rutted dirt road to the spring, passing the boathouse with its narrow wooden boardwalk and peeling white paint. We passed the grove of maples and that single birch tree I love. This little spring is about a quarter of a mile around the lake, and here we stopped for no particular reason except that the spring is usually the final destination for anyone walking by the lake. It always has been for me, and Will, and for my father, when he walked us down here. There’s an old metal pipe jutting out from a little rock alcove. And someone at some time made a large, round, shallow pool in this resting place and lined it with quite beautiful tiles, glazed and brightly colored and painted with fish. The pool is fed by the spring and the spring by the lake.
We four sat down on the low stone balustrade and passed around the tin cup that is always left in the alcove, which looks as if it had been fashioned especially for this cup. Anyone who wants a drink can place it beneath the pipe to catch the water. I wonder a lot about this cup: I wonder who put it there, and if that person meant to hide it; I wonder how it could stay here year after year and nobody steal it; I wonder if it has rested there the whole length of people’s lives, and if it will be here after I die. We passed the cup along, one to the other, until we’d all had a drink. When it came round to me, I hurriedly wiped the rim before I put it to my lips. As we were passing the cup, I asked them about what we might expect in there among the trees and in the dense brush. On my way here, I had turned many possibilities over in my mind, rejecting bears and panthers, but not at all sure about snakes, spiders, and wolves.
Mr. Root bit off a plug of tobacco and offered the rest around as he pondered my question. Ubub accepted some tobacco, but Ulub preferred a stick from the packet of Teaberry that I usually carried around for the Sheriff. I decided to chew a stick myself, as everybody else was chewing. After turning his tobacco into black spit, he said, “Ain’t no wolves, no. Fox, maybe. Rabbits, most likely.” He scrutinized the narrow road beyond us, where it disappeared into the dark. “Milk snakes, for sure.”
I wondered what a milk snake was, but didn’t want to stay on the subject of snakes. I assumed it wasn’t dangerous, or Mr. Root would have said so.
Ulub was nodding. “Uh cah,” he said, snapping the rusted shears as if they were crocodile jaws.
Everyone looked at him, frowning. And he repeated the word, straining to add the final sound. “Cah-aa-aaa-ud.”
Cahd? Cud? “Cat!” I exclaimed triumphantly.
Ulub looked at me happily, nodding.
“Ah, he means one of them feral ones,” explained Mr. Root, probably a little annoyed I’d beat him to “cat.” “Feral, yeah. I seen one a them.”
I had a feeling he was guessing. Actually, I was a little disappointed that they weren’t full of knowledge of what might lie ahead in the woods. I guess I figured the Woods’ talking problems and the way they lived alone would have improved their relations with animals and nature. As far as I knew, Ulub and Ubub had no family at all; it was only themselves who lived in a ramshackle wooden house on a road up beyond the hotel. Mr. Root, I think, lived on the other side of the national highway that bisected Spirit Lake. There was some idea that the people on the other side from the Hotel Paradise were higher on the social ladder and had more money than the people on the hotel side. This was not a view my mother held to, of course. Though there might have been a few more big Victorian houses on the other side, it was true, there were also a lot of crackerbox houses and trailers. So it looked all one to me, the ramshackle rich and the ramshackle poor. I thought most of us were really ramshackle middle-class. Spirit Lake was definitely way above Cold Flat Junction with respect to upper-classness, though.
We all sat there chewing and looking at the road ahead where it burrowed in among the trees and tall grasses, with nobody making a move to get up and follow it. No matter which way you approached the Devereau house—by the spring side or by the dam side—the way became what I’d told myself looked to be impassable. But then, I asked myself, how would the Girl ever have turned up on the other side of the lake? I did not like to think of the alternatives. Especially the one that said she hadn’t—that she hadn’t been there at all.
Maybe that’s why I said nothing to them about the Girl, or about her appearing over there, for it would just mean a lot of questions that I couldn’t answer, and didn’t want to, anyway. It was something I seemed to want to keep to myself. I was gripped by a feeling I could not name. It wasn’t fear, for there was no rush in my veins or sudden dropping of my stomach. It was more like a terrible sadness. It was not deep dark at this time in the evening, not even movie dark, for light tunneled through the dense black pines, filtered through the leaves of the maples. Light’s gray dust sifted across the dead black leaves of more than one autumn. Rainwater lay pooled in old tire tracks, and the road narrowed even more where it was hemmed by bracken and spongy mosses and overrun with vines and dead branches. We all made a single file, me being sure I was between two of them. All the while I kept my eyes peeled for signs of the Girl. I honestly think I must have expected she would drop bread crumbs behind her. Sounds, tinny rustlings in the dead leaves, the short, cut-off bird calls—all of them came at me sharp as a knife edge. Something flashed above and Ubub tried to tell us what it was; something dashed away and Mr. Root said, “Rabbit.”
It was Ulub who we had decided should lead the way, since this had been his route on the night in question. This route was a little bit shorter than the one around the other side of the lake, where the stone dam had been built. It was nothing but a small rubbishy pile of cemented bricks and flat stones worn smooth from people walking across it. At one end was a crumbling gray stone pillar.
So Ulub led, occasionally
snapping his shears. From his backpack, Ubub had taken out a small axe with a broken handle and used it to flail away at dead limbs and hanging vines. Mr. Root seemed to enjoy thrashing through undergrowth. But, raising my hand against some tangled vines before me, I thought the axe and scissors might really not have been necessary, for in many cases the growth was so old and fine and brittle it took little more effort than sweeping away spiderwebs. It was deceptive. You’d see before you this intricate drapery of vines and twigs that from a distance looked impregnable, and yet, once upon them, you could push them back with a stroke.
Up ahead, Ulub had stopped in front of an oak tree and was running his hand across its trunk. He motioned us over and I saw that carved into the bark was a rough heart. Beneath the heart were hewn the letters AL.
AL. It made me smile. For this was before Ulub started being called by his license-plate letters, and I remembered Dr. McComb had said his name was Alonzo. It made me smile to think of Ulub being an Al. I wondered, too, if the heart was just for him; there was no arrow through it, but I supposed Ulub’s heart had often been pierced.
Except for the birds’ twitters and the soft plopping of occasional pine cones, it was all deathly quiet. It was really like walking through something dead, a dead landscape.
Something slithered across my instep. Prepared for a milk snake, I squinted my eyes nearly shut and looked down. But it was only a lizard, a very small one, now nestled in its camouflage of leaves.
My tongue moved in my mouth, searching for the flavorless wad of gum, before I remembered spitting it out back there among the vines. Yet my tongue still moved. A strange emptiness came over me, and I wondered what would happen to a person whose thoughts trailed away, whose mind emptied out. Who had nothing in his mouth, or in his stomach or in his mind, a sieve through which everything had leaked out, just as on the ground the light-confetti had leaked through the branches overhead. I remembered those gangster movies where the one with the machine gun would tell later how he made a sieve out of so-and-so, blood spewing everywhere. I looked down at the light-droplets fallen through the webs of branches and imagined light leaking out of me like silver blood spewed across the leaves. What I longed for was another helping of mashed potatoes. I knew I was not actually hungry, for it had been only an hour since I had eaten, and yet it felt like hunger. Hunger or this huge emptiness. I felt fainthearted. It was a better word than “cowardly.” Can your heart swoon or sleep? Run away? Hide? The lizard dashed away and woke me from this fantasy, and I saw the others had gone on, and were stopping long enough to get Ulub away from another tree—another heart, I supposed.
We went a little distance, no longer filing along, for what there was of a path was either covered by leaves and twigs or was not even there, and maybe never had been, and what we’d taken for a path was just an old rut in the ground. So we were separate and divided, as if we each had our separate thing we were looking for, but all moving in the same direction. I was closest to the lake, about twenty or thirty feet from its edge. I could catch only glimpses, through the thickness of the brush and the hanging branches and the trailing bend of a willow. Light was turning to nickel, and that made it harder to see the water. I was taking some heart from the silence around me. It could not be penetrated by kitchen sounds or by the rattle of a martini pitcher or by Vera’s waspish commands.
I squinted to see what I could of the lake, fast disappearing in the disappearing light. And I thought of my father. This was my father’s lake, for he came here often, to the boathouse and the spring. To fish for fish that I guess he always tossed back. I do not remember much about my father. I do not think about him much. Other people have come to this lake and gone away, fewer and fewer over the years, almost no one now. But my father seems to hover here still. Finally we came to the edge of a clearing, and then the clearing itself, and then there was the house. To me it was like coming upon a familiar dream-place, one I’d seen again and again in my dreams. Here it was now, in person, in the flesh.
Slowly we approached it. Mr. Root stopped so that he could light his oil lamp, for it was close to eight o’clock now, that period of lavender light that signals approaching darkness. It was the time when drivers will switch on their lights, even though you can still see clearly. But drivers like Lola Davidow become uncertain in this light. It is always a relief to me when adults are uncertain, for most of the time they claim they’re so right. So Mr. Root grew a little uncertain and lit up his oil lamp. It looked friendly, the small flame spurting in its glass cage.
We paused around back to look at the small porch where a screen door listed, the top dropped away from its hinge. This was the rear door to the kitchen, which we could tell was quite large, for it was still the same room around the next corner, where we stood looking in through a long window with old, watery glass.
Then we rounded another corner and looked in through the same sort of window to what appeared to be a living room or front parlor. Its most prominent furnishing was a grand piano. Against the walls were bluish blobs of old overstuffed chairs and a sofa. There were round tables covered with dark cloths. Ulub now went into an act, waving his arms and trying to talk, his excitement making talk all the harder. He was pointing to the piano and then running back around the side of the house and pointing to the kitchen. We tried to quiet him down a little, and I decided we should go into the house and let Ulub show us what he meant. This is what we did.
Nothing seemed to be locked up, including the back door to the kitchen, and I wondered how the house had kept itself together all of this time and free of squatters. For there were no signs that people had attempted to take it over, nothing except for stubs of candles stuck on little plates. Bread-and-butter plates, my wide experience with them told me. Yet, even they could have been left behind by the Devereau sisters, along with their furniture. I wondered if they had taken flight suddenly. Probably not, though, for no one had ever mentioned their leaving in that way. No one knew where they had gone, either, or if they had gone together.
Mr. Root brought out his matches and lit the two candles on the kitchen table, for it was growing dark and of course there was no electricity. The table was a lot like Miss Flagler’s, white porcelain, only this one was chipped in a lot of places and dark patches showed through. The four chairs were painted wood. Ulub, still in his pleasurable excitement, gestured for us to follow him into the parlor.
Atop the shawl covering the closed lid of the piano sat three more candles, and Mr. Root went to work again with his matches. He didn’t waste them, lighting only one and picking up the other two candles to hold their wicks against this lighted one. They were still stuck to their dishes, rooted there in candle-wax drips. The room was eerily illuminated now, and the clumps of chairs and sofa sprang into greater relief. There was a big fireplace with a marble mantel, in front of which sat two dark horsehair armchairs with little lace antimacassars, stiffened with age. Several round tables of varying sizes—one behind the sofa, a larger one more or less in the room’s center, two smaller ones beside chairs—were all cloth-covered but absent of photos or knickknacks. Had they held such things, the room would have looked much like Dr. McComb’s sitting room, I was surprised to see. Except that his seemed warmer and more friendly. Well, of course it would be; his had been lived in for all of the forty years or so that this one had been vacant. I could not make out the colors of the wallpaper very well, but the pattern was of vines and weary-looking flowers, petunias maybe. One portrait hung against the wall by a sideboard. It was the only picture in the room and I went to inspect it. The Devereau sisters when they were children, that’s who the three girls in it must have been. Four girls, really, for in the center and below their chin level was another little girl, the youngest in the portrait. The three sisters ranged around her were unmistakably sisters, for they all had the same squarish faces, long brown hair, plaited or loose, and straight-lipped, solemn expressions of people about to be baptized. But the fourth was blond and had a round face and an a
lmost merry look. Pale blond.
I had to shake myself out of thinking it might be the Girl. Time seemed to be melting, running off like a stream or a river, for, of course, she could not even have been born at the time this picture was taken. I figured that the Devereau sisters were probably in their early teens here, but could have been younger, for children always looked pinched and solemn and old in pictures back then. My mother certainly did. If what Aurora Paradise said was true, this blond girl must have been Rose.
Ulub’s arm wavings and guttural words were distracting me, and I turned to see him sitting on the piano stool, punching a finger on the keys and saying something like “Ee wah may-en,” and then he’d punch some more keys.
Ulub kept saying this—“Ee wah may-en”—and Mr. Root had his face screwed up in a terrible act of concentration. Finally, he snapped his fingers: “She was playing!” And when Ulub nodded his head vigorously, Mr. Root slapped his thigh.
“Mary-Evelyn was sitting here playing the piano when you looked through the window?” I nodded to the window nearest the piano, where it was still light enough to see the place where we had been standing out there, looking in. Ulub nodded again, yes, yes. Then he rose and beckoned us to follow him back into the kitchen, where he sat down at the table and pretended to pick up a fork or a spoon and raise it to his mouth. Back and forth from ghost plate went the ghost fork. He also wore a rather dumb expression, which he meant to mean this was not his face but another’s. One of the Devereaus, of course. And then he moved to another chair and changed his expression, and then to the third chair. Ulub was taking all of the parts. In silence we watched him making his rounds of the table until he got the bright idea of having us play the Devereau roles.
Hotel Paradise Page 16
