by Mel Bossa
“What the hell is going on here?”
It was Grandpa Lynch, in a nightshirt that came down to his knees.
Startled, Chas and I let go of each other’s throats.
“Well?” Grandpa demanded. “Get up! What are you two up to, anyway?”
“Nothing, Grandpa,” I murmured.
“He went crazy,” Chas said, still breathless. “He went crazy and tried to strangle me.”
Grandpa looked at Chas, then at me. “When did you get in, Chas? I didn’t hear you come in.”
Chas hung his head and didn’t answer.
“Go back to sleep. The two of you. And if I hear another peep…” He let it hang with an unstated threat. “Go on. Get into your beds. Both of you.”
We did, and he shut the light off but left the door ajar when he left.
Chas and I lay in bed with all that still hanging over us. Nothing had been settled. Everything was wrong. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The moon rose higher and higher, shining through the still-open blinds, until it covered the whole opposite wall with a sickly light. I was conscious of Chas also still awake. But I didn’t care. I hated him. Hated him and hated Eileen—and hated myself for ever giving a stick for either one of them. They were no good. Chas never had been any good. But now I knew she was just as bad as he was.
After a long time Chas whispered, “I’m sorry, Rog. I didn’t know you’d act like this…Rog?”
I didn’t answer, and I felt as though I was going to cry. I got up and went out in the hall and crept over to the bathroom. I cried there, muffling my face in a towel; trying not to cry made me do it all the more. I felt so rotten, so betrayed, hating everyone, when all I ever wanted was to be friends with Chas and with Eileen. So many things confused me. I’d never understand why they’d done what they had. Never.
When I finally stepped out of the bathroom, there was some light filtering out of the bottom of Grandpa’s study door.
I went and opened it. Grandpa was sitting in his usual chair, reading the Bible. He heard me and looked down the four steps to where I stood sniveling in my underwear.
“Come in. Shut the door,” he said gently, as though nothing had happened.
“I’m sorry for waking you up, Grandpa.”
“I wasn’t sleeping. I hardly sleep anymore. Maybe that’s because my body knows its time is running out and supposes it might as well get as much done as possible. But you might have woken your mother and aunt.”
I looked at his legs, skinny and mottled, almost brown, sticking out from under the nightshirt. They looked worse than sick people’s legs. I hoped Grandpa Lynch wasn’t sick too.
“You mustn’t swear as you did in there, Roger. Even when you’re angry. That was a bad word you used. Do you know what it means?”
“Yes,” I answered softly, ashamed of myself.
“Then you mustn’t say it again. Come here and kiss me. You didn’t before, you know.”
I went up and hugged and kissed him. He held me a minute longer than usual, looking into my eyes as though asking me a question, but without words, just by looking.
I wanted so much to talk to him, but I didn’t know where to begin or what to say. That sudden gulf opening between us—always so close before—reminded me of my hating Chas and Eileen. I started to cry again.
Grandpa Lynch held me longer, rocking me.
“I don’t want to sleep in my room,” I whined. “Can I sleep with you?”
“I snore loud as an engine car,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
“You won’t be able to come sleep with me for comfort when you grow up, you know. You’ll have to face all your troubles and sorrows without your Grandpa’s old bones to sleep next to.”
“I don’t want to grow up,” I said, feeling my face turning red. “Not ever.”
Grandpa held me so close to him that his mustache scratched my neck, and I could smell pipe tobacco all over his shirt front.
“I’m afraid you won’t be able to stop it, boy. I’m afraid you’ve already begun to grow up tonight,” he said softly, as though talking to someone miles and years away.
Chapter 10
“Well? How does it look? Smaller?” Karen asked.
“Not as small as I thought it would look,” I replied. “For all the years I’ve been away, Nansquett looks remarkably the same.”
“I’m glad, darling,” she said, nuzzling up against me.
We were seated on the front right fender of my car, parked on Twill Road, right in front of what had once been Grandpa Lynch’s house. It didn’t look smaller; as a matter of fact, two side wings had been added on, with six extra guest suites, as the big swinging wooden sign on the front lawn announced. It was a vacation motel now, sold by my Aunt Linda and Uncle Al, who’d inherited it more than a decade before, right after Grandpa died. Painted a pale yellow, with dark brown trim on the windows and gables, instead of the ash gray and white it had been. But it was still there, and it brought back whole truckloads of memories, making me happy we had come by here today.
We almost hadn’t. I almost didn’t turn off the freeway at this exit. But we’d already gone so far out of our way anyway that it didn’t make any sense not to stop at Nansquett for a quick look around.
At least that’s what Karen said, after I had jokingly suggested we leave the New England Thruway and veer off to the summer community for an hour or two. It would be the last time we’d be this close in years, I hinted. We were on our way back to New York from the Cape. We’d been at Provincetown and Wellfleet for a month—almost all of August, taking our honeymoon, deferred from the year before. Being together so closely the first time for such a long time, we both felt we were still getting to know each other.
What I did know of our sometimes polite, sometimes candid, but always somewhat tentative coming to terms with each other was the quality of our love for each other. Mine had been sudden: The minute I’d walked up to the reference desk of the Forty-Second Street Library and spotted Karen, I knew I was in love with her. She was girlish yet businesslike in her mauve corduroy jumper and pale blue frilled-at-the-neck-and-cuffs blouse. I looked at her, waiting my turn on the line. Then, when she asked for my book slip, I handed her one on which I’d written, “I love you. Marry me.” Involuntarily her hand had dropped the slip to the counter and had gone up to her throat, remaining there while she stared at me. Then she recovered enough to ask me if the book was fiction and who the author was. So I said the same words I’d written, and this time I thought she was going to cry and shout at me. She’d done neither. She’d gone past me to the next person in line, an elderly man with a beret and thick Viennese accent. He was clever enough to see how smitten I was and, whispering to her, suggested (she later told me) she at least let me buy her a cup of tea in the nearby restaurant. She did, finally, unable to get rid of me, and I began a winter-long siege of her affections, finally succeeding so well, we were married the following July.
Karen’s love for me was based on astonishment. Lovely as she was, somehow she’d never thought of herself as being very attractive, never mind marriageable. So she had been surprised at first by my overwhelming desire for her, one that brooked no opposition; surprised when I later on and more formally asked her to marry me; surprised when I showed up at the wedding; surprised when I told her we were to live in my brownstone duplex; surprised that I didn’t walk out on her, leaving her alone again. Every once in a while, on our vacation that August, I’d caught her looking at me, as though amazed the marriage had lasted this long, amazed at herself for being my wife. Amazed and pleased, because as aggressive and prone to analyzing and working out everything as I was, she was just the opposite—cool, instinctual, with an entire set of intuitive strengths that women are supposed to have and seldom do: strengths such as knowing that morning as we drove down from the Cape how badly I really did want to see Nansquett, despite my jibing. The minute I’d brought up the memory I had of the place—all golden and vague like a late-Aug
ust afternoon, without a sharp line in the image—she insisted we come here, if only for the afternoon. Maybe it was the way I had talked about Grandpa Lynch, or maybe that single summer I’d spent at Nansquett had made so strong an impression, it showed through when I spoke of it.
Once we’d veered off the Thruway and onto the coastal road, I let myself go, telling her more. I described the town in detail; I even told her about the haunted house. I’d awakened a curiosity in her about my past, and Karen claimed a right to share in that past because of her interest in the present me.
“Maybe we ought to have come up here instead of going to the Cape,” I suggested. “After all, they have guest suites.”
Karen looked at me quizzically. A month of sun had covered her with a soft rich tan and brought freckles that had always been lurking up to the surface. She hated them. I tried to kiss every one I could find. The sun had also streaked her heavy ash-blond hair so that it was almost silver-white. She was so beautiful that day, it made my solar plexus itch looking at her. Especially when she saw that I was teasing her. Her face opened up like a tiger lily, and she laughed.
“Next year,” she said, “we’ll come here. I want to take that room on the far end. There, the one with the checked dimity curtains.”
“Ugh. Can’t we rethink this?”
“How about over an ice cream soda? Or do you think they still have an ice cream store here?”
I had told Karen about the ice cream store and my first interest, Eileen. I think Karen wanted to see her—grown-up, a mother, fat, with six children.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, opening the car door and getting in.
“Sad,” Karen said, “how some things change, how they cheapen so quickly.” I spun the car into a U-turn back toward Atwood Avenue and the little bridge over the river, and a deep déjà vu set in, so hard and so immediate, I might have been in a trance. Then it settled in with an even harder click, and I had to stop the car.
“What’s wrong, Roger?”
“Nothing. I…I just… Yes, this is the spot. The unbroken bushes on the right of the road, the single telephone pole.”
“Roger?”
“This is where the haunted house was,” I said, not hiding my excitement.
“Here? There’s nothing here.”
“It’s in there. Straight through there. See! Where the trees form an alleyway. That’s the dirt road.”
Before I could complete the sentence, I had seen it, some twenty feet in and to the left of where I was pointing: a wooden sign, huge red letters on white, that read, FOR SALE: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY, 13 ACRES. WHOLE OR DIVIDED INTO LOTS.
“Oh, no! They can’t sell it!” I cried.
I jumped out of the car and went up to the sign. Sure enough, it was the Pritchard property. The sign gave a small map of the place. Karen had come up behind me.
“Damn it!” I said. “They’ll tear down a perfectly beautiful Victorian mansion and turn it into a trailer park or something.”
“Oh, darling,” she uttered, hanging on to my shoulder, “Oh, Roger, I’m so sorry.” I knew she meant it. Unlike most young women I’d met, Karen genuinely appreciated beautiful old things.
We recrossed the street and were getting into the car when I said, “Look! Why don’t we go take a look at it? It’s the last time we can.”
She got out of her side and came around to kiss me. “I’d love to see your old haunted house.”
We pushed over the bushes and brambles and, hand in hand, entered the long sun-splattered alley of trees. They were more overgrown than I recalled, and there were many more dead leaves and branches on them than I remembered too: molding clumps of leaves surrounded their lower trunks; wan white little mushrooms grew one third of the way up even the tallest of the trees. We were instantly inside another kind of day from the hot striking summer outside on the road: a dark, loamy day, rich with bittersweet decay. The light seemed utterly different too, as though the aging and rotting forest around us had permeated it completely with tiny chips of matter that hung in the air, making colors and shapes bend and change. We walked through the alleyway of tall old trees like children lost in the woods in some Grimm’s fairy tale.
“This is where we turn,” I said, half whispering.
It was less dark here. Many trees had fallen across the dirt road, felled by decrepitude or winter storms. We had to pick our way over them carefully.
“Look, wagon tracks,” Karen pointed out.
“I don’t think an automobile ever came up this road,” I said.
“Really! Oh, Roger…” But she didn’t go on.
When we reached the end of the trees, the road opened out just as I recalled it, but larger than I remembered (at night all distances seem smaller).
“Oh!” she said with a little gasp. She stood blinking with the most curious expression on her face.
“What?” I asked, following her eyes around the little area, past the ground-level stable doors set into a sloping ground, over to the long fieldstone wall with its two flights of stone steps that almost but never quite met as they rose, and on to the curved turret of the house, barely visible from where we stood. Ivy covered the wall’s surface, except on the steps, which were mossy and where the water from the broken well trickled down, winding through the large flat stones, making a shiny wet path down to a tiny deep puddle on the ground.
“Well?” I asked.
“It’s wonderful!” Karen said, at the same time furrowing her brows, as she did whenever she was about to break into some minor disagreement with me. “Really, Roger. Wonderful.”
“Let’s go up and look at the house.” I pulled her along and then put her in front of me, going up the treacherous-looking steps. All the while I talked. “There wasn’t really any ghost here, although everyone said so in the town. I disproved that theory for myself—brave, stupid little twelve-year-old stubborn kid that I was at the time. Of course, I’d never been in the house. It was all shut up and locked. But, look! There’s the well. Half tumbling over. What, Karen? What is it?”
She had stopped at the top of the stairs and looked around, clutching her arms to her chest, as though shivering. “I don’t know,” she said, looking straight at me, and her confused look confirmed that. “I don’t know. Maybe you talked about it so much that it…looks so…well, familiar!”
“Familiar?”
“Not that I’ve ever been here or even really seen the place. But, yes, familiar. And wonderful too! It feels so nice just being here, standing here. Oh, Roger, look. The house isn’t shut and locked. Do you think we could go in?”
A dim idea was beginning to form in my mind, just below the surface of my consciousness. I didn’t know for sure what it was, but I did know that if I let it come, it would. Karen’s pleasure in the place made me want the idea to rise up, to become a real thought. Going into the house could only help it along, helping further to congeal the tenuous idea.
One of the double front doors was off its hinge, inviting us, so we stepped over it and in.
“It’s huge!” she said.
The foyer was immense and opened up to large rooms on either side. But it was dominated by a long, curved staircase ascending to a balcony, which gave onto two sets of rooms, two or three doorways on either side of the landing. Light filtered down through a centrally placed stained-glass window above the staircase, acting like a skylight, bathing the foyer in sheets of wine and honey and lime colors. Even with all the dust and cobwebs that draped room after room and the cluttered furniture stacked over itself and covered with drop cloths, the place seemed inviting and comfortable.
“It’s really magnificent,” I said after we’d done a fast circuit of the downstairs rooms.
“Magnificent,” she echoed, as breathless as I was.
Still hand in hand, we slowly wandered through the first floor again, from a large music room with scrollwork ornaments on its walls and ceiling, to a breakfast room, up a set of stairs from the parlor corridor, looking ove
r the front of the house, to more parlors and dining rooms, back to the foyer.
“Let’s go up,” Karen said. I knew how she felt. I had to see what the upstairs looked like too.
“There may be a ghost,” I warned jokingly.
“Who cares! It’ll just have to move out…or somehow adjust to us.”
“You mean…?” I realized that was the idea that had been forming.
“I don’t know what I mean,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
There were three large rooms on one side of the house, connected to each other by four small chambers that must have been dressing rooms. Two more large bedrooms and another two smaller ones were on the other side. There was also a stairway leading farther up. “To the tower,” I said.
“Off with his head!” she said, leading me up.
I stopped her on the stairway and hugged her.
“You know I’d do anything in the world you want, Karen. Anything!”
As usual, whenever I made this kind of gesture, she was both touched and embarrassed.
“To the tower!” she repeated.
Like all the other rooms, this one was untouched except for age and dust and spiders’ work. Still, I wasn’t prepared for it.
“Why, it’s a study!”
“Hardly a study,” she corrected me. “It’s a real honest-to-God library. Look, Rog. Shelving up to the ceiling. It looks like it’s mahogany, trimmed with teak.”
Twenty feet in height and diameter, the library was a huge six-sided room, drenched in light from its own multifaceted hexagonal skylight, every pane of the yellowed glass intact. Shelves filled with sets of books lined each wall but one. On that one, halfway up, a wooden staircase rose to a small cast-iron balcony ten feet high. Up there were four high windows, each with its own recessed window seat.
