by Paul Boor
Nicolas boarded the family home shut. After graduation from college, he returned to Forestport, found his calling in the ice business, and wed the local schoolmarm, Ruth Stuyvesant, daughter of the town lawyer. The newlyweds aired out the family home, painted it, and refurnished it. Only Friedrick’s parlour was left untouched. The hauntings became nothing more than a low moan that might be taken for the wind on a gusty night.
Nicolas stepped into the dining room from his father’s parlour. He paused by the oak table, laid a heavy hand on it. An unlit oil lamp. Rusting candlesticks. A pall of indifference thick in the air. Nicolas and Ruth had raised their family here, taken a hearty upstate supper every evening in this simple room. Now there was disuse, disinterest, and dust; the dining room was as abandoned and forlorn as Friedrick’s parlour.
Nicolas threw open his trunk and felt for his new morphine works. He slipped the leather case and the vial of Magendie’s solution into his jacket pocket. He extinguished the lamps in the parlour and walked in semidarkness to the foot of the stairs, where, lost in the stillness of the house, he hesitated, as if listening for a sound. Then he took the first of the creaking stairs to the second floor, and Ruth’s room.
31
The Lady of the House
Nicolas found his wife, Ruth Van Horne, seated at the window in her second-floor bedroom. He knew he would find her here in her sagging willow-caned chair, knew exactly how she’d be staring out the window; he’d pictured her this way all the while he’d traveled south with the ice. With its fine view of the village and Town Lake below, Ruth had always preferred this room, but after her change of life came so early in her life, once the melancholy set in and hardened, she had rarely left it.
Outside, the rain had changed to sporadic waves of sleet that beat against the glass. Weak light fell from an oil lamp onto his wife’s expressionless face. Nicolas reached to raise the wick and bring up the light.
“Oh, Nicolas, no,” she said, frowning. “My dearest. Please don’t. It’s too horrid a night.”
He lowered the light back to dull yellow. A smile flicked across his wife’s face as Nicolas brushed his lips across her dry, rough cheek.
“Your business down south was good, I take it?”
“Excellent. Have you managed?”
“What a blessing our dear Abigail is. And that lovely friend of hers, Hilda…every evening that good woman fed me a warm supper.”
Nicolas straightened, waited for her to speak again, though he knew with certainty the only topic of interest to her.
“Valdis is recommending Saratoga again, dear. Another water cure.”
Valdis! he thought. They’d argued about that quack just minutes before he left with the ice. Valdis haunted him throughout the South.
“Now, dearest, we’ll have none of that old water cure business,” he protested gently, the years of “cures” running through his mind . . . the hot soaks, the cold dunkings, the endless search for another spring. “Saratoga’s waters surely must’ve lost any healthful qualities by now.”
“Saratoga has facilities, dispensaries, manipulators. Valdis says—”
“Oh, Ruth, I don’t know, I just don’t know,” he said, shaking his head at the more gruesome cures she’d tried—the fasting, the purges, the shocks of electricity. Valdis. “The man doesn’t have a medical degree, for heaven’s sakes, Ruth. I wish I knew what you need, what would help.” He took her shoulder and looked into her slate-grey eyes. “Come daylight, I’ll go to Boatmann and have the old boy mix up a fresh draught of laudanum.”
Nicolas remembered the morphine in his pocket. He’d retrieved it with Ruth in mind but thought better of it. “For now,” he said, stepping to the sideboard, “let’s try a touch of the old laudanum, shall we?”
How had his dear wife come to this? The Ruth Stuyvesant he knew when he was a gangly schoolboy had been the gayest of girls, the cleverest and the brightest chalking the alphabet onto the board in Forestport’s one-room schoolhouse. He singled her out at the lunchtime square dances. A schoolyard romance blossomed. At fourteen, Nicolas purposely crashed his toboggan at the foot of Carney’s Hill, just so they’d be clutched together in the snow and he might steal his first kiss. He steered them to crash after crash after that, until Ruth stayed his hand as it wandered from his mitten to soft, forbidden places. She’d said, “We must wait for marriage, Nicolas.”
Ruth Stuyvesant was destined to be a schoolmarm. From her first days in the classroom of Forestport Common School, with her face buried in a book, everyone knew. In the Stuyvesant household, she refused to cook, clean, or sew. Her three sisters groused. Her mother scolded. Only her father, Gustav Stuyvesant, the town lawyer and a dour, cheerless man given to deep fits of melancholy, encouraged Ruth’s scholarly bent. He was devoted to Ruth. She read law in his library. He took her on mountain treks, instructing her in the fine points of fishing and hunting.
As expected, Ruth entered teacher’s college. The couple made promises. Fidelity. Betrothal. Nicolas spent a year at Fairfield Academy, then Boston and college. Always there was gaiety and hope. That Ruth Stuyvesant of long ago was not the woman who sat before him now . . .
At the sideboard, Nicolas uncapped a small brown bottle, poured a splash of brandy into a medicine glass, and measured ten drops of laudanum from the bottle with an eyedropper. Thinking again, he added five more.
“I’ll be off to the lake soon, Ruth. I must see how bad the ice has gotten.”
“You’re always away with the ice,” she said. “Since…I can’t remember…it’s been—”
“Here. Take this.”
Nicolas remembered the first blow that shook Ruth’s foundation: It was her first year as the schoolmarm. She was freshly equipped with a “New York State Teacher’s Certificate of Competency in the Modern Curriculum,” teaching grades one through six. Her beloved father, Gustav—distraught over a pressing matter of law—was found hanging from the rafters of their horse barn, dead by his own hand.
When Nicolas returned to Forestport after college, he found his childhood sweetheart morose and distant. He remembered her for her woodsy ways, deep voice, misty hazel eyes, and shining auburn hair, and quickly pressed his youthful desire for the woman he once knew. Gradually, Ruth’s melancholy melted away. She began wearing her lustrous auburn hair daringly bobbed.
Nicolas was madly in love, and Ruth could hardly defend against the charms of this tall, educated gentleman known in town as “that clever Van Horne boy.” Nicolas was making a name for himself cutting ice. Indeed, Ruth was so smitten with Nicolas’s advances that, despite her earlier intentions, a son to be named Ethan soon quickened in her womb.
When Nicolas learned of this twist of fate, the lovers took to long walks along the furthest bank of Town Lake, where secluded, grassy knolls and moss-covered outcroppings of rock offered the privacy they longed for. There they vowed to marry, lakeside, on a warm, moonlit August evening while clouds of bats swooped over the glassy water.
“Yes, we’ll marry, sure,” she said, her eyes alight.
“With your little secret, it’s the proper thing to do.”
“Oh, come now, Nicolas,” she said, giving him a nudge. “What do we care about being proper?”
They were silent for a long moment, arm in arm, looking out over Town Lake.
“Aren’t the bats marvelous?” she said dreamily. “Look at them . . . how they feed without a sound . . . thousands of them . . . perhaps it’s a million.”
Now, in her darkened room, Ruth’s indifferent gaze was fixed on the dreary weather. A blast of slushy hail slapped against the glass, rattling the panes. “Heavens!” she cried, clawing at the air in front of her. “My nerves.” She settled back; her hands trembled on the arms of the chair. Her dull hair, cracked and greying, sprawled across her eyes. “You see, Valdis believes it’s a matter of a woman’s spleen. ‘Female syndrome,’ he calls it.”
“Melancholy, I call it. Now take your medicine.”
“That laudanum
—Valdis says there’s a danger of morphine, a thing he called ‘nervous waste.’”
“Enough of Valdis!” He groaned, immediately sorry. She was so fragile, like fine china. “Please don’t fret over such nonsense, Ruth. Your doses are low. Now here, drink it all . . .”
Nicolas had heard plenty about nervous waste syndrome. It seemed that persons of a weak constitution or will had their brains addled by morphine. They lost all interest in life and wasted away as if starving to death. Nowadays such weak-minded souls were advised against the use of morphine, especially by hypodermic.
“Here now, I’ll fix your coverlet,” he said. “Soon you’ll be fast asleep.” He’d taken care to measure an adequate, relaxing dose. Fifteen drops would assure a full night’s rest.
Ruth went quiet and slumped in her chair, fast asleep. Nicolas set the empty medicine glass down and organized the clutter on the table—a jumble of eyedroppers with worn rubber bulbs, powders, pills, and herbal potions. As he’d done so often in the past two years, Nicolas lifted his wife to her bed. She seemed lighter than he remembered, lighter even than on their wedding night, when he’d lifted her over the threshold of their room at the Butterfield House.
Once they’d decided to marry, Nicolas saw little reason to rush to the altar. After all, Ruth had no father to force a shotgun wedding. All of Forestport knew the simple truth. The memory of her gibbous wedding dress and grand reception at the Butterfield House was still fresh in the town’s mind when Ruth went into labor with their firstborn child, Ethan.
But their infant son proved sickly. Slow to gain weight, he suffered bouts of pneumonia and colic. Nicolas hired a nanny. Ruth returned to her classroom. Nicolas, preoccupied with his blossoming ice enterprise, was absent for months at a time. Ruth filled her solitary days with teaching duties, her evenings with the frail Ethan, and her free time in the various social involvements of a quiet village rich in private intrigues.
Nicolas was surprised when a second son, Schuyler, came on the heels of Ruth’s loneliness. With his rare times at home, he thanked lady luck. But while baby Schuyler grew hale and pudgy, Ethan took on a dusky hue. Boonville’s doctor heard disconcerting sounds in the three-year-old’s chest and advised a visit to the medical college in Albany for an opinion. There, a “condition of the heart” sealed the boy’s doom; Ruth was despondent. Her first son would never grow to be a man.
During the ice season that followed the bad news, Nicolas lingered at home more than was his habit and a daughter, Abigail, was conceived. Ruth trudged through the snowdrifts to light the schoolhouse stove and chalk the three R’s on her board. During summer break, Ruth retreated with her children to the Van Hornes’ second home, a lake house on Upper Spy. The piney air seemed good for the sickly Ethan, and Ruth fished the shoals in her beloved Rushton skiff.
Then came the horror of Ethan’s loss. At age eight, his growth stunted to the size of a five-year-old, the boy was lost to the Adirondack woods. He was off on a short jaunt on the Town Lake trail . . . alone . . . and was never found. After weeks of searching Nicolas came to accept this cruel trick of nature. The bereaved mother, however, was left with a deep, unrelenting melancholy.
Ruth was powerless against an endless assault of sweats, chills, and night terrors. She grew sulky. She drew into herself, irritated by Abigail’s youthful antics, oblivious to Schuyler’s uncanny talent at the piano lessons he took from Thomas Chubb on Thomas’s fine Steinway piano. At the lake, Ruth’s Rushton skiff sat in the boathouse unused, its fine cedar planking unvarnished. Her split cane fishing poles gathered dust, reels rusted, and fine silk line went to rot.
With autumn, the schoolmarm didn’t appear at the front of her class. Nicolas made excuses. At first the town board listened and waited, but “youngsters need learning,” as they said, and a new girl was hired. Ruth had already taken to her room.
Nicolas covered his sleeping wife with a feather duvet and swept the hair away from her face. He lit a candle, extinguished the lamp, and stepped into the hall to climb the steep, narrow stairs to the solitary attic room above. His room.
32
A Garret Room
Nicolas set the candle on the small bedside table. With Ruth’s constant melancholy, a husband had become just one more irritation. Sensing this, Nicolas had moved his things up the narrow stairway to this third-floor garret, a room filled with the sharp, ugly angles of a steeply pitched roof and narrow dormer windows. He retreated here every day at sunset to watch the room fill with shadows. The pine planks of the floor became worn smooth under his step. Around him, the walls of horsehair plaster and lath, stained from years of sporadic roof leaks, began to crumble.
Sleep would not come easily this evening. The horrors he’d seen in Galveston and the powerful feelings he’d grappled with still haunted him. He couldn’t shake the revelations of Professor Flynt about the dead boys in Buffalo. It seemed his life had been cursed with dead boys ever since the loss of Ethan. Now, more worries: a thaw, an early spring, bad ice. And Ruth.
At the north dormer, Nicolas cursed the hellacious weather. A winter’s worth of melting ice and snow drooped from the roof and threatened to tear loose the tin gutters. The maple trees lining the street were encased in sheaths of ice, their branches bowed. To the north, lightning struck at the mountains, as if all of heaven’s power were focused on the Old Forge ironworks in retribution for the open wound its mines had inflicted on the earth’s fragile crust.
Nicolas’s body craved morphine’s dreamless sleep. He picked up the candle again and tiptoed down the stairs to Ruth’s room. He slipped his works into his jacket from the sideboard. Turning to the door, he looked at Ruth, motionless under her feather bed, her skin pale and chalky. Ruth’s weight was off; he’d felt it lifting her to bed, her limbs frail, her cheeks sunken . . .
Back at his dormer window Nicolas watched a cloud-choked sky refuse to give way to dawn. He set his works on the bedside table and curled into himself on top of his cold bed. Why was he constantly pursued, into his bedroom, into his sleep, by dead boys? Dead boys in his dreams, dead boys in his ice . . . though the two in his ice, murdered boys, were real enough. Too real. And the undertaker, Thomas Chubb, knew something about them.
He must talk to Thomas.
33
Sky Van Horne
He was snatched from sleep by the distant rumble of thunder. It was only moments past sunrise; pale morning light shone at the dormer window. Thin sheets of rain washed down the windowpanes.
Thunder sounded again . . . no, it wasn’t thunder; the sound came from far below, downstairs, a low, distant slamming of a door breaking the silence of his garret room where even the wall clock, unwound, had not ticked in weeks. Then the scraping of a chair, barely audible.
Nicolas rolled from bed and pulled on pants and shirt. His head throbbed from too little sleep. The serpent coiled in his belly tensed. Groggily, he took to the stairs and staggered to their foot, two short flights. A lamp was lit in his study and there stood the wayward Van Horne, his son Schuyler, at Nicolas’s secretary. He had its bottom drawers opened and papers pulled out.
“Sky?”
Schuyler looked up from the papers. “Oh! Father. You’re home.” He rocked back on his heels. “I was wondering when you’d get back from down south.”
Schuyler’s dark hazel eyes were shot through with a long evening’s worth of carousing. The lids drooped unevenly. Despite his twenty years, Schuyler Van Horne had never reached his father’s height, standing a good four or five inches shorter. A life of dissipation had softened his youthful middle and widened his girth to that of a man twice his age.
“What is it you’re doing, Son?”
“Why, I’m borrowing some sheets of your stationery. I asked Mums, and she said it seemed perfectly all right. I’m planning a few small notes of promise in the village.”
“Notes of promise? Promising what?”
“Ice. The businessmen are looking toward the summer, Father. The inns and such.”
“You’re writing notes for my ice?”
“It’s that . . . I’m in need of funds for my ventures, Father. Mums said it was fine, a few small advances.”
“But . . . but she shouldn’t . . . you shouldn’t,” Nicolas said, perplexed, his voice rising, “and besides . . . how would you know what to charge?”
“Well, I’ll ask them.”
“Ask the purchaser to name his price? They’ll tell you anything.”
“Perhaps they’ll have a bidding war.”
“On my ice?” Nicolas circled the desk, leaned closer, and pointed out the window at the steady drizzle. “Look at this thaw, Son. We may have no ice this summer.”
“But Mums said . . . Mums—”
“Schuyler—you disappear from the face of the earth when the first man steps onto Upper Spy, and now you sell my ice to put gold eagles in your pocket?”
“Father, you weren’t here. I’m in need of funds for my musical enterprise in New York. The city is fabulous, I tell you. The cabarets, the dancing, the racket we make. They say it’s like the beating of a thousand tin pans.”
“Tin pans?”
“Until now, I admit, I’ve been nothing but a song plugger, hammering on the piano into the wee hours, but my chance has finally come. I mean it. The publishers love my work—they’re playing my songs on the west side, on Twenty-Eighth Street, where all the gaiety is. You must see it to believe it. And my songs are published. They’re published!”
Nicolas shook his head in disbelief. He knew little about New York City. The ice traders of Connecticut and Massachusetts supplied Manhattan; there was little reason for Nicolas to venture beyond Albany.
