Indian Summer

by Ed Ifkovic

  When I joined her, finally, sitting at the other end of the table, just the two of us at the long, elegant table, I realized that Carlotta was sobbing quietly.

  “Carlotta,” I began, “tell me.”

  “I did return to the Inn,” she admitted. “I didn’t think anyone saw me, so I lied. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d come back here.”

  For a moment I got dizzy with the announcement. What did this mean?

  “Tell me what happened. Please.” My body shook. This was not good.

  Carlotta stood, started to slice pieces of the roast, one after the other, as though she were feeding Coxey’s Army. It was as though she could not stop, her body hunched over the meat, the knife moving back and forth.

  I held up my hand. “Carlotta, please. Sit down now. Neither of us is hungry.”

  Carlotta looked at me. “I can’t help it.” She sat down, cupped her hands.

  “Tell me why.”

  “Listen, Edna. I made a mistake.”

  “Tell me. Now.”

  Carlotta bit her lip. “I was driving out of town, as you know, headed to Greenfield to see Nathan. That letter shook me up—he, well, he made demands on me. He’s horrible, Edna. Horrible. But I remembered something. When we’d left the Inn at noon, I was in a rush, and in my bedroom, on my writing desk, I’d left out a folder. A new chapter of my memoirs, one in which I said something about growing up at the Inn. And Martha is all over those pages. It’s a draft, mind you, hand-written notes, but I was trying to be comical, maybe, so my remarks could be taken as, well, cruel and insensitive. I’d left out that chapter on the table. You know, I write late at night and then lock up my work in my bureau. No one has seen it, least of all Martha.” She went on and on, excusing her behavior.

  “But it’s in your room, Carlotta,”

  “Edna, Martha was a dreadful snoop. I hate to say that now because it’s in poor taste to speak ill of the dead, but she pried into my business, her hands rifling through my mail, through my whole life, Edna, her eyes on my diary, her ears against a closed door listening to my conversations with friends in New York.” She placed a slice of roast on her plate, but almost immediately pushed it away.

  I had reservations. “She wouldn’t have known you forgot, especially if she knew you locked up your manuscript at night.”

  “Edna, you never knew Martha. Really knew her. You just met a pleasant, likable down-country schoolmistress who smiled a lot. She was that, but she was other things—vindictive, mean-spirited, petty, tremendously jealous of my life, distrustful, and, oddly, afraid of me. My memoirs threatened her.” She shook her head. “Now I know I’m being mean-spirited myself here, and a little nasty, but I have to speak the truth to you—to get you to see why I returned, anxious to hide—lock up—my writing.”

  “But couldn’t you have told that to Trooper Wolniak? Why hide it? It only makes you look, well, guilty.”

  Carlotta shrugged her shoulders. “In the confusion, after Martha’s body was found, I got rattled. I felt I would sound so petty. I wasn’t thinking murder, especially that anyone would ever consider me a murderer. That never entered my head. It just didn’t, Edna. Why would it? You know me—a second-rate actress given to showy bursts of ego and sensation. I’ve always projected myself as a worldly, world-weary, bathtub gin party girl. Flaming youth, though not so young or flaming anymore. Suddenly I’m here squabbling with my sister, hiding materials from her. I wanted to hide it because if Martha read it, she’d explode, we’d fight, and you’d hear another confrontation. I wanted no more ripples on your visit. God knows, Martha and I squabbled right after you arrived, over Jason’s visit. Christ, Edna, ex-husbands are around more after the divorce than they were during marriage. I was thinking of you, Edna. I know that sounds stupid and vain, but that’s the way it was. I didn’t want another fight with Martha.” She closed her eyes. “Now,” she sighed, with more than a trace of melancholy, “I never will.”

  I wasn’t through. “Was Martha here? Did she see you?”

  “No, I just rushed in, ran to my room, but the house was quiet. Julia was already gone for the day—I’d seen the River Road bus leaving, the one she takes at that hour—and the house was empty. I looked in the kitchen, checked the backyard, but no one was here. I figured Martha had gone to Millicent’s. Julia packs the supper in a basket and it wasn’t on the counter, so I left. I didn’t linger. I ran in and out, locked up my book, headed to Greenfield. It wasn’t important.” She nodded, as though now the story was completed.

  “But you lied about it.”

  “I know. That was foolish, wasn’t it?”

  I frowned. “It was more than foolish, Carlotta. Officer Wolniak is no fool, and will not take kindly to the news.”

  “I will have to tell him, right?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  Wide-eyed. “Will you tell him for me?

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re his friend.”

  “No, Carlotta, you’re my friend, and I’m telling you what you have to do.”

  “He won’t think I killed Martha, will he?”

  “I would never speak for Trooper Wolniak. But, you know, it does place you here near the time of the murder.”

  “But I told you . . .”

  I was exasperated with Carlotta’s manner of playing helpless maiden. “I’m telling you how it looks to the disinterested body looking in. Not only were you here at the time of the murder, but you have motive, supposedly.”

  She actually gasped. “I had no motive to kill Martha. Where are you coming from?”

  “But you seem to have told numerous souls that you’d like to kill her.”

  “What?” Carlotta exclaimed. “That’s not motive. That’s sisterly venting. It’s—it’s just talk. Everyone says things like that.”

  “But not everyone’s sister ends up dead.”

  “Oh my God,” Carlotta gasped.

  The two of us sat quietly for a while, the only sound the monotonous tick-tock of the grandfather clock. We didn’t touch our food. When the chimes began and the clock struck the hour, Carlotta jumped. Then she looked embarrassed. She stared across a table spread with food, the meat sitting in the filmy juices, the string beans flaccid, the small red potatoes hard as dull stones. The sliced tomatoes, covered with diced basil, bled their juices on the platter. “I have no appetite,” Carlotta mumbled. She rose, surveyed the table as though inspecting a failed battlefield, and left the room.

  Tired, I picked at the roast desultorily, a forkful of potatoes, a string bean. The taste of ashes in my mouth.

  Late that night, asleep, I woke suddenly in the dark room. Something was wrong, I knew. Slowly, in methodical order, I reviewed Carlotta’s explanation of her impromptu return to the Inn, her hasty entrance and departure, her squirreling away the pages of her book. Carlotta’s long careful speech—that was it. There was about it a rehearsed quality, a delivery that smacked of premeditation and calculation. Lord, I’d written enough stage dialogue. I thought of Fanny Cavendish mouthing her lines in The Royal Family. I could be wrong, I told myself, but I didn’t believe Carlotta Small, She’d just lied again. To me, her friend. Miss F. Ferb.

  I didn’t like to be wrong. Ever. Being wrong was a luxury I didn’t permit myself. What was it Dottie Parker once said about me to Noel Coward, which he gleefully repeated back to me—and to a dozen others in the Rose Room. “Ferber,” she pontificated, “believes all the world’s a rage.” If someone disagreed with me or told me I was wrong about something, I liked to throw a good tantrum. “If you don’t agree with her, she’ll tell you off until you surrender your soul,” Dottie had added. That remark, indeed, had thrown me into a new rage. When we crossed paths at the Algonquin, I’d turned up my nose. I’d sputtered, trying to think of a quip, some rapier-sharp retort, but I mumbled something about Dottie’s inability to surrender her soul when she spent her time surrendering her body. But Dottie just rolled her eyes and passed by. Harlot, I had summed up
at that moment. Strumpet, with razor wit.

  That night I wandered far from the Inn. The lane that ran in front was dark, unlit, but the pale-white nighttime sky threw illumination and shadow across the drifting acres. Across the road was a dense wilderness, the state forest that seemed endless and, at night, pitch black. A coal-black backdrop to the shadowy lane itself. I didn’t wander very far, city girl that I was and would always be, thank you very much. But I was able to follow the road some distance from the house, up near the hill that offered a postcard view of the three homes. I stood in the chill night air, my jacket buttoned to the neck, gloves on my hands, looking up at a harvest moon, bold and insistent, in the sky above, moon shadows filtering down on the treetops, and I stared at the three homes below me. Nearest to me was Stanley Lupinski’s upstart Victorian, now shrouded in darkness, save for a dim light at the back, probably the kitchen. Stanley doing what? Running his fingers through the columns of the Farm Journal? Staring out the windows at the bold orange moon? Unable to sleep? Then there was the sprawling Sugar Maple Inn, splashy with illumination at this hour: lights on in the parlor, in the back kitchen, in the upstairs hallway, over the front steps. It looked inviting, a refuge on the windy, autumn night. And then, most distant, was Millicent Wright’s imposing structure, that brick and hand-hewn beamed edifice, totally dark now, a mere hint of house under the moon’s light, disappearing when clouds covered the moon. Three homes; disparate lives. Standing there, immobile, my mind playing with the souls locked inside those homes, with their petty angers and silences, meshing with the characters I had created in my mind—my fictional Connecticut, the elegant past clashing with the sterile, vacant present—Orrange Oakes, Tamar Oakes, Orrange Olzsak, Stas, Ondy, the Polish interlopers on this puritanical landscape. I felt coldness creeping up my spine, a chill that came out of nowhere. Suddenly, in a lofty fir near me, I heard the shriek of a night bird. An owl? A vulture? A burst of cacophony so piercing that I jumped, shook with fright. All right, I thought: ain’t nature grand—but enough!

  I started back down the lane, headed to the safety of the Inn. My room, with my typewriter and a ream of untouched paper. The notebooks and plotlines and scribbled ideas. But I had to drag my feet along the dusty path. For some reason I had trouble moving. My body shook, not so much with the chill of the late October night air, but with a premonition that swept over me, froze me in place. Staring at the three houses, with those lives so different and yet so interlocked with one another, so vitally bound to one another’s fates, I sensed the utter weight of doom and disaster. This was no idyllic triptych, some pastoral scene out of a Harper’s Magazine from another century. Rather, this was a panorama of lives frayed and raw—and ready to collapse.

  Inside the Inn, closing the creaking front door, pausing just outside the parlor door, I heard Carlotta weeping in her room. Quietly, I walked up the narrow stairs to my room and closed the door. I didn’t know why but I sat in a chair drawn up to the window, my fingers lingering on my untouched notebooks, and stared out into the blackness of the night. There was a light on in Eben’s tenant house. But as I watched, entranced, caught there, the light suddenly went out. I started. And I was staring into total pitch-black night.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Saturday morning, just before nine, I stepped from the Pierce-Arrow into a rainy, cloudy churchyard. Eben, under an umbrella, held open the door. Thunder pealed, and a sea of dark umbrellas stretched along the walkway leading to the First Congregational Church of Rawley’s Depot. Parked at the side, conspicuously, was the awful black hearse. Carlotta and I, walking with Peter and Delia, made our way into the church, just as a fresh torrent of rain poured from the sky. I stepped in a puddle and felt the dampness to my ankles. My shoes were ruined, I knew. New Barcellos, fresh of the boat from Rome and bought at Maisson’s on Madison. And now ruined.

  Inside, I sat in a front pew with Carlotta, though I protested, wanting to be as inconspicuous as possible. But Carlotta had seized my arm as we entered the vestibule, so tightly I thought I’d lose circulation in that elbow, and I found myself directed by a somber, black-clad usher down the aisle to a pew on the left. Black-clad, indeed—a wash of black and drab suffused the entire place, every pew packed with funereal attire. Carlotta, I noted, wore a simple black dress, plain and almost to the ankle, and I wondered whether she’d raided Martha’s unfashionable closet for the Edwardian smock. But she’d also worn a black Persian lamb wrap over it, a furcet cut short as was the fashion, and on her head a large ebony chapeau that had more twists and turns than a mountain road, with a thick black veil covering her face. I wore the plain black dress I’d brought just in case I went out to dine, the one with the beaded swirl of cultured pearls and the black-laced collar with rhinestones. Very sensible and fitting, quite. On my head a Hattie Carnegie cloche.

  I would have preferred the rear pew, watching the townsfolk, observing their behavior, surveying the mob. And mob it was. Instead, like others packing the pews, I was compelled to turn my head constantly, albeit as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, as newcomers entered, found seats, and, for some reason, caused a stir. I nodded to a few Broadway types, New York visitors to Rawley’s Depot, loyal to Carlotta, folks who’d perhaps only met Martha at the Inn once or twice, if that. Bob Benchley, for one; Harpo Marx, for another. Neysa McMein, looking flamboyant and beautiful, but without her husband. And Bunny Wilson, a surprise show, I thought. They all caused a stir, that low murmur that the famous expected. I envied them because they’d be motoring back to the city when this spectacle was over.

  Carlotta got chatty as we waited for the service to begin, though I thought her amiable asides questionable, given the heavy presence of Martha’s plain-wood coffin resting on a bier not ten feet away. “That’s the First Selectman,” she pointed out. “Oh, there’s Henry and Peggy.” “My God, those ladies were students at Martha’s school centuries ago. Look how old they look.” “Can you believe Stanley Lupinski is here?’

  He certainly was, I noted. The dour Polish neighbor, dressed in his go-to-Mass frippery, sat in a back pew, and looked out of place. Hat in hand, he stared straight-ahead, his head scarcely moving. “Well,” I whispered, “he is a neighbor and knew Martha.”

  “I suppose so,” Carlotta mumbled. She kept looking around. “Frankly, I thought there’d be more people from New York.”

  I spoke too soon. “Carlotta, it’s not your funeral.”

  But Carlotta failed to catch the tone. “That’s true, Edna. How true! Mine would have to be in a hall. Broadway would dim the lights for me. I would . . .”

  “Shhh,” I insisted, not because the service was beginning, but because I was aware of the frowns of those nearby, including Peter, sitting on the other side of his mother, who tapped her on the shoulder and held his finger to his lips. Quiet, he mouthed. Delia was frowning.

  A curious mixture of folks, I thought, looking around, from well-heeled men and women, like Henry and Peggy Fenwick and the Broadway contingent—although Neysa McMein looked a tad too Bohemian in her artist cloak and feather cap—to locals in ill-fitting togs, farm women, storekeeps, even the redoubtable Miss Dangerfield, who acknowledged me in a quick, barely perceptible glance. And Eben, who’d driven the Pierce-Arrow, himself still reeking of chewing tobacco and the coal-fire mornings, was dressed in a Sunday shirt and rumpled black suit, his uncharacteristic necktie a sloppily-bound Windsor knot, his hair plastered down with some shiny pomade that caught the altar candlelight and overhead illumination, and, to me, a least, seemed capable of spontaneous combustion.

  I surveyed the pews for a sight of Millicent Wright, but she was not there, as I knew she wouldn’t be. I had paid the old woman a brief visit yesterday, and Millicent had said she was not up to leaving her home to travel across town. “I would like to go to pay my respects, but my journeys these days are ten feet or less.”

  I did not abide churches well—or, I thought, temples or mosques or shrines or Baptist revival tents. Or Aimee McPherson arenas,
crowds whooping it up. But now, surveying the austere lines of this simple meeting house, a building dating from 1791, according to the welcoming plaque out front, I relished the serenity that the quiet haven afforded me: stark, unadorned pews, none of the gaudiness of the Romish cathedrals I’d entered in Europe. The minister, the Reverend Silas Dean Winters, entering from a side door, was a modest, nondescript man, short as a country boy, bony and stringy, with scant hair and eyeglasses that kept slipping off his nose. He conducted the service in an awful monotone, and his brief words on Martha—“a decent parishioner, Ladies Auxiliary volunteer, and friend”—were so muted he could have been talking to himself. Though I hardly expected fire and brimstone oratory, some thunderous bolt of rhetoric in the tradition of Puritan Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather, I was nonplused by the lame, woeful spectacle of this worthy, and doubtless holy, Congregational descendant. The church was warm and sticky, and the rain drummed incessantly on the roof, splashed against the bare-bones windows. Around me people looked tired, spent.

  Halfway through the service the minister invited congregants to speak a few words in Martha’s memory. “Anyone?” he implored, looking out at the suddenly paralyzed gathering. A moment’s hesitation, a few strained coughs, and a severe-looking man walked to the altar, identified himself as a teacher at the girls’ school where Martha had once administered, and for a few minutes he droned on about Martha and the tradition of Horace Mann (something about a teacher sitting with a student on a log) and the necessary education of fine young ladies of fashion. I thought I’d fall asleep—or slip into a coma. Then, to my amazement, Julia Lupinski, the Inn’s housekeeper no less, rose from the rear pew, surprising everyone, walking to the front of the church, and, in a shy, hesitant voice that grew stronger from the minute she began speaking, read a few lines from a crumpled paper about Martha’s kindness to her, Martha’s concern for her well-being, Martha always asking how her little boy was doing in school. Odd, disjointed, rambling—but very moving.