Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  Father had called it the Lodge, and although Mother had complained that the name made it sound like the gate-house to a manor, the name had prevailed. In this basic summer house on the lake, we had been Family. When we were in San Francisco, my father had worked long days, appearing in our lives briefly in the evenings, generally granting us one whiskey-and-soda’s worth of time in the parlour or library before he wished us a good-night and sat down to dine with Mother. Week-ends were better, but often he and Mother were taken away by social obligations—either that, or Levi and I were dragged along for social obligations thinly disguised as family events, such as one memorable picnic at the beach that ended with me bloodying the nose of the snobbish son of the bank’s vice-president, who had dared to make a remark about my little brother’s Jewish features. Family museum trips were better, but too highly organised to be much fun.

  Here, however, Father had been himself. Which was only proper, since he had built the Lodge with his own hands.

  The original building had comprised four spacious rooms: an all-purpose sitting room at the front, a grand fireplace and dark-panelled walls, and beside it a smaller room that had served as my father’s bed-room in his bachelor days, converted into a billiards and smoking room after my mother came. Behind these rooms were the kitchen, with the table at which we often took breakfast, and the dining room, opening onto a broad stone terrace that nestled between the back of the original Lodge and one side of the two-storey sleeping addition. The newer wing, five bedrooms and two baths, had been added (along with electric lights and hot-water heaters) when he had brought civilisation, in the form of Mother, back from England.

  Father had lived in a tent among the trees for the better part of two years during the construction of the Lodge, which coincidentally amounted to the time it took his parents to withdraw their demands that he return to Boston and assume his responsibilities there. He had chosen the trees, helped to cut and haul them, milled the boards, and stacked them to dry. He had learnt a score of trades in the course of the building, become a brick-layer and a glazier, a carpenter and a plumber. He’d rebuilt the fireplace chimney three times before he was satisfied that its draw was clean, and spent a solid month experimenting with the decorative wood-work on the porch railing.

  Despite the later additions, this house was his from foundation stones to roof-tree; every time he walked in, he looked around and made in the back of his throat a small sound of profound relaxation. It was, it now occurred to me, the precise equivalent of my mother’s touching of the mezuzah as she entered the Pacific Heights house.

  “Do you want me to open the door?” asked Flo at my shoulder.

  “No,” I said sharply, then softened it to, “Thanks, but I was just remembering how lovely it was to come here, and get away from the city.”

  “Really?” she asked dubiously. I laughed, suddenly seeing the rustic building through the eyes of Miss Florence Greenfield, and she hastened to add, “I mean, I’m sure it’s a very nice house, and I know a lot of people have summer places or hunting lodges or things, especially with Prohibition and all, but it’s just, well, I’m not really a briars-and-brambles kind of a girl.”

  “Not to worry, Flo—the plumbing works, there are no bears here, and I’m sure we’ll find it clean and tidy. It’s only for a couple of days, and if it’s too dreary you two can always go back early.”

  But as I stepped forward with the key, it occurred to me that Flo was the one responsible for the transformation of the Greenfield house, and that to a woman with Deco sensibilities, the rusticity of the Lodge might prove a challenge.

  The key moved easily in the lock; I stepped across the threshold: no trace of mustiness in the air. The house was cool, certainly, but as we moved into the rooms I was relieved to find it as tidy and dust-free as it had ever been—clearly the interdiction against trespass in the Pacific Heights house had not extended here. There were even a couple of fairly recent Saturday Evening Posts laid on the table between the sofas, just as Mrs Gordimer had used to provide for us. I told myself that Norbert would have informed her that I was coming to California, and therefore a visit of the Lodge’s owner to the lake was possible—it was better than thinking that the poor woman had replaced these offerings and removed them, unused, every time she’d cleaned over the past decade.

  Flo’s cautiously polite noises had turned to honest appreciation as soon as she had seen the interior, and now, as she worked her way towards the back, her voice took on a note of enthusiasm and even—once she saw the view—wonder.

  “Oh, Mary, this is perfectly swell! It’s like something from a fairy-tale book, the flowers and the lawn and the lake—and look, there’s even a boat, just sitting and waiting.”

  I moved, reluctantly, to join her at the expanse of windows that formed the back wall of the original cabin, and saw that, indeed, the little sail-boat lay ready. One glance at its trim paint told me that it had also been recently placed there—no doubt by the stout Mr Gordimer, grumbling and snapping at one or another of his youthful assistants as they wheeled the vessel out of the boat-house and down to the dock. He’d always knelt, laboriously, to pass a clean cloth over the boat’s prow before nodding to himself, then climbed to his knees, turned his back on the gleaming object, and marched up the dock and the lawn with the weight of the world on his shoulders, muttering glum but inaudible invective to himself all the way—most of his conversations were conducted with himself.

  I’d once caught my mother smiling at his retreating back; when she’d noticed me watching her, she had winked, as if we shared a secret.

  I pulled my eyes from the waiting boat and made myself look at the wide stretch of green that spilled down to the water’s edge: my mother’s realm. Father had built the house, but Mother had formed the garden, and my dread for this spot was greater than any other. She had spent hours here every day we were in residence, pruning and weeding, planting the flowers and shrubs she had brought from the city, putting into effect the changes she had worked out with the help of Micah—who, as far as I knew, had never set foot here. It was all her, from the tiny pink rose she had placed in the shelter of the apple tree to the dancing fuchsias she had placed in shady corners and the wild-flower seeds she had scattered in the lawn, every inch of it her vision and her labour. I was afraid that seeing the garden without her in it would act like a knife in my heart.

  But I had reckoned without the effects of time: What I saw was not her garden. Oh, the bones were there, the trees and shrubs she had planted, the shape of delineation between cultivated and wild, but the flesh had changed beyond anything she had known. The lilac, once a trim and obedient resident of the far corner, now appeared to be making serious inroads on the native growth. Another shrub—a peony, I thought—was halfway to being classified as a tree; the tiny pink rose had all but overcome the apple in a riot of colour; and the English flowers she had nurtured around the perimeter had long ago broken for freedom in the lawn. The grass, which Mother had always preferred shaggy as compared to the tight trim of English lawn-grass, was nearly a meadow; although it had been mown in the past couple of weeks, pink daisies and yellow dandelions gave it the appearance of a tapestry.

  It was startling at first, then reassuringly foreign. And as I began to relax out of my apprehension, two thoughts came to me: that it was indeed magical, as Flo had said; and that it was precisely what my mother had been working towards. I was grateful that Mrs Gordimer had not inflicted her tightly pruned system here.

  My ruminations were interrupted by a voice previously unheard here—Donny’s, coming from the next room.

  “I don’t know about you girls, but I could sure use a drink after that drive.”

  “Oh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “A nice long drink, sitting on the lawn, watching the sun go down, that would be heaven. There probably isn’t any ice,” she added sadly.

  “There probably isn’t any booze,” Donny commented, his voice saying that this was clearly a more serious problem. “I kne
w we should’ve brought along something stronger than fizz. All I’ve got’s my flask—I don’t suppose we could unearth the local boot-legger at six o’clock on a Sunday afternoon?”

  “There should be both,” I said, and followed his voice into the kitchen.

  If the Gordimers had laid out the magazines and the sail-boat in anticipation of an unannounced visit, they might well have put milk in the ice-box, tea in the cupboard, and bread in the bin. I pulled open various doors and found them occupied as I had expected, so I took the ice-pick from its customary drawer, wiped off its rust on the clean dish-towel that hung below the sink, and handed it to Donny.

  “Chip off some bits from the block in the ice-box. Flo, you’ll find glasses in the second cupboard there. And unless the mice have figured out how to use a cork-screw . . .” I laid my hand on the tea caddy that sat on the set of narrow shelves along one wall, and tugged. Then I tugged harder, hanging my weight against it. Flo and Donny both stared, no doubt wondering both why the caddy had been glued down, and why I so wanted it off. Slowly, the apparent canister gave way, tipping forward: Its tin sides concealed, not tea, but a lever for unlocking a sliding door. With a grinding protest of gears long unoiled, the caddy folded itself face-downward on its shelf. I stuck my fingers against the edge of the shelf, pulled hard, and the entire wall of shelves trundled slowly to the left and vanished behind the cupboards.

  I turned to grin at my amazed companions, both of them crowding to see beyond my shoulders. “My father had an oddly elaborate sense of humour,” I explained. “He used to offer my mother a glass of tea, and this is what he meant.”

  “And that in the days before the Volstead Act!” Flo said.

  “Even more appropriate now,” I agreed. I started to move forward into the dim hidden closet to peruse the bottles, then stopped dead at a tinkle of glass skittering across the floor. “Don’t come in, there’s glass on the floor. Some of the beer bottles probably exploded in a hot spell. However, apart from that, there appears to be pretty much whatever you like,” I said to Donny. “Gin?”

  “Any vermouth? I could make us a shaker of martinis.”

  I’d never had a martini, but I obediently handed out the bottles. While he and Flo searched the cupboards for a shaker of some kind, ending up with a decidedly rustic Mason jar, I found a broom and swept up the shattered bottles—two of them. I also gingerly took the remaining three out to the dust-bin, although they were probably no hazard in the cool of that day. When I returned, I was checking over the other contents of the hidden closet when an arm snaked past me holding a cold, clear glass.

  “Cheers,” said Flo. I took the glass, lifted it in response, and took a swallow. After that, I stood where I was for a while until my eyes had stopped watering. Flo studied the shelves with her own clear eyes. “What a nifty little room, Mary. Like a safe-room.”

  “More or less. My father figured that there would be long stretches where the house was empty and didn’t want to leave things out in the open to tempt passers-by. Not that there’s anything particularly valuable here, but there’s the candelabras, and a nice set of old silver in that chest, and two or three of the cameras he used to fiddle with.”

  “Ooh, and a phonograph! Does it work?”

  “I should think so, although the music will be old.”

  “How sweet, we can lace up our whalebone corsets and tap our toes decorously to the old songs. Donny, be a sport and wrestle that old Victrola out onto the lawn, would you?” She followed him, clutching a stack of recordings in one hand and her drink in the other; I ran a last eye over the shelves, made a mental note to find some oil for the mechanism, and wrestled the door shut, tipping the tea canister back upright to lock it.

  We drank rather a lot that evening, between the martinis, the wine Flo had brought for our picnic dinner, and a bottle of very old brandy from the hidden store-room. We drank and we laughed and we listened to the music of another generation, Flo and I taking turns dancing with Donny on the uneven stones of the terrace. When it was dark, we placed candles in the three tarnished candelabras and ate our picnic on the lawn. The night was so still that the candle flames scarcely moved, and the occasional moth drawn by the light was soon extinguished. Afterwards, we returned to the terrace, where Flo and Donny danced in and out of the light. They found a tango, a dance that had been new and racy during my family’s last two summers here, and set about it with great seriousness that soon gave way to laughter. I realised that I was rather drunk and very tired, and that before too long I would become maudlin; to top it off, we hadn’t made up the beds.

  With a sigh, I put down my glass and went to see about sheets and things, only to find that the ever-efficient Mrs Gordimer had made up every bed in the place except that of my parents’ room. I took my own childhood room, not even seeing the walls or tables, simply divesting myself of spectacles and shoes and tumbling in between the sheets, there to weave gently to and fro on a sinking ship into the depths of unconsciousness.

  And struggled up from the dark comfort of sleep at the sound of a voice.

  “Huh?” I asked sensibly.

  “I said,” came Flo’s voice, “do you want a sleeping draught?”

  “No, thanks,” I told her, and put my head down again.

  I came awake again in the quiet hour before dawn, when a faint light brought shape to the undrawn curtains. As my mind returned to me through the fog of the previous night’s drink and the deepest night’s sleep I’d had in ages, three thoughts came with it.

  The first was that the years spanning the ages of fourteen and twenty-four were long indeed. In my case, they had been longer than for most people: Very little remained of the girl whose hair-brush lay on the table, whose books inhabited the shelves.

  The second came, wryly, as, “And being the married matron here, I was supposed to act as chaperone.” I had no idea where Flo and Donny ended up, and frankly had no intention of looking into the matter.

  Last was the thought that had me sitting up in bed and patting along the bed-side table for my spectacles: hidden room.

  I had searched every inch of the Pacific Heights house on Saturday and found nothing there that joined up with the third of my dreams, the dream of walking through a house and showing its rooms to my friends, all the while aware of the key in my pocket, the key to a hidden apartment. I had searched my family house both literally and figuratively, looking for an actual, physical concealed hideaway or even a place that possessed the same sensation of secret and personal knowledge, and found neither. My father’s library had contained the closest facsimile of that sensation, but when I folded myself up beneath his desk (abashedly, checking first that the door was bolted) and curled my legs to my chest, it had not been the same.

  But the casual expertise with which I had reached for, then worked, the hidden-door mechanism off the kitchen—even though I could not remember ever being allowed to work it myself as a child—had contained precisely that blend of the hidden and the known, the important buried within the everyday. I wanted to see that room again, now.

  Once upright, I discovered that not only was I unsteady, but I was dressed in the same crumpled trousers and shirt I had worn from the city the day before. I cast the garments off and took my childish bath-robe from the wardrobe, thinking to slip out to the motor and retrieve my possessions, but one step outside my door and I nearly went sprawling over the valise. With a silent word of thanks to the hard-headed Donny, I carried it inside, scrubbed myself with a cold cloth in the bedroom’s flowered basin, and dressed in warm trousers and a pull-over sweater. I picked up a pair of shoes and tip-toed down the stairs, where I became aware that Donny was behind the door to the first guest-room, the one with the largest bed. Demurely, I stepped into the main wing of the house before I could locate my other guest by her snores, shutting the connecting door behind me.

  To my mother, one of the great blessings of the Lodge had always been the relative lack of servants. We ended up roughing it, yes, but we w
ere also granted a degree of privacy we rarely found in the city. Not that Mother did all the work herself—just that my father before her had trained the Gordimers to slip in and out like the elves of a fairy-tale: Meals appeared as if by magic, dinner dishes she didn’t feel like washing up were miraculously restored to their shelves by morning, clothing left in the hampers materialised a day or two later, freshly ironed.

  The polite fiction of our independence here was maintained by the unspoken agreement as to the times of day we would be absent from kitchen and bedrooms. Mrs Gordimer and a changing régime of assistants let themselves in once in the afternoon, then in the evening, during which times the dishes were made clean, the cupboards and wood-box filled, and the oven stocked with an evening meal. The other times of day we fended for ourselves, leaving a note on the kitchen table if we had any request.

  Thus without a maidservant’s help, I laid a handful of kindling atop the stove’s embers and put the kettle on, finding an unopened tin of MJB coffee in the cupboard beside a fresh packet of Lipton’s tea, a jar of Mrs Gordimer’s blackberry jam, and similar basics. While the water was heating, I stepped into my shoes and went onto the terrace.

  The last stars were fading as the sky grew light; the lake was a sheet of black glass with a mist gentle over its surface. Everything was so completely still and utterly magical, merely drawing breath seemed a disturbance.

  After a time, the sound of water boiling drew me back. With a regretful glance at the calm, I returned to the house, opening the noisy packet of tea and wincing at the clatter of the cup and the suck and snap of the ice-box door. Unearthing a thick travelling-rug in the cedar chest near the entrance, I carried it and my milky tea outside.