Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts
Page 9
“Sad,” Franklin murmurs. “What do you think happened?”
“Sickness. One after the other.” I remember how that felt. First Mother. Then Elliott. And just when we thought our tragedy was over, Father.
“How horrible.” Franklin watches me survey the graves and does the thing he has done dozens of times in our long friendship. He reads my mind. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Eleanor, I’ve always thought that losing his wife and son must have driven your father to drink. It was tragic, but you shouldn’t hold it against his memory.”
If anyone else brought this subject up, I’d be hurt or angry. But I know Franklin’s intentions are kind, if misguided. “My father started drinking long before then. It’s why my parents were separated and we were living with Grandmother Hall when Mother and Elliott got sick. Father came to see me and Gracie, but only to give us excuses why he couldn’t take care of us. And then, the next thing I knew, he was dead too.”
It shames me to admit it, but his death haunts me more than my mother’s. She died of sickness through no fault of her own, and he died of drink. And yet I loved him. God help me, I loved him.
Suddenly, I straighten and look at Franklin. “Did you see the second wife’s grave? Ella Drummond?”
“I didn’t,” he says. “But I’ll look.”
We walk up and down the rows of gravestones, pushing aside leaves and shrubbery. We don’t find a grave for a woman named Ella or Ellen or any plausible variation with the surname of Drummond.
“What do you think that means?” Franklin asks.
“After losing all her family, maybe she moved away.”
“I wouldn’t blame her if she did.”
Neither would I. In 1840, her home was full to bursting. Eleven years later, she was the only one left.
Franklin suggests we search the other cemetery because, being the last Drummond, perhaps she was mistakenly not buried with her family. Not being in any hurry to return home, I agree. As we walk, we talk about books we have read and Franklin’s classes at school. I also tell Franklin about the Vengeful ghost in the house that belonged to my grandparents, what we learned from Aunt Bye, and what we didn’t learn from her.
“I had no idea,” Franklin says. “My father told me that Alice’s mother died of a kidney disease, but no one ever mentioned that the family had to flee the house afterward. I think you must be right about your grandfather. It explains why they haven’t sold the place. He died how many years before the eruption? Six? That’s about right.”
It is said that eruptions are most likely to occur between five and fifteen years after death. Davy’s eruption, after almost fifty years, is unusual.
“You shouldn’t have gone to that house,” Franklin says then, frowning. “Promise me you won’t do it again, Eleanor. At least, not without me there to look after you.”
I have no reason to go back to Number 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street. But his concern warms me from the inside, as if I’ve drunk a cup of sweet hot tea on a cold day. “I promise.”
15
ALICE AND HER AUNT
THE séance gave them the information they were looking for, but Alice notices that no one seems enthusiastic about searching the attic for anything linked to Davy Drummond. She has no desire to go up there alone, and on the day following the séance, her cousins seem to be otherwise engaged.
Helen and Corinne apparently had a spat in the morning, which is strange, because they usually get along despite their three-year age difference. Helen departed in a huff, and Corinne tearfully shut herself away in their shared room. Franklin left the house without mentioning where he was going, and Eleanor hasn’t shown her face at all.
Alice blames the ghost for casting a pall over the entire house. What should have been a boisterous ongoing house party among the reunited cousins has become uncomfortable and awkward.
This morning, the ghost emptied the kitchen cabinets and used the contents to create an elaborate pyramid in the center of the room with a box of rat poison balanced on top of it all. Ida cried. Alice spent hours helping her and Maisie put everything back where it belonged.
As for Aunt Bye, the shadows under her eyes suggest another sleepless night. She’s worried about Uncle Will, of course, and—based on Alice’s memory of Mother Edith’s pregnancy complaints—is probably suffering from indigestion and backache. But as much as Alice wants to believe that’s all there is to it, she knows in her heart that this haunting is part of the reason her aunt looks so haggard.
Therefore, when an envelope from Uncle Will’s solicitor appears in the daily post, Alice hesitates only briefly. It crosses her mind to hide the letter and delay any move from this house—at least until she has rounded up the cousins and pointed them at the attic.
Alice loves this house. But she loves Aunt Bye more.
She finds her aunt in her little sitting room at the back of the house, embroidering a linen cap for the baby. Aunt Bye looks up and smiles when Alice enters, though her face is pale. “Where is everyone? The house is quiet for so many guests.”
“Franklin went out, Helen mentioned buying decorations for a party, and I think Corinne is hiding from Maisie’s wrath.” Alice doesn’t bring up the spat between the girls.
“Yes, Helen is planning quite an event, I hear. But before that happens we should gather just the family for a game of charades one evening.” Aunt Bye’s eyes drop to her work. “I enjoy watching you play.”
Alice holds out the solicitor’s letter. “This arrived.”
Her aunt takes the envelope, glances at the return address, then sets it aside and returns to her embroidery.
“It’s from your solicitor,” Alice points out.
“Yes.”
“About houses you can move into.”
“We won’t be moving.” Her aunt’s needle makes quick, neat, stitches.
“But Uncle Will said—”
“Sit beside me for a minute, Alice.”
Alice settles onto a footstool in front of her aunt’s chair.
Aunt Bye cuts and knots her thread. “When I was a child and very sick, I wasn’t supposed to live. And when I did live, I wasn’t supposed ever to walk again. Doctors told my parents I’d be slow in the head.” She glances at Alice, and the two of them exchange a knowing smile. Doctors. Always underestimating the female gender.
“I had a limp and was deaf in one ear,” Aunt Bye goes on, “so no man was ever supposed to love me. Then I met Will. I was supposed to be too old to have a baby, and…” She indicates her swollen middle. “Here we are. But this is my only chance. I’ll never have another child. This one must be born in this house. He told me so.”
“Who told you?”
“The ghost did. He whispered it right in here.” Aunt Bye taps her deaf ear.
Alice breaks out in goose bumps.
“I know it sounds mad,” Aunt Bye admits. “I haven’t heard anything in this ear since I was a child, but I hear that ghost every night, whispering to me. If I stay here, I’ll be delivered of a healthy son. If I leave, my baby will die.”
“But,” Alice says plaintively, “it’s a ghost.”
“Yes. Maybe it’s a mischief-making ghost that likes to play pranks on the housemaids and worry foolish middle-aged women who ought to know better.”
That eases Alice’s mind. At least Aunt Bye knows how unhinged this sounds.
Aunt Bye leans toward Alice, lowering her voice. “It’s also an unnatural thing, and who knows that it doesn’t have unnatural knowledge? Moving house is a great inconvenience, and the ghost may be unsettling, but it’s not dangerous. I want to deliver my child in the comfort of my own home.”
Alice sits as stiff as a pointer on the scent of game. Aunt Bye doesn’t want to leave, and Alice should be relieved. She won’t be sent back to Washington.
Nevertheless, it disturbs her that the ghost c
ommunicates with her aunt this way. Telling her the baby must be born here…. Is it a warning—or a threat?
Down the hall, the front doorbell rings.
Aunt Bye reaches over and grasps Alice’s hand. “Please don’t tell anyone. I know it sounds ludicrous.”
“I promise,” Alice says.
Maisie appears in the doorway. “Mrs. Cowles, we have an unexpected situation. You’d better come. You too, Miss Alice.”
Alice helps Aunt Bye to stand, waits for the cramp in her aunt’s back to subside, and matches her pace to that of an expectant mother. They aren’t the first to arrive in the foyer. Corinne gets there first and squeals in delight.
Standing in the foyer beside a suitcase, looking extremely pleased with himself, is Alice’s little brother Teddy.
Alice looks from her stunned aunt to her grinning brother and back to her aunt. “This is not my fault,” she declares. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this!”
“She’s right,” says Teddy. “It was entirely my idea.”
“You should have been invited in the first place!” Corinne exclaims. “You’re almost eleven, after all!”
Aunt Bye is less amused. She orders Maisie to send a telegram to Washington, apprising Teddy’s parents of his whereabouts. Then she takes Teddy by the ear and marches him into the parlor.
This cheers Alice greatly. Not only has the haunted pregnant woman transformed back into to her indomitable aunt Bye, but Alice is not the one in trouble!
In the parlor, Teddy proudly narrates his story.
“I told the clerk at the train station I was buying a ticket for my grandfather, who suffers from gout and couldn’t stand in line. Then I found a family with children and sat close to them on the train. When the conductor came by, I spilled some marbles on the floor, and the other children helped me collect them. The conductor assumed I was part of their family. I got off the train at the Grand Central Depot and walked here.” Teddy sighs wistfully. “It was too easy, really. I expected it to be harder.”
Aunt Bye puts one hand to her forehead. “What are we going to do with you?”
“Let me join the party, I hope.” Teddy looks at them through his spectacles, his eyes bright. “Tell me about the ghost! Can I meet it?”
“Its name is Davy Drummond,” Corinne says, “and I’m sure you’ll meet it soon enough!”
“Oh, goody!” Teddy exclaims. “Let’s go looking for him!”
“No, you will not,” Aunt Bye says sharply. “You will go upstairs and put yourself in Franklin’s room until decisions are made.”
“You’re not going to send me back, are you?” Teddy’s bright-eyed expression of delight melts into an endearing, heartrending plea. It’s a talent that Alice has never mastered.
“To your room.” Aunt Bye stares him down, immune to his charm.
Shoulders slumping, Teddy shuffles toward the door. Corinne winks at him as he goes, but Aunt Bye doesn’t see it because she turns to Alice and says, “Oh, dear.”
“Oh, dear indeed,” Alice agrees.
WESTERN UNION
To: 132 EAST 21 ST NEW YORK NY
FEB 18 1898
WIRING MONEY SEND TEDDY HOME NEXT TRAIN
TR
WESTERN UNION
To: 1215 19 ST WASHINGTON DC
FEB 18 1898
CONSIDER LETTING HIM STAY COUSINS ARE HERE
BYE
WESTERN UNION
To: 132 EAST 21 ST NEW YORK NY
FEB 18 1898
EDITH AND I DO NOT WANT HIM REWARDED FOR BAD BEHAVIOR
TR
WESTERN UNION
To: 1215 19 ST WASHINGTON DC
FEB 18 1898
BE HONEST THEODORE WILL YOU GO TO CUBA
BYE
WESTERN UNION
To: 132 EAST 21 ST NEW YORK NY
FEB 18 1898
WAR IS IMMINENT ODDS HIGH I WILL RESIGN POSITION TO FIGHT IN CUBA IF NEEDED
TR
WESTERN UNION
To: 1215 19 ST WASHINGTON DC
FEB 18 1898
ALL THE MORE REASON TEDDY NEEDS COMFORT OF PEERS EDITH HAS ENOUGH TO HANDLE WITH THE YOUNG ONES
BYE
WESTERN UNION
To: 132 EAST 21 ST NEW YORK NY
FEB 18 1898
AS ALWAYS YOUR WISDOM IS A BEACON
UPON REFLECTION TEDDY MAY STAY EDITH AND I SEND LOVE TO ALL
TR
16
ELEANOR TAKES CHARGE
MIDMORNING, Ida hand delivers a note to me from Aunt Bye’s house.
Dear Eleanor,
I hope you and your grandmother are well and sickness has not kept you away. We all would like to see you today. I know I would. We are going to search the attic, and I’m certain you will not want to miss that. We could use your good head!
Your devoted cousin Corinne
I have three choices. I can ignore the note. I can go to Aunt Bye’s and tell Corinne and Helen exactly what I heard their friends say about me. Or I can do the easy thing, the quiet thing: go and say nothing. I can be polite and pretend it never happened.
I make the cowardly choice. I can’t even claim a moral high ground, because I haven’t forgiven or forgotten their words. I just swallow my feelings.
It’s like Cooper Bluff every summer. Uncle Theodore lines us up and makes us walk sideways down a hill so steep it’s almost a cliff. It terrifies me every single time. Of course Alice complains. But in the end, she either comes or gets left behind. That’s why I never say a word. I carry my fear like a rock in my stomach all the way down the incline, stumbling and sliding until my feet are firmly on the beach below.
Today, the rock in my stomach will be Corinne’s laughter.
Grandmother lets me go with only token grumbles, rather like Alice’s complaints on Cooper Bluff. I suspect she wants more details about Teddy’s runaway trip from Washington. The news came to us on the servants’ grapevine mere minutes after his arrival, and Grandmother will be anxious to pass on the news through her Committee of Correspondence that Edith Roosevelt can’t keep track of her children.
At my aunt’s house, I pay my respects to Aunt Bye and three lady guests who have brought her gifts of baby gowns and diapers. Aunt Bye introduces me, then rattles off the locations of my cousins. Franklin has gone to an athletic club, while Helen is visiting friends. The rest are in the attic.
“Corinne sent me a note asking me to join them there.”
“Yes, they could use your good head,” Aunt Bye agrees. Her use of the same phrase Corinne put in her note convinces me that it was written at my aunt’s request, and I sink a little deeper inside myself. “Be a dear, won’t you, Eleanor? Take this shawl up to my room.”
“Of course.”
Upstairs in Aunt Bye’s room, I fold the shawl and place it on her dresser. Just as I’m turning to leave, a stack of telegrams catches my eye. A word jumps out at me. War.
I resist the urge to pry. It’s wrong and a betrayal of my aunt’s trust.
I head toward the door.
Alice would do it.
My feet turn around of their own accord and propel me back to the dresser, where I read the worst news imaginable. War is imminent. Uncle Theodore is planning to resign his job with the Navy Department to fight as a soldier. Thoughts fly at me like hornets from a kicked nest.
Does Alice know?
How can war be imminent when they still don’t know the cause of the explosion?
Grandmother said that if war was profitable, it didn’t matter what caused the explosion.
Would our government really sacrifice its men in a war for profit?
Thank heavens my brother is a child.
But Franklin is almost old enough to volunteer.
&
nbsp; My knees quiver. Franklin.
To my shame, my last thought goes to Uncle Will, who is already there on the possible front line of battle, and then to Aunt Bye, on the floor below. Receiving visitors. Accepting gifts. Pretending that she doesn’t have a telegram predicting doom on her dresser.
I close my eyes. Uncle Theodore doesn’t know everything. He might be wrong.
Leaving Aunt Bye’s room the way I found it, I turn toward the servants’ stairs and the few extra steps that lead up to the attic floor. The door is thrown open, with light glowing from above. “Halloooo?” I call through the hole.
“Eleanor? Is that you? Thank heavens! We need you!”
When my head rises above the level of the floor and I see what lies ahead of me, I think, I should escape right now. Instead, I climb all the way up and gaze at the entirety of the attic, my hands on my hips. Then I glare at Alice.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she snaps. “You know I’m no good at this.”
It’s as if every single item in this attic that could contain something else, whether it be trunk, box, or suitcase, has exploded. There’s hardly a bare space on the floor to be found, and two of those contain Corinne and Teddy, sitting cross-legged amid the wreckage. “We’ve been going through everything,” Corinne says, “but we don’t know what to do with what we find.”
Going through everything apparently means lining up dominoes for Teddy and looking at old dress patterns and trying on hats for Corinne. She’s wearing a straw atrocity adorned with a stuffed bird and tied under her chin with a ribbon. Half a dozen other hats, equally outrageous, lie in a semicircle around her.
Alice offers me a package of Pepsin chewing gum, but I wave it away. I tried chewing gum once, and Grandmother said it made me look like a horse munching on hay. “We’re supposed to identify things that might be connected to the ghost and dispose of them,” I remind them. “Not play with them.”