Then, at last, I admit it—but only inwardly, knowing that this confession would tear open a rift beneath a foundation that has only just been (very shakily) rebuilt.
I don’t like the old white house. I don’t like the third-story windows, which are narrowed like glaring eyes, or the roof that pitches dramatically over them like a furrowed brow. Its narrow facade is harsh and accusatory, and its gaze tracks me as if it sees me as an unwanted interloper. I don’t like the wide wooden floorboards that pitch beneath my step. The furnishings are old and ugly and not mine. The threadbare rugs, oversized four-poster bed, and the fussy little chairs in the parlor fill me with cold, gray rage.
I don’t like Tattersall. It occupies a swampy sinkhole inside a circle of hills. When it rains, the brook springs its banks and the earth begins to ooze. In the park that abuts the backyard of the old white house, the wet grasses are clotted with droppings from Canada geese. The village is quiet, sepulchral. With its woods and its damp silence, it feels like a house whose windows are shuttered for eternity.
I’m overwhelmed by double claustrophobia, trapped in a dark house in a dark house. But I don’t let on. On the contrary, most of my mental energy is directed toward my star performance, the act of being fine. Everything is good and fine and I am so much better. We can all go home now.
I’m the only one who can’t go home. My home is a one-bedroom apartment in a fifth-story walk-up with academic journals crammed into every alcove. I last saw it under the astonishing spell of an interior blizzard, which blanked out the windows and carpeted the floors with ash. That ferocious gray snowfall still surges every night in my dreams and sometimes, I swear, just beyond the frame of my vision even while I am awake.
On the way back from the historical society, my bag bulging with papers, I decide to cut through the woods. I’ve spotted a break in the thickets of barberry bushes where the layers of past autumns’ leaves are compacted into a path, which I am hoping will lead me to Paisley Road.
The sun sits lower than it did when I left the house, combing long shadows from the trees. The trunks on either side of me are huddled close together, and above my head, their limbs knit into a thick canopy, mottled by roaming sunlight. The path echoes the curve of a narrow stream, unconvincingly designated the Tattersall River. The water is congested with stones: some small and pebbly, others the size of giant tortoises, their rutted shells blackly wet and gleaming amid the foaming eddies.
The forest is wild and junglelike and almost beautiful, but I exist apart from it, anesthetized by my thoughts. I’m trying to resurrect the words that Owen spoke to me this morning, something about the schools in the district—Apparently they’re very good. I spent a moment in silent astonishment toward this seeming non sequitur before I recognized the implication. When I did, my ears turned red, my own distinctive stigma of panic, which I ineffectively disguised by turning my face away from him and into the pages of The New York Times.
Realizing that he won’t be there when I return to the house opens a floodgate of relief, and something akin to contentedness—perhaps its distant cousin—courses through my veins.
And so, distracted, I nearly trip over it before I see it: a jumble of bricks stretched across the path in front of me, their corners blunted, their surfaces pocked; some crumbling and broken, others nearly whole; some disarticulated, others held together in irregular hunks by bands of powdery mortar. Further on, thickened with dead leaves and branches, the bricks converge into a mound. The crescents of sunlight that scramble over its surface only hazily define its dimensions; most of it is curtained in shadow. The path twists around it, tracing its perimeter. I count the steps. The mound is studded with unidentifiable objects that poke through the debris: bits of metal and glass and what looks like calcified sludge, exuding a milky iridescence in the halved light.
As I come to the end of the mound, I step back and survey its full length, noticing how it rises from beneath the surface of the forest floor like a subterranean beast. It is in this act of observation that I notice that the path alongside the mound is freckled by stray points of light. One sparkles just beside my foot. I pick it up and angle it between my thumb and forefinger. It’s an eyeglass lens—small and ovoid and neatly polished around the edges, perfect for the spectacles you might imagine perched on the tip of a schoolmaster’s nose in the nineteenth century.
I collect the lenses as I go, cupping them in one hand, both hands, both pockets, then finally inverting the bottom of my shirt into a makeshift pouch. As I sweep away another layer of leaves to reveal a fresh scatter of lenses, a far-off train whistle jerks me back into my body. I have to leave now or I won’t have time to wash my blackened hands and knees, make the house presentable, and to mold myself convincingly into the postures of productive convalescence.
Perhaps because my eyes are primed by the exercise of gathering lenses, a subtle disruption in the fabric of a nearby tree pricks my vision as I follow the path past the mound. I stop to confirm that what I have seen is not simply a trick of the light.
Pinned into the trunk with a single rusty nail, just slightly below eye level, is a wooden figure, perhaps eight inches tall. Studying it, I count six discrete pieces. One is the head: a round dome of hair encircling a narrow face, carved to delineate the swell of the cheeks, the dent of the chin, the long, straight nose, and the hollows in which are set the tiny eyes, barely larger than poppy seeds. Two thick twigs, perpendicular, form the body and arms. Neither is shaped, except for blunt cuts at the end of each arm and at the top of the body where it articulates with the head. The lower end of the body is uncut, uneven, and slightly splintered in a way that evokes the flowing folds of a long robe that render the figure’s feet unseen. At the end of each arm, a delicately carved hand has been slotted into the wood. The final piece forms the wings that stretch upward from either side of the figure. A series of soft, linear nicks along the surface of each wing and little nicks along their outer edges give the impression of feathers.
My first thought is, No one will ever believe that I saw this.
My second thought is more like an impulse, which bypasses the realm of conscious thought to communicate directly with my muscles. In the base of the trunk, beneath the figure, is a small hollow cluttered with decaying leaves. I kneel and sweep the leaves out with one hand, while the other cradles my pouch of tinkling lenses; then I invert the pouch, and allow the lenses to tumble into the hollow. I use my hands to form the pile of glass into a mound. Pausing for a moment to survey my work, another spike of what could almost be called pleasure flits into my body, momentarily reawakening a dormant pathway of feeling before it disappears.
I first identify Luke and Evelyn Rooney in the 1850 United States Federal Census, a document that is at once minutely detailed and maddeningly vague. I am sitting hunched over at the desk in the guest bedroom, my eyes busily unraveling the knots of tiny, crabbed handwriting, and copying what seem like the most important details onto a long white notepad.
Free inhabitants in Tattersall, in the County of Westchester, State of New York, enumerated on the 7th day of June, 1850.
Household no. 382.
Lucas Rooney. Age: 21. Sex: M. Color (Left blank. I quickly discover that this section of the census is only completed in the instances where the person isn’t white). Profession, Occupation, or Trade: Works in wool factory. Value of Real Estate owned (Blank). Place of Birth: Ireland. Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper, or convict (Blank).
Evelyn Rooney. Age: 19. Sex: F. No race, occupation, or real estate value is given. She was born in Ireland. She wasn’t an idiot or a convict.
They have no children. Their son, I note, wouldn’t be born—deducing from the date on the gravestone—until February 5, 1853. As Louisa informed me, the census was only conducted every ten years, and birth certificates weren’t required by the state of New York until the 1880s. Furthermore, the church in Tattersall that Luke and Evelyn might have attended—assuming that they, like most Irish immigrants, were C
atholic—burned in 1914, destroying any potential baptismal or death records. It is likely that the only evidence that Alexander Rooney ever existed is sitting next to me in this room, propped up against the wall between a jade plant and a crooked stack of The Journal of Neurology, shedding a loose corona of dirt onto the floorboards.
Louisa couldn’t find Luke and Evelyn in the 1860 census of Tattersall. Either they had moved, or died. I asked her about immigration papers. Would Ellis Island have kept a record of the Rooneys’ entry into the United States? No, she told me, Ellis Island wasn’t opened until 1892. It would have been Castle Garden, assuming that they came through the Port of New York. Many Irish immigrants came through Boston and then moved to other places in the country. And it wasn’t uncommon for people in the nineteenth century who didn’t own their homes to move every one or two years.
I am staring at the scribbled lines that compose Luke and Evelyn’s names as if there was some hidden meaning laced into the words that I might unravel. The census taker saw Luke and Evelyn, spoke to them, perhaps even went inside their house. He knew whether their hair was light or dark, whether they were tall or short, where they lived in the village (the census isn’t specific about location), and how they spoke. He knew if Luke Rooney was already going bald; perhaps, like Owen, his hair had retracted slightly just above his temples, ceding precious territory to his forehead. He knew if Evelyn Rooney smiled too much, or too little, or whether she had nervous habits, like touching her neck or picking the cuticles of her fingers while she answered his questions. He knew if their home was messy or neat or cramped or spacious and if it smelled like soap or dirty laundry or that morning’s baking. All of these things, which I would very much like to know, seem as though they occupy a space beyond the census page, hovering just out of reach.
There’s a vast chasm between the mysteries you don’t recognize are there and those that you do. Realizing that evidence is missing feels like its own discovery, one that quickly folds into itself, like a star that shines bright enough to snag your attention and then implodes, drawing you irreversibly inward. I am all too familiar with these intellectual black holes. The last one that I encountered ended in an inferno.
Returning to the historical society the following week, I spend nearly four hours with Louisa and her companion (the village historian, whose name I have just learned is Bill) in the sweltering room, which seems to condense all of the bulk of the July heat inside its eaves, then press it down onto our heads. Bill and I are detonating tiny sweat bombs all over the documents we’re examining, while Louisa, prim in her yellow sweater set and pressed gray slacks, seems oblivious to our discomfort.
Our quest is to determine whether the gravestone belonged to a family burying ground—as common a fixture in nineteenth-century backyards as patio furniture is today—or a communal cemetery. The idea of an entire village of people in my backyard, mingling with the roots of my Swiss chard and poking their skeletal fingers into my potatoes, causes the substance of my stomach to invert. I feel the familiar hollowed sensation of a panic attack nipping at my ears and excuse myself to the bathroom, where I drown my wrists in cold water and tell the peaked face in the mirror that she’s not going to die—not today, anyway.
I ride back into the room on a wave of postanxiety endorphins. In the time I have been gone, Bill has located two more maps of Akinville, bringing the total number up to nine, ranging between 1761 and 1920. Looking through them feels like surveying a child’s school photos in succession. Here’s Akinville in the year it was first settled, when it consisted solely of a small homestead and mill beside the river. Here’s Akinville amid the fervor of the Revolutionary War, hatched with yellow crosses representing French troops and red ones representing Patriots. Here’s Akinville swollen with industry, its fields parceled into factory and house lots, a section of the river diverted into a raceway to fuel the grinding and polishing machines of the Collier Optical Company.
The old white house is present on every map but the first—it’s even older than I thought—but the property lines are different from what they are today. The rectangle surrounding the house—which was owned, according to different maps, by men named Joseph Akin (1775), Browning Akin (1810), Merritt Hewlett (1836 and 1852), Albert Sarles (1871 and 1878), and Percy Brundage (1920)—is separate from what is now the garden. In the first three maps, the garden area is an empty lot. Then, in 1852, the words appear: St. F. Cem.
“Well, look at that,” Bill says. “It was the Catholic cemetery.”
“Doesn’t St. Joseph’s bury people in Oakwood?” says Louisa.
“Oakwood wasn’t established until 1882. They must have been burying people somewhere before that. Apparently, it was Ellen’s backyard.”
“But wait,” I say, feeling the beads of sweat thicken on the back of my neck, “if you look at the 1920 map, the cemetery has been absorbed into the property of Percy Brundage. It’s not marked anymore. What happened to it?”
Bill and I crane our necks, and Louisa nods her reading glasses off her forehead and onto her nose to examine it.
“Can a cemetery just disappear?” I ask.
Bill shrugs. “It’s possible. Old burying grounds get neglected—the stones fall down. It doesn’t take long for them to get covered up and forgotten. You might try talking to Father Lowry. He could tell you whether anyone remembers an old Catholic cemetery.”
On the way out, Louisa asks how I am getting home. When I tell her that I plan to walk through the woods, her forehead ruffles in concern.
“Oh, dear, I’m not sure you should do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not safe for a young woman to walk there alone.”
Before I can ask her to explain, Bill blusters between us with a piece of paper in his hand, showing an 1868 obituary for a Thomas McKinney with the words to be buried in the Catholic cemetery, and suddenly I have two names to populate my garden.
There was a version of me that would have heeded Louisa’s warning, despite its vagueness, and even if I thought she was wrong. In New York, I had a keen appreciation for the geography of danger. In my internal map of the city, I had marked out the areas that were safe and those that were not, and much of my mental power was channeled into navigating between them—a black-tiles-are-lava approach that I followed with childlike fidelity.
Perhaps because the Lexapro has buffed off the sharper edges of my anxiety or perhaps because of an overriding desire to return to that haunted sanctuary of brick mounds and scattered lenses, I walk through the woods undeterred. There was a thunderstorm last night and the air, baked to a humid stillness, is weighted with the fragrant must of wet leaves.
When I arrive at the brick mound, I find that the rain has husked a layer of debris from the ground, exposing a fresh spread of lenses. But I stop after picking up only a handful when I spot something in the hollow of the tree beneath the angel.
I kneel at the foot of the trunk, feeling uncomfortably like a supplicant to the wooden figure. The pile of lenses that I left is gone; in its place is a small object that I pick up in my wobbly fingers. It’s a bird, carved from a single piece of wood. Its body is small and globular, just the right size and shape for the palm of my hand, and tapers into a round head with a pointed beak and pinpoint eyes. I note that the carver has taken advantage of the natural grain in the wood to delineate the contours of the wings, which are folded into its body.
It sounds odd to say it, but I feel that somehow—through some archaic, reptilian part of my brain—I have tapped into the internal logic of another being, communicating wordlessly that the bird has been offered in exchange for the lenses. Drawn into that same logic, I feel compelled to leave something in return. I place the bird on my lap so that I can undo the clasp of my necklace, a plain sterling silver heart on a chain that Owen gave me three Christmases ago; then I hook the chain around the angel’s neck.
I shiver slightly as I do so, feeling as though a shadow has passed through me. I recall Louisa
’s warning. Was this what she meant? Had someone before me—some similarly foolhardy young woman, no doubt—been drawn into the mysterious economy of the angel tree, and been … what, exactly? Murdered by a wood-carving psychopath? Accosted by factory workers’ ghosts? I glance around, as though I might glean some clue from the trees, but there is nothing—only the same pockmarked sunlight and the contented burbling of the swollen brook.
Owen arrives home around 7:00 p.m., radiating the aroma of sweaty bodies herded into contained spaces, his thinning hair plastered streakily to his head, and launches into a tirade about Metro-North as though continuing a conversation we were already having.
“And another thing,” he says as he unfastens the buttons of his shirt, “what’s with the people who live in Dudley? Every time I see someone who’s talking way too loudly on their phone or being obnoxious to the conductor, I think to myself, I bet that person’s getting off in Dudley. And I’m always right!”
I am not so much a participant in these kinds of conversations as a surface for them to bounce off. This isn’t tennis and I’m not a player. It’s racquetball, and I am the wall.
But after a few minutes, when he’s wound down and all of his clothes are on the floor, he comes over and puts his hands on my shoulders, threading his face into the space between my head and neck, and looks down at the documents in front of me.
“What’s that you’re working on, El? More from the historical society?”
I nod. “I haven’t been able to find anything more about the Rooneys, but I’ve been reading more about the history of Akinville. Do you know why the factories all shut down? Because in 1888 a man named Judge Jacob Browning, who owned the property that is now the park, decided to remove the dam—the one that Caleb Akin built, for his gristmill—and drain the lake.”
“There was a lake?”
“Right where the park is. Akin Lake. It provided the factories with their power. Without it, there was no way to run the hydraulics. They all shut down, and hundreds of factory workers had to leave the village.”
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 34