by Rose Szabo
“I have not cooked in a long time,” she said. “I never thought, after the War, that I would ever cook with one of my family again. You have no idea what this means to me.”
Through the door to the dining room, I could see Margaret at work taking down the curtains and putting them into a laundry basket. She hadn’t come near me since the day before, and when I had tried to come to her, she’d scurried away. I was sure now that she hadn’t been the one to overturn the library, although I still had no idea who, or what, had done it. I wished I could speak to her, ask her what she had seen.
“Where have you gone, mon coeur?” Grandmere asked me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking. So if I had aunts, did I have a grandfather?”
“He has been gone for some time,” she said. “Luckily, you still have your Grandpa Miklos. He seems to have been kinder to me recently, as well. Did you have some hand in that?”
I blushed and nodded. “I talked to him about you.”
“Good, good!” She was rolling out dough, her gloves put off to the side for once. I noticed that she did not have the same webs between her fingers that I did. Had I gotten mine from my lost grandfather? I didn’t dare ask. Grandmere got so sad when I talked about the past.
“I’ve been wondering how to invite Arthur,” I said. “I don’t have an address for him. And we don’t have a telephone.”
Grandmere raised her eyebrows. “I will ask Margaret,” she said. “Unless you are feeling ready to…”
“No,” I said. “No, that’s fine.”
The groceries were delivered, along with several bottles of wine. Grandmere poured us little glasses and we tasted them, with water in between. She asked me what I liked. She lamented that we wouldn’t have the record player in time to put it on for the party.
In the afternoon, she took a nap, and I snuck back upstairs to read more of the journal. The page I had bookmarked had been calling to me since I had left it.
Grandma Persephone’s entries were sparse. The one that followed I am afraid just read We have been married. The one after that was a list of household items she planned to buy, and so on. The day after that, she wrote, When I was on the hill of serpents they told me I would take a demon lover, and that our love would consume my life. I am not in love with this beast. He is shorter than I am, he is a brute, and he is afraid of me like everyone else. I woke up last night and he was gone.
And then, a line down: I woke up this morning and he was sleeping across my feet in the bed. His mouth and the sheets were covered in blood. The air was full of black feathers. When he woke up I asked him why he had killed so many crows. He told me, because they remind me of her. Because you remind me of her, but you are not her, and I do not want to kill you. I think this man will murder me someday. And I cannot bring myself to leave his side.
I shut the book. Grandma Persephone had gone by train to meet my grandfather. She’d been afraid—terrified that he would kill her, angry that he seemed to think she was the dangerous one. It felt so familiar. I liked the girl she’d been a lot more than I liked her. How had she gone from one to the other? I kept reading, hoping for more glimpses into her life. But the next several pages were all recipes and scribbled lists, names and addresses and ailments. The scared girl was gone, and the witch was back. And I still was no closer to understanding anything.
* * *
At last, the evening came, and so did the Hannafins. They’d brought a car, along with a skinny girl who I didn’t recognize at first. Luma and I watched them from the window.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, Jane Hannafin,” Luma said. “I bit off one of her toes when we were younger.”
I stared, aghast. “Why?”
“She said she didn’t think I could do it,” she said. And sure enough, the girl looked around nervously as they got out of the car, taking little steps, like she was scrunching her feet up inside her shoes.
“Why’d they bring her?” I asked, mostly to myself.
“Maybe she wants me to even them out. Do the other side.”
“Don’t say that in front of her.”
“Why not?”
I gave her my best stern look. She, as usual, looked perfect. I’d spent the afternoon fussing over my one good dress, trying to put my hair up on my own. I didn’t trust Luma not to ruin it if she knew I wanted to look nice. I was starting to think she was onto me.
“I’m going to go check on the food,” I said. Luma didn’t look up from her vanity. She was smudging pink powder onto her cheeks, frowning at her own reflection. I slipped out of her room and down the stairs.
In the front hall, Grandmere was ushering the Hannafins inside. They looked up at the cavernous darkness all around them, at the wall of portraits, at the pile of briefcases by the door. And then Grandmere said something softly to them, and they relaxed, and I did, too. She waved them past her into the parlor, and then beckoned to someone in the doorway of the dining room across the way. After a moment, Margaret stepped from the shadows. Grandmere said something to her and then swept off to join the Hannafins in the parlor.
I hung back from the railing a little as Margaret scuttled across the hall below. She stopped in front of the black front door and knocked on the inside of it: one, two, three. And then she stood and waited. I didn’t move, or even breathe, although I didn’t know why.
A full minute passed. Just when I was feeling stupid and trying to convince myself to start moving again, an answering knock came from outside. One, two, three. Margaret opened the door, and Arthur stepped in.
He was wearing a new-looking suit, a shirt that was clean and freshly pressed. He nodded to Margaret, who scurried away. And then he tipped his head back. With his eyes covered, it was hard to be sure, but it felt as though he was looking right at me. I forced myself into movement, as though I’d only stopped at the top for a moment. He looked almost translucent in a way that made me think of the pages of books, how they sometimes glowed with lamplight when you turned them.
“Good evening,” he said as I swept down the stairs, holding my skirt back, the way Grandmere had showed me. “You look lovely.”
I thrilled a little. But I couldn’t quite forget what I’d just seen. “Were you waiting outside?” I asked.
He smiled at me but gave his head a tight little shake. “So many questions.”
“If you get here early, you can always just come in,” I said. “You’re like family.”
His grin was wide, and again, I got the impression of light, flickering from some unseen source. His lips closed, and it was instantly doused. He offered me his arm.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
I took his arm as Luma emerged from her bedroom upstairs. We both glanced up at the same time. Whatever she’d done since I left, she was radiant in a white dress, her white hair gleaming gold where the lamplight hit it. As she stepped off the last stair, she stretched out her hand to him.
“You have to walk me in!” she said, laughing.
With the crook of his elbow, Arthur gave my arm a tiny squeeze. But then he extricated himself from me and took Luma by the hand. “If you insist,” he said, smiling.
“I do,” she said, and giggling, caught him around the waist and walked with him into the parlor.
From behind me in the hallway, I heard a soft growl. Rhys stood in the shadows on the far side of the stairs, his eyes following the two of them into the parlor.
“Shush,” I said. “We are going to have a nice evening.” But I heard the sharpness in my own voice as I spoke, my own little bit of growl.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “Ellie, why are we doing this?”
“We’re trying to help Grandmere feel at home. And we need to keep the people of Winterport happy. I don’t know if Grandma Persephone ever told you this, but a lot of what she did was make sure they didn’t turn on us.”
He looked horrified. “Really? Why?”
I sighed. Sometimes I wanted to strangle hi
m.
“Because we’re strange and dangerous,” I said. “So please, if you can, try not to be too strange and dangerous tonight? Please?”
He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”
I offered him my arm, the way Arthur had done, and he linked up, and for a moment I remembered us playing together as children. He’d been bigger than me, but he’d been gentler, then. Always willing to do what I thought sounded fun, even if he didn’t like it. I remembered us breaking my dollhouse one afternoon by stacking heavier and heavier things on it, the glorious moment when the roof finally buckled and crushed the dolls under a cascade of knickknacks. I smiled up at him, and he grinned back at me. He was almost a brother.
When we got to the parlor, Mrs. Hannafin was in the middle of a long story of some kind about how her father had worked on building this house.
“More money than he’d ever made before or after,” she said. “How much did the whole house cost, do you know?”
“About a hundred thousand, if I recall,” Arthur said. He was sitting in the armchair by the chessboard. Luma perched on his knee. Jane, the Hannafins, and I all couldn’t look directly at him. Beside me, I felt Rhys’s whole body go taut, like he was pulling on a leash. I gave his foot a little kick with my toe.
“And lots of disappearances around this house,” Mr. Hannafin said. “My ma used to tell me about a schoolteacher disappeared here in ’eleven. She used to tell me, ‘Now, George, don’t ever take money to go up to that house’—”
“Let’s talk about more pleasant things,” Grandmere said.
Mrs. Hannafin tilted her head to one side. “My,” she said, pointing to a picture on the wall. “Is that an Impressionist?”
We chatted along for a while, mostly Grandmere and the Hannafins. Jane sat jammed into a chair in the corner farthest from Luma, her feet tucked up under the chair as far as they would go, silent and sullen. She had little horn-rimmed glasses and a sour expression. Grandmere kept trying to get Rhys to go talk to her, but he stayed close to me, silent and wary. I could hear his heart pounding in his chest. What about this was so frightening to him? Was it just watching Luma petting Arthur?
At last, Grandmere said, “Ah, I think dinner is ready. Shall we go to the dining room? Rhys, please escort Miss Jane.”
Jane stood and let Rhys take her by the arm. Grandmere hung back, and I stayed with her.
“Isn’t she fetching?” she asked, tipping her chin after Jane.
I flushed. “She seems alright,” I said. I hadn’t expected the Hannafins to come up in our conversation, or to be asked to evaluate the quality of a girl. The question made me nervous, like I’d done something wrong.
“For Rhys, I mean!” Grandmere said.
“I don’t know. Rhys seems…” I hesitated, not wanting to tell Grandmere what I knew. “Fine on his own.”
She sighed.
“I want to take you into my confidence,” she said. “He is not showing a proper interest in girls for his age. A young man from such a fine family should have prospects.” Prospects, I thought. It sounded like such an old-fashioned term, something from one of Luma’s books. “She has a certain something that I think he might like. She almost looks like a boy.”
Oh, no. She knew about Rhys. As long as she didn’t say it, though, I didn’t have to deny it. She frowned and studied my face. I made sure that it was blank, perplexed.
“You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed?” she asked.
“Noticed what?” I already knew, of course.
“That Rhys is a little strange,” she said. “I see you look shocked. You’re too well-behaved to think about such things, I know, but you should not be naive about this, Eleanor. It draws unwanted attention. And it is only a matter of time before he does something unspeakable.”
I was angry, but also confused. I hadn’t liked that weird violent grin I’d seen on Rhys’s face, the night he fell out of the wall. But I didn’t like the way she talked about him, either. As though it would be evil of me to even have noticed how he was around Arthur. As though there were something poisonous about the very idea.
She must have seen the look on my face, because she said, “This is too much for right now, I see. We can talk about it later. Shall we go eat?”
When we got to the dining room, Mother was already there in a long veil, and Grandpa Miklos was slumped at the head of the table, Father at the foot with a half-full glass of brandy in front of him.
“I am so glad we could all be here tonight,” said Grandmere, settling into her place at the table. She picked up a small silver bell beside her wineglass, lifted it, and rang it, and Margaret came in, bearing a tray.
I watched Miklos’s face as Margaret set down trays on the table and ferried choice dishes from the kitchen to the buffet and from the buffet to our places. He was as rigid as he had been the night that the bells rang in town, but he didn’t bolt from the table. He sat there as though he’d been glued into his chair. I wondered what he was thinking.
“Since we have company,” Grandmere said, “let’s all eat politely tonight.”
I was beginning to recognize that tone of voice; it was like the one I had used on the shopkeeper. Grandmere had already used it a few times this evening, I realized. That thought made me uneasy, especially as the family began to eat. My father’s hand went to his fork, and he picked it up, staring at it strangely as he did. He took up a bite of a salad laden with cucumbers and ate it off of the end of his fork with great curiosity. He looked like someone having a difficult thought for the first time.
Luma was the only one who seemed unaffected. She picked through her salad with her hands, eating the cucumber slices by tossing them into the air and catching them in her mouth. Grandmere squinted at her, perplexed. Father emptied his glass of brandy quickly. Mother kept pressing a damp handkerchief against her cheek, hiding it in her lap when Grandmere glanced at her.
It seemed wrong to me, but dinner was certainly pleasant. Mrs. Hannafin gossiped about people in town, and Grandmere egged her on until the stories became increasingly wild: affairs, fistfights in front of gravestones, unpaid debts. I began encouraging her, too, teasing out details, thinking it would be useful to know these secrets if I was going to keep our own safe.
And the Hannafins seemed to like us. At one point, Mr. Hannafin even clapped a red and chapped hand on my father’s shoulder. Surely, none of that would have happened if Grandmere hadn’t insisted we eat politely. The difference was obvious in Luma’s case. The older Hannafins wouldn’t look at her, and Jane kept casting sideways glances at her as though she expected to be eaten right up. I imagined her scuffing her foot under the table, her sock rubbing up against the stump of the toe Luma had bitten off.
Grandmere got increasingly annoyed as Luma continued to slosh her wine and lean her weight on Arthur’s shoulder. When Margaret brought out a meat pie and cut slices, and Luma made to pick hers up with her hands, Grandmere finally said, “Luma, control yourself!”
Luma contorted her face into a hideous scowl. She reached over and dug her hands directly into the pie, and stuffed handfuls of it into her mouth. Juices streamed down her face as she chewed with her mouth wide open.
“Miles, take her away from the table,” Grandmere said. Father stood up and wordlessly put a hand on Luma’s shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
She tilted her head back to look at him. Whatever she saw in his face, she stood up, and followed him out of the room. Father came back after a few minutes and sat down, flushed, and poured himself a glass of wine.
“Miles?” Mother said. “So much?”
His face got rigid, and he took a long sip.
Rhys got up from the table. “I’m going outside,” he said.
“Miklos,” Grandmere said, “You can be excused, too.”
Grandpa Miklos stood up, looking like he’d woken from a dream. He shuffled out of the room after Rhys. As the kitchen door swung behind them, I saw flashes of d
ark fur, and then the back door slammed.
“Please forgive them,” Grandmere said. “They have had a difficult time since Persephone passed.”
The Hannafins nodded. “Of course,” Mr. Hannafin said.
“Understandable,” said Mrs. Hannafin. They looked at one another uneasily, but then turned back to us and smiled. “A wonderful evening,” she added.
I glanced at Arthur. He looked blandly back at me. I smiled back, hoping the Hannafins didn’t notice that my hands were shaking. None of this felt right.
When dinner was done and Margaret had laid out Arthur’s coffee, I glanced at Grandmere, and mouthed, “Can I talk to you?” She shook her head and raised her eyebrows toward our guests. She didn’t want to leave them unattended. That made some sense. But I didn’t like the way the Hannafins had looked after they’d so quickly forgiven Luma.
Father poured himself more wine, and the company moved from the dining room across the hall to the parlor. “Shall we play some music, Eleanor?” Arthur asked. He seemed unfazed by any of it, as though this were his usual evening. I supposed in some ways it was.
“What a lovely suggestion!” Grandmere said.
We sat down at the bench together. Outside, Luma was howling in the night, but in here, Arthur had asked me to play piano with him. I suddenly remembered being younger, sitting with him at the bench.
And then suddenly I felt a cold hand on my back, and for a second I was transported.
It felt like the dream I’d had, the dream of being Grandma Persephone, except that I was awake. Dimly, I felt my body sitting at the piano, but I was in another time, another body, even. I was standing in the doorway of the parlor, watching Arthur teach young Eleanor how to play piano.
He looked exactly as he did now, not a day younger. His thin hands moved on the keys. Little Eleanor was kneeling on the bench to be tall enough to reach the keys. She had a look of fierce concentration on her face as she hit wrong note after wrong note.