Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  I worried at first that something horrible had happened to Maeve, that she’d forgotten or been unable to pay for the box. Then I thought that maybe she’d hired someone else to answer her mail, and they’d gotten another post office. I hoped so, anyway.

  I put the letter in a book I was reading and forgot all about it.

  Meanwhile, the noises hadn’t gone away. We all lived on the edge of terror, jumping at strange sounds and feeling anxious when we didn’t hear them. Beatriz’s face turned sallow and the skin under her eyes became a delicate shade of lavender, and Semiramis smiled less and less often. Ms. Burden pretended she didn’t hear anything, but I saw her brace herself when the noises came.

  Our house didn’t have a basement, just a cramped crawlspace. I picked a day when the sun was shining and forced myself to go down there, but I saw nothing besides spider webs, not one abandoned toy or broken planter. Anyway, the sounds seemed to come from different places, upstairs when we were in the living room and vice versa.

  Summer came, and school ended. With no homework and no after-school activities I had some time for myself, time to think about my sisters and their various unhappinesses. I’m sorry to say, though, that I was too wrapped up in my own problems to help them. Instead I did the same things I’d done in other years, reading and writing and wandering in the park.

  Beatriz had moved Philip’s computer into our room and was spending a lot of time on it. One day when she was out I got on the website Ms. Burden had told us about, ivoryorchard.com, the one dedicated to Adela Madden and her book. It turned out to be enormous, with sections for essays and histories and artwork and fan fiction, another about Madden herself, another with forums where people shared news and ideas.

  Soon Beatriz and I were fighting over computer time. Finally I went to Ms. Burden and asked if I could get my own computer, but she said no, that she was not made of money. I left her, feeling mean and spiteful toward everyone, and I checked Beatriz’s browsing history while she was out. But my anger disappeared when I saw what she’d searched for: “loud noises,” “noises at night,” “noises in basement,” and other variations.

  The next time I looked for her browsing history it was gone. And I realized I should erase mine too; the last thing I wanted was for Ms. Burden to see my fascination with ivoryorchard.com. I asked Beatriz to show me how she’d done it.

  I read a lot of essays on the website, amazed that so many people had thought about Ivory Apples for so long. The book was more complex than I’d realized, and my admiration for Aunt Maeve grew the more I read. Those obsessives Philip had told me about were here too, with their theories and axes to grind. Ivory Apples was an allegory for the Albigensian Crusade, for example, or Adela Madden had secretly been a Theosophist.

  By far the longest of the essays, by someone named Watchmaker, ran to about fifty pages. (A lot of the pseudonyms on the site were taken from the book, but I remembered the watchmaker only as a minor character.) Pommerie Town was real, they claimed; you could visit it and discover “the fount of creativity, the secret of the Muses.” Madden had done this herself, which was why she had been able to write Ivory Apples. In fact she hadn’t written it, the essayist said; it had been a gift from the Muses.

  What Watchmaker wanted, of course, was to find the way in. The essay went on to quote the scene where a man named Fo’c’sle Flynn stumbled on Pommerie Town. “The chief alderman formed a committee, and five men, wearing their best suits and tallest hats, went to call upon Fo’c’sle Flynn at the tavern.

  “‘How did you get here?’ one of them asked him.

  “‘I was lost in a forest one night,’ Flynn answered. ‘I came to a bridge across a river, and on the other side I saw two rows of pillars, shining like ivory in the moonlight. I walked between them, and so came upon the town.’

  “The aldermen looked at him with interest. ‘It was not your way that was lost, but yourself,’ one of them said.”

  After this Watchmaker wrote, “I think that here Madden is speaking of actual places. The problem is finding the right forest, and the right bridge.”

  Too many of these essays were like this one, theories that the writers tried to prove with quotes from the book or historical events or equally unhinged ideas from other people. I clicked away from them and went over to the discussion forum.

  I got caught up in the conversations immediately. They seemed like a long continuous party with dozens of friends, though some of the rudeness made me uncomfortable. Finally I exhausted the current topics, and I started going back through the archives. Something caught at me, some word or other, and I clicked on the thread.

  “Important news, peeps,” someone with the name of Eliza Woodbury had posted. (Eliza Woodbury was another character from the book, a woman with a parrot that spoke no recognizable language.) “I sent a letter with all my exciting new theories to Madden’s publisher and then waited impatiently for ‘David’ to tell me that I was totally right and all the rest of you were complete morons. (Kidding!) But I didn’t hear from ‘him’ for about two months, which was alot longer than my other letters took. Finally it came back yesterday, with a post office box number written on the envelope, and ‘No such holder at this post office box.’

  “I thought about this alot, guys. I guess the publisher used to forward our letters to this box, but why is it closed now, and who closed it? The only thing I could come up with is that, I’m sorry to say, Adela Madden might have died. I hope I’m wrong, I hope that someday we’ll get the NB we’ve all been waiting for, but I don’t think there can be any other reason. ‘David’ was Madden herself, obvs, and they closed the box when she died.”

  “NB” stood for “New Book.” Everyone on the site hoped that Madden would publish something new, despite the fact that it had been over forty years since Ivory Apples.

  I looked back at the date on the post. February 10, 2001, a month after Philip had died, so of course Eliza hadn’t gotten an answer. But Philip wouldn’t have told her that she was “totally right,” I knew that much. Maeve had cautioned him never to discuss any of the theories about the book, and I don’t think even he knew which ones were correct.

  “And here’s something else, fellow apple-pickers,” Eliza went on. “The post office box number is P.O. Box 369, Eugene, Oregon. So congrats to everyone (including me!) who thought the letters came from Eugene because of their postmark. I know some of you thought they mailed all the letters to another city or state to disguise where ‘David’ lived, but that always seemed too complicated to me, even for Adela Madden. Any of you out there live in Eugene? What does the post office box look like?”

  People started visiting the post office and writing about their experiences. The crowds grew, some of them coming from as far away as Los Angeles. Someone wrote an account of an argument between their group and some postal workers, a shouting match that ended when the workers threw them out of the building.

  “Your so stupid I dont know how you can even read,” a poster wrote, replying to Eliza. “David sounds nothing lik Adela Madden. Hes the one who died or got another job. Dont worry everone, Adela Madden is still alive.”

  Here was something else I hadn’t known, that the posters were divided between those who thought David, or really Philip, was Adela Madden and those who were sure he couldn’t be. The debate flared up again with Eliza Woodbury’s post and went on for pages.

  “You know what’s really exciting though?” someone else wrote, a bit cold-heartedly, I thought. “If she is dead then maybe we’ll finally get the NB. Her heirs or someone could publish it.”

  “I found out something really interesting, folks,” said a man named Jedidiah Cabal, using another name from the book. “I read a bunch of obituaries from Eugene, and I found one about this guy named Philip David Quinn. He has to be the David who answered Madden’s letters, right? And the letters stopped because he died.”

  “Congratulations,” someone who called themselves Quentin Foxtree wrote back. “You put 2 and 2 to
gether and managed to come up with 58. The man’s name is Philip, not David. And I hope you noticed from the obituary that Philip (not David) Quinn was a professor of engineering at the University of Oregon. Do you really think an engineer could have written all those letters? Or were you in such a hurry to share your ‘discovery’ that you didn’t even see that part?”

  It was a shock to come upon Philip’s name in the middle of these posts. Not just because Jedidiah had guessed correctly, but because I hadn’t heard anyone mention him for a while. People were forgetting him, the way they had forgotten Jane. But Jedidiah never wrote back, maybe driven away by the tongue-lashing, and no one brought up his theory again.

  Ms. Burden knew about the website, and I wondered if she could be Foxtree. Maybe she had written that insulting post to throw Jedidiah, and everyone else, off the track.

  The thread dried up after that. It had been about David’s letters, discussions and speculations about what he’d written, and when the letters stopped coming people seemed to have less to say. Still, there were enough other threads to keep me reading day after day.

  Beatriz got interested in the website as well, and late at night, as we lay in bed, we would talk about what we’d found there. We both wanted to post on the forums but finally decided it was safer not to; there was a chance we’d give something away without meaning to.

  I didn’t want to talk about the noises, especially at night, didn’t want to worry Beatriz any more than she already was. Once, though, she brought them up herself. “Do you think they followed us here?” she asked. “Those sounds?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But where did they come from in the first place?”

  “She called them up. To scare us, to make us tell her what we know about Maeve.”

  “But she’s afraid of them too. I saw her face that first time—she couldn’t have faked that.”

  “Well, maybe she called them up and then couldn’t get rid of them. That’s why she locked them in the basement. And then when we opened the door we let them out, and they followed us home.”

  I shivered. “Called them up how?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, it was your idea. Anyway, she would have said something if she was trying to scare us. Like”—I put on a wavering, spooky voice—“‘Tell me everything, and I’ll make the noises stop.’”

  I’d succeeded in making her laugh, and our talk turned to other things.

  The long formless summer vacation ended and we went back to school. A few months later my birthday came around again, the first one without Philip. I was fourteen now, four years from coming of age and getting the money Philip’s will had promised me. Or maybe I came of age at twenty-one; I’d asked Ms. Burden once but she hadn’t known. I knew one thing, though—I was leaving home as soon as I could.

  Much to my surprise, Esperanza brought out a chocolate cake for me after dinner, lit with fourteen candles. Beatriz had gone in with Amaranth and Semiramis and bought me a beautiful silk scarf patterned with stars—“Like the rain of stars in Ivory Apples,” Beatriz said.

  Ms. Burden glanced up at her sharply. Whenever any of us mentioned Maeve’s book she got a certain look, something like a cop on the verge of wringing a confession from a suspect. We didn’t say anything more about it, though, just talked about my birthday and the scarf and then fell back into our usual silence.

  “Ms. Burden?” Semiramis said a while later.

  Ms. Burden sighed. “I know Ivy calls me that, for her own abstruse reasons, but I would have thought the rest of you might use my first name, Kate. After all, I am your guardian, and we have to get along together.”

  “Kate?” Semiramis said. “Is Aunt Maeve dead?”

  I turned to her, furious that she’d mentioned Maeve. Then I saw how young she was, how saddened and confused by everything that had happened, and a wash of pity swept the anger away. So many people had died in her short life that when she hadn’t seen someone for a while, she just assumed they were dead.

  I glanced at Ms. Burden to see what she’d made of the question. She had that eager cop look again. “No, she isn’t dead,” I said quickly. “We haven’t gone to visit her for a long time, that’s all.”

  “But we’ll see her again, right?”

  “I would love to visit your Aunt Maeve,” Ms. Burden cut in. “Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find out where she lives. I don’t suppose you know.”

  “Of course we do,” Amaranth said. “She lives in the woods.”

  I glared at her. Ms. Burden laughed. “Where in the woods?” she asked.

  “She can’t possibly remember that,” I said. “She was seven or eight when we went there.”

  “I do so remember,” Amaranth said. “This one time, Philip played that CD he liked, Graceland. And I said I liked it too so he played it again, and he told me it was African music. South African music. And when we got to Maeve’s house it ended.”

  “What a smart girl you are, Rantha,” Ms. Burden said.

  Amaranth beamed. Ms. Burden stood and went upstairs, saying nothing. We looked at each other for a while, wondering what she was doing now, until she came back.

  “Forty-four minutes—I looked it up.” Her voice shook a little, a deep anger rumbling beneath her surface calm like an earthquake. “That’s how long Graceland takes. And twice that would be about an hour and a half. You can’t get to Bend in that amount of time, I don’t think. Really, why would you want to lie about this, Ivy?”

  I could have made up something, a lie shoring up another lie. But I felt impatient suddenly, sick of all our games. “Why is this so important? You don’t even know Aunt Maeve.”

  Her eyes glittered strangely, like nailheads lit by the sun. “She wrote Ivory Apples, you stupid girl. And I need to ask her—”

  “Maeve? Our aunt?” I was staring at her, facing her down, so I couldn’t afford to look around at my sisters. I only hoped that Amaranth and Semiramis didn’t understand what we were talking about. “No, she didn’t—Adela Madden wrote that.”

  “You’ve never heard of pseudonyms, have you?”

  “Look, I think I’d know if my own aunt—”

  “All right, that’s enough.” She stood up. “We’re going to take a drive, you and I, and you’re going to show me where she lives.”

  “Aunt Maeve, you mean? I told you, I don’t remember.”

  Semiramis looked up eagerly. “We’re going to see Aunt Maeve?”

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “For one thing, you and Rantha have to go to bed—”

  “Oh, not yet, surely,” Ms. Burden said. “Let’s all go.”

  She sounded like she used to, wild and spontaneous, uncaring of what anyone else would think. It seemed grotesque to me, considering all the things she’d done since, but the others were already shouting with excitement and running to the door.

  We piled into Philip’s car and she made a circuit of all the freeway entrances near our house, asking me if I recognized them. Some of them did seem familiar, at least for a moment or two, but I said I didn’t remember.

  I stayed alert throughout the trip, ready to pinch any one of my sisters if they said anything, but none of them did.

  CHAPTER 12

  MS. BURDEN TOOK US on these drives a couple times a month, all over Eugene and across the river to Springfield. I made the others swear once again not to give anything away and they did, though Semiramis didn’t understand why. “When are we going to visit Aunt Maeve, though?” she asked, and I had to tell her I didn’t know.

  It was around this time that Ms. Burden became crueler toward me, her punishments more frequent. She never said that this was because I wasn’t telling her what she wanted, but she didn’t have to. We both knew she would stop if I answered her questions.

  It felt as if all the masks were off now, as if we’d stripped down to our innermost selves. She’d become the person I’d always known she was. The fact that I’d been right about her was no comfort, though.


  So, for example, the next day she complained that I hadn’t washed my dishes after breakfast. “But Esperanza does that,” I said, puzzled. “When she comes to cook dinner.”

  “Oh, Ivy,” she said. “Why should Esperanza clean up after you, especially when she has so much else to do?”

  “It’s only the dishes. And anyway, it’s her job.”

  She sighed. “I just wish that for once in your life you wouldn’t be so lazy.”

  “Really?” I said. “I’m not the one lying on the couch all day reading. And you don’t wash your dishes either.”

  “That’s enough. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again. I’m taking away your allowance for a week.”

  Week after week, she found some excuse not to give me my allowance. I tried not rising to the bait, tried not saying anything at all, but nothing worked. She would always find some fault, usually one she’d never mentioned before, and my allowance would be gone.

  It wasn’t even all that much, just ten dollars a week. That’s what Philip had given me, though I’d heard around school that kids were getting fifteen and even twenty dollars now. But it meant that I had to ask and sometimes beg if I needed new clothes or a book for school.

  Beatriz saved me here, as she’d done so many times. She got ten dollars too, and she gave me half of it. But we both knew that Ms. Burden could start taking hers away at any time.

  Her punishments became more clever, as if she enjoyed thinking them up. Maybe she did. Once she dropped me off in a sketchy part of town for a dentist appointment and then didn’t come back to pick me up. The office closed for lunch, and I ended up sitting out front as men in old, torn clothes shuffled along the sidewalk, leering at me and making horrifying suggestions.

  When the office opened up again I used their phone to call home. No one answered, and I left a message. Then I sat in a corner and pretended to read their dusty magazines, trying to ignore everyone’s questioning glances. Sometimes that horrible drilling noise came down the hall, starting up with a whine and then fading in and out, like a fly buzzing around the room. Sometimes the door to the hall opened and the receptionist called another patient, bringing with her a bright chemical smell that was starting to make me feel nauseated.