The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Thank you,” said Nora. “I’m tempted to sign up on the spot.”

  “I should have known,” Jeffrey said. “The famous Helen Day Halfway House, Cooking School, Intellectual Salon, and Women’s Shelter strikes again.”

  “Nonsense,” the old woman said. “Nora understands what I mean. Now we are going to talk about my sister Katherine, so you can stop fretting.”

  “Halleluiah.” Jeffrey went to the other sofa and sat down facing them.

  “Did Katherine ever talk to you about her writing?” Nora asked.

  “I can remember her reading some poems to me when she was twelve or thirteen and I was about nine. It was an occasion, because Katherine was always very private about her writing. Not her opinions, mind you. If she thought something was absurd, she let you know. Anyhow, as I was saying, I used to see her writing her poems all the time, and once I asked her if I could read them. No, she said, but I’ll read some of them to you—and she did, two or three short poems, I forget. I didn’t understand a word, and I never asked again.”

  “But later on? When you were both grown up?”

  “By that time, we didn’t talk to each other more than once every couple of months, and all she said about her writing was that she was doing it. She did call to tell me she was going to Shorelands. She was pleased about that, and she was going to stay with me for a couple of nights when she left. I was up here, and Katherine lived in New York—by herself, of course, in Greenwich Village, a tiny apartment on Patchin Place. I went there two weeks after I came back home from Shorelands. I knew she was dead, I hope you take my word for that.”

  “What did you think had happened to her?” Nora asked.

  “Years later, that silly old windbag Georgina Weatherall pretended to think Katherine had run away with some drawing of hers and changed her name to keep out of sight. What a story! Katherine never stole anything in her life. Why should she, she never wanted anything. It just made Georgina look better than having one of her guests die so far off in the woods that you could never find her body.”

  “You’re positive that’s what happened.”

  “I knew it the second I saw that ridiculous woman. Katherine would have known just how to ruffle her feathers, and the last thing that kind of woman can stand is the thought that someone is laughing at her. It was exactly like my sister to provoke a fool like that, and then decamp a split second before she was ordered off the premises. It was just her bad luck to die in the midst of this particular jaunt, so that we could never give her a burial. Her heart caught up with her at the wrong time, that’s all.”

  “How did Georgina know to call you after she disappeared?”

  “Katherine gave her my number. Who else’s? She wouldn’t have given her Charles’s number, or Grace and Effie’s, heaven knows. Katherine always liked me more than any of the rest of them. I want to show you some things.”

  She stood up with a rattle and rustle of the necklaces and went through the arch. Nora and Jeffrey heard her giving orders in the kitchen, then the slow march of her footsteps up a staircase.

  “What do you think she wants to show me?” Nora asked.

  “Do you think I ever know what my mother is going to do?”

  “What’s wrong with Grace and Effie?”

  “They’re too normal for her. Besides, they were scandalized that she went off and worked for Lincoln Chancel. They thought it wasn’t good enough for her. My aunts don’t much like what she’s doing now, either. They don’t think it’s very ladylike.”

  “Hard to see how it could be any more ladylike,” Nora said.

  He smiled. “You haven’t met Grace and Effie.”

  “How did they wind up with this notebook, or whatever it was, the one that caused all the trouble?”

  “My mother used to keep her sister’s papers in the basement here, but after she had a couple of bedrooms put in downstairs, she didn’t have much room left. Grace and Effie agreed to take them—four cardboard boxes, mostly drafts of stories and poems. I looked through them a long time ago.”

  “No novel.”

  “No.” He looked back toward the arch and the kitchen full of women. “By the way, despite the way she talks about Lincoln Chancel, or even Alden and Daisy, my mother’s still loyal to them. Don’t mention what we were talking about with Ev Tidy, okay? She’d just get angry.”

  “I saw the look you gave me.”

  “Remember, when she stopped working for them, she recommended Maria, who was about eighteen and just off the boat. Maria hardly even spoke English then, but they hired her anyhow. They hired me, too. She thinks the Chancels have done a lot for our family.”

  “I never did understand why Alden and Daisy fired her,” Nora said. “She was like a member of the family.”

  “I don’t think they did. She quit when she had enough money saved up to start this business.”

  The treads of the staircase creaked.

  “I’m sure Davey told me that they fired her. Losing her was very painful for him.”

  “How old was he, four? He didn’t know what was really going on.” He gave her a tight little smile as his mother’s footsteps came down the stairs. “Too bad they didn’t send him out to Long Island. It might have done him some good.”

  “Might have done him a lot of good,” Nora said, and turned toward the kitchen to see Helen Day, flanked by three of her assistants, leaning over a copper vat. She inhaled deeply, considered, and spoke to an anxious-looking girl who flashed away and returned with a cup of brown powder, a trickle of which she poured into the vat.

  The long day caught up with Nora, and she felt an enormous yawn take possession of her. “How rude,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Helen Day marched back through the arch, apologizing for the delay. She sat a few feet away from Nora and lowered two objects onto the length of brown corduroy between them. Nora looked down at a framed photograph on top of a spring binder so old that its pebbled black surface had faded to an uneven shade of gray. “Now. Look at that picture.”

  Nora picked it up. Two little girls in frocks, one of them about three years old and the other perhaps eight, stood smiling up at the photographer in a sunny garden. The smaller girl held a doll-sized china teacup on a matching saucer. Both girls, clearly sisters, had bobbed dark hair and endearing faces. The older one was smiling only with her mouth.

  “Can you guess who they are?” asked Helen Day.

  “You and Katherine,” Nora said.

  “I was playing tea party in the garden, and wonder of wonders, Katherine happened along and indulged me. My father came outside to memorialize the moment, no doubt to prove to Katherine at some later date that she was once a child after all. And she knows what he’s doing, you can see it in her face. She can see right through him.”

  Nora looked down at the intense self-sufficiency in the eight-year-old girl’s eyes. This child would be able to see right through most people. “Did you find this picture in her apartment?”

  “No, that’s where I found the manuscript. This picture was on her desk in Gingerbread, and it was the first thing I saw when I went there. Good heavens, I said to myself, look at that. You know what it means, don’t you?”

  Nora had no idea what it meant, but Helen Day’s eyes and voice made clear what it meant to her. “Your sister felt close to you,” she said.

  The old woman reared back with a rustle of necklaces and pointed a wide pink forefinger at Nora’s throat. “Grand-slam home run. She felt closer to me than anyone else in our whole, all-balled-up family. Whose address and telephone number did she give in case of emergency? Mine. Whose picture did she bring to Shorelands and put right in the place of honor on her desk? Mine. It wasn’t a picture with stuffy Charles, was it?”

  Because the finger was still aimed at her throat, Nora shook her head.

  “No. And it wasn’t a picture of those two idiots who never read a book in their lives, Effie and Grace, not on your life. She never felt any closer to those three tha
n she did to strangers on the street. At first, I couldn’t understand Katherine going off and leaving our picture behind, but when I noticed she had left her silk robe and a bunch of books, too, I saw what she was doing. She knew I’d be coming to get everything for her. She left those things behind for me, because she knew I’d take care of them for her. And I bet you can guess why.”

  Again Nora gave the answer Helen Day waited to hear. “Because you understood her better than the others.”

  “Of course I did. She never made any sense to them her whole life long. It was like Jeffrey with the Deodatos. I love them, and they’re wonderful people, but they never could figure out some of the things Jeffrey did. People like Jeffrey and my sister always color outside the lines, isn’t that right, Jeffrey?”

  “If you say so, Mom,” Jeffrey said. “But you’ve colored outside the lines a few times yourself.”

  “That’s what I’m saying! A couple of times in my life people said I was crazy. Charles told me I was crazy. Going with Lincoln Chancel! Giving up my son, and not even to him, but to people he thought were inferior! You must be as crazy as Katherine was, he said. Well, I said, in that case I’m not doing too badly. You can bet he changed his tune when Jeffrey got his scholarship to Harvard and did so well there. When people don’t have a prayer of understanding you, the first thing they do is call you crazy. Grace and Effie still think I’m crazy, but I’m doing a lot better than they are. They thought Katherine was crazy, too. She embarrassed them, just like I did when I went to work for the Chancels.”

  She folded her arms over her chest in a clatter of coins and beads and gave Nora a flat black glare. “My sisters actually thought Katherine ran away with that drawing, changed her name, and lived off the money she got for it. Know what they told me? They said Katherine never had a bad heart in the first place. Dr. Montross made a mistake when she was a little girl, and she’s had special treatment ever since. Stole that drawing and took off, changed her name, now she’s laughing at us all. They said Charles changed his name, didn’t he? Didn’t you? they said. Wasn’t Mr. Day you married, was it? I said I never changed my name, man I worked for did that, and when he spoke, you listened. All I did was get used to it, and it was only my married name anyway. All that writing, they said, that was crazy, too, but it wasn’t, was it, Jeffrey?”

  “Not at all,” Jeffrey said.

  “She was invited to Shorelands. Nobody says those other people were crazy. And Dr. Montross wasn’t a fraud. Katherine had rheumatic fever when she was two, and her heart could have given out at any time. We all knew that. She died. Grace and Effie said, You never found her, did you, and neither did all those policemen, but they didn’t see what it was like. You could have sent twenty men into those woods for a month, and they wouldn’t find everything.”

  “If she wanted to get out, why go through the woods instead of taking some easier way?”

  “Didn’t want to go past Main House,” said Helen Day. “Katherine didn’t want anyone to see her. And you know, maybe she did get to the road. Maybe she even got a ride and a room for the night, or took the train somewhere, but her heart stopped and she died. Because she never got in touch with me about her things. I waited two weeks, but neither Katherine nor anyone else called me, and I knew.”

  “But your brother and your two older sisters didn’t agree? They thought she might still be alive?”

  “Charles didn’t. He was sure Katherine had died, just like me. Dr. Montross told our parents that it would be a miracle if Katherine lived to be thirty, and she was twenty-nine that year.”

  “And Grace and Effie?”

  “They knew it, too, but they changed their minds when that book came out, almost saying in black and white that Katherine took that picture from the dining room. Katherine couldn’t do anything right, as far as they were concerned. They never had a good word to say for her until they started going through her papers before throwing them out—papers I gave them for safekeeping—and saw some scribbles on a few pieces of paper that reminded them of a movie they didn’t even like! They still thought she was crazy, but they didn’t mind the idea of making some money off of her. Old fools. Katherine didn’t write that book, Hugo Driver did. If you want to know what my sister was writing, look in that folder.”

  74

  WITH A RUSH of expectant excitement, Nora opened the spring binder. Jeffrey stood up to get a better look.

  UNWRITTEN WORDS by Katherine Mannheim 15 Patchin Place, #3 New York, New York (copy 2)

  She turned over the title page to find a poem titled “Dialogue of the Latter Days,” heavily edited in green ink. Her heart sank. This was what Katherine Mannheim had been writing? The poem continued on to the second page. She flipped ahead and saw that it took up twenty-three pages. “Second Dialogue,” also heavily edited, ran for twenty-six pages. Two more “dialogues” of thirty to forty pages apiece filled out the book.

  “It’s one long poem, or so I’ve decided, divided up into those dialogues. She had two copies, and made changes to both of them. She must have taken the first copy to Shorelands to spend the month revising it there, and I think she was planning to type up a third and final copy with all the revisions when she got back.”

  She had been “unwriting” the Unwritten Words through a lengthy, painstaking series of revisions. “This was on her desk?”

  “In her apartment, right next to her typewriter, along with a big folder full of earlier versions. The one she took to Shorelands was lost along with everything else she put into her suitcase.”

  “You never showed it to me,” Jeffrey said.

  “You weren’t here all that often, and I wasn’t done looking at it. I always had trouble understanding the things Katherine wrote, and this was harder than anything else, especially with all those scribbles. After a couple of years, I began to find my way. I saw—I think I saw—that she was writing about her death. About living with her death, the way she did for so long. If you had asked me, I would have said that she never thought about it because she didn’t seem to. Katherine wasn’t a brooding sort of person at all, but of course she thought about it all the time. That’s why she wrote the way she did, and why she lived the way she did. What I think is, my sister Katherine was a saint. A real-life saint.”

  Startled, Nora looked up from the book. “A saint?”

  Helen Day smiled and glanced down at the photograph. “Katherine was the most sensitive, most intelligent, most dedicated person I’ve ever known, and deep down inside herself the purest. What most people call religion didn’t affect her at all, even though we were raised Catholic. You’ll find more spiritual people outside churches than in them. Katherine couldn’t be bothered with the unimportant things most people spend their whole lives worrying about. She knew how to have a good time, she sometimes shocked ordinary-thinking people, but she had focus. When I take on new girls here, I look to see if they have at least a little bit of what Katherine had, and if they do, welcome aboard. You do, you have some of it.”

  “Well, a lot of ordinary-thinking people might think I’m a little bit crazy,” Nora said, thinking of her gleeful demons.

  “Don’t you believe it. You’ve been hurt. I can see that. No wonder, considering what happened to you. Here you are, chasing around Massachusetts instead of going back home, if you still have a home to go back to.” She looked over at her son. “Alden Chancel might not think you’re the right wife for his son, but you’re hardly crazy. In fact, what I think, you’re one of those people who take in more than most of us.”

  “You’re giving me too much credit,” Nora said.

  “You’re a person who wants to know what’s true. When I look back, it seems to me that most of what I learned when I was little was all wrong. Lies were stuffed down our throats day and night. Lies about men and women, about the proper way to live, about our own feelings, and I don’t believe too much has changed. It’s still important to find out what’s really true, and if you didn’t think that was important, you wou
ldn’t be here right now.”

  Yes, Nora thought, I do think that it’s important to find out what is really true.

  Helen Day checked her watch. “I have to make sure everything’s all right before I put in an appearance at the Asia Society. I hope you’ll think about everything I said.”

  “Thank you for talking to me.”

  All three stood up. “You’ll be at the Northampton Hotel?”

  “Yes,” Jeffrey said.

  Helen Day had not taken her eyes off Nora. “If you’re still up around ten, would you give me a call? I want to talk about something with you, but I have to think it over first.”

  “Something to do with your sister?”

  The old woman slowly shook her head. “While I’m thinking about my question, you should think about your husband. You’re stronger than Davey, and he needs your help.”

  “What’s this ‘question’ of yours?” Jeffrey asked.

  She turned to him and took his hand. “Jeffrey, you’ll come here tomorrow, won’t you? We’ll have time for a real conversation. If you turn up around eight, you can help with the driving, too. We have to pick up a lot of fresh vegetables.”

  “You want me to drive one of the vans while Maya and Sophie sit in the back and make fun of me.”

  “You enjoy it. Come over tomorrow.”

  “Should I bring Nora?”

  Helen Day had been moving them slowly toward the front door, and at this question she met Nora’s eyes with a look as significant as a touch. “That’s up to her.” She let them out into the warm night.

  75

  “YOU LIKED HER, didn’t you?”

  “Who wouldn’t like her?” Nora asked. “She’s extraordinary.”

  Jeffrey was driving them down Main Street, where restaurant windows glowed and gatherings of three and four drifted in and out of pools of light cast by the streetlamps.

  “I know, but she drives a lot of people up the wall. She makes up her mind about you as soon as she meets you, and if she takes to you, you’re invited in. If not, you get the big freeze. I was almost certain she’d warm to you right away, but . . .” He glanced at her. “I guess you see why I couldn’t say much about her beforehand.”