Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

  Alfred nodded with pride and then looked out the small kitchen window and sighed. “If only all the guests tonight should be as grateful as you two.”

  Her heart leapt again as she thought of the party, of all the people milling about the lawn, asking questions, staring at her with sad, pitying eyes.

  First her son is born deaf, and then her husband dies of tuberculosis. What a shame.

  They would think those things and then go back to the party before the champagne made them forget their names and fall asleep. The next day, they would wake up with terrible headaches and then take the train back into the city to gossip about the wedding and what a fantastic party it was, but did you see the horrid flower arrangements?

  As Alfred busied himself with pulling out linens and china for the pre-wedding afternoon tea, John and Amelia sat in silence. She reached down and grabbed his tiny hand, never wanting to let go.

  The house around them vibrated with energy, but they were calm and safe in the tiny kitchen. She knew it was a moment she would remember forever. A time of peace. Peace that she knew would end soon.

  CHAPTER 4

  ERIN

  The summer I turned fifteen, my parents took my sister, Katie, and me up to Powers Lake for a week-long visit with our grandmother. I’ll never forget the moment of panic, and feelings of abandonment, as they drove away after what felt like an unceremonious drop-off on the front porch. From our teenage vantage point (Katie was thirteen), they nearly pushed us out of the car without stopping.

  Katie and I shared a twin bed covered in an enormous crocheted doily and listened to our grandmother snore each night through the thin walls. She did let us eat Cocoa Krispies for breakfast each morning, and we spent every afternoon sunbathing on the green Astroturf-covered pier, listening to the pink boombox I had gotten for my birthday. We only moved to either flip the cassette tape over or momentarily jump into the lake to cool off.

  After a long day at the lake, we would walk home on the gravel road, our sandals flipping and flopping as we tried to avoid any rocks sharp enough to poke through the rubber. Our grandmother would be waiting for us, wearing knit pants even in the summer heat, and make us dinner. She cooked things like sloppy joes and stuffed peppers—really, anything with ground beef and a sauce component. She seemed happy to have someone else to cook for on a regular basis, as our grandfather had died ten years before.

  By the end of the week, when our parents came to pick us up, they were shocked when they had to peel us away from the pier and when we asked our mother to make us shepherd’s pie for dinner.

  Now I swallowed hard as I pulled up to my grandmother’s house and thought of that visit and the way that everything then seemed beautiful and sparkling with excitement. About how it took so little to make us so happy and how it was so easy to feel carefree. It was a feeling I wasn’t sure I could ever recapture. I was about to turn the car off and wait on the front porch for my mother when my phone buzzed with a text from her: Got hung up at home helping your father look for his reading glasses. Will be thirty minutes late. I sighed and sat back, cranking up the air-conditioning as the autumn sun beat down on the windshield. I glanced over at the yellowed envelope full of pictures sitting on the passenger seat. I reached for it and slid a finger under the envelope flap, feeling the remnants of sticky sealant.

  I slowly pulled out a stack of black-and-white photographs. They were all different sizes, and some slid down into the space between the console and my seat. I flipped through the ones still in my hand. Most were family portraits, with the people dressed in formal garb, frowning at the camera. One photo, on the lawn in front of a grand Queen Anne mansion, had a mother, a father, and what seemed to be three daughters. I turned it over and someone had written: Hoppe family, 1908. Monarch Manor. The picture was too faded and grainy to make out any of their faces, as I searched for any family resemblance from what I assumed were my long-dead ancestors.

  I put the photos back into the envelope and fished around in between my seat and the console for the photos that had fallen. I extracted one, which was of a party on the lawn of what appeared to be Monarch Manor again, with white tables and women with parasols scattered around the lawn. The back read: Afternoon Tea. I set it aside and felt around, my fingers locating one more photo. I slowly lifted it up.

  It was another family portrait on the lawn of the estate, but the quality was much better than the others. It was of the Hoppes again, although everyone was older. The back of the photo dated it as fourteen years later, in 1922. There were children and men in the photo—the husbands and children of the sisters, I assumed. The girls were perched grimly on their mothers’ laps, enormous bows decorating their heads, with little saddle shoes on their feet. There was only one boy, on the lap of a woman on the end with light-colored hair that fell in ringlets around her shoulders. She held on tightly to the boy, as if he was about to scamper away, a gesture I recognized from when we tried to get Will to pose for a picture. The Mom Death Grip, as I called it.

  I looked at the boy’s face, and the breath escaped my lungs. My fingers trembled as I brought the picture closer to my face. He stared at the camera with Bambi eyes, round cheeks, and lips that pulled down. His ears stuck out slightly, and his mouth was parted, as though he was saying, “Cheese.” His shoulders sagged and his legs were bowed toward each other, the soles of his feet together.

  He looked so much like Will, he could have passed for his carbon copy.

  I turned the photo over again rapidly, reading the inscription again, hoping I’d missed a name or some identifying marks. But as I first saw, it only had the date.

  I looked at the mother again, who I realized looked nothing like me, for she was far, far prettier, and then back to the boy.

  “Hello there. What’s your name?” I whispered to him, a smile creeping over my face.

  I was pulled away from the photo by the sound of tires squealing along gravel as my mother raced up the driveway and pulled her motorcycle next to my car.

  “Remind me never to ask your father if he needs help with anything before I leave the house again,” she said as she threw up her hands. She took a deep breath and ran a hand through her short silver hair as I climbed out of my car, photo still in my hand. “Let’s get to it. Your father and I have fish-fry plans tonight.” She turned and trudged toward the front door.

  “Wait, I found something.” I held out the photograph of Will’s doppelgänger as she turned around. “Do you have any idea who this is?” I said as I pointed toward the family.

  My mom rubbed her tanned face and grabbed the photo out of my hand, fast enough that I automatically reached for it again. She turned it over with a flash and then back to the front again and gave a low whistle.

  She pointed to one of the little girls with the bows. “Well, that might be my grandmother, Emily. I’ve seen pictures of her as a child.” She smiled. “Pretty neat.”

  “What’s the story about the house? I never knew we had money in our family.” I pointed to the Queen Anne in the background.

  “Yup. I thought I told you this.” She cocked her head to the side. “They had one of those big ol’ houses on Geneva Lake. They made all their money in beer or whiskey or some kind of alcohol before Prohibition kind of put a damper on that party. And then the Depression happened, and . . .” She held her palms in the air.

  I slowly nodded. Lake Geneva was fifteen minutes away, and I knew it had a deep history of old mansions and fancy, historic family estates. I just never imagined that someone in our family might have owned one of those grand residences.

  “What about him? Do you know who he is?” I pointed to the little boy who looked so much like Will.

  She peered closely at the photo, holding it two inches from her face. “Whoa.” She looked from the photo to me. “Guess the family gene pool is a strong one. He looks just like our boy.”

  “No kidding,” I said as I took the photo from her. “I’d love to know his name.”

  “We
ll, I might have an old family tree somewhere. Or”—she swept a hand toward the house—“we might find one inside. A needle in a very, very large haystack.” She cracked a smile, her lined cheeks forming an accordion across her face. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”

  I held the photo in my hand and stared at the little boy for a few moments longer before I carefully placed it back into the envelope with the other pictures in my glove box, shielded from the sunlight.

  * * *

  Several hours later, we had gone through ten boxes full of old Christmas decorations. They all seemed fairly worthless, just boxes and boxes of broken ornaments, random ornament hooks, and cheap stockings with the embellishments half-missing. The find of a pair of 1950s reindeer that resembled the Claymation Rudolph cheered us momentarily, but then it was back to plastic metallic garlands and fake evergreen wreaths.

  I offered to get lunch, and my mother grunted a yes. I drove down the road and pulled my car into the first sandwich shop I saw. On the way in, I paused on the sidewalk to enjoy the cool breeze off the lake. After being stuck in the rapidly warming house all morning, my hair was finally beginning to lift off the back of my sweaty neck.

  I grabbed sandwiches inside the Sittin’ Bull, a tiny shop with two tables and a lunch counter, conveniently forgetting that my mother had asked for extra onions on her sub, as I could only imagine what that might smell like after a couple of hours in the house. I turned to my car when a mother with twins casually walked past me. Two identical toddlers walked on either side of her, adorable boys wearing jeans, a continuous stream of chatting coming from them. I caught the mom’s eye and smiled as she walked past. She flashed me back an easy grin and continued walking.

  My face grew warm and I slowly lowered myself onto a nearby bench. Without consciously meaning to do so, I allowed myself to sink into my thoughts of the future: one where everything I worked toward, pushed for, prayed about, had come true.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Charlotte, Will, and me walking down this street, hand in hand, the twins chattering away, holding a conversation with each other, while I window-shopped.

  “Please, Mom. Please can we throw bread crumbs to the fish in the lake?” Will would ask, his eyes bright and clear.

  I would roll my eyes in mock surrender. “Sure. Only for a moment, though.”

  “C’mon, Will! Race you to the pier!” Charlotte would say and they would shout and shriek all the way to the water as I laughed and chased after their tiny figures. In this universe, I didn’t have to worry about therapy, meltdowns, or the phrase “Calm body.” A world where I could hear his voice, where I didn’t have to feel guilty about constantly putting Charlotte second out of survival. We could simply enjoy a beautiful fall day together.

  A car horn brought me out of my fantasy and I wiped the tears from my eyes. Allowing myself to go to that place of What If brought me both joy and pain—a momentary relief from the present but an even harder fall to reality, back to a world where Will refused to take a school picture, so the dual frame I had sat empty on one end, an everyday reminder of the fact that the smallest of accomplishments still seemed so far out of our grasp.

  “It’s just a picture,” Luke had said with a shrug before he turned back to his laptop after I had cried to him on the evening of Picture Day.

  Yes, just a picture, I thought. Just a picture. Sometimes it was the smallest cuts, the nearly invisible paper cuts, that stung the most. Luke was practical, able to compartmentalize it all, a skill I often wished I had. Then, I wouldn’t have to feel each setback so deeply that it nearly took my breath away. I wanted him to understand that everything felt like a test, one that I kept failing. A test that showed me every day how far the divide was between the mother I was and the mother Will and Charlotte deserved.

  On the bench next to Powers Lake, I tried to take a deep breath and remind myself that we couldn’t give up hope that someday things would be easier, that Will would be happier. That it would be a When, not a What If, yet my affirmations fell around my shoulders like dried leaves, crumbling at the slightest bit of wind. I felt as though I had to keep pushing, that I owed it to him, even though part of me whispered that it was hurting all of us much more than it was helping.

  * * *

  I walked in the door to my house that night only fifteen minutes after Luke had put the kids to bed. I planned on escaping Powers Lake early enough to kiss the twins good night, but I had ended up driving around nearby Geneva Lake, trying to catch a glimpse of the historic mansions to determine which had been Monarch Manor. Before I knew it, the sky was turning orange and pink. And unfortunately, I hit rush-hour traffic on the way home, making the usual ninety-minute drive a three-hour trek.

  “How was work?” I asked as I sank down on the couch next to Luke.

  “Good. Exhausting. The usual.” He was promoted to a senior sales manager at the software company Lumitech two years ago. It was a title that meant he usually wasn’t home until after bedtime each night.

  “Kids tucked in?” I asked.

  He nodded and muted ESPN. “They’re wiped out. My mom took them to the park, out for ice cream, and to the petting zoo after school.”

  I smiled. Meredith had an insurmountable level of energy, especially for a woman who was nearly seventy. “And both school drop-off and pickup went fine?” Will and Charlotte attended different schools for kindergarten. Charlotte at our home elementary school and Will at a different school ten minutes away, at the other end of the district, that housed his special education program.

  Luke’s eyes twinkled as he stifled a laugh. “Sure.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, so what happened?”

  I exhaled loudly as Luke told me that his mother took a different way to school than Will’s familiar route. He started screaming and trying to unbuckle his car seat, kicking the window so hard Meredith thought it was going to shatter. By the time they reached school, he was hysterical and they were both drenched in sweat.

  “Of course, she said, ‘It was a minor tantrum, but it’s fine!’ after she told me the story,” Luke said with a chuckle.

  I could just hear Meredith saying those words in a voice about three octaves too high.

  “Her time with Charlotte went well,” he continued. “She volunteered in the school library as planned, and loved helping the class pick out books.”

  I nodded, folding my hands in my lap. My constant guilt was slightly assuaged by the thought that Charlotte got some special time with her grandmother, and vice versa.

  “Look what book Charlotte chose from the library.” Luke pointed to the coffee table.

  “The Velveteen Rabbit.” I said the title as I picked up the book to look at the familiar cover. I ran a finger over the lettering. I used to read it to the twins when they were younger, sometimes what felt like a hundred times a day. I had identified with the appearance of the Skin Horse: patchy, worn, and looking not long for this world. I couldn’t remember the last time I had picked the book up, but I loved that Charlotte knew, that she remembered.

  “Did you guys make a lot of headway at the house?” he asked, his eyes back on his laptop.

  “Some. After the Christmas decorations, we did find an old box of McCall’s magazines from the 1950s, which was kind of cool. But I kept thinking about that little boy in the photo.” I had texted Luke a picture of him with the caption: Will? Time Traveler?

  I stopped as a mosquito landed on my knee. I swatted at it and a dot of blood appeared next to the dead insect. One of the downsides to living in such an old house was almost nonexistent foundation sealant, which led to an interesting first month in the house. I learned all about house centipedes, giant mosquitos, carpenter bees, and the nesting habits of mice. “A worthy price to pay,” I remember telling Luke that first year. “I don’t care what creature appears next; you will carry me out of this house in a coffin.” He thought I was being dramatic, but I meant it.

  I waited for Luke to ask me more about the photo or want to see it ag
ain, but his gaze remained on his computer. I wanted to reach out, touch his arm, and try to engage him, for him to share my curiosity, but I stayed quiet and trained my eyes on the television. Clearly, the picture didn’t capture his interest in the way it did for me. It was an anecdote, an interesting fact, to him. But it felt much more than that to me, and I didn’t have the energy to explain all of that to him—to try to convince him of what I wanted him to feel. What I thought he should feel. Instead, I kept it inside, safe and protected, importance unquestioned.

  Later, I crawled into bed with Luke but found I couldn’t sleep. Visions of the little boy in the photograph, and Monarch Manor, whispered across every corner of my brain, until I finally rolled over and grabbed my phone off the nightstand. It was usually used in desperation at 4:00 am when Will would wander into our bedroom. YouTube was a blessing in those wee morning hours that allowed me to get an extra hour of sleep.

  This time, I didn’t type in Thomas the Train or Sesame Street videos, but a search for the estate and the Hoppe family. A Web site pulled up a variety of grainy photos of the house from a distance, presumably taken by someone standing with their back to the lake, maybe on one of the piers. The Queen Anne structure had a turret that reached high into the sky and seemed to touch the clouds. The roof had overlapping shingles set in a fish scale pattern, and the wide front porch with furniture seemed to beckon me to Come. Sit, even over a hundred years later.

  A small paragraph detailed the origins of the estate: Monarch Manor was built by beer baron Conrad Hoppe, as a gift for his Irish immigrant bride, Mary. The couple had three daughters: Eleanor, Amelia, and Jane. The house hosted many parties over the years, most notably the Fourth of July Party each year. It also was home to the wedding of the youngest daughter, Jane. During the wedding reception, Amelia Hoppe Cartwright and her five-year-old disabled (deaf) son, John, drowned in a bizarre accident.