Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

  “I know, honey. Please, please, just let him be okay,” I whispered.

  By the time the second verse began, he shut his eyes. I dropped Charlotte’s hand and stood up quickly, tunnel vision forming. I couldn’t see anything but Will up on stage. I stepped over all the parents in my row, not hearing their grunts of annoyance as I tripped in front of their recording phones. Finally, I made it to the side of the gym and half-crouched as I got to the front row. Will had opened his eyes and seen me approach, and we made eye contact for a brief moment. In that split second, his shoulders seemed to relax a bit.

  He is going to be fine. He will calm down now, I thought as I watched his face.

  And he might have been, if the song hadn’t ended right then and the crowd burst into loud applause. Applause to show how proud they were of the children, applause to boost their confidence.

  And yet, as with most things that other children loved, Will hated it. He let out a high-pitched scream of terror and clamped his hands over his ears before collapsing on the floor. I tore up to the front of the stage, my heartbeat in my ears, my face turning red, as I scooped him up into my arms. I don’t remember how I got outside of the gym with him, as everything went blank, but I did see Luke and Charlotte come out seconds later.

  Will was still screaming in my arms, his body shaking in terror. “It’s okay. You’re safe,” I whispered to him, pressing my arms tightly around him. I slid down onto the floor, curling him into my lap, rocking him gently.

  Charlotte came over and put a hand on her brother’s face. He stopped screaming once he felt her touch, although his body was still racked with sobs. I looked up and then saw that Charlotte, too, had started to cry.

  “I’m sad,” she said with ragged breaths. “He’s scared.”

  I reached a hand out and pulled her toward me, too, and hugged both of them.

  Will’s teacher, Miss Ball, came out of the gym and found us in the hallway. “Poor guy,” she said with a sympathetic frown. “It’s so loud in there. Who can blame him?” Her long blond hair twisted around her shoulders like a waterfall.

  “So loud,” Luke repeated woodenly. His cheeks creased as he rubbed a hand across his face.

  “He did great in the rehearsals yesterday, so we were hoping for the best,” she added. She looked at me. “I’m so sorry he’s upset.”

  “Me too,” I said. I pressed him more tightly to me as I stood up, holding him to my chest. I reached down and put a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. I looked to Luke. “Did you get our coats? I think we should go home.”

  I saw him hesitate before he went back into the gym, as though he had assumed Will could rejoin the group or that we should try to stay. It was forever our dilemma: How hard do we push? But this time, I knew that pushing was a terrible idea.

  “Good-bye, Will. See you tomorrow,” Miss Ball said as she leaned over, Will’s head still on my shoulder.

  We walked out of the school in silence. As I buckled Will into his car seat, smoothing back his sweaty hair, I wondered where we had gone wrong. Was it too much to expect him to be in a recital? Was that fair to him? Was it fair to assume he couldn’t do something?

  I knew that we shouldn’t set him up to fail, but I had no idea how to do that when I didn’t know where the goalposts were most days. If I had any sense of what was possible and what wasn’t, I could make that choice. But even after five years, I still didn’t know what to expect from my son.

  On the way home, I heard my phone beeping with a text message, and I ignored it. I ignored it on the chance it was my mom or my sister, asking how the recital went. Finally, after the twins were in bed, I looked at it.

  It was my mom, but the message wasn’t at all about the recital. It read: Going through one of the boxes from Grandma’s house that we set aside. Found something interesting. Call me.

  “Well?” I said as she picked up.

  “What took you so long?” my mom replied. I took a deep breath, prepared to tell her what happened, but she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Remember all those boxes that we set aside, filled with what we laughed were ‘memories’?”

  I grunted in response. Most of the boxes contained things like old newspaper articles from the local Powers Lake Gazette, with articles circled about how such-and-such distant relative had completed their first marathon or how their pig had come in fourth in the Walworth County Fair’s 4-H competition.

  “Well, at the bottom of one I found an old prayer book that belonged to my grandmother Emily. It’s covered in ratty white satin material, and I thought it was blank, but just as I was about to toss it back in the box, a newspaper article came fluttering out of it.”

  “Okay?” I closed my eyes and sank back down on the pillow, trying to push away my annoyance that she didn’t remember the recital, even though I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Well, dear daughter, the article is dated May 30, 1923, two days after the accident with Amelia and John. And while most of it is just a recap of what happened, there is one quote from the article by someone who claims to have seen her on the train platform the next day, on a train bound for the Big Apple.” Her voice ticked up in triumph as she finished.

  “New York? Really?” I sat up and rubbed my forehead. “No, that can’t be true.”

  “You said there were rumors that she jumped and took the kid with her, right? Maybe she had to get rid of him and run away to New York. Probably had a boyfriend out there, secret lover, the whole shebang,” my mom said. “It makes sense.”

  I thought about it for a moment, the idea that she staged the whole accident to run away with a secret boyfriend, and again my gut said, No. She didn’t do that. “Well, people say lots of things. Who knows? Who was this that said they saw her?”

  “Hang on.” I heard rustling in the background as she muttered to herself. “A . . . Georgina Lindemann. Listed as a close friend of the Cartwright family. And a Matthew Cottingsley was quoted as saying, ‘I simply can’t believe that Amelia and John are gone. I still hold out hope that they are alive, somewhere. ’ And then—get this—it says: ‘When reached for a comment, Mr. and Mrs. Hoppe declined to comment.’ Sure sounds like they think she did it, too.”

  I pressed my lips together for a moment before I exhaled loudly. “So what? It doesn’t mean anything.”

  My mom chuckled. “Whatever you say, kiddo. Just thought you would want to know. The bigger question is: Why would someone keep it? Seems like a pretty weird thing to hang on to, especially if the family had no official comment, right? Listen, kiddo, I have to go. But just wanted to tell you the news.”

  After I hung up, I searched for Matthew Cottingsley, Lake Geneva on my phone. I quickly learned that his family was one of the first investors in the Cottingsley Tool Company, which later became a major hardware chain. His family had an estate on the north shore of the lake called Cottingsley Glen, which was ravaged by fire in the 1950s.

  At the end of one article, one particular fact made me swallow hard: Matthew Cottingsley never married, as it was rumored his true love was his childhood sweetheart, Amelia Hoppe, a widow who died in a boating accident with her young son.

  I slowly put my phone down and looked out the window at the ancient maple tree in the front yard, watching the leaves sway in the cool fall breeze as I wondered if Matthew ever released his hope that Amelia and John were alive or if he had reason to believe they had survived the accident.

  I then looked up Georgina Lindemann, the close family friend who claimed to have seen Amelia on the train. I learned that her husband came from New York society, old money, and owned half of the city. When I clicked on the image search, the first photo that came up was of her and Margaret Cartwright at a ladies’ tea. The way they stood together, hips touching, made me believe that they were, in fact, best friends. I imagined that Georgina must have known Amelia well, or at least well enough to recognize her easily.

  How could it be a case of mistaken identity if Georgina was Amelia’s mother-in-law’s best
friend?

  I stood up and pulled open the front door, the old wood creaking as it always did, and stepped out onto the crooked front porch. The air had the unmistakably crisp autumn smell of crinkled leaves and browning leaves. The streetlights illuminated the sidewalks, and I watched as the fallen leaves danced down the street with each kiss of wind. I sat down in my porch swing, making a note again to ask Luke to bring it inside before winter came. I wrapped my gray cardigan tighter around my waist, and I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, trying to make sense of what my mother told me.

  CHAPTER 13

  AMELIA

  It was sounds that kept Amelia alive and connected to the world during the summer of 1918. She spent two months in her bedroom at Monarch Manor, the window open and the lake breeze flowing through her room that held the smell of sickness no matter how windy the day.

  The sounds began each morning as the sun would barely begin to peek over the horizon, of the engineers as they gathered on the white piers. She would already be awake, staring at the grooves on her bedroom ceiling, waiting for them. Patrick would always be first, grunting orders with his thick Irish brogue, his voice still heavy with sleep. She would hear the shoveling of coal, of the metal tip being thrust into the pile and depositing it into the yacht’s engine with a rat-a-tat-tat of spilling rocks. Soon she would smell the fire as the engine was lit and then hear the testing of the whistle, a low, sweet tone that woke everyone else in the house.

  She could picture it all in her mind, the white pier gradually illuminating with the brilliant yellows and oranges of the sunrise, first lighting the lake and then softly moving across the white boards of the pier and then, finally, across the Monarch Princesses slowly bobbing in the water. She could hear all of it, picture it as though she were there, but she couldn’t see any of it. Nor did she see anything else but the ceiling tiles—there were exactly forty-four of them—and anything else she could spot if she turned her head to the right or left.

  She didn’t see anything for two months, almost the entire summer, when she lay in her room, sick from influenza when she was six months pregnant.

  She had first felt ill when she and Henry rode the train up to the estate for the weekend, after he was done with work for the day at the bank. As the train listed from side to side, she suddenly felt hot, like her insides were burning, and the mass of people in front of her began to swirl. She had grabbed Henry’s arm to steady herself.

  “Is everything all right? Do you need some water?” Henry had asked. Since she had told him about the pregnancy, he had been at her side constantly, asking how she felt and what she needed. She had heard from her friends that their husbands were never as interested in their pregnancies as they were, but with Henry it was different. She sometimes felt as though he wished he could be the one carrying the child.

  By the time their train reached the Williams Bay station, she could barely stand, and Henry had to carry her up the porch steps with the aid of one of the deckhands. He laid her in her childhood bedroom, calling for the doctor. He came and examined her, and she heard him grimly say, “Influenza,” outside of her door. “It’s widespread,” he had said. “She needs to rest, especially given her condition.”

  So there she stayed for the entire summer, as Henry went back and forth to the city on the train. He came the first few weekends, until the doctors convinced him to stay in the city. “Work obligations,” her mother had said as she smoothed Amelia’s hair back. The sheet was pulled up to her shoulders, and her skin was slick with sweat, despite feeling cold all over. She shivered so hard that her stomach bump jumped around, like it was dancing.

  She turned her head away from her mother, a task that felt monumental. She knew why Henry stayed in Chicago. It was for him to stay healthy in case she didn’t make it. In case either of them didn’t make it. She closed her eyes slowly and said a prayer that if one life had to be taken, let it be hers.

  On Sundays, she would wait for the afternoon sun to move high above the lake and strain her neck to hear the sounds of the Crane steam yacht approaching. The boat would drop anchor off of Monarch Manor, and their large Victrola on deck would come to life, playing a selected opera recording. She would hear the family and staff gather down on the veranda overlooking the lake to listen to the music and then, when it was done, cue up their own Victrola and volley music right back, usually one of her mother’s favorites by Vivaldi.

  “Do you want me to ask the Cranes to stop the tradition? Does it bother you or disrupt your rest?” her mother had asked her one Sunday evening when she stopped in to bring her fresh water.

  Amelia weakly lifted a hand in the air. “No. Please—no.” It was all she could say, but there was so much more. It was one of the few times when she was reminded that there was a world outside of her bedroom, that there were people laughing, eating, drinking, and listening to beautiful music. They walked around without struggle and breathed without coughing. Maybe, someday, she could do those things again, too.

  The evening of the Fourth of July, she listened to the fireworks outside of her window. They flashed red and blue and white throughout her bedroom, illuminating the bedsheets that covered her stomach.

  “Just think, next Fourth of July you will be able to bring the baby to watch all of the festivities,” Mary had said brightly, yet Amelia heard the catch in her voice.

  And so, as she lay in bed for another day, another memory missed, she made a promise that her mother’s words would come true and that her son or daughter would watch the fireworks the next year, from her lap. That the child would be startled by the sound of each one and cry, while the adults would lovingly laugh and try to soothe him or her.

  The next morning, she was able to sit up in bed and slowly sip a cup of broth. The baby inside her shifted as she did so, and she took it as a good sign. A sign of encouragement.

  Later that afternoon, she listened again, this time to the sounds of her mother hosting afternoon tea, promptly at four o’clock. She heard the kitchen staff trudging their way to the vegetable garden to pick the cucumbers for the sandwiches, and eventually, the sound of the steam yachts approaching the dock as the women came for tea.

  When she heard them leave, her door opened.

  “You are looking so much better. I told the ladies that I think you will be better in no time,” Mary said. She sat on the edge of the bed, her white sundress splayed underneath her and her feathered hat perched on the side of her head. In her hands she held a clear glass bottle. “Frances brought some witch hazel for you.”

  Frances Hutchinson’s estate, Wychwood, was famous for the witch hazel plants grown on the property, and she was always extolling the benefits of the plants.

  Mary leaned over and took a cotton handkerchief from the bedside table and dotted some witch hazel on it. She slowly rubbed the cloth against Amelia’s forehead. The liquid immediately cooled her skin and made her feel like she had slipped under the surface of the lake, water soothing every pore.

  The following week, she was able to stand, albeit for a brief moment before she collapsed down into a maid’s arms. A few days later, she took a step forward, toward the window, toward the water that stretched before her. From her vantage point in the bed, she couldn’t see the other side, and it looked like the water went on forever, that there was no other shore. That everything in the world had been swallowed up by the water. Yet when she stood, she could see that there was another side and that the water did end.

  She pressed a palm against the window and opened her eyes wide, taking in everything that she had missed seeing that summer: the white sailboats lazily floating on the surface during a regatta, the ducks waddling around the perimeter of the property, the dome of Yerkes Observatory jutting above the tree line in Williams Bay. It all looked the same, yet the world was different. She was different.

  She placed a hand on her stomach and felt the baby shift under the weight of her palm. She pressed down on what seemed to be his or her bottom, and she cupped it in
her hand, patting it slowly, rhythmically.

  “It’s you and me, together, forever,” she whispered. “We have been each other’s constant this summer. And next summer, you will get to see and hear everything that I do.”

  The noises of the house kept her alive that summer, reminded her that there was an outside to her room, that there were things to experience beyond fevers and night sweats. She never could have imagined that her son, due to her illness, would be robbed of the ability to hear those same things.

  CHAPTER 14

  ERIN

  I turned my car down the worn gravel path that led from the road to Monarch Manor, holding my breath the entire way. Even though I had driven by the house from time to time after the first time I saw it a couple of weeks ago, it never ceased to amaze me. There was something so magical about the juxtaposition of great beauty and terrible decay. There wasn’t a time when I approached it that I didn’t nearly gasp with admiration and sadness. Yet this time, the gasp that left my body was all sadness.

  The wrecking crew was already there, big yellow machines lining the property, while men in hard hats pointed toward the structure and nodded, their feet shuffling in the rocky driveway. I pulled my car off to the side and their heads snapped in unison toward me, like an unwelcome visitor entering a locals-only bar. A man with a dress shirt and a plastic name tag clipped to his pocket walked toward my car.

  “You from the township?” He had a weary look in his eyes, like dealing with the township had slowly been killing him with each house he tore down. Or, maybe, it was the houses’ revenge for destroying them, I thought. In exchange, they stole a little piece of his soul.

  “Um, yes?” I said before I could stop myself.

  He nodded and walked away, jerking a thumb back toward my car and saying something to his crew. Whatever it was, it wasn’t glowing praise, as they all glared at me in one singular yellow-hatted ball of hate. Yet they didn’t require any more of me, so I stayed in my car and watched without making eye contact with any of them.