The Paper Palace

by Miranda Cowley Heller

  “She was such a strange little girl. The way she clung to her father. Those hollow eyes. I remember there was something about her that drove Anna running out of the house every time Rosemary came to visit.”

  “She hated the way Rosemary smelled.”

  “That’s right,” Mum says. “Anna said she smelled of formaldehyde. Sickly sweet.” She crushes five fat cloves of garlic with the wide flat of her knife and throws them into a cast-iron pan. Finely minced carrots, celery, and onions are already caramelizing in olive oil and browned butter. She opens a package of ground meat wrapped in butcher paper—veal and pork—and adds it into the pan bit by bit, then milk, to make the meat tender. An open bottle of warm white wine sits on the counter for deglazing.

  “Hand me that, would you?” She points to a slotted spoon. “What’s she like now?”

  “Still an oddity. Direct. She’s a musicologist. Lives in a ranch house. Short feathered hair. Slacks. That sort of thing.”

  “Married?”

  I nod.

  “And her mother?”

  “Died a few years ago.”

  “Poor woman. What a sad life.”

  I watch my mother stir the sauce slowly, round and round. I hesitate. “Leo went back to her. Did you know that? They got remarried.”

  “I did not know that. I assumed he was dead or in prison.”

  “There was a wedding picture on the mantel. A photo of them on a cruise. Just an ordinary-looking older couple.”

  She picks up a cucumber and starts peeling it. “Let’s not talk about Leo. As far as I’m concerned, he died a long time ago. He was a bad man. I don’t like to think about him, and you shouldn’t, either.”

  She takes the bottle of white wine from the counter, pours some into a glass.

  “Isn’t that cooking wine?”

  “It’s wine,” she says, drinking it down.

  “I need to talk to you about Leo, Mum.”

  “Eleanor, people will be arriving soon and I’m trying to cook. So, whatever it is will have to wait.”

  Jonas and I haven’t spoken since I called him from Memphis yesterday, from the dizzying sidewalk outside Rosemary’s house. When I see his mother and Gina appear at the door, my stomach does an odd drop—something familiar and yet forgotten. It takes me a moment to realize what it is: I am nervous, excited, anticipating his arrival. It is the strangest sensation, like a sense memory from my past—something I haven’t allowed myself to feel in so many years; and yet there it is.

  But Jonas isn’t with them.

  “He insisted on taking a shower even though he’d just had a swim. Complete waste of water,” his mother says, coming in through the screen door.

  “He’s right behind us.” Gina hands my mother a bottle of wine. “I brought white.”

  “We’re drinking red,” my mother says, taking it to the kitchen.

  “Ignore her.” Peter comes over and gives Gina a hug. “She’s been an utter cow all afternoon.”

  “Be fair,” I say, though I completely agree with him. “This is always a difficult day for her.”

  “You’re right,” Peter says. “I take it back.”

  “I’m sorry I never got to know Anna,” Gina says. “She seemed like a cool person.”

  “She was,” I say. “The coolest.”

  My mother comes out holding a platter of cheese and crackers.

  Jonas’s mother waves it away. “I’ve cut out gluten and dairy. My arthritis.”

  “You should have told me,” Mum says, annoyed. “I’m serving pasta. But we have olives.”

  “How was Memphis?” Gina asks.

  Peter sighs. “Muggy. Tired.”

  “I’ve never been,” Gina says.

  “Elle liked it.”

  “I did. It’s a city full of ghosts,” I say.

  “Do you want wine or a ‘drink’ drink?” Peter asks Gina.

  Over Gina’s shoulder, through the screen, I see Jonas walking down the sandy path. His hair is wet and messy. He’s barefoot, in torn Levi’s and a blue chambray shirt. His cheeks are flushed. He looks like he did when we were young. Lighter on his feet, clear. When he sees me, he smiles: not his usual “happy to see his old friend” smile that I have grown so accustomed to, but something more, intimate and open, as if to say: finally, after all these years, we can look at each other without the scrim of shame between us.

  Peter gets up from the dinner table, stretches. “That was delicious, Wallace. What’s for pudding?” He lights a cigarette and wanders inside to the shelf where Mum keeps a stack of old LPs next to what may be the world’s only living Victrola.

  “We have fresh pears and sorbet. Who wants coffee?”

  A scratchy Fleetwood Mac song comes on. “Did you actually purchase this album, Wallace?” Peter calls from the living room.

  “It was Anna’s,” she says. “Aren’t you going to read the Shelley?”

  Every year, on the anniversary of her death, Peter reads us Anna’s favorite poem, “To a Skylark,” the prayer she asked for at her funeral. It is a sacred ritual.

  But tonight Peter says, “I’m too tired and too drunk. Can someone else do it?” and flops down on the sofa.

  Gina pulls her chair over to him, and they start some pointless conversation about restaurants in Bushwick.

  I feel like punching them both in the face.

  Dixon picks up the battered book, peers at it, then hands it to Jonas. “My eyes aren’t what they once were,” he says.

  Jonas finds the page.

  “For beautiful Anna,” he says. “We hail to Thee, blithe spirit.” And he begins.

  “I just don’t believe in psychiatry.” My mother holds forth to the last of her guests.

  “That’s because you’re afraid you’ll be sent to the nuthouse,” Peter says from the sofa.

  “As far as I can tell, the only thing it’s good for is making children blame their parents for everything that’s ever gone wrong in their lives.”

  “The only thing I blame you for is making me take sailing lessons,” I say, and everyone laughs, forgetting. Everyone but Jonas.

  “Watch. Now she’s going to say she wasn’t given enough love from me as a child,” Mum says, getting up from the table and heading into the kitchen to start on the dishes. “Of course she’s absolutely right.”

  “Not everything is about you, Mum,” I say.

  Jonas stares at me, his eyes burning.

  I get up from the table and go out the back door into the dark night. Then I lean against the cold cement-block wall and wait, for what feels like a lifetime.

  Book Five

  ◆

  TODAY

  6:30 P.M.–6:30 A.M.

  32

  Today. August 1, the Back Woods.

  6:30 P.M.

  I strip out of my damp bathing suit, leave it on the cabin floor, and lie down on the bed. From the Big House, I hear Peter’s deep laugh, my mother calling to the kids to stop playing Parcheesi and get ready for the barbecue. The ceiling of our cabin is crawling with carpenter ants, brought out by the heat, the impending storm. A dusting of cardboard covers Peter’s bedside lampshade. I stare up through the skylight at the evening sunlight breaking through the trees, the dappled twigginess of the branches. Nimbus clouds float past, pregnant with rain.

  When Anna and I were very young, our father planted a delicate birch sapling outside our cabin, its trunk as thin as a pussy willow. A tree planted in a forest. He said it would grow up with us, grow tall with us. Back then, before it reached beyond the roof line, the skylight above my bed was an uninterrupted rectangle of blue. I loved to lie there, staring up at the open sky, watch gulls flying the wind shear. After Conrad died, I prayed to that open sky—not for forgiveness, but for guidance, a way to move beyond the past, a clear path forward. By then, the split ends o
f birch branches had begun to appear in the corner of the skylight—tiny sharp strands that poked at the air. Inch by inch, year by year, the birch’s unruly mane grew into frame until it covered the windowpane, blocked out the sky. I had begged for answers, for the clarity of glass. But the passage of time brought only a messy tangle of branches marking my failure to heal.

  “It’s a window,” Jonas had said, that long-ago day by the stream. And I had said, “I know.”

  Last night I stared at him across the crowded table, his green eyes darkening beyond the candlelight. He stared straight back. No one flinched. Finally his lips curved into that ironic smile—relief, regret, the absurd, sad inevitabilities. We were always meant to be together. Marriage, children—nothing has changed this essential truth. If I could take back what I have done, I would do it. Every bad decision when the road forked. Every terrible choice that led me away from him. Every terrible choice that led me away from Peter. Not just fucking Jonas last night, or what we did today, what I can’t stop thinking about, what I want to do tomorrow, but Conrad—that day, that bright choppy day, when the winds turned. The truth I have kept from Peter. The lie I carried into our marriage. I picture Rosemary, her prim, bland living room, her moist cake, the rage behind her eyes. The way she thanked me for saving her life. I have never thanked Jonas for saving mine. Only blamed him. Blamed myself. Kept Peter at arm’s length, punishing him for my own sin. Built my entire life on a fault line. If I had told Peter about Conrad, about that day on the boat, I know he would have forgiven me. And that is why I couldn’t tell him. Because I did not want to be forgiven.

  And the choice Jonas is asking me to make now. To leave my wonderful husband. To cause my children pain. Peter is not vindictive—whatever happens, he would never take them away from me, never create a rift between me and them. He loves us all too much for that. He is a man with backbone. It is his gravity that holds my orbit steady when I falter. I am in love with Jonas. I always have been. I cannot live without him, cannot give him up now, after waiting for so long. But I’m in love with Peter, too. I have two choices. One I can’t have. One I don’t deserve to have.

  I get up off the bed. I need a hot shower and too many Advil. My body is sore. My head hurts from trying to think, going around and around in circles. Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had? I wrap myself in a towel. I should go to Dixon’s. Be with Peter, with my children.

  Outside the bathroom, I turn on the shower to let the water run hot, then go in search of Advil. I root around my mother’s deep, disorganized cabinet. My hand grazes something in back, and I pull it out, already knowing what it is. One of Anna’s ancient Playtex tampons. No one else ever used that brand. The plastic wrapper has yellowed, but the little pink plastic applicator inside has held its pink. I think of Conrad peering in through the bathroom window, my legs spread wide, tampon skittling across the floor. The day I met Jonas. And I think of Anna, always shouting at me for touching her things—that I was the one she told when she lost her virginity. How sad and scared she was those last months. How Peter held me fast, every day, when the tears came. I step into the shower, stand under the hot, gushing water, hoping it will drown out my guttural animal sobs, my salted-wound despair, begging the water to make me clean, to scald away the past. Knowing that there is only one choice to make.

  6:45 P.M.

  We walk up our steep driveway, stop at the dirt road, wait for Mum at the triangle.

  “Don’t wait for me,” she yells from halfway up the driveway.

  But we wait. I’m barefoot, in a linen dress, flip-flops shoved in a straw bag, flashlights for the walk home, trying to keep my insides at bay. Maddy has run on ahead—she likes to be first—with Finn racing down the dirt road behind her. I watch my mother’s slow progress. Her knees aren’t what they once were. She’s wearing her same old jeans—slightly too short, slightly too wide, and a cotton Indian shirt that covers her behind, as she likes to say. The pond frames her ascent: a glass-blue horizon line, waist-height, behind a fretwork of trees. I pretend to listen to Jack arguing with Peter about why we need a beach sticker for White Crest Beach. The surfing is better, and it only costs thirty dollars for residents.

  “We’ll see,” Peter says.

  I swat at my ankles. I’m being bitten alive by blackflies.

  A horsefly lands on my arm. Its quail-speckled wings settle. Horseflies are slower than blackflies—bigger and easier to kill, but their sting is ten times worse. I swat it. Kill it. Watch it tumble to the dirt road and twitch once before dying.

  “Who has the bug spray?”

  Peter reaches into a canvas bag.

  “Here I am,” my mother announces. “The flies are back. I’m glad you decided to come with us, Eleanor,” she says. “Though I wish you’d put your hair back. It looks so much nicer when it’s out of your face.”

  * * *

  —

  We are coming up to the Gunthers’ house when my mother stops. The Gunthers’ vicious German shepherds are long dead. So are the Gunthers. I don’t know the family who bought the house. Yet I still feel a tinge of nerves, expecting the high-pitched barking, the saliva, the growling, gums exposed for the kill, every time I approach their white wooden fence, now partially rotted away, fallen into the dark underbrush along with everything else.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mum says. “The red onion.”

  “Jack can run back,” Peter says. “It’ll take five minutes.”

  “Why am I always the one who has to do everything?” Jack grouses. “Why can’t Maddy or Finn go?”

  I can see the muscle in Peter’s jaw clenching. “Because you are currently making up for your utterly shit behavior to your sainted mother this morning.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll go.” I start back without waiting for Peter to contradict me. I know every fucking family is unhappy in its own fucking way. But right now, for a few hours, I need Happy Family. Until I am safely on shore, I need to hold on to this truth like a life preserver. Not let go.

  “Can you grab me a sweater?” Peter calls after me. “It’s going to get chilly.”

  * * *

  —

  A white cat I’ve never seen before is sitting on the deck outside the screen porch. There’s something about a white cat that revolts me—a ratlike porn-y quality. The cat disappears into the bushes when it sees me coming. The bottom half of a chipmunk lies on the deck, its furry tail dangling between the wooden slats. I know I should clean it up, but it’s disgusting and I may as well let the cat finish his dinner. I leave it there and go to our cabin to grab Peter a sweater.

  The top bureau drawer is open. Peter, I think, annoyed. I’m always careful to shut it tight to keep the moths and spiders out. I shove the drawer closed. My jewelry box is out on the bureau top. Odd, because I know I didn’t leave it there. I open it to check if anything is missing. Nothing has been taken, but something has been added. A piece of folded paper lies atop my tangle of earrings and necklaces. It has been cut in the shape of a snapping turtle. Inside is my green glass ring. Jonas has had it all these years. Since we stumbled back into each other in the Greek coffee shop. Since that spring evening on the pier. Since the beach picnic where I first met Gina—Anna’s last summer on the pond. I wonder where he has kept it. Hidden away. A tiny secret. It’s such a small thing, a worthless tin thing, its gilt long gone. Yet, when I put it on my finger I feel a powerful sense of completion—as if I’ve finally been made whole, restored—like a Venus de Milo whose missing arm has been found, trapped under the earth for centuries, and, at last, reattached. I close my eyes, allowing myself this, at least. I remember the moment he gave it to me. His clammy, shaking hand. Saying goodbye. Two children who would always love each other. I stick the ring in my pocket, crumple the paper turtle, toss it into the wastebasket, and grab Peter a sweater.


  7:15 P.M.

  I catch up with the others as they approach the turnoff to Dixon’s. His driveway is actually a section of the Old King’s Highway. Past Dixon’s house, the road dead-ends at a wide field, overgrown with goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. But beyond the far edge of the field, hidden under the shade of the woods, the ancient road reappears. When we were young, this was our secret route into town. We could walk the whole four miles—all the way from Becky’s house to the Penny Candy store—without ever going on the tar road. Sometimes, after a heavy rain, we would find bits of pottery or arrowheads unearthed from the steep banks. One year I found a small medicine bottle, plum purple, sea-glassed by time. I imagined some Pilgrim tossing it from a wagon or saddlebag into the thick woods with a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one had seen him littering. The bottle had lain there untouched for two centuries—gone directly from his hand to mine.

  The trail comes out of the woods at the Pilgrim cemetery, a long-deserted graveyard. It fascinated us: the rows of small sunken tombstones carved with winged death’s heads, wind-worn and pitted, their epitaphs barely visible, filled with lives, with resignation. Most of the dead were children. Temperance, Thankful, Obediah, Mehetable. Aged 3 wks, aged 14 mo. and 24 d’s, 2 yr 9 months, 5 d’s. All facing east. On Judgment Day, the children would arise to face the dawn, hoping to be placed on God’s right hand, to be judged among the righteous.

  The smell of mesquite and hamburger wafts up the driveway. “Yum,” I say, catching up to the kids. “I’m starving.”

  “You must be, after that long swim,” Mum says.

  “I want three hamburgers,” Finn says. “Can I have three hamburgers, Mom?”

  “It’s not up to Mom,” Jack says. “You have to ask Dixon.”

  “What about hot dogs?” Finn says.

  “What I need is a stiff gin and tonic,” Peter says. “And I’ll shoot Dixon if all he has is that Almaden swill.”

  “He uses them for lamps,” my mother says.