The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  I sat with my nursing bra unclipped, my breasts goose-pimpled and limp from being recently unburdened. I was alone in the cabin with Margaret’s dog. I started to cry.

  Being in Love

  When she first met Margaret, Michael Strange was a prominent member of dizzying social circles: old money that tolerated her artistic flirtations but would never stand for explicit lesbianism.1 She was sophisticated and confident, a mentor to Margaret. She’d had secret romantic dalliances with women before.

  Margaret and Michael took walks through the Central Park Zoo, where Michael played games: showing up incognito and trailing an increasingly panicked Margaret, hiding just out of sight, laughing, before revealing herself to have been there the whole time.2 They took walks through the Village, where Michael suggested they wander down the less savory alleys, engage with the less savory men. Margaret went to cocktail parties at Michael’s grand Upper East Side apartment. They spoke on the phone at all hours. Margaret befriended Michael’s daughter, Diana, who was off to Hollywood to be a star.

  On the night of Diana’s farewell party, Margaret stayed at Michael’s after all the other guests had left. Taking Margaret to her bedroom, Michael put on a lace negligee; she read poetry out loud. She complained about her husband, voiced concern that he was seeing another woman, that he mistreated her in front of the servants, that he would never understand her the way Margaret understood her, that she could never love him the way she loved Margaret. They were drunk. This was the night they became lovers. Michael told Margaret they must write a book together. She told Margaret to stop writing the children’s stories and do some meaningful work. You’re a son of a bitch, she said to Margaret. I will love you until the day you die.

  22

  I clipped my bra back together. I stood up. I put the remains of the baked beans in Tupperware and washed out the pot. I wiped the slushy footprints from the front hall.

  I DON’T KNOW if it’s better to be the one who loves too much, or the one who loves too little. I don’t know if it’s better to be left or to be leaving. The scale of love measures the fatty red weight of the heart, which, when beating, looks nauseous and seizing, overeager and aggressive. Embarrassing.

  I WIPED MY eyes. I booted up my computer.

  The message-board mothers had wanted me to write. Michael had wanted me to write. And so I started furiously typing. I opened myself to the muse—to Margaret, to Michael—hoping that documenting their relationship would somehow bring them back to me. Hoping documenting their relationship would bring Clara back to me.

  It didn’t.

  WAS I WRITING them down wrong? Did they dislike it? I was trying very hard to only state objective truths.

  Mixed Signals

  In 1942, Margaret summered on her own in Maine so that Michael could give her marriage one more effort. But when she got back to New York, Michael called up in a frenzy: her husband had discovered proof of their affair, had called a doctor to treat her for what he claimed was mental illness. Homosexuality. Lesbianism. Margaret helped Michael get a room at the Colony Club, an expensive women’s social club for Manhattan’s elite. She helped her organize a formal separation. People talked.1

  Michael bought a new summer home in Connecticut, where she brought Margaret. The women would write together, Michael raging, Michael correcting Margaret’s grammar, Michael telling Margaret to pack her things and go, Michael bringing Margaret into the bedroom, Michael promising to love Margaret forever. Then the New York Journal-American published a scathing exposé about Michael’s divorce, “The Sappho of Long Island.”2 Michael told Margaret not to call her, walked the city in disguise to avoid gossip. But after several months—as always—Michael changed her mind. She rented two apartments on East End Avenue, across the hall from each other, doors always unlocked, often open. Margaret gave up her own apartment, and moved in.3

  23

  If it didn’t hurt so much, I thought it might even be funny, Margaret’s timing. Michael’s timing. My own. The second I’d realized that I loved Clara—the night that Ben came home from his first business trip—Michael had swept in to claim her. Michael had held on ever since. The joke was that as soon as I recognized love, as soon as I named it, its object was no longer mine.

  I paced the cabin and thought about how else I might lure them all back. I went upstairs and opened the windows—cracked them each a perfect inch. I stoked the downstairs fire, feeding it crumpled newspaper. The play mat, with its pervasive sour spit smell, sat empty in the corner of the living room, next to the leather couch. It had a quilted pattern, purple and green paisley next to pink and white polka dots. It looked like the patchwork of the ground seen from an airplane. It looked like a world I could fall into, if I lay down and inhaled the place where Clara had been. It looked like somewhere I might find her. I lay down, my head on the stain she’d left. I closed my eyes and let the dry heat of the fire hold me.

  24

  When I opened my eyes, it was spring and it was muddy and I was alone in an untamed field, shoeless and itchy in wool. Where was Clara? I heard instrumental horns in the distance, loud and large and inappropriate, given the pastoral scene. A tension in the air, the recognition that for now the world was still but soon something was coming. Where was Clara? The yipping of the dogs, the subtle rumble of the ground as they cantered and yelped. The fear and desperation of the rabbit almost palpable, although I couldn’t see it. Where was Clara? Every rustle in the trees, every rumble, I thought, signaled the rabbit’s arrival.

  SOMETIMES, WHEN CLARA was asleep, I missed her. I’d say to Ben, “Ben, should I go wake her up?” When she was awake, I would count down the hours until she was asleep again, and then, when she slept, I would say “Ben, should I go wake her up?”

  REALLY IT WAS a gorgeous landscape, unlike anything you’d see on Long Island today. And this had to be Long Island—somewhere ritzy like Old Westbury or Glen Cove, where Margaret and her beagling club would meet weekly to hunt. Mansions and gardens and stables, the Long Island Sound glittering in the distance. I was lucky I hadn’t had to brave the traffic to get out here, lucky I could pretend myself carefree and rich, Daisy Buchanan or at least Jordan Baker, picnicking in style, the wind in my hair. But I couldn’t enjoy the fresh air, or the sound of the water. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t explore, because of Clara.

  It felt very unfair that because I loved her, I would always have to wonder where she was, what she was doing. Very unfair that there was now a part of my brain forever focused on Clara—I couldn’t escape into my research or writing, I couldn’t zonk out in front of the TV or get gluttonously high and play video games or take an impromptu vacation or even lounge about, enjoying my own heightening delusions. This was so obvious, this had been creeping up behind me all along, but it was only here, as I was beagling without her on Long Island, that the unfairness of it hit me.

  I do think that sometimes it takes a recalibration to confront the obvious. It takes an escape, then a return. And this was the obvious that I’d been skirting, the ugliness that I’d been avoiding, the shard of glass in the corner of my eye: I wasn’t sure that I enjoyed being a mother.

  But maybe I did.

  The grass was wet and smelled so sweet and young that I couldn’t help but think about Clara. The darkening blue of the sky was her eyes, and the little roots that crawled the dirt, her hands. I didn’t not enjoy being a mother. I didn’t want somebody else to mother Clara, I certainly didn’t want her possessed.

  It was about control, this whole thing: Clara’s abduction, the hunt. Michael liked to be in charge, and Margaret liked to play games—she liked a sense of fun, a challenge. I wasn’t sure what I liked. Not this. Not twisting a blade of grass around my finger, pressing my palm to the bark of a tree. Listening. Hoping. Chewing my tongue bloody with the anticipation. Where was Clara? Ben, should I go wake her up?

  You’re never in control when you are the one waiting, when you depend on the actions of others. Depend: from the Latin pendere, t
o hang. Hang your hopes, hang your hat, hang yourself in a noose if you’ve hung a yellow ribbon on the old oak tree and heard nothing in answer. Margaret had some plan but I didn’t know if she was the dog or the rabbit, or thought she was the dog but was actually the rabbit, or didn’t cleave to any stupid hunting metaphor because she was a woman, and a woman was of her own breed.

  And now here came the dogs, drooling, snapping, lusting after the rabbit I’d yet to see. And here was Margaret in her knee-high boots, grinning and running with them. She was far enough away that I couldn’t tell if Clara was still part of her. I couldn’t tell what she’d done with my baby. In the sixteenth century the word baby meant the tiny image of oneself seen in the pupil of another person’s eye.

  In my wool socks I slogged through the muck to get to Margaret, who was surprisingly spry.

  “Where is Clara?” My voice brought to mind the old expression: I’ve a frog in my throat. Get it out, please. I’m so desperate I can no longer speak.

  “What, the baby?” Margaret called to me, laughing. I wanted to slap her. She gestured to the dogs.

  I’d been worried that Solly wouldn’t take to Clara. Supermarket checkout lines displayed tabloid cover stories about infants mauled by previously docile family pets, babies with reconstructed faces and glass eyes. Tabloids were called “rags” because they were unserious, because these stories were not to be believed. Was I unserious if I paged through them while waiting for my groceries, if I bought them at the airport before boarding the plane? There was a certain unseriousness ascribed to me, regardless. Me, the only woman at an academic conference in a city I didn’t know, sipping the house white wine alone at a back table. Me, my bathroom trash can full of disposable ice packs and the heavy, bloodied gauze I’d packed into my large postpartum underwear.

  “The baby?” Margaret asked again, arresting me mid-flight.

  “Is she—” I couldn’t finish. Margaret grinned and adjusted a hairpin. Sweat beaded at her hairline, trickling down her ear. The pack’s excitement heightened, and we watched the dogs circle a tree stump, and we heard the dogs yelp, heard the dogs cheer.

  “What is that?” I asked Margaret, slowly. And then I was running, pushing past the eager animals, kneeing them, braving their teeth to reach their prey. I was wading through dogs, fighting my way against their tide. They were endless, writhing, licking me, panting. Some snarling as they blocked their kill, others jumping with excitement. Their tails were stronger than I’d have expected, solid bone, and they smiled up at me, waiting to be told they were good boys. Muzzles red, viscera dripping from their teeth. A united front that I couldn’t break through. “What have they caught?”

  The thing was dead; it had to be, to provide the dogs’ noses such color. There was a heat. There was a smell. I thought of savory pies, steaming, thought of prodding my spoon into the tender center of a chicken potpie and casting off the shell of crust. With an internal temperature of 98.6, or thereabouts, it did make sense there would be steam, when the inside moved outside.

  I couldn’t look; I couldn’t look away.

  On the one level, I’d thought before, if something out of the blue happened to Ben—a plane crash or some quick terminal illness—I wouldn’t have to make any rash decisions, and the monotony of my marriage would be solved. Could I say the same now, about Clara? Was it simpler to let circumstance take over?

  But then I vomited all over one of the nearer dogs, which startled him. I couldn’t catch a breath of this good, unpolluted air, and I couldn’t stand upright, had to crouch with my hands scraping through my hair, had to start keening.

  “I didn’t take you for such an animal rights sort,” said Margaret, coming over to examine the results of the hunt. In response I spat leftover bile. “It’s only a rabbit.”

  I looked through the lattice of my hands, my face still covered. The dogs parted for Margaret, to reveal matted fur. A torn stomach displaying small round pellets. It was only a rabbit.

  “You thought it was the child?” said Margaret. “Of course not.” She was droll about it, but I could tell she was offended. “What do you think we are?”

  “Where is Clara?” I asked.

  “You’ve read the book,” said Margaret. “Given your own work, I assume you’ve read mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once,” said Margaret, “I wrote a book about a bunny who wanted to run away.”

  “What?”

  “He told his mother, ‘I am running away.’”

  “Clara’s a she,” I said. “And she doesn’t want to leave me. She hasn’t run away, you’ve taken her.”

  “But do you?” asked Margaret.

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you want to run away?”

  MEMORY, MARGARET WROTE once, is a wild and private place to which we only return by accident, as in a dream or a song.

  When I was eight and my mother was sick, I brought her prepackaged Jell-O cups because that was the only food she’d eat. Her room smelled like rotting fruit and cat piss, like unwashed bodies and my father’s cologne. I peeled back the lid for her, and used a plastic spoon to mix the set slime into something more appealing. A TV tray was set up by the side of the bed. The curtains were shut.

  “I didn’t want it from you,” my mother said when I put the cup down on the TV tray. At the time I heard: My mother doesn’t want me. I’d left the room to go cry by myself in the downstairs bathroom, but now I understood what she meant. She couldn’t have me there. She couldn’t be the wronged princess, pining in her tower room, and also my mother. She couldn’t be desirable to my father and have birthed me from her once-taut stomach, couldn’t be a sweet young wife and at the same time have these two fast-growing girls.

  Margaret, however, always embraced incongruity. This didn’t mean she was happy, didn’t mean she did not want. But here she was, incongruous, a hunter and an author of cute books about bunnies, a children’s icon who didn’t especially like children, an extrovert who loved being alone. Here I was, pondering the incongruity of being a mother and an academic, of devoting oneself to two projects, which is to say living a life, which is, I guess, no incongruity at all. Merely living, merely choosing, in each moment, who and what to which you will attend. The Latin, atendere, means to stretch.

  “NO,” I SAID. “I don’t want to run away.”

  “Then go and find her.”

  On Whimsy

  Margaret worked with a variety of illustrators over the course of her career, but none more closely than with Clement Hurd and Leonard Weisgard. Clem found Michael abrasive; he didn’t care that Margaret was with a woman—he just didn’t like this particular woman. He mostly kept his distance once Michael came on the scene.1 Leonard, for the most part, weathered Michael.

  “Leonard,” Margaret would say, “I’m feeling rich,” and they would go to eat foie gras with port wine or thick, decadent alfredo at La Crémailère or Aux Gais Penguins or Pappa Monetta’s. Margaret’s rich feelings had little to do with money—she generally didn’t keep money in mind. She’d grown up with money: a Swiss boarding school, a Long Island property, visits to relatives in stately southern homes. She spent the entirety of her first manuscript advance on flowers, cashing her check and buying up the total wares of a horse-drawn flower cart on her walk home from the bank.2 Whimsical. Annoying. When she said she felt poor, she meant that she was suffering a dearth of creativity.

  It was Leonard who talked Margaret down off the ledge when Michael was cruel, and Leonard who collaborated on her only Caldecott Award–winning book, The Little Island. Leonard who said colors and shapes could be translated into sounds, and thus Leonard who illustrated Margaret’s Noisy Books.

  In the first Noisy Book, Muffin, the little dog, is having eye trouble. As he leaves the dog doctor with a bandage over his eyes, he hears a variety of city sounds: feet walking, cars honking. He hears a squeak squeak squeak, and he wonders what it could be. Not a lion, not a policeman, not an empty house. It turns ou
t to be a life-size baby doll with bright blue eyes and yellow hair. The unspoken assumption that all blind dogs must be in want of a little blond baby was a strange one, but it fit Margaret’s aesthetic.3

  She enlisted an actual dog—progeny of her own Kerry blue and Bill Gaston’s prizewinning standard poodle—as an artist’s model. It peed on Leonard’s paintings.

  25

  The cars I passed were loud, but I wasn’t sure how to describe the noise they made. There is no Old French or Latin to ground onomatopoeia, no history to explain it. There was no explanation for how fast the scenery shifted, how one moment I was standing in an open field with Margaret, and the next I was here, alone at the center of a city stylized in primary colors, the sky cerulean, the clouds strangely thin. It was New York, I thought, or was it Chicago? There were no other real people—not Margaret, not Clara—just abstract empty-faced ciphers completing their urban activities: waving a child across the street, walking a dog, hammering at the side of a white building one hundred feet up in the air. It felt like the natural evolution of any city, the culmination of the claustrophobic crowds that only amplified your loneliness, the people who walked past you like you weren’t even there.

  If I closed my eyes, I sensed the outline of a dying fire, a towel spread next to a sink where a saucepan sat upside down, drying. With my eyes closed, I could hear a baby whimpering, the onslaught of sleet, the sighs of radiant heat: a cabin in the middle of nowhere, dusty and itchy winter dry and inaccessible. But with my eyes open, I could make out the old Chicago skyline drawn in black and red, beside the ink-blotted lake.