by Nancy Mauro
“Well, that’s nothing new. The place has been empty for ages.” Persian is gruff, impatient with pleasantries. “Where’d your side of the family resettle again?”
“Albany,” Lily supplies.
“Your great-grandfather started up the sawmill.” The old woman stacks a tattered pile of westerns onto the trolley. “Luis Oster. Came from the Palatine immigrants in Herkimer—out on the Mohawk.”
“Very German. He even brought over a wife from the Rhineland.”
“Well, the house is very American,” Lily says and pretends to copy down information from the computer screen.
“Oh, don’t do that, honey—you can print off the screen at the reference desk.”
“Gutsy old guy. Fired McKim, Mead and White and built the house himself. It’s a shame they all up and left.”
Ginger plucks a thread from her trousers. “I suppose you can’t understand a mother not wanting to return to a place where her child was abducted,” she says sharply to Persian. “And by the nursemaid, of all people.”
This bit of family nonsense had never sat well with Lily. Even as a youngster, her precocious sense of subversion would have her rally for the maid. What disappointment she felt at the pastoral ending. What typical denouement that her grandfather was found asleep under a haystack.
“An unlucky house,” Persian clucks. “Although the first place for fifty miles to have electrical lighting.”
“Built as the Victorian slid into the Belle Époque.”
“Pile of kindling.” Lily doesn’t suffer from nostalgia where architecture’s concerned.
“The county owns most of that land,” Persian says. “It seems to me they do what they can.”
Ginger pulls her cardigan tight across her chest as if to guard against the century-old felony. “Anyway, everyone thinks it’s lovely to have a nice girl like you returned to her estate.” She taps Lily’s knee. “Although the old mill’s been turned into a restaurant.”
“And hotel. Called the Old Sawmill. They do an excellent lamb shank.”
“That’s your opinion, please.”
“With a cinnamon and fig reduction.” Persian smacks her lips. “Cooked in a funny clay pot.”
“You do like your Arabic food.” Ginger turns away. “I’m not much for the Middle East myself—you know what I think about anyone who puts their women behind veils.”
Lily looks from the computer. There was one question that lingered after hearing her grandfather’s tale. None of her childhood storytellers had the answer. “Do you know what happened to the nanny?”
“The nanny?”
“The nursemaid,” Ginger says to her colleague. “She disappeared, didn’t she? Down the river?”
Persian folds her arms. “They never found Tinker. Not a thing.”
CHAPTER 8
The Lower Extremeties
His is the only civilian vehicle racing north along the West Side Highway tonight. Strands of taxicabs whisk apart to accommodate his efficient slips between lanes; they are like comrades, sending him along from one hand to another. It’s only later, as he drives past the George Washington Bridge under its wrap of reconstructive foil, that he’s reminded of his slight contravention of responsibility. Four days in the city and the injured Saab is yet to be examined. It must be that patch of mustache stuck in his peripheral thought that’s distracting him. He can’t tell this to Lily, of course. Instead he’ll have to claim that the exhausting process of rental cars and estimates and the sly handiwork of unvetted mechanics had just been too much to bear. When a campaign is as critical as Stand and Be Counted, he’ll say, everything else must become soluble and compromised.
What a douse of cold water this bristled bit of Lily’s lip is turning out to be. It appears he’s spent days, ages, an entire life span not making eye contact with his wife. Otherwise, wouldn’t his gaze have wandered down to her lip sooner?
He was working under the assumption that rural air could dissolve their hostilities and trigger a physical interest in one another. What Duncan would give to be curious about her breasts once more! He would push his head out the Victorian windows and breathe in chestfuls of that sweet country elixir if he felt any stirring, any inquisitive movement for what went on below her clothing. With small-town pleasure he’d chase her across the warped flooring until his fingers closed on the hem of her dress. Until he could unravel her naked. Take her in the rank hallway with the shame and force of a ranch hand lured in for lemonade. He’d tie a cowbell around her neck and make her graze the carpet on all fours, drop grasshoppers into her pubic hair while she slept, fuck her with a cucumber he’d grown himself. For some reason he believed the river valley held a certain dirty kink that had escaped their condominium life. That had evaporated into the stratosphere of cathedral ceilings and elevator cars sliding up and down the side of their building. Lily and Duncan, rolling out of opposite sides of the same bed, twenty minutes of precisely timed difference between their awakenings to avoid a collision in the bathroom. And to avoid each other, the hatred of morning conversation, their lips—mustached and otherwise—grown weary of the good-bye kiss.
But what’s going to change in the country? Upstate, doors close just as easily. Her bicycle shuttles her to the Osterhagen Loaning Library, any noise from the rusted crank shaft drowned out by tractors lowing in the field. The fallacy is revealed: in the country it’s even easier to avoid one another. Shamefully easy, in fact, to fall asleep in separate bedrooms. He’s driving toward her but he won’t be able to say the words that could spike some life into their mutual indifference. This is his story, a tight circle that begins and ends with dully antagonistic thoughts of Lily.
She’s waiting for him. Braced in the entrance to the sunroom, her face is a lunar eclipse. She lets him pass so that he can dump his work on the table and set his computer under the lamp. Duncan feels a flirtatious misbehavior in his heart valves, a palpitation or detonation, he’s not sure which. She’s leaving. She got up the courage and she’s going, he thinks. Still wearing those fucking khakis, although the grease stain has somehow faded a bit. He lowers himself into a chair and turns to her. “Okay.” He doesn’t know why he says this, or what it means exactly beyond his willingness to comply and to acknowledge the nullification of an agreement made years ago, when they were just babies, for fuck’s sake.
“Who do you think Tinker was?” she asks.
“What?”
“In the garden.” Now she fidgets around the perimeter of the room, pulling an elastic band through her hair. “You thought Tinker was a pet?”
Despite his annoyance, Duncan is nodding. He knows because he can feel his head bobbing in the affirmative. He wonders, it’s not over, then? If it’s not over, will it be soon? Are you trying to drive me into protracted madness?
“I thought it was a pet too.” She reaches for her shoulder bag that’s hooked to the coat stand in the hall. “Except, guess what I found?”
He pulls himself up straight. How the fuck should I know? He thinks this, but when he actually opens his mouth he says, “What?”
She pulls an envelope from her bag and comes over to the desk, moving his computer to one side of the round table. “I did a little research on this place.” She slides a photograph out of the envelope. Duncan plants his feet on the ground while she drops the picture in front of him. She says, “Oster Haus, nineteen hundred, commissioned by Luis Oster, Dutchess County, New York State.”
It’s a portrait of their house in its youth. He recognizes the architectural details, the lead panel windows and gingerbread trim still crisp and intact. In spite of himself he picks up the photograph, handles it by browned edges. A group is gathered on the grass in front of the house.
Lily draws a finger across the sepia lawn, bringing his attention to the handwritten inscription across the bottom, scrawled right over women’s skirts, over a blanket: Family picnic, 1900. Each face appears to have turned toward the camera, somnolent and off-guard. As if unaware that the photogra
pher had arrived, assembled the camera box on its rickety legs, disappeared under the black cloak. A look of suspicion ruffles collars, fans the plumes on hats. He scans for Lily’s features among her river folk kin. But the only thing uniting them, perhaps, is a trifling sense of irritation.
“Look at their names, Duncan.” Lily leans over his shoulder so that they’re nearly touching, and he can feel a radiant heat from her armpits and neck. One of her breasts skims his shoulder blade. In a voice that barely disguises her excitement, Lily reads the inscription at the bottom of the photo panel. “Mr. and Mrs. Luis Oster, Mrs. Lena Oster-Freitag, Reverend Masterson, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Wexler.” Duncan senses her feverish presentation is nearing its zenith, so he waits while her finger (nearly shaking) points to one side of the picture. “You’ll notice here, Duncan”—how many times has she said his name?—“there are two more people standing to the side.”
And indeed there are. Almost out of the frame, a little boy and a woman. “She’s holding her hand up to block the sun.” Lily makes a circle around the pair.
“Okay,” Duncan says. “Who are they?”
“My grandfather—Luis Junior—and Nanny Tinker.” Lily stands back, hands on hips of dirty pants.
Duncan suspects that his confusion and inability to follow Lily’s postulate stems from either his lack of anthropological training or his lack of attention at family dinners. He sits there, pressing his lips together and flaring his nostrils.
“Jesus Christ, Duncan! The goddamn nanny is buried in the backyard.”
He’s skeptical but digs anyway. If only to watch, with curious regard, the soft-core humiliation of her body bent on all fours, burrowing manually through the dirt.
Her face has taken on a new sheen. The slack around her mouth tightened, replaced by possibility, fueled by mystery, and he doesn’t dare voice his skepticism. His job, while Lily shreds through the soil without an ounce of archaeological refinement, is to spade the grass, peel it away from the earth, and expand the garden plot. He watches the way her shoulders contract below her short-sleeved shirt, and feels a sting of pity for her enthusiasm, for her bookish pursuits, her universe of dead artifacts.
“Duncan.” Delivered along the edge of impatience. How long has he been staring off like that? She’s leaning into two feet of soil. He drops the spade and bends down beside her, smelling in her a season. A tissue tucked away in a winter pocket. Lily is trying to pull a thick root from the ground. He places his hands on either side of hers and they pull. The conspiracy of their bodies reaching into the earth, the touch of hips above the hole, the crossing of forearms, helps to ease the tendril from the ground. They sit back in the grass. It’s not a root.
It’s a bone.
Unlike ad people, babysitters rarely meet violent ends. So none of Duncan’s creative machinations have prepared him for a murdered nanny.
“The possibility of a murdered nanny,” Lily corrects him. “Everyone’s so complicit in your world.”
“It’s not complicity, it’s just what angry townsfolk do.”
“If they lynched the nanny, why would they give her a headstone? You don’t carve an epitaph like that when you kill someone.”
“Maybe she was good with the kid. Before she abducted him.”
“No.” Lily moves around the table. Night has fallen quick and hard. They linger in the kitchen, their arms and legs taut, foreheads and upper lips glistening. “I bet she got caught in the thresher. That kind of thing happened all the time during the Industrial Revolution.”
“Right. And dumping bodies in the garden—was that also a hallmark of the mechanical age?”
Lily leans her weight against a chair.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Duncan suggests, considering the femur that’s locked in the cellar.
“We can’t call the police. This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to us.”
And she’s right. He understands it when she sighs, signifying that all the boredom of the universe is being held back at the moment by this private mystery. By a fine yard of floss. He looks at her. She’s covered in dirt. It’s crescented beneath her fingernails, streaked in her hair, across her forehead.
“You look subterranean, Lily.”
She almost smiles. “Thank you.”
This is his opportunity. “Why don’t you let me wash those?” He nods at her pants. “You’ve had them on for a week.”
Lily glances at herself in a cursory way. Then she slowly undoes her pants. Her hands, fingers unbuttoning and pushing, move with a complete lack of self-awareness, without lust or suggestion, as though she is alone in the room, undressing for bed and he, watching from the window. Lily pushes them over her hips and stands with the pant legs around her ankles. Duncan is surprised by her body and the things he’s forgotten—the lengthy whiteness of it, the lean muscled thighs. He reaches out and slaps her ass.
Smack, like that. He doesn’t know what impulse he’s following here; it’s delivered a little too hard and much too late to be playful. Lily’s mouth twists in surprise, maybe pain, and all words are eclipsed by the sound of her skin, of his hand belting across her flesh. Duncan is immobile, can only watch as the imprint of his palm rises up from her ass.
The evening is suddenly stripped of its aspirations, it sinks back to the kitchen plane with a bump and a skid. She looks at him and says, “What the hell was that for?”
“I’m sorry.” He wants to explain, but as she puts a hand out to touch the welt, Duncan has to resist a serious urge to slap the other cheek. What is wrong with him? Has he just assaulted his wife? She doesn’t move, doesn’t bend to pick up her pants, just stares at him. He feels movement against the left side of his zipper. Lily looks down toward his crotch, as if instructed by his subconscious. Christ, he thinks, what bad timing. They stand in the night kitchen, trapped in a song loop, in a double helix, in the instant where simple math turns to calculus. He wants her and he wants to slap her and he wants to run away from her at the same time. Lily bends then and picks up the pants. She steps forward. He hunches over and swears he can feel the heat of her warming up the metal of his zipper fly. She moves toward him, her mouth open, tongue bunched up against lower teeth. His lips fall slack, he can already taste her breath. She holds the trousers out to him, then turns and leaves the room.
CHAPTER 9
The Epidermal Layer
In the morning her mustache is gone. This is something he notices right away. Even as she’s racing across the backyard toward him, waving her arms. “Hey! What are you doing?”
It’s like baby’s skin under there with the fringe gone, Duncan thinks. He can see her clean and shapely mouth forming the words hey and what and are you doing into a question. Can see the twitch of lip over teeth as she bounds across the grass, papers flying from her schoolbag. Duncan stands in the garden holding the shovel, assessing the pit, trying to choose a spot to start.
“Good morning.”
“You can’t dig without me.” Nearly out of breath. “You weren’t going to dig without me?”
“No.” He jams the shovel into the dirt and turns the soil.
“Are you going to wait? Until I get home?”
“Take the day off,” he says.
She hesitates. “I can’t.”
“Right. You’re on a schedule.”
“Come on, Duncan. Promise.”
He woke up after only a handful of hours of sleep, thinking about the kitchen. The sound of her skin flapping around it like something large and ensnared. He sat himself down in front of the computer, wanting to scratch up some new ideas, but found he couldn’t concentrate on jeans with those great, winged thoughts of his wife set loose up there.
“I’ll promise too—we’ll both swear,” she says. “No one digs alone.”
This morning he asked himself whether this weekend commute was just a charade. Something they could participate in now in order to exonerate themselves later, assure family and friends that every stone had bee
n turned. But he couldn’t sit still long enough to find the answer. He feared hearing the sound and feeling her skin under his palm. There was the uncharted mathematics of the span and length of his hands traveling over her open thigh.
And now the mustache is gone. He notices it. And she’s brushed her hair around her shoulders. A pink bra strap has slipped down her arm, out of her short-sleeved blouse. Is she really going to the library? How can he be sure? His attention is drawn to her pink bra, and, logically, to her breasts. To the handfuls he used to cup and slurp. To the dark nipples punching through white skin. But something tells him it’s too late. They have made resolves, exchanged indelible phrases like a currency. From this position, Duncan believes, any sentimentality should be forced down to the grass, twisted into submission. He’s a man, a quick grapple and down it should all go. Duncan will be safe in the garden, alone with the nanny who is simply bleached bone. It’s his garden, after all. It’s the shovel he bought for his own botanical pursuits. He doesn’t want to promise her anything.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’ll wait.”
Lily arrives at the library in a gruesome funk. Why has she insisted on coming here this morning when there is, in all likelihood, a woman buried in their backyard? Nothing in the Osterhagen Loaning Library could possibly be of more interest. But the truth is messy. Duncan asked her to take the day off and even though she wanted to she could not bring herself to consent. There was a weakness in yes, shale sliced along the horizontal, and the word lodged in her mouth.
Lily climbs off the bike and shackles it to a tree. For months now she’s been carrying around a suspicion that Duncan is afraid to be alone with her. A fear that he remains bound by only some ancient courtesy. And that this long-weekend business is his way of staving off the decision that has to be made about their marriage. He had caught her off-guard this morning. His invitation had flustered her and she’d ridden away like a screwball, stubborn and inscrutable.