The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  Salina felt the need to change the subject as quickly as possible, and she said, “Roseanne thinks the two of us should make a trip to Niagara Falls. With the children.”

  “That’s nice,” her mother said. “But I don’t know if the Falls are a place for children. They’re very dangerous.”

  “We’re not planning to let them play in the water,” Salina said. “And we can tie a rope to them or some such thing.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun for them. Father, what do you have to say?”

  “I don’t think either of you can have much to say,” Salina said. “Roseanne is a married woman and I’m perfectly capable of deciding where and when I go. Who knows, maybe I’ll meet a nice man on the train and get married in Niagara Falls. I hear they do that there. It could be very romantic. Or I could borrow that woman’s barrel—you know the one—and go over the Falls myself for excitement.”

  Her mother turned pale.

  “Mother, I was joking. I’ve little interest in going anywhere with Roseanne’s holy terrors.”

  “I don’t think you’re ever just joking when you say a thing like that,” her mother said. “Don’t forget, I’ve known you all your life. I wouldn’t mind a look at that letter. I must say I’m curious.”

  “You’ll have to stay that way,” Salina said before heaping her plate with potatoes.

  Her mother finished her meal in silence, as though she were trying to imagine what Salina might be up to, exchanging correspondence with Oliver Diamond.

  Afterwards, when the dishes were done and the house was quiet, Salina sat at her desk and penned her first letter to Oliver, enclosing a drawing of her teapot. She did not know where the audacity to do so came from. She was not a pencil artist of any great confidence, although she did keep a sketchbook with ideas for future projects in clay. Beneath her teapot sketch she wrote, I reveal my modest talent in hopes you will overlook its limitations. She sat with one ankle tucked behind the other, and she periodically looked down at her blue shoes and admired the colour and the stitching. She felt as though she were talking to Oliver, and she chose her words carefully, with just the right amount of wit and playfulness, or so she hoped. She wondered if a new chapter of her life were beginning, knowing at the same time that it was much too soon to arrive at such a conclusion. She wrote with Oliver’s letter open beside her, and when she was done she folded her letter and her drawing and slipped them into an envelope, which she then addressed to “Mr. Oliver Diamond.” When she was done, she locked the letter from Oliver in her desk drawer, and went to bed.

  * * *

  TO YOUNG ESTELLA Diamond, there was before and after the teapot. The very night she first looked inside, she felt as though something was different. She couldn’t quite grasp what it was, but it had to do with time, which she had previously compartmentalized into the span of her own life, and a second, relatively short and insignificant period leading up to it. Now, she thought it was possible she had not seriously enough considered that period before she existed. The past—especially her father’s past—had become a presence, and a very big mystery. Even as the two of them had climbed the stairs in the darkness that night, she’d thought, Who was he before he was my father?

  They’d returned to bed without waking the rest of the family. Estella heard the bedsprings creak across the hall as her father settled himself beside her mother. Her older brothers were asleep down the hall, two to a room. As the only girl in the family, she had a room to herself. Her mother had decorated it in anticipation of a daughter after the first of the boys had been born, or so Estella had been told: pink-flowered wallpaper, a white chiffonier to match the white iron bedstead, a rose-coloured counterpane with scalloped edging. Estella did not especially care for all the pink delicacy, and she would rather have had dogs than flowers on her walls, but she knew her mother had badly wanted a girl to occupy the room, and so she did not complain. There was that far-off thing called adulthood when she would be able to do whatever she wanted, and she was content to wait until then to exercise her own decorative choices, although she suspected she would not care enough to bother. She planned to have other, more important things on her mind.

  As she lay in the dark, the house now quiet around her, she thought about those beads that had been on top of the letters. She knew they were made of clay, and she wondered who had made them and how they had they been fired. Her father’s kilns at the factory were huge, the size of a house. How could you fill one of those with such tiny objects as beads? And why had they been decorated with ugly creatures, like imps and goblins in fairy tales? She imagined them freeing themselves from the beads after the kiln was bricked up, running around in the fire and smashing things. Then she began to imagine them running around her room in the dark, and she scared herself and had to switch on her bedside lamp.

  She thought of calling to her mother, but instead she got out of bed and crept down the hall and got into bed with Jack and Andrew. She climbed over Jack because she knew he wouldn’t mind, and wiggled in between them.

  They both woke up.

  “Not again,” Andrew said.

  “I got scared,” she said.

  They rolled away from her in opposite directions and she was left in the middle with the sheet stretched tight. She tried to be still, but she felt restless. Finally Andrew got up and went to her room, which is what she’d hoped would happen.

  When she was alone with Jack, she found that she didn’t want to tell him what she’d found in the teapot. He was the youngest of the boys, the closest in age to Estella, and she usually told him everything, but the way her father had watched her without speaking made her think the teapot’s contents should not be spoken of. She wondered what he would have told her had they sat in the parlour while he smoked a pipe instead of going back to bed. The decision to return to bed, she thought, was the decision to leave things as they were.

  Only they weren’t the same. Her father was not the same man.

  She found herself squirming to get comfortable until finally Jack said, “Damn it, Nelly, if you’re going to stay here, you have to be still.”

  “Don’t call me Nelly,” she said, giving him a kick under the covers. Jack was the only one who called her that. She pretended she didn’t like it.

  “Just count to a hundred and go to sleep,” he said, ignoring the kick. He began to snore softly again.

  Estella knew there were hunting dogs on the wallpaper in this room instead of flowers. She counted dogs until she fell asleep.

  When she woke in the morning to the sound of her mother’s breakfast bell at the foot of the stairs, Jack was already dressed and Andrew was pulling on his socks. Andrew saw she was awake and said, “You’re a pain in the neck.” Then he went down to breakfast, and Jack said, “Just sometimes.”

  Estella went downstairs, still in her pyjamas. Theo and Mathew were working at the plant now and they had already eaten and left with their father. Estella sat with Jack and Andrew at the dining table, and the three of them had oatmeal porridge and orange juice for breakfast. The boys left for school shortly after, and when they were gone, Estella’s mother sat down with her and said, “Andrew says you had a bit of a wander again last night. You must learn to get yourself back to sleep, Estella. You can’t keep waking up the boys when they have school.”

  “Jack doesn’t mind,” she said.

  “Yes, he does,” said her mother. “He’s too kind to say so.”

  Estella noticed that the wooden spoon she’d used to get the lid off the teapot was still on the table. Her mother saw her looking at it and said, “I’m not sure how that got there,” and she took it to the kitchen along with the empty porridge bowls.

  Later, her mother went to the garden and Estella stayed in the house. She sat at the table with her paper dolls laid out in front of her, but she didn’t play with them. She kept looking up at the teapot. Every once in a while her mother called in through the door, “Everything okay in there?” and Estella called back that
it was. By the time her mother was in the house again, Estella was on the floor under the table, right in the middle, away from the many chair legs.

  “What are you doing under there?” her mother asked.

  Estella could see only her mother’s feet, in stockings, since she’d taken off her garden shoes, a pair of brown lace-up oxfords that had once been her good shoes.

  “Thinking,” Estella said.

  “Don’t think too hard. You’ll ruin your brain. Do you want some lemonade?”

  Estella crawled out from under the table and they had lemonade.

  Estella asked, “Why did you name me Estella?”

  “It’s my favourite name. Don’t you like it?”

  “You should have called me something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Sally.”

  “I’m not much for those modern names,” her mother said. “Wait and see. You’ll like Estella when you’re older.”

  They went to the backyard together. As her mother worked in the daisy bed along the fence, Estella sat on the patio in a wicker armchair and thought about the unfinished business of the teapot. She wished she could take it from the shelf right now and carry it to a hiding spot, but she suspected it would not be a good idea to be caught with the teapot again. She slipped back inside and went up and down the stairs in her sock feet, trying to find the steps that creaked and a way around them. She counted the stairs on her way down and when she hit a creak, she backed up and tried a different spot. She descended ever more quietly, hugging the wall, bypassing the steps she’d identified as the noisy ones.

  That night, after everyone was asleep, she practised going downstairs in the dark to get herself a glass of water in the kitchen. No one noticed.

  A few nights later, she removed the letters from the teapot again, and she managed to get through the next two before her eyes began to blur from concentrating so hard on the handwriting. Salina’s writing was tiny with an even, forward slant. Her father’s was easier to understand, more loopy and rounded, like printing. They were both hard to read, though, because she hadn’t had much practice with cursive, but she had the stairs figured out now so there was no rush. She put the letters away and went back to bed.

  It took her many nights to get through all the letters with the rest of the family asleep upstairs, and when she got to the end she didn’t understand what had happened. Who was this Salina person? When she’d figured it out as best she could—that Salina and her father had been married, and that she had died—Estella was back where she’d started with the teapot, and she realized for the first time that knowing more also meant knowing less. The letters, she thought, had changed everything, but mostly who her father was because he had another wife. And if Salina was Oliver’s first wife, was she also Estella’s first mother? On the one hand, she knew this could not be true—Beatrice had decorated her room when she was born, and called her Estella—but on the other hand, well, it was confusing because she knew the Diamond family only as it was right now.

  As she placed the teapot back on the shelf after reading the last letter, the word that stayed with her was “heartbroken.” She pictured a red Valentine’s Day heart with a crack down the middle, but she suspected there was more to it than that.

  ESTELLA AND HER father never discussed the letters. As she grew older, she began to wonder if he knew she had read them. How long had he been watching in the doorway that first night? Perhaps not long enough, and he might have assumed the cursive was beyond her ability. Over the years, she kept expecting there would be some inadvertent allusion to a previous marriage in her parents’ conversation, perhaps when they thought the children weren’t listening, but none ever came. There was one time in a hotel restaurant when Estella heard her father tell a man named Allen Foster he had been married twice, but that was it. When Estella tried dropping hints now and then, her father displayed no inclination to talk about his first wife.

  She could hardly believe it, then, when Salina’s name was the last word he uttered, right before he died. Estella was forty-two years old by that time and her father was almost ninety. Her mother had been dead for some years. The whole family was there, Estella, her brothers and their wives—Theo and Gladys, Mathew and Fay, Andrew and Harmony, Jack and Rose—crushed into the hospital room because they knew death was imminent. When Oliver spoke Salina’s name, it baffled everyone but Estella, since no one else remembered the supposed aunt who had made the teapot.

  That evening, after Oliver’s body had been delivered to a funeral home, the family gathered in the dining room to discuss arrangements—her dining room now, Estella supposed, because her brothers all had their own homes by this time. It was assumed she was the right one to take notes since she was a teacher, and she was seated at the mahogany table with a pad of paper in front of her. On the table was Oliver’s cut-glass brandy decanter, placed there for the men. Estella was the only one of the women who poured herself a glass.

  The discussion turned from the funeral to-do list to the meaning of Oliver’s final word, spoken with such surprising vigour before he had closed his eyes and slipped away. All agreed he had said the name Salina, although Estella stayed out of it. When her brothers had not much to offer by way of explanation, and when silence engulfed them, she finally spoke up and said that she thought they’d been wrong, and that Oliver had not said Salina but had been speaking to Beatrice.

  “I’m sure that’s what he said. Mother’s name, of course.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes. He might have garbled it, but he was speaking to Mother.”

  From there, Fay concocted a story that included a tunnel and a bright light.

  Estella drank the last of her brandy and poured herself another, drawing a look from Gladys over her new cat-eye glasses.

  “I think we should put this in the eulogy,” Fay said. “She was the love of his life, after all. What does everyone else think? Is it too personal?”

  “No,” Estella said. “Let’s do it.”

  She wrote Eulogy at the top of a new page and underlined it, and then, Father’s last word.

  Other ideas were tossed around and Estella added them to the list on her notepad. They all agreed that Theo, as the eldest, ought to deliver the eulogy.

  “That wedding portrait,” Harmony said, pointing to the framed photograph on the wall. “Could we set it on the casket in the church? Would he like that?”

  Estella looked up at the portrait. She wanted to say that Oliver was no longer capable of liking anything, in case Harmony hadn’t noticed, and then she couldn’t stop herself, she began to cry.

  The others weren’t used to seeing her cry.

  “Estella,” Gladys said, and she felt Gladys’s arm around her shoulder, and along with it a physical loathing for this bit of affection from Theo’s wife, who had been in her life long enough that she barely remembered a time before her. She slipped out from under Gladys’s arm and rose from the table, thinking, but not able to say, that she was crying for more than one reason: the obvious one, and another that involved a woman they had never heard their father speak of and now never would.

  Andrew assumed she’d had too much brandy.

  “Maybe lay off that, eh,” he said, indicating the decanter on the table.

  “Oh, right,” Estella said. “Everyone knows women can’t hold their liquor.”

  She grabbed the decanter by the neck and went out to the garden by herself, where she sat in her mother’s wicker chair on the patio.

  She sipped her brandy and thought about her father. Relief was what she’d felt when he’d breathed his last, the kind of relief that made her want to collapse on the floor, because the caregiving and the fighting and the craziness were over. And then on its heels came guilt, because the last year had been such a challenge to her patience, and she hadn’t always met the challenge with grace. She had not been able to get her head around the anger that had been part of her father’s dementia, so often dire
cted at her. She was his only daughter, and the only one of his children who knew about Salina. She still remembered the night so long ago when she’d first looked in the teapot, and the feel of his hand on her shoulder as they climbed the stairs together. It was too late now, but she wished that she’d come right out and asked her father more about his first marriage.

  She wondered again why he had spoken Salina’s name rather than her mother’s in his last moments. Perhaps it was just his dying brain going back in time, but was there also a possibility that he had lived all those years in mourning for the real love of his life? If so, it was tragic, but it was also a betrayal of Beatrice. And she wondered if she, too, had betrayed her mother by imagining she might have been a different person had she been raised by Salina.

  She had not been a good daughter to her mother in so many ways. Maybe Oliver had not been a good husband in the same ways.

  Eventually, she fell asleep with her glass in her hand and the brandy decanter close to empty at her feet. When Theo tried to wake her up because they were leaving, she was in the middle of a dream about white teapots stacked in a beehive kiln with the furnaces about to be lit. The letters were in one of the teapots and she didn’t know which one. An oven man was trying to get her out of the kiln as she searched for them, and he kept grabbing her arm. Finally she told him to bugger off and leave her alone.

  Which he did. Theo, not the oven man.

  She slept the rest of the night in her mother’s chair, fretting about the letters, which she had at one time known by heart. The air on the patio stayed warm until morning, even though it was late in the season.

  * * *

  Dear Miss Passmore,

  I write this from the territorial capital city of Regina after a long train journey west during which I witnessed a great number of extraordinary things. (You see, I am trying to be interesting.) I’ve been considering which of these is most memorable, and I have decided it is the Clydesdale horse that I saw escape its enclosure in a moving boxcar and leap from the door that had been left open to provide fresh air for the animals inside. The horse apparently kicked its pen apart before launching itself to freedom, although I didn’t witness that particular part of the excitement from my vantage point on the deck between cars, where I myself was catching a bit of fresh air. My last view of the horse was of a black creature from a Greek myth making its way in a gallop across the open prairie, with no apparent injuries. It was a beautiful site, but a memento mori nonetheless, because there is danger and the possibility of a quick end in the wilderness. This is the truth ignored by a romantic way of thinking, is it not? You see, I am not a romantic, in spite of what you might have heard about me.