In his office, he dug out a quart of whiskey, set the bottle on the desk, and waited for his storm of thoughts to ease up. With deliberate slowness, he selected two glasses and walked back to the couch, stooping down in front of Lydia, whose hands were loosely locked between her knees. She raised her eyes to his.
“I’m going to pour you a drink,” he said, setting the glasses down, unscrewing the bottle, and pouring. “Not because I want you to spill your guts and tell me everything on your mind.” He gave her a small smile. “It’s just to calm your nerves. Think of it as medicine.”
He held the glass to her and she took it.
“Thanks, Doc.”
She tried to smile but looked beat up. When Dolly had been a mess so many times after Craig died, she had leaned against Jack on the couch in the house, watching movies, basketball games, anything. He’d talked easily about nothing, feeling that every word, every laugh from Dolly was a victory, a step of healing. But Dolly had always been like a sister. Jack’s feelings for Lydia were more complicated.
Lydia took a sip of whiskey and slumped down farther. Jack poured himself a drink and sat next to her, careful to leave space between them.
“My life’s a farce, Jack,” she said at last. “That sounds dramatic. But in the truest sense, my life is a farce. I am a woman pretending she has a loving husband that she’s helping in his work. But really I’m just aiding his lustful delusions about an imaginary lover and telling myself lies about it.”
Jack could think of nothing to say. She looked at him, then away, taking another small sip of whiskey.
“Now he claims that he’s discovered a poem by Mary Stone Walker,” she said. “Not in the furniture. Not in any one of the hundreds of items crammed into our chaotic barn or in the junk he’s been insanely scrutinizing for almost two decades. He found this poem in a used book. Just happened to find it in a box of junk books from Brad Kramer. The guy who owns Jacob’s Tavern and Books.”
Jack stared into his glass. Frank didn’t strike him as the sort of guy with any artistic skill. He couldn’t imagine him pulling off a forgery. Maybe he’d managed to persuade a talented student who was captivated by the tale. Jack had a flash of the adoring looks he had seen on some of the young female students’ faces at Frank’s readings. “You’ve seen the poem?”
“No. I still haven’t seen it. But tonight we had guests over at the house. And he read it. Performed it, you could say. There at the dining room table we all sat, listening, eating the silly shortcake I baked for his special occasion.” A brief cry broke into her speech. “I’m such a fool! He read it to us all, but he’d already shared it with just about everyone else there. Everyone but me. I could have stopped this disaster if I’d only seen it. But of course he didn’t show me, because I would have ruined everything.”
“Jesus,” Jack murmured.
“I’m getting used to his…meanness. But the poem…” She took a gulp from her glass, giving little shakes of her head.
Jack waited for a moment, expecting her to mention the date and her own disbelief. He didn’t know anyone except Frank Carroll who still truly believed Mary Stone Walker had gone on to live incognito as an active poet. It was an entertaining notion and a lingering question in White Hill, her hometown, but Walker was too minor a poet, too brief and unknown a life for the masses to still be wondering what happened to her.
Lydia turned her eyes toward him.
“Yes…the poem?” Jack prompted.
“The poem he read out loud… It was mine.”
Jack didn’t know what she meant. “You mean he was kidding around?”
“No!” she cried. “Not kidding around. He read a poem that I wrote—to him in 1983—and said it was written by Mary Stone Walker.” She held up her hands. “My poem… He read it as if it were Mary Walker’s.”
Jack was still confused. “You mean he was passing it off as hers? He actually told them she wrote it?”
“Exactly. I confronted him in the kitchen, and he acted like I’m insane. Like I’m a liar. Like I was just trying to screw things up for him. He said he’d never seen it before it just appeared in this book, but I’m telling you, no one else even knew about it but him. And it was important.”
Jack stared into the dim recesses of the barn. “Do they believe him? Do they think it’s real, these other people?”
“Yes! Some local scholars have looked it over, and even some librarian at the Library of Congress saw a facsimile of the page where it’s inscribed. They all think it’s genuine. It’s the talk of Carson Community College.”
Jack considered this. “So we know it’s not authentic.”
She emitted a guffaw. “Of course. Obviously.” She turned to him. “You don’t think I’m making this up, do you?”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, I know you aren’t making it up. Lydia, listen. You’ve got to tell him that it can’t be authentic.”
“I did tell him!”
“But, I mean, the facts—”
“Oh, I’ve lost all my credibility. He has shut me out. I said…” She stared vacantly and seemed to lose her train of thought. “Do you know what it’s like to have someone betray you like that, Jack?” Her voice wavered, and she shook her head. “It’s like I don’t even exist. It’s like I have no personhood to him.”
“Lydia.” Jack drank his whiskey down. “There are things you can tell him that are inarguable.”
“Like what? There’s no official dead body, so every imaginable outcome is still a possibility, and that man is willing to believe any notion that crosses his mind—”
“I know. I know his position on the subject. I’ve heard it before.”
“So you have talked with him about this?”
“I’ll tell you,” Jack said, trying to sound reassuring, but also wondering just how much he really needed to say if the forgery was so clearly a fraud. To the academics, and even to Nicholas, he would come off as a troublemaker at this point. “I approached him a few times, but he always cut me off immediately. If it would help, I’ll tell you what I tried to tell him, but…just remember: I did offer, and he wasn’t interested.”
Lydia’s expression did not change and he couldn’t read it. “What do you know?”
“I told him that my grandfather knew Mary,” Jack began, and his heart thumped harder. “What I didn’t get a chance to tell Frank was what he really needed to hear. He just didn’t want to.”
“He refused to listen to you?”
“Well, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that. I don’t make a habit of speaking to the backs of men who’ve just dismissed me.”
“So he was rude.”
“That isn’t the point.” Jack felt irritated at the mere thought of Frank’s condescending face. “There are things I would have shown him if he had cared to have a serious conversation.”
“Like what?”
“I had not shown anyone anything to that point, or ever discussed any of this, because I promised I never would. A very serious promise, mind you, one of those deathbed commitments, Lydia. And it would have been bad for everyone involved if the story got out.”
Jack had a sudden realization that had surfaced before, but he had shoved it away: this emotionally drained woman, who’d come to him more than once for help, could logically blame him for everything. Her husband’s fantasy had torn up her life, and all along, through every passing year of Frank’s obsession, Jack had known the truth. Of course Lydia would blame him. Why wouldn’t she?
“I told my father I would respect my grandfather’s vows. If I hadn’t, and if my father before me hadn’t, there might have been a lawsuit, or…I don’t know, maybe even murder. The Evans family is a vindictive, violent bunch. That much of what Frank says is true.”
“Murder?”
“The Evanses could be ruthless, my grandfather said. The grudge they he
ld against Mary Walker for disappearing is legendary. I’m sure you’ve heard that. But the details of the story… They’re ugly, and it won’t help anyone to know about them at this point. Let’s just discuss the bottom line.”
He stood up and moved reluctantly toward the photo of his grandfather’s fishing boat on the wall. On the floor beneath it, an eighty-year-old toolbox sat inside an even older crate stamped Stratton Bros., Greenfield, Mass. It was his grandfather’s last box of prized possessions, a cherished few items that had survived the twenty years of sorting that took place after his wife’s death and before his own.
Ordinarily, Jack kept the crate in his house, double-locked in a closet. People would steal anything, his dad always said, though Jack had never been robbed. But he’d brought the box up here a week ago, planning to show Nicholas the beautiful Negus pelorus, an instrument for taking relative bearings at sea, and the two nineteenth-century sextants in their cherrywood boxes. He had even hoped to teach both Lydia and Nicholas how to use the devices in those bright, future days he had foolishly allowed himself to imagine, when he would instruct them on everything they’d need to know to sail the Great Lakes.
He lifted the sextants out and set them on the floor. Who was he kidding? Nicholas and Lydia, both of them, would not only resent his secrecy, but also kick him out of their lives forever when they realized he’d been sitting on the facts that would have awakened the lummox to reality. There had to be some way out of this confession he’d set himself up for here. Lydia could never understand how he’d wrestled with the issue. For years. He’d never be able to make her see how his family and his principles mattered so much that to betray them would permanently damage some essential structure in him. People don’t think that way anymore. No, they expect you to be what they want you to be. If you aren’t, there’s something wrong with you, and you become expendable.
The complicating element here in 1999 was that Jack had had no idea Frank Carroll was making such a fucking mess of his life over his Mary tale. And if that rainstorm hadn’t driven Nicholas to his barn, Jack still wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know that Frank Carroll had based his entire academic career on it and planted it at the center of his home life. How could Jack have conceived of such a phenomenon?
From the spattering of Frank Carroll lectures he’d attended or heard about over the years and the occasional blurb in the paper, Jack had thought it was a hobby for the guy, an entertainment. His own distaste for the bullshit of it was, he guessed, largely because he identified more with the pretty girl he grew up with than her arrogant husband. Not to mention a strong sense of Mary Walker being a real person who deserved an accurate, unromanticized biography or none at all. Jack had never wanted to submit himself or the memory of his grandfather to needless town gossip, and he still thought it was wrong to do so. However, his silence would perpetuate the suffering of these two people he had stumbled into caring about.
From the crate Jack lifted the plastic bag thick with the letters, postcards, and other papers his grandfather had valued through the end of his life, and he carried it to the couch. Lydia had stretched out, one arm bent under her head, her knees pulled up toward her chest, her eyes closed. He sat down gently and, with a change of heart, tucked the bag out of view under the couch.
“You’re back,” she said lifelessly. “I think I drifted off for a second. Were you gone long?”
“A couple of minutes. I was looking for the papers I want to show you,” he improvised.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It’s not fixable. You said it yourself. Frank doesn’t want to hear anything that doesn’t fit his story. And I can’t accept him passing off one of my poems as hers. Our life together is over.”
“Lydia,” Jack said, guilt pricking his mind. “Listen. The one fact that matters most is that she did not live past 1939.”
“Yes, that would discredit this document. Since my word means nothing. But…what makes you sure?”
Parsing up the past into what was harmful to discuss and what was not, he suddenly couldn’t think at all. “It’s a long story.”
Lydia sighed heavily, wearily. “Jack. I have time. I have waited almost two decades for a genuine new fact to surface. Please tell me what you know.”
She sat up, and his gaze caught in hers. He couldn’t imagine that a man who’d fallen in love with those eyes would prefer the imagined eyes of a dead woman. “My grandfather knew that she died. It’s a very unhappy story.”
“I understand it’s not happy. I’m not surprised.” After a pause she added, “Don’t you think you’ve borne the weight of your grandfather’s knowledge alone long enough?”
Jack’s gaze darted to her face, sure he heard judgment in her voice. “Don’t forget, Lydia, it wasn’t mine to share. My grandfather promised her that he would never, ever tell anyone what she’d done or where she went.” He started to bend down to reach for the bag, then gripped his hands on his knees instead, feeling the burn of old anger. “I did not ask to be in this position. But I don’t believe that just because someone publishes poetry, their life belongs to others. Even after they’re dead.”
“I agree. But…”
“But what? The only reason I even considered telling your husband anything was because…well, because he was your husband, frankly. And because of the little bit I knew of you from when we were kids, I didn’t like to think of you being made a fool of.” He looked at her straight on. “How could I know he was making such an enterprise out of the question? That he was tormenting you and Nicholas with his…his self-serving fantasy?”
“I don’t think it was intended to be torment, Jack,” she said evenly. “He’s a scholar. It’s one of the things scholars do. They become obsessive in their quests. He wanted to save Mary from obscurity—”
“Christ, Lydia! Why are you still defending him? He wanted to make a name for himself through a tale that he became married to. He wanted to live in a romantic story about a woman with a certain mystery and appeal around her, simply for what it would do for him. For his career! And if you don’t see that, I don’t know how to show you.”
“Well.” Her face tensed, and she tightened her body into a smaller form on the couch.
“He did not have the truth of Mary Stone Walker’s life in mind, or he would have sought more information from people that knew her. Like me. Okay, he took a disliking to me for some reason. But there are numerous others. No, real life did not fit into Frank Carroll’s mission. He wanted her life to turn out to be a thrilling page-turner with a nice stack of literature he could publish, right? Best way to ensure that was to stick to partial truths. But we don’t get to design the story of other people’s lives merely from plots we like…making devils and angels out of ordinary men and women, whatever suits us, to hell with the messiness of real human beings’ lives.”
He grew agitated as these thoughts that he’d repeated in his own head many times emerged as spoken words. “I think he should have at least sensed that maybe there was something dark and not at all that glorious about her…disappearance. But no, that wasn’t in his viewfinder. He wouldn’t peek past his own version of Mary Stone Walker, even when I offered him significant suggestions that I knew more. He didn’t want it, and that should tell you a lot about the man. He didn’t want her, not the real her. Just like he doesn’t want the real you.”
He was shocked to hear his own final words. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
“Yes, it was. And how would you have any idea about that?” she asked shakily. “Marriage is a complicated thing.”
“Oh, yes, so I see. Marriage is a complicated thing. Like Mary’s, for instance.” He pulled out a cigarette with a wry laugh. “Angel of White Hill now, but in her own time, and in her own home—” He couldn’t go on. The self-censorship on this subject was too old. He lit his cigarette, inhaled, then blew the smoke away from Lydia. “There’s no end to the co
mplications of marriage, it seems to me.”
He stared away from her, fully aware that she was probably also looking away from him.
“My grandfather talked about this stuff to my father because he was tormented by the fact that Mary had come to him in a time of crisis, and that because he cared, he ended up playing a part in her premature death. Eventually he couldn’t keep it in. He completely blamed himself. Completely. Furthermore, Granddad knew firsthand how jealous Bernard Evans would be that he’d ever even spoken with Mary, and he knew how violent that man could be. Bernard Evans had put at least three other lumbermen in the hospital, can you imagine? His own employees. And then there was the whole clan of Evanses, and Granddad was sincerely afraid that one of them would take revenge on one of us.” Jack looked at her without seeing her.
“Do you think I was anxious to let that demon loose? And how could it be right under any circumstance for my grandfather, Robert Kenilworth the fisherman, to go down in local history as the bad guy in a story about the beautiful poet Mary Stone Walker?” He grunted. “I know this town. That’s exactly what would have happened. What will happen if I open my mouth. And then maybe I’ll die at the hand of some pissed-off Evans prick. Who knows? People are insane.”
He could hear his own heart pounding.
“Wow, Jack,” Lydia said quietly after a few moments. “I see why you’ve wanted to keep this to yourself.” For minutes neither of them spoke. The kerosene lamp hissed softly as both of them stared into the barn’s shadows.
“Okay,” Jack said. “I knew this stuff and wanted to protect Granddad. But still, Lydia, there were facts out there you all could have found. Even that scrapbook you brought to me had bits of information that relate to Walker. And that thing found you; you didn’t even have to search! You might not have been able to tell what things meant without a whole lot of work or talking to someone like me, but her story is out there.”
Jack walked to his worktable and pulled the scrapbook out from under a magazine, setting it on his knees, next to Lydia.
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 26