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Carson Woods, Michigan—April 1999
Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck…
While the poor ship in flames went down.
…And love’s the burning boy.
~ Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), “Casabianca”
Their eyes were like dark lamps, glimmering. Her son. This man who had become a friend. Together they represented safety, except from the fear of her husband’s mind. No one could protect her from that. As she entered Jack’s house, the two of them watched her, their spirits hovered close to her, and their hands were quick to assist her. Opening the door, taking her raincoat, handing her a towel, and leading her farther inside to offer her tea.
“I’m fine.” Lydia found herself struggling a little bit for breath. “I was delayed. But Frank didn’t see me.”
“But you saw him,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s okay.” She tried to dismiss the subject. She didn’t want to discuss in front of Nicholas the fact that his father had returned to the house with a policeman and another set of lies. “I’m so confused at this point that it would be best for me if we could talk about everything after some sleep.” Her attempt at a reassuring smile felt like it might tear her dry lips. “I saw Frank in passing, but he did not see me. I managed to get the things Nicholas and I will need in order to stay here—for a few days.”
“Good.” Jack lifted his hand to touch her but lowered it to his pocket instead.
“Nicky, I want you to rest.” Looking at him, Lydia felt her voice waver. “Let me give you a hug. Then let’s find someplace for you to sleep.”
She wrapped her arms around her tall son, and tears filled her eyes. She clutched him tightly and felt his arms tighten around her as one strangled sob rose from his chest.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry for all of this, Nicholas.”
“It’s all my fault, Mom,” he said miserably.
She pulled back to look at his flushed face.
“Listen,” she said. “You are not responsible for your parents’ choices and behavior over many years, and it is there that all this trouble began. Do you hear me? The poem you forged was just an attempt to stop the pain. A well-intended mistake.”
Nicholas was silent before reaching into his back pocket. Hesitantly, he pulled out a small object. For a moment he just stared at it, then he held out his hand. Lydia opened her palm, and into it he placed a wad of aged paper, folded to a tight square and damp from the rain.
She looked at Nicholas, heart hammering, and then began to pull on one edge. Like the mouth of some strange creature, it opened slowly. And there before her lay her own words…in the likeness of Mary Stone Walker’s script. Like a magic trick. Expertly forged lines with pauses and little scrolls of ink forming Lydia’s own words gave rise both to memories of writing the poem in Boston and a flash of the first time she’d seen Mary Walker’s handwriting in the Carson Community College library.
“Oh my goodness,” she whispered. She folded the paper down and slid it into her back pocket. “You were very brave to go back in and get this, Nicholas,” she said, awestruck.
“My feet just took me back in there. I didn’t have a chance to decide.”
“It was the right thing to do. For everyone.” Lydia squeezed his hands and exhaled heavily. “Now. Let’s try to rest. I hope you can sleep until dinnertime,” she said, and after watching him walk away, she went to the kitchen and sat at the small table, staring through the window at the storm.
When Jack had made sure Nicholas was settled in the bed in his den, he returned to the kitchen, and Lydia waited for him to meet her eyes.
“Mr. Kenilworth, my friend. In all this madness, some interesting facts have arisen and been swept away.”
“To the sawdust bin where they belong,” Jack said, busying himself with dirty dishes in the sink.
Lydia almost stopped herself from continuing. Who was she to demand that he talk—about anything? “I don’t know about that,” she said, and then her voice sank to a whisper. “I could have used your help a long time ago.”
“But I had no idea.” Knowing immediately what she was referring to, he kept his voice low. “No idea of your problems or Frank’s thing for Mary Stone Walker. Now, however, I want this all over with, and I want peace. I no longer care if my grandfather’s friendship with Walker becomes common knowledge if it makes you happy somewhere along the line and gives Nicholas some room to live his life. That’s how it is from where I sit.”
“I can’t imagine Frank listening to me at this point. I don’t know what’s going to make him see reality, but I don’t think it will be me.”
“Oh, Lydia. Listen,” Jack said after a few moments of silence. “Let’s cut to the chase. I’ll help you any way I can. If you think it would help your family, please take the death certificate to Frank in a day or two. Or whenever. It has to have some impact. He can maybe save a little face and base his next phase of research on it.”
“His next phase of research?”
“He can go to Chicago, which is where the document shows that Mary was buried, and seek out evidence and maybe even witnesses there. Tell him you just want peace for your family. And maybe—with the patience and effort that you are obviously skilled at—maybe in time everything will work out for the three of you.”
The concept of the official death certificate was still so fresh and strange that it was difficult for Lydia to fit it into her personal understanding of Mary Walker. She was dead. She had been for six decades, just as her old friend, Ruth Donovan, had feared, and it was suddenly clear to Lydia how deeply she had hoped that the woman had survived 1939. “What exactly does the certificate say?”
“I can show it to you.”
They left the house together, locking the front door behind them and dashing through the rain-filled wind into the barn where they sat side by side on the couch. Jack pulled the bag full of his grandfather’s papers from the floor.
“You keep it in a plastic bag on the floor?” Lydia asked, alarmed.
“I got this out earlier tonight. When you first arrived.” He fished through the papers. “My intention was to show you everything.”
He found a yellowed envelope, opened it, and showed her the simple document inside from the Cook County coroner. She held it. This paper created by someone who’d seen and testified to the poet’s dead body was the closest she had ever come to the flesh-and-blood Mary Stone Walker.
“But it says ‘Mary Williams’!” Lydia’s gaze shot to Jack’s face.
“She used her mother’s maiden name. As I said, she did not want anyone to find her or to ever know what she’d done.”
“How can you be sure it’s the same woman, Jack?” She regarded his face anew. Did he look like someone who could be stuck in a fanciful old family tale, as Frank had assumed? Jack’s expression was weary and not entirely patient as he closed his eyes briefly.
“She wrote to my grandfather with her new name and address, explaining why she was using that name, why she wasn’t staying with her Williams relatives in Chicago as she had supposedly planned to, and…some other things.”
“Do you have that letter?”
“I do.” His jaw shifted.
It seemed to Lydia that he might be growing angry.
They looked at each other, then he held his hand out for the death certificate. “Would you like a copy?” he asked.
“Yes, please. I have my own reasons for wanting to understand all of this. But I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to talk to Frank about this subject again.”
Jack walked to his copy machine, turning back to look at her as he set the death certificate on the machine’s glass.
“Is that so?” he said doubtfully. “After you’ve worked on this so long together, that’s hard to imagine.”
As he passed her the page, his eyes seemed to be trying to read her face. She picked up the plastic bag.
“What about the letter, Jack?”
He took the bag from her hands and replaced the original death certificate inside it.
“Why don’t I read parts of it to you. So that I can explain it. Then I’ll make you a copy.”
The sound of the wind grabbing with fierce gusts at tree limbs and the eaves and corners of the barn was suddenly accompanied by the low grind of a car engine, and a flash of headlights hit the house. Then another set of lights followed the first. Lydia and Jack hurried to the window where she recognized Frank’s pickup truck. She raced to the barn door and unlocked it to leave.
“Lydia, no, stay in here!”
“We can’t let him go in the house!”
“I locked it, remember?” Jack came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders to pull her back from the door just as Frank and two other people burst in.
“Ah, there they are,” Frank said. “The thief and her accomplice. Embracing?”
Beneath a hood trimmed with white fur, Drew Johnson’s mouth formed a grim frown. Slightly behind and between Drew and Frank, Shane’s face had a similarly angry cast.
“How dare you come out here after all you’ve said and done,” Lydia said. The barn seemed suddenly isolated and vulnerable.
Frank pointed a finger at her while glaring at Jack.
“This is my wife, Kenilworth. I don’t know what you’ve been trying to pull with her, with Nicholas, but I’m warning you right now that you’re looking like a home wrecker. And a con man.”
Trembling, Lydia gave a short laugh. “Give it a rest, Frank. Your games are completely transparent.”
“Were you the one who told her to call the police to claim I’d trashed our house?” Frank went on. “I didn’t know who destroyed everything, but her phone call certainly put an end to that question.”
Lydia could feel Jack’s eyes on her.
“I didn’t smash those things,” she growled, “and you know perfectly well who did.”
“Did Nicholas help you?” Frank furrowed his brow. “You can’t be left with your son, dear, if you’re going to engage him in destructive, illegal activities. You know, I was at the police station when you called. About me.” He gave her a critical frown. “And they told me that. Even though he’s fifteen, your care can be put off-limits if you’re criminally inclined.”
“Don’t even listen, Lydia. It’s nonsense,” Jack said.
“Is it? You know her so very well, do you?” Frank tilted his head. “Better than I do?”
“I know what I see. Your son’s a basket case, but it isn’t because of his mother.”
“Watch it, Kenilworth. You’re getting a little close to accusations you will regret.”
“Please, Lydia,” Drew said, her voice shaking with a mixture of nervousness and anger. “That poem is so special. And it was all we have left of her. Please give it back.”
Lydia stopped the words of outrage that she wanted to spew and shook her head. “Drew, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Let me set all of you straight. And then you can get off my property. Lydia is here because she wanted me to tell you, Professor, what I know about Mary Stone Walker. There are inarguable facts that I tried to pass along to you years ago, but since you never wanted to hear them, I’ll assume your interest is limited, and I’ll be brief now. The woman left White Hill on October 29, the night she disappeared in 1939, to go to Chicago for medical attention. She died there about four weeks later, and I have a copy of her death certificate and a letter she wrote from Chicago. To my grandfather. There were no poems written in 1940 because she was no longer in this world. The page you are speaking of, miss, is a forgery.”
The roaring of wind and crash of the surf on the shore far below accentuated the silence in the barn.
“Give me the poem, Lydia.” Frank’s voice was low and threatening.
“My poem?”
“Mary’s poem. Give it to me. Now.”
“You can’t hear me, Professor?” Jack said evenly. “Mary Walker has been dead for sixty years. She died alone in a tenement in Chicago in November 1939 when she was twenty-five years old. Dead. Forever silent. She wrote no more poetry. Get it through your head, man.”
“How do you know all this?” Shane spoke up.
“That’s too horrible,” Drew said softly, eyeing Jack. “It can’t be true. How could she die?”
“I know that it’s true because my grandfather befriended Mary and helped her get to Chicago where she sought medical help. She was a morphine addict.”
“Ah,” Shane said, nodding. “I always wondered.”
“That’s hogwash,” Frank said with an unfriendly glance at Shane. “No evidence for it.”
“And she had other problems that drove her to leave. My grandfather was a kind man, and he pitied her.”
“Oh, he pitied her, did he?” Frank chuckled. “If she knew him at all, it was undoubtedly the other way around. You see, Lydia, how it is? Even your pal here wants to make Mary Walker into a pathetic little female who could only survive with the help of a man. Doesn’t that rile you?”
“Here, Frank.” Hands shaking, Lydia held her copy of the death certificate toward him and he took it. “The certificate of her death in Chicago. She was using her mother’s maiden name, Williams, in order to hide.”
He scanned the page and laughed. “Williams? Mary Williams?” He let the paper drop to the floor. “What kind of fool do you think I am, Lydia? What kind of fool are you?”
“Well, I guess I am the kind of fool who married someone who wants to pass my writing off as someone else’s.”
“Get the poem, Lydia,” Frank said, his tone suddenly light, as if he’d just thought of the idea. “If it isn’t part of Mary Stone Walker’s body of work, you know it won’t ever be read at all. You know that.” He straightened the collar of his coat, shook his hair back, and stared with intention at her. “We talked about that.”
“Hmm. I think you have a problem here, Cap’n,” Shane said after a few seconds, staring at Frank with doubt. “This does not sound good.”
“You could have avoided this whole situation, Frank,” Lydia said. “Long ago, you could have talked to people who knew her. You could have found out more than your imagination can whip up from gazing at her pictures and poems and fantasizing about her life. You could have written an honest account of her life, her struggles, her work. That would have been a genuine scholarly effort and meant more than all of this—”
“Stop! I was pursuing the truth through the only thing that matters—the written legacy of a genius. You would have had me speaking to people like your friend here?”
“Or maybe Bernard Evans himself,” Jack said.
“He hasn’t a whit of sense left, Kenilworth. You must know that.”
“What do you mean?” Lydia asked, her eyes darting from Frank to Jack, who glared at each other. A fractured image from a recent experience crossed her memory as she asked again, “What are you talking about?” The image involved Lincoln Babcock and Mary’s old house. “Bernard Evans is dead.”
“Bernard Evans is in the state hospital. The asylum,” Jack said, his eyes on Frank. “He has been there for years. Decades.”
“But…” Her mind filled with the image of the old man pointing up to Mary’s attic window and screaming at her as if he knew her, and as if…as if whoever he thought she was, was part of his madness. “I saw his obituary ages ago. It must have been over fifteen years ago.”
“It was fake. He had a twisted plan, you see. He thought if she believed he had died that Mary would return,” Jack said. His gaze was sympathetic as he took in Lydia’s alarm. “He’s crazy.”
“That was a futile hoax that proved his stupidity.” Frank laughed. “H
e was an idiot, and there was no point in trying to talk to him.”
“You knew he was still alive, Frank?” Lydia’s voice sounded slightly unhinged.
“Why would a woman who was constantly degraded by such a lout ever return to the place where she met with such treatment? Such constant abuse? Demeaned daily in her own home. It seems pretty obvious that she was too good for that.”
“And I’m not,” Lydia stated as Frank’s description of Bernard’s treatment of Mary sounded viscerally familiar.
“None of this is about you, Lydia!” Frank cried. He rammed a fist down hard on Jack’s worktable. “Do you hear me? None…of this…is about…you!”
“Except for certain key points,” she said, putting her hands on her hips as Frank moved toward her, her fingers digging into her own bones.
“No, woman, none of it is. You gave up literature. You gave up on Mary. And you gave up on me,” he said. “You’re a romance writer, not a poet, and what’s done is done.”
“What’s done is done.”
“Yes.”
From her back pocket she pulled the piece of paper Nicholas had torn from Teasdale’s book and held it in both hands. Just as Frank was recognizing it, she tore it in half. He cried out and took hold of her wrists, trying to immobilize her hands.
“Goddamn you, Lydia. Stop right now! I swear if you don’t let me have this victory, you will not live to remember this.”
She began to tear at the two sides, wildly, haphazardly, again and again, as Frank shoved her to the wall and tried to grab the remaining pieces from her hands. Jack pulled at his body from behind, and Frank rammed his elbow back at him but only grazed his head.
“You’ve come to the end of this road, Professor,” Jack said as he and Shane wrestled Frank’s bulk off Lydia.
Breathing hard, Frank looked around at the faces all directed toward his own.
“All of you are out of your minds,” he said, breathing hard. “We had this chance, this one chance, at last. To resurrect her.”
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 32