by Kit Reed
Bottom line? They know I’m screwed. Me. “Fuck that shit,” I told Iris, and she can flinch all she wants, she knows it’s a direct challenge and she knows I mean it. “Let’s us go down to that bank and open that safe-deposit box and you can damn well pull out the paperwork and show me what went where.”
Iris started a long, complex explanation designed to confuse; I tuned out some time around “We live in a landmark house, Elena. It’s an honor.”
I think: Millstone dragging you down into this ocean of heirloom furniture and worthless junk, and you don’t even know which of these things is which.
“Our legacy and yours, Elena.” Rosemary’s eyes glistened. Tears? “And the least we can do is keep it up!”
Iris was saying, “You’re a lucky girl, Elena.”
Yes I would not respond. I stared her down.
The day after Mom’s funeral, I dreamed I heard Mormama, warning me. Get out now, or you’ll never get out.
I was eight years old and I was grieving. I think I yelled, “You get out. Go away!”
I could swear I heard, If God would let me, I would!
By that time I was bawling. “I don’t want you, I don’t want anything, go away!”
I can’t! God, she was sad. I have to stay and take care.
I snorted tears. “Take care of what?” I heard, or comprehended her wail in the seconds before I crashed into sleep.
All of you.
When I walked back into 553 last week I could swear I heard our Mormama groan. Not again.
Look, lady, Barry left me with no money and no place to go and yeah, I take your warning, and it scares the crap out of me. Something inside this house keeps its women close. Three old, old women who never change. It gnaws people to bits, and sooner or later, it will swallow them whole.
Well, not me, Mormama. Understand? Not me! I’m out of here!
While I confronted the unthinkable, the twins talked on. The bonds. The exigencies. “This beautiful, beautiful house … it’s an honor and a responsibility…”
“Fuck that shit,” I told Iris, although I know I’m screwed. “You can’t just say I’m broke and get away with it.”
“Language!” With that ladylike shudder.
Go ahead. Shudder and flinch. This is a challenge. Deal with it. “That was my money. Let’s us go down to that bank and open that safe-deposit box and you can damn well pull out the paperwork and show me exactly where it went.”
CHAPTER 7
Mormama
Bad things happen in the bowels of this house. There was trouble in this house before I entered it, but I lost my dear Teddy to undercroft before I met or comprehended the horror that lies below. He was only three! The sweetest of Little Manette’s four boys, my darling Teddy reduced to ash and chunks of bone in the dawn of his life in this miserable heap of dreams, and I could not take care of him.
I blame Little Manette. I blame the vein of evil in her that prompted this pretentious, monstrous house, and to this day I cannot tell you whether it sprang to life in the murky undercroft when my daughter commanded it built or entered the building in Dakin’s arms the day he carried the new Mrs. Dakin Ellis in the front door.
I only know that there is evil in this house.
I loved my daughter but I never liked her, and she despised me. It was unnatural. She was her grandmother’s beautiful, precious doll, much, much too special for the likes of me. She was demanding and given to tantrums. When I denied her anything she battered me, howling, “So much for you, Mother, my Mama— Mama loves me, yes she does.” I begged Mother not to indulge her, for all the good that it did. Greed burned inside my daughter all her adult life and when she was thwarted, anger flared up and scorched the earth.
Understand, this is on her soul. In her overwhelming greed, my daughter made Dakin Ellis build this overblown shrine to vanity before she would consent to him, and Mother urged her on.
By that time they were so close that when Mother said “Smile,” my daughter smiled. You see, with me, Mother had always been harsh and judgmental, but she was “dearest Mama” to Little Manette. Saccharine and indulgent, winning the child’s love with a parade of gifts so rich that when Mother said “Dance,” my dainty daughter danced, and an ugly dance it was, because given things men did to them, true ladies must have everything done their way.
They colluded over blueprints for Manette’s new home in Jacksonville, ordering this addition to the floor plan and then demanding that— stained glass in the stairwell— and on and on before she would accept Dakin’s ring. Things the poor boy had to do to get what he took from her. Dakin’s bride saw to it that he set their eighteen rooms on an unbroken foundation so the house rode high, like a great plantation house, proof against floods, vermin, Yankees, I suppose, and she insisted that uncertain ground or not, Dakin must build on this particular plot on the best street.
He did warn her: too close to the river, with one too many flood tides, the complex limestone layers might shift, but Little Manette, she of the small mind and tiny feet, demanded this spot in this fine neighborhood because in those days, all the best people built along the river.
We didn’t know that he had it built over a— what? Vortex? Void? I call it undercroft, but when I first came into my daughter’s house, I had no idea what lay below. I only know that I was uneasy from the day I walked in, and it wasn’t only Dakin’s condescension when he lined up seven children on the porch and introduced me. Mormama. One more Mama than we need.
The big boys were grinning: Dakin Junior and Randolph. Little Teddy covered his giggle with tiny hands, but I loved those eyes. Puny Everett lifted his arms to his father, whining to be coddled, and the little girls? A maid came and whisked them away, leaving me with Dakin Senior, hampered by the family weakling’s skinny, thrashing legs. He handed me off to Tillie in the entryway with its rich décor, and carried Little Manette’s darling Everett upstairs.
Tillie was a sweet colored girl in a gray gown with a starched white collar and a white apron. Neither of us knew what to say to the other. I took her to be a nurse. “Is Mrs. Ellis ill?”
“No Ma’am. She said, ‘See to her,’ so I does. She down with the wet cloths on her eyes.”
“I see. And you?”
“I feeds her babies. I done the twins, but this girlbaby … She took this one hard.”
Oh. The wet nurse. “I see.”
By the time I came to Jacksonville Manette had named her three girls for flowers: Ivy, Iris and Rose. “So you’re feeding little Violet, Magnolia, Daisy or Hyacinth? What is it this time, Hydrangea?”
Tillie tried to cover her smile. We both smiled. “No Ma’am. This girlbaby name Leah.”
“Pretty!”
“She say it come from a cow.” Even though everyone else had vanished, she covered her mouth so nobody could hear. “This the one that broke the camel’s back.”
CHAPTER 8
Theo
I woke up feeling bad. Like Mormama sneaked in and planted words in my head when I was out cold, so I couldn’t stop her.
Mom got that there was a problem; she got whatever stink was coming off me and today around five when I was just about to die of it she said, “Let’s us go out to the Publix. I need Advil and some Tapatío sauce, Rosemary’s a no-onions, no-spices kind of cook. Come on, we can get your Aunt Ivy a quart of her favorite ice cream on the way home. Double chocolate in sugar cones for us. Plus I can get these job apps printed at Staples while we’re out. I’ve posted their forms, plus photo, but they all want my signature on hard copy.”
She was so bright and grinny that it scared me, like she was on to me, because this is how Lane gets when she’s fixing to back me into a corner so tight that I freak and yack up the truth.
We got in the car and all the breath came out of me. I thought, OK, and waited for Mom to start, but she just drove. We didn’t stop at the Publix on Riverside, she drove right past, like we might keep going until we ended up in Boston and maybe Dad would come out of tha
t girl’s house and beg us to hook up with him.
Mom took the bridge to San Marco and I rode along waiting for her to pry the lid off and start on me, but she didn’t. We talked about pretty much nothing, you know, riding along with the radio on, both of us all happy and lalala, with her saying, this is where I used to, when she wanted to know what was the matter and me saying, Mom, is that a real flamingo or one of those plastic things when all I wanted to say was, This scary thing keeps showing up in my room.
In the bottom of my soul I was thinking, don’t ask, and she didn’t, so I didn’t say. We stopped under a big tree at the far end of the parking lot of the big Publix over on Atlantic Boulevard, they had free samples and that was cool. When we came out with her Advil plus Twizzlers I thought, whew. Maybe we really are running away and I won’t have to tell her after all.
Stupid not to get that she’d parked us in this big patch of shade for a reason. So we had the showdown or whatever you want to call it in the parking lot at the Publix on Atlantic, and it wasn’t her prying until I gave up and told her what was the matter so she could say that’s crazy, honey. Chill.
Except. Son of a bitch, she brought it up!
“It’s. Uh. I don’t want to weird you out or anything, but. Uh.” She was trying for casual, and it wasn’t working. “It’s about May Street, I mean the house.”
I pulled off a pretty good shrug: you don’t scare me. “It’s old, it’s creepy, what else is new?”
For a minute I thought she’d choked on a Twizzler. It took her that long to get it out. “There’s something in the house.”
Lady, I’ve fucking seen it.
I’ve played it so cool that she still thinks that I, at least, have escaped the … Word! Is there even a word for this? I don’t know what the fuck it is or how it got into my life. The visitations. That shaft of cold in my tight little room, talking, talking, talking. I tried for cool and managed. “Oh-kaaay.”
“That’s one reason I put you in the wet nurse’s room; she wouldn’t be caught dead.”
“What’s a wet nurse?”
Boy, was she embarrassed. “See, your great-great— oh never mind. Little Manette got married when she was eighteen and they had too many babies so fast that she brought in a wet nurse to feed them.”
Ewww.I had to say something, so I said, “Little?”
“OK. She was your great-great-great-great whatever, you have so many greats in this place there’s no keeping track, Theo. Shut up and listen, OK?”
OK.
“It was too much. Little Manette and her mother didn’t get along, but when the last baby came, old Charlotte got on a train and came down to help. Like, surprise. She just showed up on their front porch with three suitcases in the carriage and a steamer trunk coming in a van. It was everything she had, and do you know what she told them? She said, ‘I’m here to take care,’ and she … It … All I can say is … Look. If you run into anything weird in the upstairs hall…”
Don’t ask, T. Just wait.
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be afraid of, it…”
It’s embarrassing. I go, “Ice cream,” like, if she doesn’t say it, I won’t have to deal. “We have to go get Aunt Ivy’s marshmallow fudge whatever at Baskin-Robbins, right?”
Too late. She’s all gritted and clenched and bound to tell me. “It’s not a ghost, exactly, and it isn’t your neighborhood predator sneaking in to rob us blind, but there’s, oh, gack! She’s kind of living here. If you call that living.”
We’re in it now.
“So if you see anything in the night, like, oh, a moving shadow in the hall, like, lurking, don’t freak. It’s just…”
If I don’t ask, we can pretend she isn’t real, OK? “OK Mom. We have to go print your letters and this resume before they close.”
“Shut up, Theo. She won’t hurt you, I don’t think. And don’t mention it to the aunts, they’re too busy pretending everything is fine.” Then in case I didn’t get it she fed me the setup line. “So if she turns up, don’t worry, it’s just…”
She was waiting for me to ask so she could finish. My mouth fell open and words popped out. “The fuck!”
Auto-snap. “Language!” She put the car in reverse and hit the gas so fast that my head jerked and we left the parking lot. She drove with her jaw so tight that I knew as far as I was concerned, she was done.
Yeah, I caved. “It’s just what?” Say it, lady. Go ahead and say it.
“It’s just Mormama, trying to help.”
This is how you get your mom to tell you more than she wants. “No way. She’d be a thousand years old by now.”
“Or dead.”
So we’re up against it. “Right.”
Then Lane gives me what all our greats and great-greats passed down to her, pretty much word for word. “The trouble was, she wasn’t welcome here.
“One woman alone,” Mom said. Then her voice broke a little bit, “See, her mother spent more money than they had. The bank took the house the day she buried her mother. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Better not say, like us. When Dad bailed on us he canceled Mom’s credit cards and defaulted on the mortgage, don’t ask.
About the question period. There was no question period.
Mom said in a flat voice, “OK, we’re home.” We parked between the garbage truck in front of the truckers’ parking lot and the exterminator’s van outside the Marvista, and do you want to know what I thought? I thought, fuck!
CHAPTER 9
Mormama
When our Teddy died, instead of grieving, Manette raged.
She was furious! Like Mother, she expected her children’s lives to march in line. She gave Dakin Ellis eight children, but Everett was the only one she really cared about.
Dakin Junior was independent, and she never forgave him. Randolph had a temper and my sweet Teddy was happy but too quick and too wiry to hug, dear God, I think he knew her for what she was. Teddy was my favorite, and Everett? He was the weakling, and he whined. Tractable and pretty as a porcelain shepherd boy around his mother, and Manette loved him more than all the rest. She and Tillie carried that child around on a pillow until he was four years old.
He was docile— that is, as long as they were fussing over him, and when they weren’t, he made everybody miserable. It was hell, watching her coddle Everett while her other boys ran wild. Long after his big brothers grew up and left the house, Everett endured because no matter where he went or what he tried or what went wrong, there were always women in this house happy to take him back. He was born puny but he outlived all his brothers. He tried a few things here, there, but he lacked moral fiber. He tried, he failed, and he came back every time. He came home and his sisters kept care of that boy all his mortal life. He died in this house at eighty-five.
On the day Teddy died, Tillie and I were out with the babies in the pony cart. My daughter was dressing Everett in his little organdie sailor suit. She had him standing up on a chair so she could tie his neckerchief when Biggie ran upstairs bawling, Fire, fire! All Manette heard was the racket, and she flew off at Biggie and took her time brushing Everett’s yellow curls before she carried him downstairs and saw Dakin in the front hall with his face smeared with soot and streaked with tears. Tillie and I came in the front door with the babies just then.
And Little Manette dropped Everett and ran to him. It was the only time I ever saw them hug, and he was grieving. That man grieved for the rest of his life; every one of us on May Street grieved.
And Little Manette? She didn’t grieve, she raged!
She was that spoiled.
Oh, how she raged. Three years old. That stupid, disobedient boy. She blamed poor Teddy. She blamed his big brothers for not minding him. They were miles away at the time but she berated them until they ran away. Dakin Junior enlisted in the army. He said it was the war but we knew. He couldn’t wait to get shut of her because in all these things, the boys were always blamed, and dear Randolph?
&
nbsp; She had it in for Randolph because of something we didn’t know about, and she railed at him until the day she died, long after he vanished from our lives. She blamed Vincent because the flames were so high that he couldn’t reach the child and she blamed Biggie for being in the kitchen, boiling water for Manette’s precious white wash; she was busy doing what her mistress wanted when Teddy sneaked out behind her back. She even blamed little Ivy; I never knew why. The child loved horses, she was helping Vincent in the carriage house. She blamed Tillie for taking us out in the pony cart. Of course she blamed me.
My daughter would never blame Dakin. After all, he organized, ordered, supervised, bought and paid for every item on her growing list of wants, but I know he feels guilty all the same. I know I do, for not being there. We all do, and Manette?
She blamed everything and everybody but herself.
And Vincent and Tillie and Biggie and every living soul in this great big house? We grieved. Dakin grieved, but never where the rest of us could see, although he and the big boys rolled the empty white coffin into the church. Naturally Little Manette had taken to her bed.
Dakin had workmen come in as soon as the Hewell brothers took what we had of our Teddy away, but I know: like me, the essential part of him is trapped in the belly of this house.
They poured cement on the spot and leveled it, although Biggie would never again do laundry in the iron washtubs. He had carpenters wall off the area below the porch, as though lattice would make us safe from undercroft, or keep the animus or the terror— whatever seethes below— out of the body of the house.
The fool didn’t know what I knew in all my secret places— that there is no safe place. Oh, he endured, but he endured in grief for the rest of his mortal life. And every year he went downstairs to inspect the lattice.
As though cheap lattice and cold cement would trap the evil in the belly of the house.
As though it would prevent his youngest daughter from going down there to meet that boy; they never thought to warn Leah because she was just a baby when Teddy died. Lovely girl, she was Dakin’s favorite, although her mother wouldn’t let him in to see her after the doctor came back and they found out the worst.