The house had always had a name, that’s what my father had said.
“It’s called Harrow,” he told me. “For a school in England. A place where granddad very much wanted to go. A place he dreamed of going.”
“Why didn’t he?” I had asked, when I was eight.
“It wasn’t a school that poor boys went to,” my father said.
“But granddaddy’s rich,” I protested. “Mommy said—“
“He hasn’t always been rich. He grew up very, very poor. He grew up dreaming of having all the things he came to have in his life.”
“I dream of things I want, too,” I said.
My father said, so quietly I could barely hear him, “Better you should never dream at all.”
And now, nearly twenty-one years later, I parked my Ford before the house that had become mine.
“Harrow,” I said it aloud, against the elements. “Harrow, you belong to me.”
But I was to learn that this house belonged to no man.
3
Let me mention this now: my grandfather had never lived in the Modern Age, despite the fact that he was somewhat responsible for creating the Modern Age, what with his cattle, railroad, and shipping businesses — all of which he had completely abandoned to others by his 46th year. He turned inward; he began avoiding the modern world and turned to the ancient; he began, in my father’s words, “refusing to acknowledge the present or future.”
He used gas lamps in his rooms. Candles in wall sconces; great hearths in each room, yes, even in summer, for the house got quite cold. Heat could not enter it easily. He owned a candlestick telephone most popular twenty years before, and a large battery-operated radio that nearly took up half the parlor, and these were his only connections to the outside world as I then knew it.
The rain stopped by seven, and I was too exhausted to go through all of the papers in my grandfather’s great library—piles of them still sitting there after all this time.
Mrs. Wentworth came in with a late supper—just as we had discussed on the telephone before I drove up. She had been granddad’s companion in many ways, and I had no doubt she felt badly used after having taken care of the man for thirty-one years and then to have been shut out of his will. But she bore this well—I felt no evidence of jealousy or anger about the woman, whose exuberance had not been dulled by his death or his wishes.
“Lamb stew for the chill,” she said, heating up a small saucepan on the ancient Easter Range that looked like the kind I had last seen at the age of six—in the grand kitchen that seemed made to serve banquets. “And a bit of fresh salad. I grew the lettuce out in the Holy Land and the peppers and shallots, too. All fresh. One more week and we’ll lose them all to this chill.”
The Holy Land was, of course, the ruins that stretched behind the house, just to the west.
Wentworth was a round woman whose eyes never seemed to close as she spoke of missing the old man and of the days when he was his usual self. She reminded me a bit of a character from Dickens, the well-fed dowager with no dowage.
“He had been in such pain for the past year, it was a blessing he got called,” she said.
“Mrs. Wentworth,” I said, when she brought a cup of black currant tea into the drawing room for me. “Are you doing all right yourself?”
“Fine, sir,” she added. It was almost refreshing to be alive in the year 1926 and to be called “sir” by a woman who had a good three decades on me if not more. She was easily 60 years old. My father’s generation had been called “sir” with regularity, but I had grown up with Jazz Age men and women who believed that was part of the dead past.
“I know my grandfather didn’t provide for your retirement...” I began. With a pang of guilt at the sudden wealth handed to me, I noticed the china cup from which I drank—expensive beyond what I could imagine.
“Oh, sir!” She laughed, sitting herself before the fire. “Good lord, he provided me well enough over the years. Didn’t you know?”
“Know?”
“He paid me twice the going rate for housework and cooking. And then he taught me how to take care of it,” she added, a wistful quality overtaking her voice, “but...I do miss the old badger.”
“Badger?”
“That’s what I called him. He was my old badger and I was his shrew.”
“Did you love him?” I asked, impulsively, feeling that I had broken some barrier with her, that we’d created intimacy in this moment...and I had known my grandfather so little that I wanted to find out more about him from someone.
Mrs. Wentworth blushed, shaking her head. She rose, brushing her hands against her skirt. She grabbed a poker and pushed at the kindling beneath the logs—sparks danced up the flue. “No, sir. I cared for him, but he was as unlovable as a badger, your grandfather was. He had claws. He dug down and hid. Whether it was those books of his or those letters he wrote to Lord knows whom, what went on between us was hardly love. But I did care for him, and I knew he needed me here.”
“I thought, perhaps,” again I had not thought this through. Something in Wentworth’s manner had gone cold.
She set the poker back down against the hearth. “A fire like this can burn all night, but its beauty is when it dies. When it’s ash, that’s when you can get near it. Like your grandfather, I suppose,” she chuckled, and then left me alone again. I heard her later, just before I went to bed, washing up in the kitchen. I stopped in, and said, “I’d like very much to keep you on. At least until I know what I’m going to do with this place.”
“Did you leave your wife then?”
“Months ago,” I said, not wishing to correct her. Madeleine had, in fact, left me. But that was in the city—that life. That worry. That hurt.
That emptiness.
She nodded as if agreeing that not being married was good. “Well, I will be happy to come work here, for as long as you need me. But my feet hurt some days.”
“I don’t want you to hurt—“
“No, sir, I don’t mean I don’t want to keep coming here. Harrow is as much in my blood as in my dreams. I couldn’t leave this place if I wanted to. Just that some days...” She hesitated, and I detected that now she was lying.
“Some days I just am not up to coming here. My feet, and sometimes my hands, get cold. They swell. Maggie comes in some days. Maggie’s good at washing and dusting, but you must watch her when it comes to keys. She is sticky with keys.”
“There’s a Maggie as well as a Wentworth?” I asked, grinning.
“There’s even an Arthur who comes twice a week for the grounds,” she nodded. “He’s good with a gun should you like to hunt. There’s good game about these woods. Wild turkeys; excellent geese this time of year.”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a hunter.”
“And then,” Wentworth said, not having heard my feeble comment, her eyes closing for a moment as if in prayer, “there’s folks that are no longer with us.”
We had a moment of silence between us. While I loved my grandfather dearly, I did not know him well enough to even pray for his soul. Weep for him, mourn a bit, and wish that I had known him better, yes. But pray? I had not believed in God since the war. Prayer was for the naive and the deluded; it was for the mass of people who refused to face reality. Madeleine had been a devout Catholic; she had thought I would go to hell for my lack of faith. But even she had left her faith when she left me for another man. I had come to the conclusion that all religious faith was lost as the years went on, and it was for children to keep them obedient.
I thought then that the only hell was knowing what men did to one another in war, and how we managed to destroy ourselves in peace. God was a dream. Faith was a foolishness. However, I respected Wentworth in her prayer. She needed it.
When the moment had passed, I said, “Of course. When you’re feeling well, I would love to have the help. Particularly going through his things. His papers.”
“Burn that lot,” she snapped, a change of mood overcoming
her pleasant features with wrinkles and winces. She turned back to her business. “I’ll lock up, sir. You seem tired. The bed is all fresh and ready for you, and I’ll be back by eight to fix breakfast and show you the grounds.”
Sensing a new bitterness in the air like the scent of burnt cooking oil, I nearly withdrew myself from the kitchen and went to the small wine cellar beneath the back stairs. Very quickly, and without much of a search, I grabbed an old cask of amontillado with a light amber color to it and the scent of walnut and brown sugar at its cork, and went back up to the drawing room. I lay before the fire, thinking of Madeleine, trying to erase the images in my mind of my wife in the arms of the man who had enchanted her, and managed to drink myself into a coma fairly quickly.
The fire was red ash when I awoke, having heard someone whisper something in my ear.
Then, I fell back to sleep, the liquor still swirling in my head.
4
I awoke when I felt a crawling in my ear. It terrified me all the more because I heard a gentle buzz along with the crawling, and knew some insect had crawled up my neck and along my ear lobe. I slapped at my ear, and the feeling ceased. I had fallen asleep, drunk, on the red oriental carpet with the fleur-de-lis-like designs; the room was cast into darkness. For a moment, I believed I was back in my apartment in the city; but within seconds, I remembered I was at Harrow, in my grandfather’s drawing room.
I heard a clock in the hallway chime three times, and sat up so that I could find my way to my bedroom. The alcohol pulsed in my blood, causing me to grasp at walls and doorways.
The house was completely dark—pitch black—and I stumbled, stubbed my toe as I went, turned this way and that, opened doors, reached for lamps and switches but could not find any, until finally, it came to me that I was dreaming and not walking through the house at all. Then, another stubbed toe, and I knew that no dream was this bad.
I came to the great glass door to the conservatory, finally, and opened it on to a cloud-shrouded moon, and there, the Abbey, a haunted skeleton of some unknown history, fittingly preserved in its decadent state.
The moon emerged fully from the clouds, and grew brilliant, casting a coat of light across the world of Harrow.
Granddad—the Badger—had cut away the world, had finally collected a graveyard to keep life and death both back from the door.
Wandering the property alongside the ruins, in the hours before dawn, was like moving slowly through another century, another world.
As I went, I felt a presence with me, a warm presence, a benevolent presence, a presence that made me think my grandfather was still there, a ruin among his ruins—
I turned toward that presence, to look it in the face.
5
I was dreaming, wasn’t I?
But this could be no dream: I was awake in a haze of alcohol and sleep and exhaustion and, even, mourning. For how could I be out, drunk still, in the darkening garden with its halo of moonglow, stumbling through these ruins?
The moon streamed across the forms and monoliths that defined the abbey. In the shabby but pure light, a woman who may have been—perhaps not the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, but one of the most mysterious - stood in the half-light of the moon as it moved slowly like a white veil being drawn back. She seemed to be carrying something on her back. Her face was obscured, but I saw that she was naked, but not naked, that she wore a gown so tightly wound about her form that very little was left to my imagination —
But you are drunk, I told myself, what wild creature is this who stands so still, not ten feet away from me? No wonder, I reasoned, that there was such a thing as the 18th Amendment, this Prohibition that was so easily ignored and so rarely enforced: for drink made men see angels in the moonlight! It led men like myself down a literal garden path to see visions of heaven and beauty, flickering faerie temptresses with breasts and wings and the shadows of night—before us, before us men, who, according to my ex-wife, were unworthy of even the lowest rungs of hell. So said my drunken mind that might’ve even been shouting this out loud:
For it was neither woman nor creature, but a statue of an angel, the burden on its shoulders, wings; there was no gown at all to allow the figure any modesty; it was a beautifully sculpted nude.
And as my eyes finally adjusted to the ambient light of shadow and moon and the whiteness within the darkness, I saw that I stood—as I had begun to hazard in my liquored mind-fog—in a garden.
6
It was a place that I remembered from my childhood visits. One would think I could never forget this wonderland. It was what my grandfather had called his Garden of Earthly Delights, a sunken statue garden bordering the abbey. It had a long narrow path between the miniature wilderness that had been growing and twisting within it for a quarter of a century. Among the weeds and the grass and the flowers gone wild, were several statues.
The angel before me seemed to shimmer in the light. I sensed the other figures in murky darkness - and then it came to me: I had played Blind Man’s Bluff with my grandfather here in this very garden, and had hidden behind a statue of the god Pan, and had sought brief refuge beside a representation of the Greek goddess, Athena, before my grandfather had managed to grab me and I had lost the game. Once, as a child, I had begun crying in the garden and had looked up at the turret that extended from the East Wing of Harrow. There, I saw my grandfather standing at the window within the turret room, looking down at me. He dried my tears with his stern but loving presence. I could not remember much of the afternoon spent in this special retreat of my grandfather’s, but at least I felt at home somewhere in the world.
The memories were coming back. That was good. I had been at Harrow one evening only, but soon I would remember the small things about my grandfather, the wonderful things. My father and mother had despised him, and I had been kept away often from him and from Harrow; but now it would be different. There was great good in Justin Gravesend. I was thankful to him for those brief memories of happiness in childhood, of seeing him at the tower window, or playing in the garden with him nearby, of knowing now that he had saved me from work that bored and frustrated me, and had, through this inheritance, brought me to his own greatest love: Harrow.
And then, I saw some creature stir among the fern and ivy, and there, a shadow, and then another, low to the ground, so small that at first I thought I was imagining it, all around the statue of the angel…creatures, moving…
7
Cats.
I counted six of them, and I went over to see why there was this lost city of felines in this garden of angels and remembrances; they began yowling as I approached, all running in and out of the arbor and around the statues. I thought: my hands are full here. I need to burn down the garden, get rid of these feral cats, and probably sell the whole damn property and just get a house closer to the city.
I lingered by the angel a bit, laughing at my foolishness: who was I to rid a place of cats? I always liked cats, and no doubt they would kill a few mice.
The chill of October began to seep into my bones, and I even heard a mockingbird - an early riser - in a nearby tree. I felt sleepy and somewhat happy and ready to take on the ownership of this estate and all that went with it.
Cats and angels and moonlight, as well.
And then, one of the statues moved.
8
All right, she was a vision, I’ll admit, but not of an angel nor of a goddess nor even a statue. She had stood so still for the longest time that I had been positive she was some shepherdess carved in alabaster from a pastoral scene. She was perhaps five foot four, at the tallest, and in her right hand she carried a lantern that had as poor a light within it as I’d ever seen.
She had, in fact, been standing there for several minutes, and I saw at once that there were two cats at her feet. The Queen of Cats, I thought, and here she is. Unlike the angel, she was not a nude, but wore a heavy jacket that went past her knees, and in the feeble glow of her lantern, I could practically see
fire in her red hair. Also, unlike the angel, she was flesh and blood, and even shivered a bit to prove it.
And, after a moment’s hesitation when she wasn’t sure if I had really seen her or not, she stepped around the cats and the ivy, and looked at me as if I were the one trespassing on her property. As she got closer to me, I began to smell fresh shallots, the kind my grandfather grew in the Holy Land garden. “Who are you?” I asked as calmly as I could, given my wobbly feet and my feeling of having just gone from seeing an angel to seeing something too human. I could not take my eyes off the lantern - not that her face was not lovely in shadow, but the lantern looked so ridiculous. “What kind of contraption is that?” I pointed at it before she had a chance to answer my first question.
“It’s a lantern. A bicycle lantern,” she added as if this first explanation weren’t enough for my enfeebled brain. I detected a slight brogue, a charming bit of Irishness in her, and I laughed so loud I was afraid to wake people in the village.
Certainly, cats scattered through the underbrush at the honking sound of my laugh.
“I used to have one of those,” I said, “give it to me, let me see.”
She looked at me as if I were ready for the nut house. And some part of me thought: bless the night and the moon—it clothes us with something more provocative than mere flesh - it gives us a glimpse of our souls. She was there, near the angel statue, and the moonlight made her seem as fierce and beautiful as any of the figures standing nearby.
“Please,” I said. “I won’t bite.”
She took a few more steps in my direction, and I went in hers - nearly stumbling across a thick patch of weed and roughhewn stone - and soon I held the lantern up.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 2