Murder on the Cliff

by Stefanie Matteson

  It was, quite literally, the house of Charlotte’s dreams.

  She had dreamed of it when her third marriage was falling apart. It had been one of those vivid dreams that the dreamer recognizes as being out of the ordinary, what Carl Jung had called an archetypal dream. She had been carrying it around with her for more than thirty years.

  In the dream there were two churches: one was large, ornate, and overrun with women. The other was Aunt Lillian’s house, a little white temple, simple and pure. She had to make a choice, but it was a clear one. She would choose the temple; it was so lovely. By contrast, the cathedral looked tasteless and vulgar. She started heading toward the temple, but then noticed that it was deserted. Why wasn’t anyone there? Did all those women at the cathedral know something she didn’t? She reconsidered. Yes, the cathedral was tasteless and vulgar, but its complex façade and baroque embellishments had a warmth and richness that the other temple lacked; it spoke of history and tradition and ritual. Was the little white temple too regular, too austere? She didn’t think so, but everyone else seemed to. She was torn—charmed by the simplicity, but seduced by the ornament.

  In her interpretation, the two churches stood for the state of being single and the state of marriage. In her dream, she had chosen the baroque cathedral.

  She had tried to patch that marriage up, to no avail. He had been one of her leading men and was widely considered to be one of Hollywood’s most charming. That he was also a drunkard and a womanizer she hadn’t discovered until later. Her first marriage—to her hometown sweetheart—had fallen apart when she went to Hollywood; her second, to a New England blueblood, had been her most successful. She had had ten happy years with Will before he died of a heart attack in his forties. After her third husband, there had been a succession of lovers—Line Crawford among them—before she had dared to enter that ornate cathedral for the fourth time, only a few years ago.

  Her fourth husband, Jack Lundstrom, had built a small, family-owned mining company into one of the country’s biggest conglomerates. She had always thought her best chances for marital success would lie with someone whose achievements matched hers, but in a different field, someone who wouldn’t be threatened by being Mr. Charlotte Graham. When they’d met at a mutual friend’s, they’d recognized themselves in one another, and been immediately attracted. Such is the power of narcissicism. She should have known better at her age.

  They’d separated after two years. Now she suspected that he was about to ask her to come back. She had dreamed the dream again two nights ago. Actually, it had been in the early morning, the morning she had found Okichi-mago’s body. She wondered which church she would choose this time.

  She parked the car behind an old Dodge in the driveway. As she got out of her car, she noticed that the huge old oak growing next to the driveway bore a plaque that said the tree was alive at the time of the signing of the Constitution. It described the tree as being fourteen feet around and the largest of its species in Rhode Island. Old Trees, she decided, was a fitting name for the residence of a woman who was nearly a hundred.

  Past the oak, a mossy path led through a gap in a stone wall to the house. Charlotte followed the path to the front door, which was flanked by a pair of monumental Japanese temple urns. Above the door, pigeons nested in a transom window above the cornice. Their droppings littered the porch floor in front of the door. The door itself had a gigantic keyhole, which made Charlotte feel like Alice after sampling the liquid in the bottle labeled “Drink me.”

  The feeling of the house was one of lyrical decay, of a place that was lost in time, out of a mossy, tree-shaded dream. Newport was full of such places. A house such as this would be a treasure in Burbank, but here it was just another old crumbling edifice. The city had sometimes been compared to Troy, with its layer upon layer of history. In places like this, she felt as if she had broken through to one of the earliest layers.

  Aunt Lillian met her at the door, her blue eyes shining. She had changed out of her kimono, and was again wearing a white kerchief on her head. She looked like a Normandy peasant. She showed Charlotte into the living room, which took up almost the entire first floor.

  “I see why the house is called Old Trees,” said Charlotte.

  “Did you see the plaque on the bicentennial tree by the driveway?”

  “Yes,” said Charlotte.

  “The National Arborists Association put it there in 1987,” Aunt Lillian said. She gestured toward the back of the house. “I was just putting the kettle on for tea. Would you like to sit down?”

  “May I help you?” asked Charlotte.

  “If you’d like.”

  Charlotte followed her back to a tiny kitchen, which looked as if it hadn’t changed since the turn of the century. A toaster oven sat on a counter next to an old gas refrigerator. The sink was made of soapstone. A steep, narrow staircase led up to the attic bedroom.

  “Do you live here alone?” asked Charlotte as Aunt Lillian put the kettle on the old gas stove and set a Japanese lusterware teapot and two cracked cups on a battered old toleware tray.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I moved here when I was forty, into the big house. When my husband died, I moved over here. My son was grown and I didn’t want to take care of that big place by myself. I never liked it anyway. Too pretentious. I prefer my little temple.”

  Charlotte was getting to the point in life where she was beginning to think of herself as old, but she could have been Aunt Lillian’s granddaughter. If she had moved to Old Trees when she was forty, she must have lived here for fifty-six years—more than many lifespans.

  “Where did you live before you moved here?”

  “On the road. Tokyo for many years. That’s where I met my husband. Peking. Canton, Seoul, Hanoi, Moscow, Reykjavik, Gothenburg, Havana, Trinidad, Lima: you name it. My husband wrote travel books. On the Road in Mongolia, On the Road in Chile, On the Road in Mandalay, On the Road in the Balkans.”

  “I’ve read some of them,” said Charlotte. “I enjoyed them very much. In fact, Edwin Harvey had been the most prominent travel writer of his generation.”

  “Just about everyone has. Everyone of a certain age, that is. No one under fifty ever heard of them. He wrote thirty-six. I wrote one myself,” she added. “It was called I Married a Gypsy. I hated the title. But the movie I Married a Millionaire was a big hit, so everything had to be ‘I Married a Whatever.’”

  “I remember,” said Charlotte. “One of my big early films was I Married a Vampire. I hated the title too.”

  They returned to the living room, where Aunt Lillian showed Charlotte to an armchair next to a table heaped with magazines: the Sierra Club bulletin, the National Review and The Nation, Japanese newspapers and magazines. A recent issue of Japan Times had a photo of Okichi-mago on the cover page.

  Aunt Lillian clearly kept her mind active, and her choice of magazines indicated wide-ranging, if not downright conflicting, interests. Charlotte looked around the room. Scattered among the junk were some lovely things: a magnificent pink jade Buddha, a beautiful Chinese landscape painting.

  “I see that you have some beautiful souvenirs of your travels.”

  “Not much really. Considering that this”—she waved a frail arm at the contents of the room—“represents a lifetime of traveling. I’ve given a lot away, of course. But I never really had all that much; we were always on the move. Never wanted much either. Didn’t want to be encumbered by possessions. That tansu was the one piece of furniture I ever coveted.” She pointed to a low Japanese chest made of a light-colored wood, with a branch of wisteria blossoms inlaid in multicolored woods across the front.

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Yes. It reminds me of sitting out on the veranda at Shimoda when I was a girl. I used to spend my summers there with Lavinia. The wisteria growing on the veranda there is the oldest specimen of Japanese wisteria in the country. Uncle Townsend grew it from a cutting he brought back from Japan. Paul’s had his eye on that tansu
for years. He wants it for Shimoda. I’ve practically had to chain it down to keep him from walking away with it. If there’s anyone who loves beautiful things, it’s Paul.”

  She was interrupted by the whistle of the teakettle.

  “There’s the teakettle,” she said, rising. “He wants me to leave the tansu to him, but I’m not going to. No reason—just contrary, I guess. I figure its my contrariness that’s kept me going for so long.”

  Charlotte started to get up, but Aunt Lillian laid a restraining hand on her knee. “Stay here, my dear. I wouldn’t want to wear out one of my young visitors.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “I’ll be right back.”

  While she was gone, Charlotte surveyed the room, which was out of another century. Not the restored and sanitized century of Shimoda, but a faded, crumbling, and peeling century. The uneven plank floors were covered with an old braided rug; pots of African violets stood in little pools of sunshine on the windowsills. The room was shabby, but it had an aura of peace and refinement; Shawn would have called it wabi.

  Aunt Lillian returned in a moment with the tea tray, setting it down between their chairs on a cracked leather ottoman which was stacked with books and magazines. Then she poured the tea, and passed a cup to Charlotte.

  “I love your house,” said Charlotte, as she stirred some honey into her tea with an old silver spoon, ornate and heavy, that looked as if it hadn’t been polished in the last fifty years.

  “I know it’s decaying,” said Aunt Lillian, as she munched on a piece of cinnamon toast. “But so am I. I figure we’re a good match.” She offered the cinnamon toast to Charlotte and then took another piece for herself. “I have a good appetite,” she said. “I take it as a sign I’m not going to die soon. Pity,” she added with a little smile. “I feel as if I’m about ready.”

  Charlotte smiled, and returned to the subject of the house. She’d had enough of death for the moment. “I had a dream about a house like yours once.” She proceeded to tell Aunt Lillian about the dream.

  “Well!” said Aunt Lillian when Charlotte had finished. She leaned back in her tattered chintz armchair, the glow on her face like light shining through a piece of old parchment. For a few minutes, she sat silently. Only the very old could be as still as she was, Charlotte reflected, as if all haste and striving were over and done with, and all that was left was waiting for death and meditating on the divine fate that had brought her to these ends.

  Charlotte had had some reservations about recounting the dream to Aunt Lillian. She was afraid she wouldn’t understand, but she had understood perfectly. Why shouldn’t she? She had chosen the temple fifty-six years ago.

  “Did you choose the temple?” asked Aunt Lillian.

  Charlotte hadn’t told her how it turned out. “No,” she replied.

  Aunt Lillian nodded knowingly. “I had a similar dream, years ago. A man I’d known and admired for many years had proposed marriage. I dreamed that I was on a rock in the ocean. The waves were crashing all around. My two married friends were on shore. I could have joined them, but I decided that I liked the excitement of being out there all alone on my rock. The rock was painted white, just like your temple.”

  “Did you ever have any regrets?”

  “No, I didn’t. Though it got pretty scary out there on my white rock sometimes, especially during typhoons.” She looked up. “But I don’t think it’s about your temple that you came to see me, my dear.”

  “No, it’s about Paul Harris.”

  “Oh, yes. What about him?”

  “At the reception this afternoon, you told me that there was an error in my speech, that Paul hadn’t just met Okichi-mago last year, that he had known her for many years. I wondered what you meant.”

  “Just what I said, my dear.”

  “When did he meet her, then?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It must have been twenty-five years ago.”

  “Twenty-five years ago!”

  “Yes. He didn’t just meet her, as you said in your speech; he created her.” She went on to relate the story: “As you know, he’s been collecting art in Japan for years. One year, he heard a story in a Kyoto geisha house about a little girl named Okichi who was supposedly a descendant of a child that was born to Okichi and Townsend Harris.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “About six or seven. When he came back, he came to me about it. When I taught school in Tokyo, I did quite a bit of research on Uncle Townsend’s stay in Shimoda; it’s not far from Tokyo, you know. Paul asked me if I knew anything about a baby. I had heard rumors, but I was never able to confirm them. Most of the mixed-blood babies born to Japanese women were put to death: there was even a clandestine burying, ground for them there, a cluster of little gravestones next to a stream in a remote valley. I assumed that if there had been a baby, it had been put to death too.”

  Charlotte listened in fascination.

  “But I did know quite a bit about where he might look if he wanted to pursue it further. The Japanese are a nation of reporters. They keep records of everything. The Shimoda town office had a whole warehouse full of old diaries and daybooks. If there was a baby and if it had survived, there would be a record of it somewhere. On his next trip, Paul went to Shimoda and tried to track down the records. It became an obsession with him, documenting the authenticity of this rumor. Every time he went to Japan, he’d get a little farther.”

  “It turned out to be true, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Okichi was supposed to have put the baby to death, but she gave it to a relative to raise instead. She probably wanted to keep it, but she was already a pariah; to admit to bearing a child of mixed blood would have meant even further ostracism. I always thought that her guilt at giving her baby away might have been one of the reasons she was so miserable in her later years. Paul found Okichi-mago living in the country with her grandmother, who was the granddaughter of Okichi’s baby.”

  Charlotte took a minute to figure out the relationship.

  “So Okichi-mago is Okichi’s great-great-great-grand-daughter,” she said finally.

  “Yes. Three greats.”

  “What do you mean he created her?”

  “Like Pygmalion created Galatea. From the day he found her, he managed every aspect of her life. She was his ivory image. The grandmother died not long afterward, and he arranged for a guardian to bring her up. He supported her, he sent her to the best schools, he paid for her lessons—singing, samisen, flower arranging.”

  “The idea being, presumably, to turn her into a famous geisha?”

  Aunt Lillian nodded. “The most famous geisha of her time. He studied the careers of the most famous geishas of the twentieth century and orchestrated her career accordingly; it was Paul who arranged for her to meet Tanaka, with the idea of his becoming her patron. He thought the patronage of a rich and famous businessman would enhance her career.”

  “It’s just like Hollywood,” said Charlotte, thinking of the many starlets who had been plucked out of obscurity and groomed for stardom by one movie mogul or another, including, to some degree, herself.

  “Yes. Well, the geisha is to Japan what the Hollywood star is to America. Right down to being the subject of endless gossip.”

  “Was her romance with Shawn orchestrated too?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Aunt Lillian, her eyes sparkling. “I think she did that on her own. Would you like more tea?”

  Charlotte said yes, and Aunt Lillian poured her another cup.

  “Why has Paul never married?”

  “Because of his mother. He lived with her until he was nearly forty. She was a woman of exceptional grace and beauty. She had a lovely house, on Sutton Place in New York. Why should he have given up such a gracious life? I know what people say about such relationships, but there was nothing the least bit Freudian about it. If more men had mothers like Eleanor, fewer would ever marry. No one else could ever have measured up to her. Except, of course, Paul’s own creation.”

  “A
re you saying that he was in love with his creation?”

  “Yes, but not in a romantic way. He was in love with her as he is with his restoration of the Temple of Great Repose. I was wrong when I compared him to the Pygmalion of Greek legend, who fell in love with his ivory sculpture. He was more like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion. For Paul, transforming ah impoverished Japanese orphan into a beautiful and famous geisha was less a labor of love than a scientific exercise or a technical challenge.”

  “‘I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe,’” said Charlotte, quoting from the Shaw play, which was based on the Pygmalion myth. She had played Eliza Doolittle in her younger days and the redoubtable Mrs. Higgins in a Broadway revival only last year.

  “Actually, Okichi-mago was very much like Eliza Doolittle,” said Aunt Lillian. “She didn’t sell flowers, but at the time Paul found her she was selling little folk dolls that her grandmother made …”

  “Aunt Lillian, Paul Harris wrote the speech that I delivered this afternoon. If he’d known Okichi-mago since her childhood, why was he perpetuating the idea that he had only met her last year?”

  “He was creating a legend, my dear,” she replied as she helped herself to another slice of cinnamon toast, and then offered the plate to Charlotte. “Does the Hollywood mogul who is creating a star reveal her taking diction lessons, having her eyebrows plucked, going on a reducing diet? No, he unveils her full-blown, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter.”

  She was right. She remembered Paul talking about Okichi-mago’s mysterious benefactor. He had been the benefactor, the one who was pulling the strings of the marionette.

  “She was his secret project,” Aunt Lillian continued. “Paul is a very secretive man, despite his active public life. He kept his relationship with her locked away, like he does his spicy pictures.”

  Had Aunt Lillian seen his pictures? Charlotte wondered.