by Jane Langton
On Bellwort Path no imagination was necessary to picture Captain Thomas Cunningham, because his tall stone was adorned with a bronze portrait. Captain Cunningham had been a bluff and stalwart-looking man, handsome and bewhiskered, just the sort of person to rely on in a crisis.
Mrs. Winthrop’s favorite monument was the obelisk belonging to Barnabas Bates, THE FOUNDER OF CHEAP POSTAGE. If only Mr. Bates were postmaster general right now!
Even closer to Zachariah’s neighborhood on Willow Avenue was Auburn Lake. It was just a pretty ramble along Walnut Avenue or sometimes (when Eloise was feeling frisky) a scramble down Oxalis Path.
The lake was charming with its little bridge and with the splendid row of hillside tombs along the shore. They belonged to some of Boston’s best families—Lodges and Cabots, Kirklands and Higginsons. The most distinguished was the mausoleum of the Gardner family.
Eloise was proud of the fact that her very own mother had been invited to a garden party by Isabella Stewart Gardner. There had been Japanese lanterns and exquisite sandwiches—Mother had slipped a few of the delicate triangles into her pocketbook.
There were flowers everywhere. The cemetery was a riot of pink and white dogwood trees, orange azaleas and tulips in a hundred dazzling colors. Eloise was pleased to see how many visitors had come to see the blossoming of spring at Mount Auburn.
Hurrying back to Zach, she spread her scarf on the grass, settled down, opened the Globe to the obituary page and read some of the death notices aloud—
BELMONT
Sampson, Louisa B.
BROOKLINE
Otto, Caspar
Wilberforce, William
CAMBRIDGE
Balski, Mary
Peeps, Pearl
Galenowitz, Albert
Morton, Margaret T.
“Nobody we know today, dear,” Somehow it was always a little disappointing. Eloise couldn’t help wishing that one day an old friend would cross the bridge and move into this delightful neighborhood.
Putting the paper aside, she craned her neck and looked down the slope to Narcissus Path. Why, goodness, there was the bereaved mother again, tending the grave of her infant child. Such a tragedy! Dead at fourteen months!
The little boy had died twelve long years ago, and yet the grieving mother still came once a week with flowers and scattered them around the pitiful little stone. Today, good gracious, she was lying down on the mossy bank and closing her eyes. Was she taking a nap? Oh, goodness—Eloise uttered a little shriek—what was that?
A large dark form was stalking along Narcissus Path between the little boy’s grave and the blocky monument celebrating deceased members of the Pond family.
A bird, it was a large bird. Not a pheasant, not a goose. What was it?
Eloise held her breath, then gave a little sigh of rapture. The bird had turned toward the sunlight and at once its breast was iridescent, shining with feathers of blue and green and gold.
It was a peacock! Oh, if only it would spread its tail!
8
The courage of the elderly on waking in the morning—no lone needed it more than Edward, one of the senile residents of the Aberdeen Street Nursing Home.
Opening his eyes, he was always bewildered. His brain was tangled, and yet he had a profound awareness of the pity of his condition. He was bereft.
Looking around the room, he knew he had seen it before. He groaned. His sheets were drenched.
There was a lump in the bed across the room. The lump sat up. It swung its legs over the side of the bed and rubbed its frowzy hair.
Edward watched the other man dress himself. It was a long struggle. When the man finished puzzling over the buttons on his shirt he stared doubtfully at his shoes, then put one on the wrong foot.
A woman came in, said good morning to the other man, took off his shoe and fitted it on the other foot. Then she put on the other shoe and tied them both smartly. Standing, she fastened his red suspenders, talking cheerfully.
When the man in the suspenders vanished, Edward lifted his head and made whimpering noises. At once the nurse crossed the room and her face grew enormous. She was bending over him and smiling. She said, “Good morning, Edward. I’m Dorothy, remember?”
“Yes,” said Edward. And he remembered that he liked her.
“It’s Friday, Edward. Your niece will be coming to see you this afternoon.”
Edward frowned. “I don’t have a niece.”
“Of course you do.”
“No,” said Edward crossly. He reared up from his pillow. “I tell you, I don’t have any goddamn niece.”
“It’s all right, Edward. Here, just roll over and let me change you.”
A little later Dorothy pushed his wheelchair along the corridor to the elevator, and they went down together to the first floor for breakfast.
In the dining room Edward faintly recognized the other people at his table, but he could remember only one of their names, because she was the only one who talked to him.
“Barbara,” he said.
“Good morning, Edward,” said Barbara, with a broad smile on her clever face.
9
Leonard was on his way to a store he usually avoided, the trendy little grocery on the corner of Huron and Lakeview. Most of its customers were Mrs. Winthrop’s neighbors, prosperous people who lived in the happy daylight sunshine of Escher’s woodcut Day and Night.
Few came from the other side of Huron Av, a neighborhood more like Escher’s darker city—not that those three-deckers and elderly wooden arks were so bad. Canny realtors were already roaming the streets, appraising properties, their eyes alight.
Leonard would not have come here at all if he hadn’t run out of coffee. On his last expedition to the supermarket he had forgotten to put it on the list. He promised himself to buy only a few beans of Mocha-Java and get out of there fast, without a glance at the croissants or the baby spinach.
But as he strode along the sidewalk on Huron Av, three amazing things happened.
The first was not really so amazing, but Leonard always enjoyed the awareness of something moving high over his head. It was the fat sausage of the Goodyear blimp, making its lazy way over the city of Cambridge. The blimp looked like one of Escher’s fish shapes, and like so many of his prints it seemed slightly miraculous.
The second thing was indeed amazing, at least until Leonard thought about it afterward. It was an encounter with himself. Coming toward him along the sidewalk was a mirror image of Leonard Sheldrake. It had the same grey-streaked hair, the same clumsy arrangement of features and the same skinny shoulders. Even its windbreaker might have come from the same sporty catalog.
Leonard’s mirror image seemed startled too. For an embarrassed fraction of a second their eyes met as they passed each other, separated by two feet of empty air. A few yards farther along the sidewalk Leonard looked back. His image was looking back too, in perfect obedience to the optical laws of reflection.
Leonard turned away smiling, remembering an insane moment in a Marx Brothers movie, Harpo pretending to be Chico’s reflection in a nonexistent mirror.
It was just a coincidence, naturally. The other guy wasn’t really an identical twin. He was a little taller than Leonard and probably twenty-five pounds heavier. Strange that it didn’t happen more often. With six billion people on the planet there couldn’t possibly be six billion different combinations of noses, ears and elbows. There were probably a thousand Leonard look-alikes in the state of Massachusetts.
But for a moment he had felt eerily like part of the Escher print called Magic Mirror. What if he and the other guy had exchanged selves? What if they had both gone through the enchanted surface and come out on the other side? What if Leonard was now the other guy, and the other guy was Leonard?
The fact that he knew everything about himself didn’t mean a thing, because perhaps until the moment of meeting he had known everything about being the other person and the other one had known everything about being Leonard.
He gave up, cast one more glance over his shoulder just as, naturally, the other guy was glancing over his shoulder, and walked on in the direction of coffee.
The third amazing thing was of more consequence.
10
Like Eloise Winthrop, Maud Starr made a habit of reading the obituaries in the Boston Globe. Maud was the proprietor of Twice-Told Togs, an upmarket used-clothing store on Huron Avenue.
Her interest in the death notices was different from Mrs. Winthrop’s. Maud read them vulture-fashion, hovering over the recently deceased, flapping back and forth to snatch at likely prey. This morning she pounced on a juicy one—
EFFINGTON—Entered into rest,
April 17, Martha (Goldberg)
Effington, 49, late of West
Newton and Chatham.
Beloved wife of Benjamin Effington.
Devoted mother of—
Well, well! Poor dear Martha, may she rest in peace! The dear dead thing was only forty-nine! Her grieving husband was probably about the same age, perfect, ripe for the taking. Rich, no doubt, with a summer home on the Cape.
Maud whipped out the phone book to look up Effington. As she ran her finger down the page, the phone rang.
It was her friend Sally, proprietor of a similar shop in Dedham. Maud and Sally were often in touch, comparing notes. Sally had just bought a darling antique wedding dress from the nineteen-thirties. “Pink satin, with posies on the shoulders and a train. Sweet. What about you? Got anything new?”
“Do I! Oh, Sally, remember that green coat with the missing button? Well, I found a button that more or less matched, so I sewed it on and then I put the coat in the window along with the green feather boa and that kooky green satin two-piece, and guess what? A guy came in, all serious—you know, his eyes bulging out of his head—and wanted to know where it came from. And so—”
“Where what came from? Maud, slow down.”
“Oh, sorry, it was the coat. He wanted to know where I got the green coat. Well, of course I didn’t know who brought it in. It was just draped over the doorknob a few days ago when I opened the shop.”
“How strange.”
“Strange? You bet it was strange. Mysterious. When I told this guy I didn’t know, he said, ‘How much?’ and naturally I named a high price, but he didn’t boggle, he just snatched out his billfold and handed over the cash and walked off with it. And you know what? He was holding it sort of tenderly. I’ll bet it belongs to the woman he loves, don’t you think so? Only maybe she’s left him?”
“Oh, my God, Maud, maybe he’s a stalker.”
“A stalker? Do you really think so?”
Maud did not tell her friend Sally that she herself had been the stalker in this case. No sooner had Leonard left the shop with the coat over his arm than she had whisked out her BACK SOON sign, hung it on the door, locked up and hurried after the interesting stranger with the haunted face. Did he live nearby?
You couldn’t wait around for the men in your life to appear. You had to be proactive. You had to snatch at the least opportunity.
The coat was Leonard’s first piece of luck. For the last week he had spent his spare time wandering fecklessly around the neighborhood, up and down Sibley Road and Fayerweather Street and Lakeview Avenue, exploring the streets below Huron, and then moving east to Concord Avenue and Garden Street. He had visited the art gallery again and again. So far he had not caught a glimpse of the elusive Frieda.
But he had recognized the coat at once in the window of Twice-Told Togs. One of the buttons didn’t match the rest, and Leonard remembered with a rush of excitement the missing button on Frieda’s coat. This was her coat, it was certainly her coat. Why had she parted with it?
Climbing the hill on Sibley Road with the coat over his arm, Leonard heard footsteps clattering behind him. He stood aside to let the woman pass.
But she stopped, breathing hard. It was the woman from the shop.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “It’s just my morning run.” Gasping, she waved a vague hand in the direction of Brattle Street, Mount Auburn Hospital, Memorial Drive and the Charles River. “I always run around the neighborhood at this time of day.”
“Well, carry on,” murmured Leonard, politely not looking down at her four-inch heels.
“Too exhausted,” she said, grinning at him. “Do you live around here?”
The woman looked a little sinister. Maud was wearing one of her newfound treasures, a slinky outfit with a pattern of green scales. Leonard nodded and started to walk on.
Undiscouraged, Maud teetered along beside him to the front walk of Mrs. Winthrop’s house. There he nodded at her again and said, “Well, so long.”
“My name’s Maud,” she said, looking at him eagerly.
“Leonard,” mumbled Leonard, walking quickly away.
Maud stared at the house number, and at last withdrew. She could think of a dozen ways to pursue this promising beginning.
Gently Leonard laid the coat on his bed and inspected it carefully, looking for some sort of identification, remembering the way his mother embroidered her telephone number on the fabric of her umbrellas.
There was nothing personal in Frieda’s coat. The pockets were empty. But when he lifted it from the bed he noticed a bulge on one side. There was an inner pocket with something in it. Leonard found the pocket and pulled out the contents.
It was an old-fashioned videocassette.
He didn’t have time to set up his old VCR and look at it now. Hastily Leonard thrust the cassette into a drawer and hung the coat carefully in the closet, where it made a bright splash of green among his dun-colored clothes.
11
The Aberdeen Street Nursing Home was not the most luxurious ous nursing home in Cambridge. Mary Kelly’s friend Barbara Strong had chosen it partly because it would take a little longer here to spend down her savings, but mostly because the staff had a good reputation.
Barbara was not senile, but she was so crippled by arthritis that she had institutionalized herself. Sensibly, wretchedly, she had left behind everything that had been precious in her life—her house, her garden, her pleasant town of Concord and all her friends.
Some of the friends visited her once and never came again. Others came often, bringing news and gossip, books and conversation. They ran errands for Barbara, brought her home to dinner, took her to the movies. They made friends with the wordless old women in the nursing home—Jenny, Wilma, Shirley—and the pitiful old men—Edward, Henry, Bob.
Mary Kelly was one of Barbara’s loyal friends. Last week she had brought wild flags yanked up from the muddy shallows of the Sudbury River. Today she brought only herself. She wheeled Barbara out of her room and along the corridor to the place where the old men and women sat in a row against the wall. Then she pulled up a chair beside Barbara and read her a letter from their friend in Tallahassee.
Other visitors came. One was Jenny’s granddaughter, bringing her baby boy to see his great-grandmother.
Babies were a rare sight in the nursing home. All the old women smiled and leaned forward to see the little darling.
Another visitor, a good-looking blond woman, admired the baby too. She held out her arms and said, “Oh, please, may I hold him?”
Mary recognized her as the niece of old man Edward, the pitiful old gentleman who never spoke. She would talk brightly about one thing or another, while her uncle hung his head and showed no sign of hearing.
Mary and Barbara watched as the young mother lifted her little boy out of the stroller and handed him to Edward’s niece.
“Oh, isn’t he yummy,” cooed the niece, cradling the baby tenderly in her arms and nuzzling his round cheeks with her nose.
But then there was a harsh shriek, and everyone looked up.
The cry came from old man Edward. Dorothy, the head nurse, was wheeling him from the elevator. His mouth was open, he was staring at the baby in his niece’s arms and howling at the top of his lungs.
Before anyon
e could stop him he jerked the wheelchair out of Dorothy’s control and surged forward to snatch at the baby. Words came out of his mouth. They were real words, but disconnected.
“Baby—no,” gasped Edward. “She—no! No, no, no, no!”
Terrified, the young mother snatched her child back from the old man’s niece, plopped him in the stroller and rushed him away to the outside door.
Left behind, the grandmother held up disappointed hands.
Edward’s tangled mind seemed to have forgotten the baby. He began shouting another fragment from his old life, “Garage, park it in the garage.”
His embarrassed niece hissed at him, “Shut up, Uncle Edward.” She grasped the bar of his wheelchair and raced him down the hall.
But her uncle was still howling as she punched the elevator button, “Fool, you fool, you fucking, goddamned fool.”
“My God, Uncle Edward.” She was shouting now. “Will you please shut up? Jesus God, where’s the goddamned elevator?”
At last the elevator doors opened, she shoved him inside, the doors closed and quiet fell.
Mary looked open-mouthed at Barbara, who merely shrugged her shoulders and muttered, “Crazy place,” as though these aberrations happened all the time.
Mary kissed Barbara, said goodbye to the others and left the nursing home. She was not there to witness the anger of Edward’s niece when she erupted from the elevator in a rage.
Barbara watched her march up to the reception counter and demand to see the head nurse.
Dorothy emerged from her office and looked at the woman warily. Edwards niece attacked at once.
“Dorothy, I am impoverishing myself to pay for my uncle’s residence in this place. Surely relatives wishing to bring their children should call ahead.”
“Yes, well—”
“Listen to me, Dorothy. I don’t know whether or not you are aware that my brother is a member of the licensing board for Massachusetts nursing homes. I happen to have observed other infractions of the code. I have only to say a word to my brother and he’ll—”