The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  “Hello?” My voice sounded small and frightened. As if in answer, the icy rain came down harder, falling in a silvery sheet that obscured my vision of the other side of the pond. When it let up the figure was gone. As if the rain had washed her away . . . or as if the black water had swallowed her up. But the surface of the pond was undisturbed. Could someone have disappeared beneath it so quickly? My heart pounding, I made my way around the edge of the pond to where I’d seen—thought I’d seen?—the figure. In the spot where it had stood was a narrow wooden walkway spanning a spillway—a weir, my father would call it—from the pond into a stream that led to the river. There were no footprints on the walkway, or in the mud on either side of it. There were cypresses, though, just beyond the pond at the edge of the garden. I must have mistaken one of the tall wavy trees for a person. An easy mistake to make, especially after that story Monty told about the girl drowning herself in the pond.

  I turned to walk up the hill to the house through the heavy, but no longer ice-laden, rain. As the adrenaline rush of fear receded the icy core of anger inside me also melted. I felt leaden, weighed down by my wet clothes and the glowering storm clouds over the bloodred bricks of Riven House. You’ll never have the courage to leave, they seemed to say, like Monty, who’d thought he’d gotten out of Riven House but had ended up back here.

  I saw a light in the library and decided to approach from the back terrace rather than trudge around to the boot hall. When he looked up from his desk, Monty startled at the sight of me. I must look like a specter, hooded and dripping in the rain, I thought, feeling a perverse spark of satisfaction for giving him the same fright I’d just had on the lawn. Then he smiled and I felt guilty for scaring an old man.

  “Clare, you’re soaked,” he said, pulling me inside. I only thought of the mud as I stepped over the lintel. I stopped and tried to take off my boots.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “These old floors have seen worse . . . but you do look like you went into the pond in those.”

  “I practically did. I couldn’t really see where I was going through the rain and then it started hailing.”

  “Hailing? Really? I must have missed that. I’ve been immersed in my writing—” He gestured toward the octagonal desk, which was covered with old books, marbled folios, notebooks, and photographs. A photograph of a girl in a white dress with an apple blossom wreath—the same photo I’d seen framed in the hallway—was propped up against the base of a bronze Tiffany lamp.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you—” I began.

  “Oh, please, I’m happy to see you. I was worried about you driving up in this. Did you say there was hail?” He shook his head and chuckled. “The weather in this valley sure plays its tricks. Is Jess all right?”

  “Jess is fine,” I bit off. “He’s back at the house trying to light a fire. I suppose I ought to get back there before he burns down the house.”

  Monty chuckled again, as though not in the least disturbed at the idea of his new caretakers burning down his property. “I’m glad you came up. I especially wanted to give you this—Jess mentioned you might want it back . . . now let’s see, where is it . . . ?” He shuffled the papers around on his desk and finally retrieved an old, dog-eared composition book, the kind with a black-and-white marbled cover. I looked down at it, wondering why Monty would be giving me an old notebook, and was startled to see that my name was on the cover—or rather my maiden name, Clare Jackson, written in my own handwriting.

  “My old notebook,” I said. “From college. You collected them at the end of the semester . . .”

  “And then due to my unfortunate run-in with the administration I was unable to ever return them. Jess told me that you always regretted not getting yours back. He seemed to think its restitution might inspire you.”

  “When did he say that?” I asked, running my hand over the worn surface of the book.

  “When you were both here,” Monty said. “I think, well, if I’m not being too forward, I think Jess feels bad that you gave up writing, that perhaps you have felt overshadowed by him. I’ve seen it happen myself with many writing couples—why look at poor Zelda! Not that you’re as fragile as her. Jess said he hoped that coming here would inspire you to write again.”

  “He told you that?” I asked, looking up from the notebook.

  “Yes, Clare. Why are you so surprised? You were easily the best writer in my class that year—the best I’d seen during my time at Bailey—and Jess had the wit to see that and fall in love with you. Although I can’t swear that was his primary reason for falling for you,” he added with a sly smile that reminded me of his reputation with the female students back at Bailey.

  “Then he must be disappointed,” I said, looking back down at the notebook. Beneath my own name I had written “Senior Fiction Seminar—Professor Alden Montague” in careful schoolgirl script. How young I’d been! How proud of getting into Old Monty’s elite circle.

  “He did not sound like a man disappointed with love when I spoke with him,” Monty said gravely. “Only a man disappointed with himself and worried about his wife—if it’s not intrusive of me to say so. He said you hadn’t been well this winter. I think he hoped that being up here would be good for both of you—and that is my hope as well. This place . . .” He looked over my shoulder, past me and out the window. “It has its moods, but sometimes it still has the power to surprise me.”

  I turned, following his gaze out the window, half afraid that I’d see that figure standing on the weir again. Across the river the sun appeared wedged between a bank of storm-gray clouds and indigo mountains. It cast a low beam of light across the river, skating over the lawn and pouring through the glass doors.

  “Oh!” I said, awestruck by the power of light to utterly transform the landscape. Even the gloomy pond glowed now like a copper plate in a jewel-green lawn. An empty lawn, of course; there was no figure on the weir.

  “Go on,” Monty said, waving me away. “Take your time settling in. Let me know if you need anything . . .” He was already moving back to his desk, which now lay in the sunlight as though preserved in amber. I had the feeling he was rushing back to his work while the desk, and the room around it, held the charge of that electric light.

  I left without saying good-bye and walked quickly down the hill, leaping over puddles and steering well clear of the boggy area around the pond, keeping my eyes on the ground. Not looking at the weir. I wanted to get back before the light faded, wanting above all to share it with Jess.

  Jess had given up the Brooklyn job so that I could come here and start writing again because he thought that’s what I needed. It was true that I hadn’t been well this winter. All the worrying about money had taken a toll on me. I needed to get away as much as Jess did. No wonder he’d been angry when I questioned him about it. He wouldn’t want to tell me that he was hoping I’d start writing again. He always said that other people’s expectations could kill the muse quicker than a bullet to the head. But he’d feel—irrationally, of course—that he was being criticized while he’d only been trying to do something nice for me. It had been one of those inevitable misunderstandings that crop up in marriages—like something out of an O. Henry story—but it didn’t have to be the end of the marriage. Of course I should talk to him about telling me what was going on. I knew that Jess believed that it was good to have some mystery in a marriage, but keeping a job offer secret was really too much.

  When I cut through the field it whispered silkily at my passing. I arrived breathless at the house just as the sun slipped down beneath the mountains on the other side of the river. But the light was not entirely gone. When I opened the door Jess was standing at the window watching the sun set. As he turned I saw the light reflected in his face from the fire in the stove and a dozen candles. He’d laid the white china plates out on the kitchen table. There was wine and bread and cheese and apples and grapes. There were even flowers—a damp fistful of late summer wildflowers in a Mason jar. I pictured
him gathering those flowers in the rain and forgave him everything.

  “There you are,” he said. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”

  “A little,” I admitted, going to him. “But I found my way back.”

  Chapter Five

  We had left the city sweltering in summer, but awoke the next morning, twined inside Jess’s old camp sleeping bag, to cool air that smelled like apples. My thoughts of leaving Jess had evaporated with the rain. He’d turned down the teaching job because he thought coming here would be good for me and he was worried about me. And maybe he was right, I thought, putting away the notebook in a bureau drawer. I hadn’t been myself this winter—maybe not since our last year of college. Jess had seen something in me in Monty’s class—he’d seen me like no one ever before or since had seen me—maybe better than I saw myself.

  We spent the morning unpacking and cleaning together. I expected Jess to complain about the house—it was worse than the ranches and split-levels he’d turned his nose up at—but he seemed amused by its seediness and evidence of former tenants—empty Southern Comfort bottles, Mickey Spillane novels, and a stack of racing forms that revealed a former caretaker who’d thought his ticket out of here was the trifecta at Monticello.

  “Let’s hope our writing has better odds,” Jess said.

  Our writing.

  Our nearest neighbor, the puppet maker Katrine had mentioned, drifted up from the barn, the roof of which we could just glimpse through the trees, in a cloud of gauze and patchouli to give us a loaf of zucchini bread and offer to do our “charts” for half price. She had a Dutch accent like Hanneke’s and said she’d been born Sanne, a Dutch version of Susanna, but had been reborn as “Su-sun” to celebrate her kinship with the stars and added that everyone just called her Sunny (which sounded so close to her Dutch name that I was unsure why she bothered with the lengthy explanation).

  “She looks like she spent the last thirty years baking in the sun,” Jess said when she’d gone, referring to Sunny’s lined, leathery face. “Did you notice she said she used to live up at the big house? Do you think she was one of Monty’s early conquests? Exchange student circa class of ’78?”

  I swatted him with a dust cloth. “It was sweet of her to bring us something to eat.”

  The zucchini bread had a weird taste, though, and we’d eaten all the food from last night, so around midday I suggested we go to the store to buy groceries. Just then Monty showed up in his Subaru station wagon offering to lend it to me for the duration of “our stay”—as if we were guests instead of employees—in exchange for picking up his groceries and running a few errands.

  “Sure,” I said, wanting to give Monty and Jess some time alone. I left them ambling off toward one of the barns, like two old farmers talking about their crops, and drove into town.

  I approached the IGA on Route 9 with trepidation—a lot of the kids I’d grown up with had worked there after school—but I found it transformed into a shiny new health food store called Eden that rivaled Whole Foods at half the price. The checkers and baggers did bear a familial resemblance to the kids I’d grown up with, but they were younger, and if any of the older staff recognized me they didn’t say. I’d never looked like I belonged here and in my Brooklynite uniform of skinny black jeans, hand-printed T-shirt, and slouchy sweater, I must have looked even more out of place.

  The town of Concord itself was largely unchanged, a corner crossroads on Route 9 anchored by Dietz’s, a family-owned pharmacy still hanging in there despite a new CVS down the road, a gas station, an empty storefront that once held the Concord Department Store, and a college hangout that had changed its name since my day from Pete’s to Cassie’s but, I discovered when I went in, still had the same purple trim, broken-down couches, and, seemingly, the same stoned waitstaff. My server, a skinny boy with a scraggly goatee, gave me a flier for a Harvest Moon festival. “It’s going to be held in an orchard,” Scraggly Goatee told me in an awed whisper. “Those old trees have a lot of earth energy.”

  I tried not to smirk as I slid my change in the tips jar. When had the town gotten so new-agey? It had always had the hokey apple stuff. I’d grown up eating Sunday dinners at the Apple-a-Day Diner and had gone to Lil’ Blossoms Preschool. The high school mascot was Johnny Appleseed and our football team had been called the Redskins until it was changed in the seventies, but I didn’t remember any of this hooey about moonlight festivals and earth energy. I did remember stealing into the Corbett orchards at night to meet Dunstan and how eerie the apple trees looked in the moonlight, like bony witches reaching their arms out to grab me, and how Dunstan had slipped his jacket over my shoulders because I was shaking and I hadn’t told him it wasn’t from the cold.

  When I gave Jess his latte he told me he’d “given up such citified confections in favor of black joe berled on the stove with a couple-a eggshells tossed in.” By which he meant coffee cone-dripped in the Braun coffeemaker left behind by the previous caretaker. So much for the La Spaziale espresso machine and, I thought with a little guilty pleasure, the tattooed barista at Sweetleaf’s. Even if he wandered into Cassie’s he was unlikely to be charmed by Scraggly Goatee.

  Nor did Jess seem tempted to go into town in our first few weeks. While I spent the mornings grocery shopping and running Monty’s errands, Jess stayed in the house writing. When I came home he would rise from his desk, slipping pages from the printer into a drawer, stretch, and say he’d go see what Monty was up to.

  Monty was showing him around the place, teaching him the outdoor chores that involved, mostly, mowing and fixing broken things. Sometimes they ended up at the South Barn, where the men would drink beers with Dale the Welder (as Jess called him, eschewing the phrase “Metal Artist”), a Vietnam vet who’d followed a Bailey girl from California in the seventies and had made his home here. I spent the afternoons cleaning the new house, unpacking, and copyediting. Sometimes Sunny would come by with some late-season tomatoes or a Mason jar full of murky green tea that smelled and looked like pond water. She wouldn’t stay long though, always saying she had to get back to her children. She looked too old to have kids, so I guessed they must be her grandchildren. One sounded like a baby from the crying I heard sometimes at night.

  At five I’d head up to “the house” as we’d come to call Riven House, as if there were no other, to meet Monty and Jess for drinks in the library. When I realized these drinking sessions could go on all night while Monty and Jess talked writing, with only a box of saltines and a tin of sardines to sustain us, I offered to whip us up some dinner. First, though, I had to clean the kitchen. It took me nearly a week to clean decades’ worth of bachelor neglect but then Monty and Jess oohed and aahed over the simple salads, grilled fish, and pasta dishes I added to our evening drinking sessions, all garnished by the early fall produce I found at the nearby farm stands.

  At first I’d avoided the Corbett stand, afraid that a vestige of my childhood was still lurking amidst the barrels of apples and crates of gourds and squashes where I had worked in the summers and after school. But the girls who worked there now—girls with tanned, toned arms and flowered aprons like rustic milkmaids—were clearly Bailey girls. Only the smell of apples was the same—the cotton candy scent of Northern Spys that instantly took me back to autumn afternoons picking in the orchards and riding back in the wagons loaded down with twenty bushel bins with the three Corbett boys—Dunstan, Derrick, and Devon. Lifting a knobby, firm Northern Spy to my nose I recalled Dunstan’s hard, muscular arms pulling me in for my first kiss among the barrels and bins, his lips tasting tart and sweet as cider . . .

  “Those are an heirloom variety called Northern Spy.” When I looked up I saw a pretty, dark-haired girl in a yellow flowered apron. She was holding an apple, a paring knife poised against its dark red skin. In her flowered dress and old-fashioned apron, she might have drifted out of the last century. She could have been that girl in the picture—the Apple Blossom Queen of nineteen-twenty-something, come to offer me a taste o
f the forbidden apple. “They’re especially good for—”

  “Pies,” I said. I must have startled her because her knife slipped and sliced into her thumb. She yelped and dropped the apple, which rolled under a bin leaving a trail of blood on the dusty boards and a coppery tang in the air.

  “Are you all right?” I asked looking back at the girl. She was sucking on the injured thumb. A drop of blood had landed on the collar of her dress, a new blossom in the floral print.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Occupational hazard.” She held up a hand that was nicked and scratched. I remembered my mother’s worn and scarred hands.

  This is what a farmer’s wife’s hands look like, my mother had said to me once when she caught me looking at them. Remember that when you’re kissing Dunstan Corbett out behind the hay barn.

  Dunstan’s going to be a policeman, I’d countered.

  She had laughed, wiping down the counter with a dismissive gesture. That won’t stop them Corbetts from putting you to work. How do you think they took over all the orchards in these parts? Don’t let Dunstan’s soft smile fool you; he comes from hard people.

  I looked around at the fruit of all those orchards—fifty acres of which had once belonged to my family—and then back at the girl, who was still nursing her finger.

  “At least you made a sale,” I told her. “I’ll take two bushels.”

  THE SMELL OF blood stayed with me the rest of the afternoon as I peeled and cored apples in the kitchen of the main house. I made two pies, one a Dutch apple with a cinnamon and brown sugar crumb topping and one plain apple in a fluted crust with an apple leaf design cut out of pastry scraps. When I was done the odor of blood had been banished by the scent of apples. I opened all the windows in the kitchen to let the steam out and a crisp breeze blew in, rattling the glass in the cabinet doors, shivering the china cups in the cupboards. As I passed one closed cupboard I could hear a sound like a bell ringing. I put down the tray of cheese and crackers I was carrying and pressed my ear to it. Yes, there was a bell ringing—a faint faraway sound, like those wind chimes I’d heard on the first day. I tried to open the cabinet but found that it was sealed, painted shut. What could be in there making that sound? Some ancient kitchen timer jarred into life? Mice playing “Chopsticks” on the family crystal?