The Widow's House

by Carol Goodman

  I’d start now by taking a bath and changing into the green dress for dinner—the one Jess said shimmied over my hips. In the rotunda I paused on the bottom steps to listen to the house. I could hear Monty snoring in the library. I could hear the wind blowing, rattling the old glass windows in their frames—we’d probably save a mint in heating if they were all recaulked—and a dry, sandy pattering coming from above me. I looked up and saw that the oculus was coated with a layer of snow. The house had that hushed feeling that comes when it’s snowing outside, every tiny noise magnified. I could make out the sound of paper crackling coming from Jess’s study on the south side of the rotunda. Jess must be in there writing.

  I climbed the stairs as quietly as I could but when I reached the top the door to Jess’s study opened.

  “There you are,” Jess said. “I wanted to talk to you before dinner.”

  “Talk to me while I take a bath,” I said.

  He followed me into our bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed while I rinsed out the tub—Jess always forgot to after he took a bath—and started the water. I peeled off my cardigan and thermal shirt and old jeans and turned to see that Jess was watching me.

  “Want to join me?” I asked, sitting on the rim of the tub.

  “How long have you been seeing ghosts?” he asked.

  Feeling suddenly cold—and not a little ridiculous—I reached for my robe.

  “It was just a story.” I belted the robe loosely and sat down on the bed next to him. “You know I like ghost stories. So did you once.”

  “That’s the kind of thing you like in college. I lost my taste for them when my girlfriend started seeing the ghost of her miscarried baby.”

  “Our baby.” I wrapped the robe tighter around me. “And I never said I saw her, only that I heard her.”

  Jess made a nasty sound. “Christ, Clare, you wound up in the loony bin for a month. You scared the fuck out of me. And then last winter . . . I just don’t know if I could go through that again.”

  “You won’t have to,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ve just been really into this story I’m working on. Don’t you ever get so wrapped up in what you’re writing that you believe in it?”

  “Not so much that I see things. Are you seeing things, Clare? Did you really see a ghost all those times?”

  “It was foggy or raining each time,” I said. “It’s easy to see shapes in the fog or the rain. And that time on the terrace, it was really my reflection.”

  “Jesus, Clare, Cortland was right. You’ve been spending too much time holed up in this place.”

  “Cortland’s just jealous he’s not inheriting Riven House. Besides, we came here so you could write.”

  “It’s not worth it if the place is driving you crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy!” It came out shriller and louder than I’d meant it to. “And there’s nothing wrong with Riven House. Not now—”

  “You mean now that the ghost of Mary Foley has instated you as heir?”

  I bristled at his mocking tone. “You’re the one who knew all about that before me. Did you ask Monty to redo his will?”

  “Don’t change the subject—”

  “You brought up the inheritance—and you called Katrine Vanderberg to come witness the will. And she’s the one who brought up ghosts and the one who’s been using my family tragedy as a marketing gimmick, which you might have noticed was rude if you hadn’t been ogling her tits.”

  Jess stared at me and then in a calm, cold voice said, “The last time you started losing it you accused me of fucking every girl in a ten-mile radius. The doctors said the paranoia was one of the symptoms of your psychotic mania—along with delusions and hallucinations—so I am not going to get angry at you for that nasty comment. I am going to insist you talk to a psychologist about these hallucinations you’ve been having. Maybe if you start medication we can head off a full episode. If the hallucinations don’t stop I think we should leave here.”

  “And go where? We don’t have any money. We don’t even have insurance. If I’d kept my job at Broadway—”

  “Yeah, I know it’s all my fault, as you’re always ready to remind me. But now that you’re an heiress maybe your daddy will help us out a little. I’m sure Monty won’t want you to stay here if it’s driving you crazy. And at least when he’s gone we can sell this rotting pile.”

  “Is that what your girlfriend Katrine wants?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Jess was right. I was acting paranoid. I started to tell him that I was sorry, but he had already gotten up, crossed the room, and gone out, slamming the door behind him, before I could even begin to think of how to say that.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Monty and I had our dinner by the fire in the library that night. Jess didn’t come down. I told Monty that he had an idea that he wanted to keep working on. The last thing Monty needed was to worry about Jess and me fighting. We discussed, instead, the house.

  “You don’t realize how relieved I am to know it will go to someone who loves it. Cortland and all those vultures down in New York City have just been waiting to get their hands on it to turn it into a museum or luxury hotel or some such nonsense. They’ve never thought I could manage the estate properly because I’m a writer and not a goddamned lawyer, but the trouble with lawyers is they have no imagination. Think of the novels you and Jess will write here! I believe that’s what this house was meant for, that it’s designed to channel creative energy. The problem is that for many years the energy had gone stale. But now with you and Jess here writing I can feel it tingling from my synapses to my fingertips.”

  Monty splayed out his liver-spotted hands, his long arthritic fingers palpating the air as though striking invisible typewriter keys. His face looked hectic in the firelight, two red spots blooming on his veined cheeks, his eyes gleaming feverishly. I thought of him crouched over his typewriter down in the basement like a spider feeding off the currents of inspiration Jess and I transmitted through the filaments of cobwebs hanging through the house. Then I shook the image away.

  “Jess thinks maybe I’ve gotten a little carried away with the ghost story,” I said tentatively.

  Monty made a dismissive sound. “I didn’t expect Cortland to understand, but Jess ought to have. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been working here in this room and thought I heard voices in the house or looked up from my desk to see her standing out there on the terrace looking in. A true writer gets so lost in the fictive dream he comes to believe it. That’s all those sightings were. Jess . . .” Monty looked around the library, his eyes lingering for a moment on the glass doors as if he expected Jess to be there. He leaned forward, grasped my hand, and continued in a hoarse stage whisper. “Jess is a fine craftsman, but he doesn’t have the imagination that you do, Clare. That’s what I was trying to say in that review. He doesn’t empathize with his characters and so they don’t come alive on the page. But you, Clare, you have the gift of empathy. You feel things more than other people and that raw talent comes through in your writing. You’re the real talent in the family. It wouldn’t be surprising if Jess were jealous of you.”

  My face burned from the guilty pleasure of Monty’s praise combined with a dread of what Jess would think if he heard what Monty had said. I listened to the house for a moment, for any movement from Jess’s study, but I only heard the crackle of the fire and the furtive patter of the falling snow.

  “I think Jess is just worried about me. I had a bad stretch last year. He wants me to talk to a psychologist.”

  “Nonsense,” Monty said, patting my hand and sitting back. “You don’t need a shrink; you need to keep writing—and a good night’s sleep so we can both get an early start in the morning.”

  I took this as an indication that he was tired and ready to retire. I walked with him to the head of the stairs to his apartment and offered to help him downstairs but he waved me off. “I’m not a complete invalid yet that you have to be my nursemaid.”

 
I had a feeling that he liked preserving the privacy of his apartment. Jess had said it had the air of dreary bachelor digs circa 1978. Still, I stood at the top of the stairs until I heard him get to the bottom. How long would he be able to manage those stairs by himself? What would we do when he couldn’t anymore? Could we convert one of the first-floor rooms into a bedroom? I pictured hospital beds and walkers and those awful bedside commodes that looked like crouching spiders. Monty would hate it.

  I cleaned up our dinner dishes and took the trash out to the outdoor bins. The ground was covered with five or six inches of snow. I stood for a moment in the shelter of the old apple tree hugging my cardigan around me, looking down over the lawns and garden, all indistinct and muffled in the falling snow. In the distance I heard a foghorn and the low mournful whistle of the southbound Amtrak train. I pictured the snow falling on the black water of the pond and the river. Before long the pond would freeze and then the river. My father had told me that when his father was a boy he went skating on the river like Hans Brinker in The Silver Skates. I stood until my hands and toes were frozen and my hair was coated with snow, but nothing emerged out of the swirling gusts of snow and darkness. No ghosts. Monty was right. Writing had driven them away.

  As I walked up the stairs of the rotunda, though, I heard a bell ringing. I froze on the stairs, listening for it to ring again, imagining Minnie ringing the servant’s bell at the dumbwaiter to summon the bad fairy who had stolen her baby. But instead of another bell I heard a soft murmuring. I stopped on the second-floor gallery and listened, my eyes resting on Bayard Montague’s pale face. It was coming from Minnie’s Mourning Room, a voice talking to itself, as Minnie must have in her delirium and grief after her baby died. Looking at Bayard’s face I imagined how he would have dismissed her grief as ravings. After all, he had given her a live baby. What did she have to carry on about?

  I crept softly to the door and put my ear on the old, thick wood.

  The voice was Jess’s. The bell must have been his phone ringing, but who was he talking to? Who did Jess still talk to from our life in the city? He’d alienated most of his friends through one argument or another—this one because he’d said something dismissive about his writing, that one because he’d sold out and gone commercial, another because he’d been offended at a review Jess had written. I didn’t think he’d talked to Abe and Yuriko since Yuriko told me about his turning down the Brooklyn College job. Could he be talking to Ansel? Telling him how the work was going?

  The thought that the only person Jess had to talk to late at night in this big lonely house was his agent made me so sad I had to rest my forehead against the cold wood door to keep from crying . . . and then I heard my name.

  Why was Jess talking to Ansel about me?

  I pressed my ear to the door and heard my name again—but that was all I could make out. Murmur murmur murmur Clare. As if he said my name louder and clearer than anything else—or because every time he said my name he spit out the word with anger. My tears of pity for Jess turned into ones of grief for us. How had I made him so angry?

  Then I made out another word: Crazy.

  He was telling someone—somehow I doubted now that it was Ansel—that I was crazy. The thought that he was talking to a doctor struck me cold. He had called a doctor and was demanding that I be put away because I was seeing ghosts—

  But that was crazy. What doctor could he possibly reach at this time of night? He was talking to some friend—or maybe one of my friends.

  I realized with a guilty pang how long it had been since I’d been in touch with Marika. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even gotten work from her in over a month. I’d told her in October that I was too busy working on my own writing to take on any copyediting. Maybe she’d been hurt that I hadn’t called after that. If Jess was telling her that I was losing it up here she’d have no reason to disbelieve his word.

  A flicker of fear kindled in my gut. I had cut myself off from my life in the city. I was isolated in this big old house at the mercy of whatever Jess told people about me. I wrapped my arms around my chest and looked up at the oculus, which, covered with snow, stared back at me unseeingly like a blind eye. Monty had said that the house channeled energy, but what if that energy was crazy?

  A sound from inside Jess’s study startled me out of my thoughts. I mustn’t let Jess catch me eavesdropping. I hurried around the gallery and went into the nursery because it was the first door I came to and because I knew Jess wouldn’t follow me inside. Not if he thought I was writing. I could shut myself in here for days and neither Monty nor Jess would bother me if they thought I was writing. I leaned my back against the door and pressed my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Writers! Talk about crazy.

  I sat down at my desk to catch my breath. I turned on the lamp, which cast a warm yellow light on the desk, and opened the window. Cold air swirled in a dusting of snow that glittered in the lamplight like pixie dust. I straightened notebooks, pens, and piles of typescript and then sat back, breathing easier now. In the morning I’d call Marika. I wouldn’t ask if Jess had called her but I’d be able to tell if he had. I’d make a date to come into the city and have lunch with her. Cortland had been right; I needed to get out more. Maybe Jess and I just needed a little time apart. Everything would be all right when we’d both finished our books.

  I leaned forward to turn off the desk lamp and noticed that with the light shining directly on the wall I could make out a shadowy pattern beneath the frieze of circus animals. Perhaps it was just the pattern of the bottom layer of paper slightly out of line with the top layer. I got up and ran my hand over the paper that I’d torn earlier. It had loosened since before dinner, as if the moisture in the air from the snow had gotten in under the paper and melted the old paste. A long strip fell away under my hand, peeling off like sunburned skin.

  Stop picking at it, I heard Trudy’s voice say in my head.

  But I’d seen a glimpse of something in the frieze that caught my interest. I pulled a little harder and uncovered a foot-long swath of the circus animal parade.

  Only they weren’t circus animals anymore. Minnie had pasted photographs over the heads of the animals and clowns. I knelt to look closer. Over the face of one of the clowns in the pony car she had pasted a photograph of Bayard. It was harder to make out the face over the second clown. It looked like it had been cut out of a newspaper instead of a photograph and Minnie’s gluey fingers had smudged the newsprint. It was only from her wreath that I was able to recognize Mary Foley. As for the circus animals, each one had been given the face of a human baby. That would have been grotesque enough even if Minnie hadn’t scratched out all their eyes.

  My hand shaking, I peeled away another strip of paper. Minnie had pasted over the entire frieze, making it into a parade of dead babies.

  WHEN I WOKE up the next day and looked out my bedroom window I saw a world transformed by snow. A fresh, clean slate. As if the weather had pasted a new layer of wallpaper over the mistakes of the past, just as Bayard had pasted over Minnie’s crazy collage in the nursery. When Jess came into the bedroom to dress (he’d spent the whole night in his study) I told him that I would make an appointment with a psychologist. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been so wrapped up in the writing that I’ve gotten isolated. I was thinking I’d ask Marika for a recommendation and go have lunch with her in the city.”

  He seemed to flinch at Marika’s name—perhaps it had been her he’d been talking to last night—but he quickly recovered. “No need to go so far,” he said, sitting down beside me on the bed. “Katrine gave me the name of a psychologist at Northern Dutchess.”

  Blood rushed to my face. “You talked to Katrine about me needing a psychologist?”

  “I didn’t need to, Clare. She brought it up after you told that ghost story. She was worried about you. She feels responsible because she brought us here in the first place.”

  I bit back a nasty comment about what Katrine could do with he
r concern when I caught the exhausted look on Jess’s face. He looked like he’d been up all night. Katrine wasn’t the only one who felt responsible for bringing us here. After all, if Jess had taken the job at Brooklyn College we wouldn’t have come to Riven House.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It would have taken me a month to get into a Manhattan psychiatrist but Dr. Schermer was able to take me the day before Christmas. After thirty minutes in his office I saw why his calendar was so open. He had spent the time reading questions off a clipboard and scribbling down my answers without once looking up and making eye contact. Only after we’d established my age, sibling order, age of parents, medical history, marital status, and that I was not having suicidal thoughts, did he ask in the same bored monotone what had brought me here today.

  My husband thinks I’m crazy because I’m seeing ghosts.

  “I’ve experienced a lot of changes lately and as a result have been feeling some stress,” I said. “My husband noticed and suggested I come talk to someone.”

  “What kind of changes?” he asked, still not looking up.

  I folded my hands and was careful not to play with my wedding ring, which according to a novel I once copyedited was a sure sign of marital unhappiness. Not that Dr. Schermer would have noticed.

  “My husband, Jess, and I moved up here from the city in September. We’d been having some financial challenges so we took a job as caretakers at the house of our former professor.” I paused, pleased with how reasonable it all sounded.

  “And how has that been going?” Dr. Schermer asked while stealing a glance at his watch. Did he think because he wasn’t looking at me I wasn’t looking at him?

  “Fine—at first. My husband has been writing again and I’ve started writing too—”

  “You listed your profession as freelance editor,” he interrupted. I thought psychologists weren’t supposed to interrupt. The one I’d seen in the hospital had been able to spend hours not talking.