The screechy laugh was Alex Lockwood’s. “A ghostwriter,” he said. “Ghostwritten by Graham McCall. That’s great. Why don’t you send it to a publisher and tell them it was ghostwritten by Graham McCall? I’ll bet they’d believe you. It’s good enough.”
“Yeah,” Tierney said. “They sure would if they could see that spooky old house she lives in.” She looked at Alex and then at G.G. as she went on. “You dudes seen that haunted house on Westwind that Graham McCall built? My folks are always taking tourist-type visitors out there to see it.” Tierney pantomimed driving a car and gesturing grandly toward something beside the road. “ ‘There it is, folks, the famous McCall House, built by Morrison’s most famous author.’ And then everybody always says how it looks deserted. But it’s not. You live there, don’t you, shrimp?”
Ms. O had been saying Tierney’s name over and over again in a stern tone of voice, and at last Tierney stopped talking. Everyone was staring at Libby.
“Do you?” Wendy was looking very excited. “I love that house. Do you really live there?”
Libby nodded. “It doesn’t look deserted on the inside,” she said. “Or in the backyard. It’s just that it’s so big and old and no one has the time—”
“Oh, you’re so lucky. I think that would be a wonderful place to live,” Wendy said. “Do you—do you suppose I could see the inside of it someday? I’ve been imagining it forever.”
“Yeah,” Tierney said. “Me too. I’d like to see it, too.”
They were all agreeing, asking if they could see the house, and Ms. O was saying “People! PEOPLE! Let’s get back to work,” when the bell rang for the end of the period.
“So, we’ll start our next session by finishing the critique of Libby’s story and then we’ll go on to Tierney’s,” she said. “That will be the last of the stories that were entered in the writing contest, so I hope you’re all working on something new to share with us.”
They all said they were. Alex said he had “tons of stuff—boxes—barrels—libraries full,” and when Libby said, “So do I,” he grinned at her and said, “I’ll bet you do.”
As soon as Ms. O left the room, Libby hurried out, too, not wanting to be left alone in the reading lab with the others. But out in the hall Wendy ran after her. She caught up just as Libby got to her locker.
“Libby,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. I think your story was just—just outrageously awesome.”
“Outrageously awesome?” Libby asked.
“Yes,” Wendy said. “Great! Wonderful! Tremendous! Outrageously awesome.” She was doing her bright and shiny student-leader smile right at Libby. At least it was right at Libby for a second, until it shifted to some people who were coming down the hall. Then she yelled, “Hey! Wait for me,” and ran off after her friends without even saying good-bye.
As Libby opened the locker and put away her manuscript, she was thinking—outrageously awesome. “Outrageously awesome,” she whispered to herself—and then, “or else—she just wants to see the inside of my haunted house.”
8
That afternoon Libby took the bus home, although the weather was perfect, with a cool spring sun sparkling on a sleek, rainwashed world. There was even a special reason for walking on that particular day—in order to check out the Vincentis’ backyard, where the two Vincenti ladies had been planting tomatoes recently and having interesting conversations about the divorce that was happening next door. But for some reason Libby had simply hurried to the bus stop without stopping to ask herself why and arrived at the McCall House much earlier than usual.
It wasn’t until she was prowling around the house looking for someone to talk to that she made the connection. For once she had something really good—and really true—to tell them about.
No one was in the library or Great Hall, but there were two letters addressed to Libby on the enormous redwood burl coffee table in front of the fireplace. The first one, from Mercedes, Libby jammed into her jacket pocket, knowing pretty much what it would say without reading it—that in a light, kidding way it would ask her why she wasn’t writing. And then at the end, after a few paragraphs about how the play was going and the funny things that had happened backstage, it would wind up with another little hint that Libby hadn’t written for a long time.
The other letter was from Felicia, whose mother worked for Elliott in the bookstore. Felicia had been Libby’s special friend for several years, coming over often to help work on the collections, to play chess, or just to talk about books and writers. But last fall Felicia went away to college. Libby quickly opened the letter and skimmed it—mostly about classes and professors, and then stuffed it, too, in her pocket—and went on looking for someone to talk to.
The first person she found was Elliott in the kitchen. Surrounded by a ring of attentive cats, he was bending over the huge old Wolff range, stirring something that smelled delicious.
“Hi, Elliott. Aren’t you home early?” she said, as she maneuvered between cats on her way to the refrigerator, stopping long enough to pat heads or scratch ears. “Hi, Ariel. Salome. Isadora. Greetings, Goliath, you fat old thing.”
“Ahh, Libby,” Elliott said. “You’re just in time. Come taste this for me and tell me what you think. Perhaps a bit more curry?”
While Libby tasted, and then tasted two or three more times, because Elliott’s curried chicken was delicious and she was starving, he explained that Janice had taken over for the afternoon so that he could come home and cook. Janice was one of Elliott’s employees, the one who was Felicia’s mother. She had been a good friend of the McCalls for years and years, and taking over so that Elliott could come home and cook was one of the nice things that she often did.
“Business was slow today,” he said, “and I had a sudden culinary attack.”
Libby grinned around a mouthful of hot curried chicken. Calling Elliott’s frequent urges to cook something special a “culinary attack” was part of a family joke. The rest of the joke concerned how completely uncontagious his “attacks” had always been. Even though Elliott had lived with the McCalls for almost six years now, no one else in the family had shown any signs of catching the disease. They had, in fact, gone right on being as hopeless in the kitchen as ever. And, although she had been quite young in those pre-Elliott days, Libby could remember just how hopeless that had been.
After Mercedes had given up on being a Californian and moved back to New York, the rest of the family had decided to take weekly turns shopping and cooking—with disastrous results—one week as disastrous as the next. When it was Gillian’s turn, it was feast or famine—lobster and caviar until the money ran out. When Cordelia shopped, she bought only things that everyone hated—on the grounds that such foods were probably better for you and would certainly last longer. And Christopher tended to buy mysteriously inedible things with poetic names, like plantain and aubergine. But then Christopher was invited to the poetry reading at Elliott’s store, and soon afterward Elliott moved in—and wonderful things like chicken curry began to happen in the McCall kitchen.
“Umm,” Libby said, taking another taste. “Outrageously awesome. Which reminds me. Today was the writers’ workshop.”
“Yes, I know,” Elliott said. He wiped his hands on the front of his apron, a long canvas affair with a coat of arms with crossed shish kebabs on the stomach, poured himself a cup of coffee, and eased his long, lanky body down into a kitchen chair. “I’ve not forgotten. How did it go this time?”
Libby poured a glass of milk and joined him at the table. “I read my story,” she said, and paused for effect. “AND THEY LOVED IT.” A slight exaggeration perhaps—but the rest of it wasn’t. “Wendy said it was outrageously awesome,” which was the absolute truth and Wendy’s exact words. Why she said them was another matter, and one that didn’t need discussing at the moment.
There was no need, for instance, to mention that the workshop members wanted to visit the house, because they weren’t going to get to. Not that
Libby wouldn’t be permitted to invite them. Without even asking, she pretty much knew what the family would say.
Gillian would think it was a wonderfully exciting idea. Cordelia would certainly approve if it could be done properly with formal invitations and suitable refreshments. Elliott would say it wasn’t up to him to decide, since he was only an unofficial McCall House resident. Only Christopher might be more or less against it, simply because he was such a private person. But, on the other hand, Christopher almost never insisted on having things the way he wanted them. So the vote would be two yeses, one “I suppose so if it’s really important to you,” and one abstention.
However, there wasn’t going to be a family election because the most important vote—Libby’s own—was NO. A loud and definite NO. And even though Libby hated to admit it, even to herself, Elliott was one of the main reasons for that NO.
It wasn’t that Elliott wasn’t a great person and a terribly important member of the family, because he was. But it was just that he was one more thing that didn’t fit in to the usual pattern. How many people had an extra adult male family member who was not at all related to anybody? And anything at all unusual was just one more thing for people like G.G. and Tierney to make fun of.
Elliott was delighted with Libby’s account of the workshop meeting, and Christopher was, too, when he came in from the garden a few minutes later. And at dinner that night, while everyone had an outrageously delicious meal of chicken curry with mango chutney and condiments, there was quite a bit of discussion about how glad everyone was that Libby’s reading of her story had turned out to be such a success. Libby was feeling pretty good herself, although in the back of her mind there was still a little prickling reminder that the jury was still out on just how successful she had been. There was something else that kept prickling there, too, and after dinner some of it came out in a very roundabout way. She was talking to Gillian at the time.
It was dark by then and raining again, hard and steadily. The wind roamed up and down the long, cavernous verandas of the McCall House, pounced around corners, and drove sheets of water against the tall windows of the Great Hall. It was the kind of night that suited Graham McCall’s castle, the dim shadows hiding its shabbiness and the noisy threat of the wind and rain making it seem a safe, strong fortress against the storm.
Christopher had built a fire in the Great Hall’s huge stone fireplace, and Libby and Gillian were reading in front of it, curled up together in one chair. One chair was all that was necessary, since Graham’s custom-built leather furniture was so huge and Gillian and Libby were both so small and loose-jointed. It was quite possible, in fact, for one chair to hold all four cats as well, although tonight there was only Salome, curled up in Gillian’s lap, and Ariel, draped over Libby’s armrest.
Gillian, who was wearing her favorite black sateen harem pants and a madras cloth tunic, was reading a book by Muriel Spark. And Libby, in her usual jeans and T-shirt, was reading a beautiful new book on Greek mythology that Elliott had just brought home from the store.
“Gillian,” Libby asked suddenly. “Do you suppose we could afford to have something done about the front of the house?”
“The front of the house?” Gillian marked her place in the book with one finger. “What’s wrong with the front of the house?”
The same question had occurred to Libby, but having made a special inspection just before dinner, she now thought she knew. In fact it seemed strange that she hadn’t noticed it before.
“Well, it’s looking awfully run-down, don’t you think? The yard’s so overgrown and the balconies need painting. And some of the shutters are crooked. It almost looks deserted, like a haunted house, or something.”
“Oh, that,” Gillian said. “I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t thought much about it.”
“Well,” Libby said. “This friend of mine at school said something about it.” Referring to Tierney as a friend wasn’t easy, but she managed to get it out. “What she said was that her parents are always bringing people here to see it and they always say it looks like a haunted house.”
Squeezing her way past Ariel, she got to her feet and began to act it out the way Tierney had done—being one of Tierney’s parents pompously pointing out the home of the famous writer. Then she added her own original touch by moving backward to indicate a backseat passenger, peering out big-eyed and saying in an excited voice, “Oh, my, is it really? Oh, I’m so excited! Is that really where Graham McCall lived? But why does it look so deserted? Do you suppose it’s haunted?”
Gillian applauded, waking Salome, who mewed accusingly before she rearranged herself and went back to sleep. As Libby climbed back into her corner of the chair, Gillian regarded her thoughtfully for a moment before she said, “We might discuss it with Christopher. It seems that he might do something about the yard at least, since he enjoys gardening so much.”
“I know,” Libby said. “He loves to garden—in the backyard.”
Ever since Libby could remember, Christopher had spent a great deal of time out-of-doors, mowing and pruning and planting the three large terraces that stretched from the back of the house clear down to the river’s edge. And when he was finished, he often sat on the highest terrace in the garden gazebo—a Graham-built gazebo, large and ornate with a peaked and pinnacled roof and glassed-in walls—where Christopher wrote poetry or simply enjoyed the results of his hard work in the garden.
And the results were beautiful. The backyard of the McCall House was every bit as grand now as it had been in the days when Graham McCall was alive. It was only in front that …
“I wonder why Christopher never …” Libby began and found that Gillian was saying exactly the same words. They both laughed, and after they’d thought for a moment, they laughed again and nodded, because of course they really knew the answer. The backyard of the McCall House, sheltered as it was by high fences and hedges, was a secluded and private place. To work in the front yard, on the other hand, would invite the stares not only of chance passersby but also of the dozens of people who made special trips to stare over the fence at the famous McCall House, the enormous old stone mansion built by Morrison’s much-beloved or (depending on your point of view) despised author.
“Christopher couldn’t stand that,” Gillian said, as if she had been reading Libby’s mind.
Libby nodded. “Why?” she said after a while.
Gillian ran her hand through her pixie-cut gray hair. “Why, indeed,” she said. “He certainly didn’t get his retiring nature from his father—or from me. But he’s always been that way, quiet and shy except around people he knows well. But sometimes I think it was our fault, Graham’s and mine. When Christopher started to go to school, Graham’s books set in Morrison had just come out and, as you know, not everyone was pleased. Some of the local residents accused him of spreading slander and gossip, and for a while there was even talk of lawsuits. Nothing came of the suits, and of course nowadays no one cares about such things anymore.”
Gillian smiled an ironic one-dimple smile and then went on. “I gather that some of the people who complained then that Graham had ruined their reputations are rather proud of it nowadays—now that ruined reputations are so much more popular.”
But after a moment even the ironic smile faded, and Gillian sighed. “However—Christopher did have a hard time for a while, and sometimes I think that to send a small, sensitive boy to school in a town that has a grudge against his family is a rather foolish thing to do. Christopher didn’t complain very much, but I know that he wasn’t happy for a long time.”
“Umm,” Libby nodded. She’d heard about it before, how much Christopher had hated going to public school, which was probably one of the reasons he’d agreed to having her taught at home for so long. Not that he’d expected her to have the same kinds of problems. “I was always such a shy, tentative child—not at all like you,” he’d told her before she started school. “I’m sure you’ll have no problems at all.” And Libby had pretty
much agreed with him—until her first day at Morrison Middle School.
They went back to their books then and read quietly for several minutes before Gillian asked, “What made you think about it, the front yard, I mean? Was it just what someone said about bringing visitors by to look at the house, or had you been worrying about it before?”
“No. Not before. It was just what Tierney, this friend of mine, said, I guess, that made me think of it. I don’t think I thought much about it before that.”
Gillian nodded and opened her book. But before she’d had time to get really into the story, Libby interrupted again.
“What do you think people say about Mercedes? I mean, don’t you think people say it was wrong of her to go back to New York and leave Christopher and me here?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gillian said. “What do your friends say about it? About having a mother who lives someplace else most of the time?”
“Nothing,” Libby said. “That is, most of them don’t know. I don’t talk about it much. But if some of them came here, they’d probably ask where my mother was, don’t you think? And why she went off and left me?”
Gillian nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I imagine they’re quite accustomed to the idea of parents who live apart, in the case of divorce.”
“I know. But this is different, isn’t it? Christopher says he and Mercedes never considered divorce. He says they’ve always been very good friends.”
“That’s quite true,” Gillian said. “And it’s also true that they’ve been even better friends since Mercedes has been spending most of her time on the East Coast. But I understand what you’re saying. It is more unusual for a mother to leave her family in order to carry out her chosen career. But I think you know how I feel about it. Acting is a ‘calling,’ just as writing or dancing is a ‘calling,’ and I don’t think anyone can be blamed for following a ‘call.’ ”
Libby on Wednesday Page 6