The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

by Laird Koenig

  THE

  LITTLE GIRL

  WHO

  LIVES

  DOWN

  THE

  LANE

  LAIRD KOENIG

  Meta4 Press

  An Imprint of Titans of Fortune Publishing

  THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE

  META4 PRESS LLC

  For permission to quote from copyrighted material the author wishes to thank the following:

  Warner Bros. Music, Inc., for portions of "Tea For Two" by Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar. Copyright ©1924 by HARMS. Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Music, Inc.

  Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College for portions of "There's a Certain Slant of Light" and "An Awful Tempest Mashed the Air" by Emily Dickinson, reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from Thomas H. Johnson, Editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Little Brown and Company, Inc. for an excerpt from "That Love Is All There Is" by Emily Dickinson, from Thomas H. Johnson, Editor. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Copyright © 1914, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

  Copyright © 2009 by Laird Koenig

  All rights reserved

  First published in the U.S.A. by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York

  First British Edition published 1974 by Souvenir Press Ltd, 95.Mortimer Street, London W1N 8HP

  No part may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages for the purposes of a review.

  Digital Production Meta4 Press LLC, Santa Barbara, California.

  For Mary and Richard Kebbon

  ISBN: 9781608040001

  FOREWORD

  CHILDREN’S HOUR?

  The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was not written for children. If that little girl, Rynn Jacobs, had grown up as I planned, few young people would have entered her world or shared her secret. Rynn began life in a play for the theater.

  Living in London at the time, I was thrilled that my play reached the hands of one of the most important producers in the West End eager to cast and bring Rynn on stage. One problem. Our star would have to play a girl of thirteen. What actress, no matter how brilliant at thirteen, was enough of a star name to put on the marquee to draw in audiences. (More on the search for a thirteen-year-old star below.)

  Alas, Rynn had to wait patiently while I sat down at my rented London typewriter turning her story into a novel.

  My agent, Jenne Casarotto, since that time has become the most important theatrical literary power in London. She loved my book and took it by hand to one of the top publishers. Because he was not in his office, she left it on his desk. On her way out the front door Jenne ran back and swept up the manuscript, and acting on one of those brilliant hunches the best agents have, took it to Ernest Hecht at Souvenir Press. So enthusiastic was Hecht that on publication date he announced it in one of the first full-page book ads ever to appear in The Times of London.

  No. Rynn didn’t reach the London stage. Instead she made her first appearance in my novel—a 13-year-old girl London read about, and New York publishers were quick to bring to America. In the British and American versions Rynn is still a brilliant, very English girl whose father finds her a house at the end of a lane in South Hampton Long Island.

  There in the book Rynn lives alone. And quietly. Her story—and I quote a fan letter that says it perfectly—“The story of a 13-year-old-girl all alone in the world is heartbreaking, until you realize that she is NOT a normal girl. Her keen intelligence and maturity draw you in and, while you feel sympathy for her, you are also a little scared just the same. This short, yet utterly sinister story will have all readers hooked until the end. I’ve read this book for years and re-read all the time."

  More than the wonderful reviews, I’ve been moved by young people’s letters telling me of being touched and often opening their hearts to me. What can I say but to thank them? I have learned that a book belongs every bit as much to the reader as to the author.

  While the novel was being printed in 31 languages, Rynn continued to live alone and quietly down that lane, till the movie offers ended her privacy. In a great stroke of irony the star we failed to find for the London theater, in America went to the biggest thirteen-year-old movie star from Taxi Driver –the remarkable Jodie Foster.

  Thirteen. Marvelous for us. True, in the movie, Foster is not an English girl as in the play or the novel but fulfills the role in an irony of successful casting so delicious Foster triumphantly captures the critics and the public. And today? If you Google the movie on IMDB you will find DVDs and TCM now enjoys cult status, especially among young people.

  And the play? It’s come alive on stage in America, England, France, Germany, Austria and Russia, but the author insists the tea Rynn serves in the very last scene must be Earl Grey. And the cookies have to taste of almonds to cover another taste, from which we’ll tiptoe away, leaving it Rynn’s secret.

  Laird Koenig

  May 2009

  1

  IT WAS THE KIND of evening the little girl liked best.

  She stood at the window on this last night of October and looked out on the world shivering on the edge of winter. Cold wind rattled the dead flower stalks in the garden and scraped the maples’ naked branches, sending the last of their dry leaves lying like torn black paper into the dark. Suddenly the girl pulled the window curtains and closed out the night.

  She ran on bare feet to a stone fireplace and with an iron poker prodded the logs till the red coals crackled into a blaze. She held out her hands to the fire’s glow and felt it reaching out into the sitting room and kitchen of what had been, until a hundred years ago, a farmhouse. The owner of the house had put a new gas heater against the wall, but the girl loved the warmth of a fire and the sharp smoke-smell of burning maple logs.

  A few more steps took her around a coffee table and a rocking chair to the gleaming metal dials of a stereo. She raised the volume and sound flooded down from speakers hanging above in the shadows of the rafters. Liszt’s Piano Concerto Number One and one of the world’s great symphony orchestras swelled and throbbed into every corner till it seemed the tiny house itself was the orchestra. The glorious sound wrapped around her till her heart and the music beat as one. She raised the volume and the music soared even higher.

  No neighbor would telephone or pound on the door to complain of the noise. The nearest neighbor lived a quarter of a mile down the lane filled with dead leaves.

  The girl stood motionless in the middle of the room. She waited in the near dark as dim red light flickering from the fire wavered the shadows back into the corners.

  She waited. Soon the moment for which she had waited so many days would come.

  From early morning, except for her walk in the autumn rain into the village, she had cleaned the house. Down on her hands and knees she had waxed the oak floor. She had dusted and polished the unpainted wood surface of the simple furniture which twice during September had brought an antique dealer, a man in skin-fitting black leather who smelled of cloves, to the house with increasing offers to buy everything in sight. When her father explained that most of these pieces were not his to sell, the dealer had shaken his head sadly. They were, he said—his eyes making love to the table and chairs, the candlesticks, the couch, the braided rug—some of the best examples of Early American he had ever seen. The floor and the furniture, already polished by the years, now shone in the firelight
. Even the braided rug under the gateleg table, said to be a hundred and fifty years old, was almost restored to its colors since the girl had taken it outside and beaten it free of dust. In the kitchen, separated by a wooden counter, the metal of a modem range and refrigerator glinted in the fire’s glow.

  At the kitchen counter the girl opened a paper cake box and with both hands carefully lifted a small cake thick with pale yellow frosting onto a plate. Although snowy sugar daubed her hands, she did not lick her fingers. She rubbed off the frosting with a paper towel.

  Into the cake’s gleaming, rippled-satin surface she slowly pushed thirteen, tiny yellow candles, standing them upright in a ring. The other candles she returned to a drawer. She struck a wooden match, the first of three it would take, moving the flame as quickly as she was able to bring all thirteen candles alive and dancing with fire. When she shook the match to kill the flame, her hand silhouetted by the blaze of candlelight, glowed red. She studied it for a long moment just as she had looked at everything more closely on this special day. Slowly she turned her hand. Her fingers, blood red at the edges, were almost transparent except for the line of small, perfectly trimmed fingernails.

  She carried the dazzling cake, but instead of taking it directly into the parlor, she crossed to the dark corner by the front door where, under a coat rack, a long mirror glinted. Even before she reached the mirror the candle glow blazed the shadowy corner into light.

  She stood very still before the doubled spangle of flames. In the wavering candlelight her hands and face seemed pale, white as wax. Her long hair, which was usually the color of fallen oak leaves, was now touched with copper. She stared. She decided it was true, her face was, as her father had written in one of his poems, heart shaped. Certainly the brow was wide, the chin pointed. White and heart shaped and dotted with freckles that seemed darker in the firelight, dots from a crayon on white paper. Her eyes sparkled, full of wild light. Small eyes, she thought. Green but small. Once she had complained to her father that other girls her age had enormous eyes. Her father, translating a Russian poem at the time, had put down his work and insisted that her eyes weren’t small at all. He explained at what was, now that she thought about it, too great length, that she had fine bones and a face which had already grown to its full size. Her eyes were now exactly right for the size of her face.

  At the time she had known this was her father’s love for her talking: She had not been convinced. Even then. Her eyes were small. Instead of small green eyes, even wildly flashing and full of light as they were now, she wished she had great, big, enormous eyes.

  "Happy Birthday," she said to the girl in the mirror. She was careful not to smile, for a smile would show her chipped front tooth and she could not bear that. "Happy Birthday to me," she said and any worries about her eyes—and they were green and she loved that—paled in comparison to the agony she felt over the chipped tooth. Abruptly she told herself, very sternly, not to think about the tooth, not to let it spoil this special day. Slowly as one in a ceremony, she carried the blaze of candlelight away from the mirror. Music throbbed around her, and the night wind tearing at the house soon filled her with a joy so great she closed her eyes trying to hold in her happiness, to keep this moment from passing.

  At the coffee table where she knelt to place the cake before the fire, she could almost see herself performing some ritual act, something out of a play or one of those old Biblical movies she had seen on the BBC. She could see—almost as if she were outside herself-a slender little girl in a long, white-linen caftan her father had bought for her in Morocco. This, the finest thing she owned, had blue embroidery at the collar and sleeves, a color which would keep her safe, the shopkeeper had assured both father and daughter, from the evil eye. Her feet were bare on the smooth oak floor. Yes, she was quite satisfied. She looked very much like one of those solemn virgins in mythology, a priestess placing an offering on an altar.

  She tucked her bare feet under her legs and stared into the candle flames. She reached behind her, and with her hand, set the chair rocking. Again she shut her eyes, feeling herself part of the fire’s warmth, the candle flames, the music, the night wind.

  Suddenly at a sound she held her breath. She sprang to her feet and lowered the music’s volume.

  Thuds pounded on the door.

  She ran and parted the front window curtains and peered out. In the windy night a tall man in a raincoat stood at the door. Lit by a strange orange light, he seemed to glow and waver like the candles on her cake.

  She knew more knocks were coming, thuds she dreaded, and suddenly she wanted nothing more than to reach the front door in time to stop them. Before she had reached the hall they came, three bangs, even louder than she expected.

  "Yes?" she asked at the door.

  "Mr. Jacobs?" The voice on the other side, out in the night, was unknown to the girl.

  "Who is it?" Her accent was English.

  "Frank Hallet."

  "Hallet," The name meant nothing to her. Hallet? Then she remembered the real-estate woman who had leased the house. to her father. Hallet. He must be her son. What could he possibly want? The girl stood motionless. She knew the man would not go away till she had opened the door.

  "Just a minute," she called.

  She raced back to the coffee table and opened a cigarette box. From a package of Gauloise, she drew out a cigarette and holding back her long hair, leaned into the flames of the birthday cake. The tip of the cigarette glowed, as she drew on the cigarette. Rising, she turned and blew the smoke behind her. Repeating her smoking, she sent smoke into the four corners of the room, before hurling the cigarette into the fireplace and running back to the hall.

  She turned the lock and opened the door on the night and the wind that sent leaves scratching across the oak floor.

  The man glowed in the dark because he held one of those pumpkins she had seen lying gold and orange in the fields and for sale in stacks at the crossroads. This great orange globe had been scooped hollow and a burning candle within shone out through two eyes, a nose, and an enormous grinning gash of a mouth cut through the thick pumpkin flesh.

  "Trick or treat." The man’s voice boomed, almost a shout so he could be heard above the wind.

  "What?" the girl asked. But it was not because she could not hear. She stared at the man. Cold air swept into the house.

  What did he want?

  "Trick or treat." The man thrust the grinning pumpkin face at her as if his demand could be explained by the blazing eyes, the fiery smile.

  "I’m sorry," the girl said. She groped unsuccessfully for some way to show him she did not understand why he was here or what he wanted. She made no effort to conceal her shivering. The precious moment she had worked toward all day, like the warmth in the house, was draining away into the cold. More than anything else at this moment she wished, longed, ached for some way to make this man leave her door.

  "Halloween," the man shouted the way he might try to communicate with a foreigner who did not speak his language.

  "Yes?" the girl said, wondering if she dared put her hand on the door frame, a move that would block the one step which would bring him from the porch through the door.

  The man moved before she did. Only one step, but already he was leaning into the hall, peering into the sitting room.

  "Somebody’s birthday?" he was staring at the candles glowing on the cake.

  Inside the long sleeves of her caftan, the little girl’s hands tightened into fists.

  "Your birthday?" the man asked.

  The girl nodded slowly. Under her sleeves she opened her fists only to rub her arms against the cold.

  "Happy Birthday."

  "Thank you," she said flatly, striving to bleed the two syllables of any feeling, for now she felt her only weapon against this man was to give him absolutely no encouragement beyond the barest civility. She thought of older women in London in stores like Harrods and tea shops like Richoux who could freeze clerks and waitresses with their ma
rvelous studied iciness. If she could succeed in creating that kind of chill, the man would be forced to go away.

  "May I tell my father what you want?"

  "Besides your birthday, tonight’s also Halloween," he almost shouted.

  Did he not think she could hear him? Again the little girl thought of London and a friend of her father’s, an old poet with filthy hair, who in spite of living in one tiny room—hardly big enough to hold his clutter of old cups of half-drunk tea in which cigarette butts floated, much less the yellowing books and torn manuscripts and the smell of cats—forever roared in a voice that was as loud and flat as this man’s. After their first visit her father had explained that his elderly friend was deaf.

  "Halloween. Trick or treat." The man repeated the words carefully in case the wind carried them away.

  Though the girl showed him a face as expressionless and unencouraging as her voice, he seemed to feel a need to explain.

  "My name’s Hallet. Frank Hallet. Your father knows me."

  The man twisted around to peer into the dark where the wind scattered the leaves.

  "My two kids will be by any minute. Trick or treating. Right now they’re up the lane at your neighbor’s waiting for the candied apples to harden. What I’m doing is I’m sort of acting as an advance scout. To make sure any houses they try to trick or treat don’t have any real goblins." The man giggled.

  The girl was certain she had never heard such a silly sound come from a grown man. His face, reflecting the orange candle glow, searched hers. That was a joke. It could be taken two ways. Did she understand his real meaning?

  "Like dirty old men who try to give candy to pretty little girls, right?"

  He giggled again.