The House on Primrose Pond

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “You’re familiar with the book?”

  “And the author. Carolyn Marvin has been up to Eastwood to do a library talk. We had a packed house that night.”

  “I can see why.” Susannah handed her the form.

  “Gilmore?” The librarian looked up. “Are you by any chance related to Claire Gilmore?”

  “She was my mother. She died a few years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Did you know her well? She hadn’t lived here in some time.” Susannah’s mind darted immediately to the note, now tucked in the shoe box along with the volume of Yeats. Could this librarian know anything about it? It didn’t seem too likely, but then, finding a love letter written to her mother while she was married didn’t seem too likely either.

  “I remember, though. She came in here a couple of times a week. That was all before the Internet and Amazon; libraries were more of a hub back then, especially in a place like this.”

  “I know what you mean.” Susannah took the card the librarian had just issued her. “She was a big reader, and she always belonged to one book club or another.”

  “There was a club that met right here in the library. They’d focus on novels—Russian for a while, then English, and then American. Maybe German too . . . I can remember her checking out The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks. And at some point, she left off with the novels and wanted only poetry.”

  “Really?” Susannah thought of the well-thumbed volume of Yeats.

  “Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron. But she told me she was drawn to some of the more modern poets too: Yeats, Auden, Roethke. I asked if she was joining a poetry-themed book group and she said no—it was because of the Poet’s Corner.”

  “Poet’s Corner?”

  “At the paper. The Eastwood Journal. She was the arts and culture editor, and somehow she got the idea that the arts page should publish poetry. So she wanted to familiarize herself with ‘the canon,’ as she called it. She would be reading submissions and selecting them for publication; she wanted to feel like she was qualified. I admired her for it; I really did.”

  Susannah was silent, processing all this new information. She had known about her mother’s job at the paper; Claire had spoken of it often and with great animation. But she had talked about profiles they ran, or the film, theater, and art reviews. Had she ever mentioned poetry? If so, it couldn’t have been often, because Susannah didn’t remember it.

  • • •

  The librarian had placed the checked-out book about Ruth Blay on the desk and was now typing something on the keyboard of her computer. Susannah picked it up and extended her hand. “Thank you for all your help . . .”

  “Janet,” said the librarian. “Janet Durbin.” She shook Susannah’s hand. “If I can be of any further assistance, please let me know.”

  “I will.” Susannah returned to the car and put the book on the seat beside her. Ruth Blay’s story was fascinating, distinctive, tragic—all qualities that might make it a suitable basis for a novel. A novel that she would write, right here, so close to the very place where it had happened. She decided she liked the connection, loose as it was. Although her circumstances were not at all like Ruth’s, she did feel exiled here in New Hampshire. And she was husbandless too.

  This, she saw, might be an idea worth further investigation. She could read the rest of the Marvin book, and do a little more research too. And she could think about it—she definitely needed to let the notion settle and percolate. God knew she would have plenty of time, buried as she was in the sticks and the snow. You wanted to come here, she told herself. You chose this. But if Charlie were here, she would have chosen none of it.

  Traffic was light on the way back to the house. Whatever she decided about pursuing the Blay story, she was glad she had gone to the library. Janet’s revelations about her mother made her even more curious about the note she’d found. Meeting her had been a lucky coincidence; she had known Claire and she might have known other people who knew her as well. Susannah was pretty sure the newspaper had folded—so many local papers had—but maybe there were still people around who had worked on it. Same for members of the book club. And hadn’t her mother belonged to an amateur acting group here as well as in New Jersey? There were several possibilities she could pursue.

  But when she arrived at the Hannaford market, she sat frozen behind the wheel for a few seconds. What was she doing? All her digging might well lead to some deeply upsetting revelations; this wasn’t like writing a historical novel, teasing out the backstory and then speculating on the motivations of characters long dead—and with no connection to her besides. This was about her own mother, her father—and ultimately about herself.

  She made her way through the wide, empty—yet again!—supermarket aisles, filling the cart up with groceries. More snow was predicted and the driving might be iffy; best to stock up now. As she filled the cart—apples, oranges, a pineapple, a wedge of cheddar—her anxiety dissipated. Shopping for food calmed her; she was fulfilling a basic, essential function. It was likely that she was going to uncover something about her family that she wished she had not known. But standing in the cookie aisle—the bright, cheery packages calling out to be bought, consumed, enjoyed—she understood that the novelist in her would win out.

  That wasn’t the whole reason, though. Her mother had always been the elusive presence in her life. Loving but often distracted, easily moved to anger—at her father, seldom at her—or disappointment or sorrow. Her father had been the rock, the one who read to her at bedtime, helped with her homework, took her to the zoo, taught her to ride a bicycle. As she peddled toward him, first hesitantly and then with growing confidence, she saw his slow smile widen, a perfect mirror of her own.

  “I’m doing it, Daddy,” she’d called out.

  “You certainly are.” And he’d waved his arm in a slow arc of approval that seemed to enfold her, and her brand-new accomplishment, in its airy embrace. She had known her father through and through. She could rely on him. Her mother had been less predictable and more of a mystery. Now she was beginning to understand why. She couldn’t go back to the time before she’d found the note; what was known couldn’t be unknown. She had to move forward, into the uncertain territory she was trying to map. It meant exposing what had been hidden and revealing what had been unsaid.

  Susannah paid for the groceries and wheeled them across the parking lot to the car. When she arrived back at the house, she sat there for a moment, staring at it, before she went in. Houses had lives and houses kept secrets. She’d already stumbled upon one of them. If she kept up her search, what else might she find?

  SEVEN

  The sky above Primrose Pond that morning was a pallid, anemic gray, but the temperature hovered in the thirties—practically balmy given how cold it had been—so Susannah was taking advantage of the slight spike to get some much needed exercise. It was just under four miles all the way around—a bracing but not impossible walk. The path was uneven and there were some slippery patches along the way, but it was navigable, especially if she took careful steps over the ice. Fallen pine needles provided some natural traction, and someone had been out here with a bag of gravel; bits of it were strewn on the ground, like Gretel’s bread crumbs in the fairy tale.

  The pond and its environs looked better in daylight: bare tangles of dark branches, white birches striated with slender slashes of brown, the occasional burst of hard red berries that stood out against the wan winter landscape. The gloom that had been with her since she first saw the house again was dissipating a little; she breathed deeply, in and out, in and out.

  Soon she came to a house, covered in cedar shingles, that she remembered. She and her friends had canoed the pond many times that summer, mostly during the day, but once at night. There had been a party at that house—the parents of the girl who lived in it were away—and of course there had been drin
king and the predictable pairing off of various couples.

  That was the night Trevor Bailey had stuck his hand under her shirt; when she rebuffed him, the two of them sat, in wretched, awkward silence, as everyone else made out in the darkened living room. Corbin had not been there, but he had shown up later, as the party was winding down. She thought she saw him staring at her, though she might have just imagined it. She hadn’t seen him again since that meeting in the hardware store, but she’d learned that he’d come back home at some point to help out with the business when his father had suddenly become sick, and he’d stayed on. Not sure that she wanted to see him again so soon—the rush of adolescent feelings and memories he’d unleashed were disconcerting—she had deliberately stayed away from the store. But Eastwood was a small place and she knew she’d run into him again one way or another.

  As Susannah rounded the next curve in the path, she saw both a tall woman and a dog, off leash, approaching. The woman’s coat—black, with an asymmetrical cut and oversized buttons—was a marked contrast to the down coats that absolutely everyone wore up here. A soft white knit hat framed the woman’s deeply lined but still lovely face, and a black-and-white scarf in a bold abstract pattern looped around her neck.

  “Hello!” The woman, who up close appeared even taller—was she five-ten or – eleven?—raised her hand; the leather glove she wore was a bright teal blue. “You must be Susannah Gilmore.” She extended the other gloved hand to shake.

  “I am.” Susannah thought her own puffy mitten seemed faintly ridiculous and she pulled it off so she could take the woman’s hand.

  “Alice Renfew. I live in the green house around the bend from yours. We’re neighbors.”

  “With the barn, right? I met your horse.”

  “Jester?”

  “Is that his name? Anyway, I saw the gate open, went to close it, and then couldn’t resist going over to pet him.”

  “I’m glad you did. He can get lonely out there.”

  Susannah studied Alice’s face—there was something familiar about it. “I remember you now,” she said. Alice had been married to a man they had called Dr. Dave; he was the town’s pediatrician. She and her husband were well liked. Trevor had told her about their Fourth of July party, with its long tables piled with barbecued chicken, potato salad, and strawberry shortcake, and the lavish fireworks display the doctor set off at night. Everybody in town was invited. But they hadn’t had the party the summer that Susannah spent there; she would have remembered it.

  “And I remember you. Claire and Warren Gilmore’s daughter, right?”

  “Yes. Though they’re both gone now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alice. “And about your husband. Such a terrible thing.”

  How had she known that? But Susannah just said, “It was.”

  “I think you’ll find Eastwood a comforting place to be,” Alice said. “I know I did. My husband’s been gone over twenty years now, but when he died the community just wrapped its arms around me and took me in.”

  “That’s because you’d lived here a long time,” said Susannah.

  “You have roots here too. You’ll see them blossom.”

  Susannah did not entirely believe her, but rather than seem contrary to her neighbor, she allowed her attention to be diverted by the black standard poodle that had been patiently standing at Alice’s side all this time. “Is she friendly?” she asked as she reached out her hand for the dog to sniff.

  “Friendly and more well mannered than most people you’ll meet. Also sharp as the proverbial tack.”

  At the sound of her mistress’s voice, the dog turned and wagged her tail, but not before giving Susannah’s hand an experimental little lick. “She’s a beauty.”

  “Hear that, Emma?” Alice said. “You have a new admirer.”

  They said good-bye and Susannah stood for a moment watching the two forms recede. Ever since her discovery of that note, she was on a mission to find out as much about her parents as she could. Next week she was going to have lunch with Janet Durbin, the librarian; Janet had very kindly offered to put her in touch with a couple of people from the newspaper, and she’d even provided a list of the book club members that she had found stuck in an old notebook. Now here was Alice Renfew, who said that she knew her parents too; maybe she could be another source.

  Susannah kept going. Farther on was a pair of houses, one yellow, the other white, both sealed up pretty tightly. Not all the houses on the pond were winterized. Over on this side, the bare bushes had given way to dense clusters of pine trees against whose deep green nettles the birches glowed white. A rustling in the trees attracted Susannah’s attention; in the next second, a small grayish brown rabbit darted by. She’d have to tell Jack.

  She began to feel warm inside her recently purchased down coat. And her feet were toasty and warm too, thanks to those L.L.Bean boots she’d ordered for Cally; instead of sending them back, Susannah decided to keep them for herself. At least Cally had boots now; Susannah had agreed to the purple Doc Martens. She didn’t really oppose her daughter’s choice; she’d been letting Cally pick out her own clothes since she was three. But she fretted that the oddball boots would make Cally even more of an outsider at a school where she seemed determined not to fit in.

  Now she had reached the halfway point and could see her own house from across the pond. There was a girl in one of these houses Jack had been talking about nonstop; her name was Gilda Mooney. Golden Gilda with her skein of blond hair and her dimpled smile. It was all so sweet, her son’s first infatuation, and Charlie would never know a thing about it. Susannah’s eyes filled, but she used her mittened hand to brush the tears away and kept going. She wished that Cally could acclimate as easily as Jack seemed to be doing, but that was not happening. Instead, she said virtually nothing about her days at school and spent her free time in her room, the sewing machine making its steady whirring sound from behind her closed door. But when Susannah asked what she was sewing, Cally became evasive, as she was about pretty much everything.

  Back at home, Susannah opened a can of lentil soup, added a few oyster crackers, and brought the steaming mug upstairs to her desk. The idea of pursuing Blay as her next subject had been steadily growing on her; now she decided she was ready to test it out in the form of a proposal. She had read Martin’s book quickly and then ordered a copy so she could mark it up with comments and questions of her own.

  As she sipped the soup, Susannah began to put together a timeline of the events surrounding Blay’s life and death. Her notes were accumulating, and she started a loose synopsis of the plot as she saw it unspooling. The grim trajectory made Susannah feel indignant all over again. What had it been like, stealing away and giving birth for the first time alone and in a strange place? Where were the mother, the sisters, aunts, cousins, and friends who could have soothed and helped her? What happened to the man who got Ruth pregnant? If Ruth’s crime was punishable by death, why had he remained unscathed? The facts of the story, scant as they were, did not reveal the motivations of these people. It would be up to her to create them.

  The doorbell rang and she went downstairs to answer it. Maybe it was a delivery; she was expecting a package. But instead it was the woman she had met on the path, Alice Renfew. The black poodle stood quietly beside her. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” said Alice. “We’re kind of informal around here.”

  “No, not at all; please come in.” This wasn’t entirely true, but Susannah did not want to be rude to a neighbor, especially one who might become a friend. “Let’s sit in the kitchen. I can make tea. Or coffee.”

  “Coffee would be nice.” Alice sat down and placed a round gold tin on the table. “I brought these for you. A little housewarming gift.”

  “Thank you.” Inside the tin and nestled in pink tissue paper were shortbread crescents dusted with powdered sugar. Susannah was touched. Maybe Alice really would become a f
riend; this was certainly a friendly offering.

  “Try one.”

  Susannah bit into a cookie. “Scrumptious. Did you make them?”

  “I did. I like to bake.”

  Susannah finished the cookie and reached for another. “These are so good you could sell them.”

  Alice smiled. “Actually, I did. I had a little bakery in town. It was called Lady Alice’s. Shortbread was one of my most popular items.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. It was years ago. I enjoyed it for a time—and then I didn’t. Besides, it was too hard to manage along with all my domestic responsibilities.” Susannah didn’t say anything and Alice continued. “Things were different when I was young. I went to Smith at a time when everyone believed in the ‘ring before spring.’ We enjoyed our classes, but our main interest was to marry well. And when I did, I believed that my husband’s needs always came first.”

  “Did you mind?” Susannah hoped she was not being intrusive, but Alice had introduced the topic.

  “No, not really. Dave and I were very happy. And he allowed me a lot of latitude. The bakery wasn’t the only thing I tried. I had a dress shop for a time too—I stocked it with things I made and ready-made clothes. Accessories too, like hats and scarves I ordered from Boston or New York. I think your mother may have bought something from me once. But that didn’t do well here in Eastwood, so I had to close. And then there was my charity work, and being on the board of the library, and the civic council. I guess you could say I was a bit of a dilettante.”

  “No, maybe you were a Renaissance woman—someone with many talents.”

  “That’s a nice way to look at it.”

  Susannah got up so she could prepare the coffee; when she was through, she brought the brimming mugs to the table.