The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  I decided to tie the scarf in the back, rather than under my chin, the latter being a style that made me look disturbingly like my grandmother and all her friends, women who never got used to going to Mass without a hat, or at least a small doily or a clean piece of Kleenex bobby-pinned to the tops of their heads. Come to think of it, though, Nona had probably been wearing a scarf when she attracted the attention of her new gentleman friend. Then again, he probably voted for Eisenhower and saw the black-and-white roadster film when it was first in theaters. I pulled some strands of hair down all around, and when Julian appeared, he gave me an approving nod. He was definitely being polite.

  The car, which belonged to a friend of his, a BC professor, didn’t have seat belts, and Julian wanted to drive with the top down, so we decided to take the slow, scenic route across the top of the state rather than the Mass. Pike, which would have swept us swiftly and blandly west. This would add another hour, each way, to the trip, but I was game. It was only nine in the morning; we’d be there by noon. Even if we left at nine tonight and got home at midnight or one, we’d be fine.

  Nat, true blue and probably secretly hoping that the opportunity for a little hanky-panky would present itself to me, had offered to spend the night with Henry and get him off to school. I did have to work in the morning, though, making up for taking today off, and I was seriously behind on my other job, the Sherwood Glen coffee-table books, so a motel interlude wasn’t part of the plan. At least my plan.

  The morning’s weather, juxtaposed with last night’s, offered an illustration of the local adage “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” We were headed, the forecaster had announced this morning, into a period of “Indian summer,” an annual heat wave that inevitably arrived a day or two after you’d finally given up on there being an Indian summer that year, packed away all your warm-weather clothing, and hauled out the wooly sweaters and socks. Its wintry cousin was the snowstorm in May.

  It was already warm as we got into the car and headed toward Fresh Pond Parkway. Later, it was going to be almost summery: in the high seventies in some places. Last night I’d been brooding moodily on the imminence of Thanksgiving, and this morning, I was zipping along in a convertible, wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

  The plan was to mosey on out to Lenox, stopping anywhere we felt like stopping. Julian was interested in touring The Mount, Edith Wharton’s old estate, and in finding somewhere to have a great dinner. That was all. Driving out there and taking in the scenery along the way seemed to be the point, not visiting all the area’s tourist attractions. This sounded good to me. I asked if we could make a quick detour to West Stockbridge, five or six miles from Lenox, and Julian was more than accommodating.

  “I’m just picking up something for a friend,” I explained vaguely. “It won’t take long.”

  “Of course,” he said pleasantly.

  I decided to tackle the subject of Henry right away. There was no way that Julian, having come inside to use the bathroom, could not have noticed the toys and children’s books all over the place. Remembering how straightforward he’d been when he asked me to the movies, when we left the movies, and when he kissed me good night, I decided to follow suit.

  “Just so you know,” I began, “I have a son. His name is Henry. He’s five.”

  Julian glanced over. “Evidently.” He smiled, then returned his gaze to the road.

  I waited for him to go on. He didn’t.

  “Meaning prompted.

  “Little blue trainers? Snoopy toothbrush?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say next, because I didn’t know if this was a date, in which case my having a child might be a fact of some importance, or not a date, in which case it wouldn’t.

  “I have a daughter,” he said.

  “You do?” I was shocked.

  He nodded. “She’s eight. She lives with her mother in Sussex, boards at Brambletye. I have her in the summers, though, in London.”

  “Wow.”

  “So I take it you’re not with … your son’s father,” he went on.

  “Nope,” I said. “We’re friendly, though.”

  “We’re not,” Julian said. “In point of fact, we despise each other.”

  “That can’t be easy.”

  “Oh, it’s easy enough,” he said. “She’s quite despicable, really.”

  “I meant, with your daughter …”

  “We do all right, Ruby and me. It’s all rather grand, life with Mummy and Lord Heathsby, so London’s quite amusing for her. Carryout curries and all that.”

  “I’m sure she loves it.”

  “She seems to. Like camp, I suppose. Sleeping under the eaves, in a room half the size of a maid’s room at Moors End.”

  “Moors End?” I asked.

  “Moors End House,” he answered, and smiled. “That’s what it’s called today. It’s sort of a … castle.”

  The Mount was magnificent. As we approached Edith Wharton’s elegant, Palladian forty-two-room summer “cottage,” I resisted the urge to ask Julian how it shaped up beside the castle in which his daughter apparently lived. I decided it would be more polite to Google Moors End House when I got home.

  We were just in time for a tour, so we spent more than an hour wandering through buildings and gardens constructed according to the design principles in Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses. Reacting against the dark, heavy, fussy style of the Victorians, our tour guide informed us, the author had argued that simplicity, symmetry, and architectural proportion made rooms pleasant to be in. I immediately resolved to rearrange our furniture as soon as I got home, get rid of the heavy green drapes in our living room (hand-me-downs from a friend of Ellie’s), and paint our entire apartment in shades of peach and sky blue.

  Later, after touring the formal flower garden, the rock garden, the Italian walled garden, and the grass terraces, I vowed to talk to Ellie and Max about how much nicer we could make our back and side yards, which were overrun with lilacs and violets. It wasn’t a matter of spending much money, it was just a matter of a little elbow grease, which, in my newly inspired state, I decided I would be glad to provide. I could make a grass terrace. How complicated could that be? Clip our overgrown hedges into some topiaries, get the hostas all lined up in crisp, military rows. True, I wouldn’t be able to replicate The Mount’s breathtaking view of Laurel Lake, but we had Fresh Pond nearby and it was pretty nice.

  Exhausted by the renovations I had already planned and carried out, bringing our little family’s aesthetic experience into line with Edith Wharton’s design principles, I slumped into a chair at The Mount’s Terrace Café and ordered a huge lunch.

  Across from me, Julian grinned.

  “And a bottle of the Graves,” he added.

  Over lunch, we chatted easily, talking about the kids, and about Declan and Tilda, Ruby’s mother, whom Julian had known “at university” but never married. When Ruby made her surprise appearance, Tilda had been incensed to discover that Julian had no intention of disappearing conveniently from both their lives, leaving Tilda free to find her daughter a new daddy. As we finished off the crisp white wine, we traded tales of the journeys that had brought us into the world of old books.

  I glanced up at The Mount as we sipped our coffee and suddenly felt a little sad. I wished I hadn’t learned quite so much during our tour, for despite the feeling of permanence conveyed by the buildings and grounds, the aura they exuded of having been here forever, gracefully overlooking Laurel Lake for as long as Moors End House had overlooked whatever it overlooks—the moors, probably—Edith Wharton had lived here for just ten years. For all the care that she’d lavished on the gardens and the plasterwork, the greenhouse and the oak-paneled library, not to mention the writing that she did while she lived here—working in her simple, spare bedroom until noon every day—the house was only briefly a home.

  A decade after she moved in, she was gone, living in Paris, her marriage dissolved. The Mount became a girls’ scho
ol, later a theater company, and at various points it lay vacant, falling into ruin. Even as we sat here sipping our coffee in the unseasonable warmth, it was teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Funds were needed for preservation. Its future was lurching from one restoration grant to the next.

  “Sort of sad, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “How short a time she was here, after everything she put into it.”

  Julian shrugged. “She’d been unhappy, a society matron who only dabbled in writing. The happier she got, and the more successful, the better Paris looked. I mean, who doesn’t love Paris?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Really, Anza, be serious. Where would you rather be when you’re fifty? Stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, with a crazy husband embezzling your money? Or free as a bird in Paris, in the arms of a dashing young rake who’s unlocked your repressed desire?”

  I smiled at Julian. He really was charming, with those little crinkles of amusement at the corners of his eyes. I glanced back at Laurel Lake, glittering in the sunlight.

  I didn’t know, really. I honestly couldn’t say. I think I would have kicked the husband out and kept the house.

  I had printed out directions to Esther’s, starting on Main Street in West Stockbridge. It didn’t take us long to find the place. It looked like something out of a Beatrix Potter book, a full-scale version of a cozy snug that a family of happy rabbits might live in. It was set way back from the road, on a foundation of massive fieldstones. Hardy nasturtiums were still blooming in their summer pots, throwing out final, doomed, radiant bursts of buttercup and tangerine.

  “Before we go in,” I said, placing my hand on Julian’s knee, “there’s something I should tell you.” The having-a-kid conversation had worked out so well, and our time at The Mount had been so comfortable and easy, that I’d decided to take a trusting leap with that other little secret I had on my chest.

  Under different circumstances, I might have waited a while, tested the waters. But I was really starting to like Julian, and there was no point in letting that go on, no point whatsoever, if the ghost business was eventually going to be a deal breaker. That’s me, though: dive right in. Faced with the choice of pulling off a Band-Aid slowly and gently or in one quick, searing yank, I always opt for speed.

  He looked over. I took a deep breath, then hesitated. No, I thought, anxiety rising, this isn’t the time. I’d just ask him to wait in the car. No! I immediately told myself, I can’t do that! It might take a while to explain everything to Esther and then to look for the book; I couldn’t just leave him sitting out here in the driveway, wondering what in the world I was up to in there. I’d just end up feeding him a big song and dance when I came back out, and what was the point of that?

  Besides, people sometimes surprise me, often when I least expect it. I’ll psych myself up for the big revelation, and the matter-of-fact response will be, “Oh, yeah? I saw a ghost once.”

  “What?” he said, squeezing my hand.

  “Um.” Yikes.

  “What is it?” he asked kindly.

  “Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. “There’s something I should tell you about myself. You see, I …”

  I immediately knew that I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. This was a very bad idea. I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said.

  “What?” he pressed. “What is it?”

  I sighed. “It’s nothing, really.”

  “If it’s nothing, then why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because—”

  “Because why?” he asked.

  “Because … you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You will. Trust me.”

  He smiled. “Let me guess. You … are secretly …a … spy!”

  “No.”

  “You are not really … a girl.”

  I smiled. “Arrgh!” I said, mad at myself for having cracked opened the door. “All right, all right.” I took one more deep breath before I whispered, “I can see ghosts. And talk to them. Always could. Since I was … little.”

  There. It was out. He gave me a wry, tilted look, one indicating that he might be waiting for the punch line of this queer little joke.

  I shrugged. “That’s it. The woman who lives here isn’t really a friend of mine, she’s a friend of … this ghost I know.”

  “This ghost you know,” he said dryly.

  I nodded. “He’s—was—a butler. He hasn’t crossed over yet—because he wants to find the deed to a house in Wales. It’s in a book that this woman might have. I’m trying to help find it.”

  Not elegant, my explanation, but as simple and clear as I could make it. Those were the facts.

  He looked dazed and puzzled, as though he knew he was intellectually capable of filling in the missing piece here, he just couldn’t get the facts to line up.

  So I threw some more at him, hoping his frown would begin to loosen up.

  “His name was John Grady. He was Irish.”

  “Who?” Julian asked.

  “The ghost.”

  His expression said, I was afraid of that.

  “He and his wife—,” I started.

  “This … ghost’s wife?”

  I nodded, but I could already hear disbelief in his voice. Which is fine, really. It doesn’t offend me. People either believe me or they don’t. I don’t care one way or the other, frankly. I’m not sure I would believe me if I were in their shoes. Someone points to a purple elephant in the sky, and you can’t see it? For you, it’s not there—it doesn’t exist. That’s how we’re taught to make sense of the physical world: playing peekaboo with our mothers, learning that our stuffed bear hasn’t really vanished into thin air. What’s real can’t become invisible—it’s just hidden behind Mama’s back. Can’t find your other shoe? Keep looking. It exists. It’s somewhere. What’s actual doesn’t just vanish.

  The converse, of course, we also learn: if you can’t see it, or touch it, or hear it yourself, it isn’t real.

  I can easily pull a ghost, like a well-loved teddy bear, from behind my back, if someone is open-minded and will give me a chance. But most people close right down: they’re threatened, they’re scared, what I say just flips them out. I understand that, and experience has taught me I have to respect it. When I see that steel door coming down behind someone’s eyes, it’s usually best for me to back off.

  But today, I didn’t want to back off. I wanted Julian to find this fascinating. I wanted him to think it was the most interesting thing he’d ever heard, and that I was the most captivating woman he had ever met, so I persisted.

  “Come in with me,” I said. ‘There’s no reason to be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” he scoffed. There was a tone in his voice that I hadn’t heard before. A dismissive edge, as though he were thinking he should have known something was wrong with me.

  “It’ll make more sense inside. I can show you—”

  “No.” He cut me off. His expression had hardened. “I’ll wait here, if it’s all the same to you.” He tried to soften the effect of his words with a smile, but it was a cool, distant smile. “Have a walk around, perhaps.”

  For now, anyway, it appeared that the subject was closed.

  “Sure; great!” I said, way too cheerfully. “I won’t be long.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  As Johnny had predicted, Esther had no trouble believing the story I told her. I had not telephoned ahead, both because I hadn’t had time and because I hadn’t wanted to give Esther the chance to blow me off over the phone. Winning her confidence as I stood on her doorstep was going to be the trickiest part, I knew, so I’d asked Johnny for some details I could use to gain Esther’s trust, facts I couldn’t possibly know unless they’d been imparted to me by someone in the household. Or the ghost of someone in the household.

  I did a quick tap dance when she answered my knock. She was tall and lanky like her sister, b
ut the skin on her face and hands was roughened by sun and country living. Before she could gather her wits—or slam the door in my face—I launched into the story of how she had broken her mother’s Limoges sugar bowl in the bathtub, where it was sailing Lulu, Esther’s stuffed chick, to China. I identified her favorite flavor of ice cream, at least her childhood favorite—peppermint stick. I reminded her of how she’d broken her wrist at her first riding lesson, after she kicked the chestnut mare into a trot while the instructor’s back was turned. And all through her childhood, I said, she’d had an “imaginary playmate” named Millie.

  Imaginary playmates are ghosts. They’re usually the ghosts of children who have died, and who remain connected to the homes in which other children now live.

  At the mention of Millie, Esther’s eyes filled up with tears and she swept me quickly into her kitchen.

  Millie, she explained as she put on the kettle for tea, was a little girl who’d lived in their house on Commonwealth Avenue and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Esther’s bedroom had once belonged to Millie, who’d just turned eight when she succumbed to the flu. Esther had only pieced this together a few years ago, when she’d done some research on the previous owners of her former home.

  It was Millie who’d taught Esther to tie her shoes, and not Josie, who took the credit. Millie had been central to Esther’s life for as long as Esther could remember; she even remembered looking through the bars of her crib and seeing Millie rocking in the chair.

  “I’m sure you did,” I said. “That’s not unusual.”

  “No one believed me,” she said.

  “That’s not unusual, either, unfortunately,” I responded.