by Lauren Groff
I arrived in Templeton in the dark before dawn and parked my car before the post office, where it still was sitting by the time I talked to Clarissa. I was afraid that my mother would hear me arrive and come out with a hatchet. I stood staring at Averell Cottage for an hour or so, working up the nerve to go inside.
And then I told Clarissa about the monster dying, how I touched it and felt the black of the lake, infinite depth. The monster’s death, I told her, just went to show that everything, everything, everything was falling apart.
THERE WAS AN excruciatingly long pause, then, and I could almost hear Clarissa thinking. My story had taken hours; it was deep night in San Francisco, and the city was quiet in the receiver. At last, she said, “Well. Your life’s a mess, that’s true. Then again, it’s not that bad. You’re in Templeton, at least. So put yourself back together. Heal, yadda yadda, come back home to San Francisco.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But, wait, there’s more.”
“There cannot be more,” said Clarissa.
“Oh, but there is,” I said. “The lovely and sane Vivienne Upton, who is, amazingly, now a Jesus freak…”
“…I know,” said Clarissa, “what’s that all about?”
“Hold up. How do you know?” I said. “What?”
“Oh,” said Clarissa, her voice vague, “we talk all the time. Not since you’ve come home, though, come to think of it.”
I paused and let this sink in. “Well,” I said. “Your new best friend Vivienne Upton had the gall to tell me at dinner that my entire life is predicated on a despicable lie. And she had to tell me because Jesus hates liars. So get this, ready?”
“No,” said Clarissa. “But you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“Sure am,” I said. “Remember that story Vi told you that Thanksgiving about how I was supposed to come from wild sex with three hippies in a commune? Well, that’s not exactly true. In fact, I come from one man. And he is a Templeton man. And he has another family. And I know him and he knows me. And he has no idea that I’m his. And Vi isn’t telling me who he is, but I squeezed and squeezed until she gave me one hint, which was that he apparently told her in passing that he was descended from Marmaduke Temple through some illegitimate channel or other. So of the four hundred eligible men of an appropriate age in Templeton, I am supposed to weed out the one who is my father, based on a tiny little rumor.”
“Wait. Why doesn’t Vi just tell you?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “Vi explicitly forbade me to find out who he is.”
“Then why do you want to find him?” I could hear the smile in her voice.
“So that I can figure out if I’ve gotten any horrendous genetic problems from him. And then kill him for not being there while I was growing up.”
Clarissa tried to muffle it, but couldn’t, and I had to suffer through long, jagged squawks of delight. At last she stopped and came back on the phone. “Oh, Willie,” she said. “I haven’t laughed that hard in months.”
“I’m glad to hear my life amuses you,” I said.
“It’s not that,” said Clarissa. “It’s just that Vi’s a nut. That she would think it preferable to tell you that you were a love child of hippie sluttishness, rather than the kid of some respectable guy in town. What a trip she is.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “It’s all fun and games until it’s your life. But the question I have for you, Clarissa, is this: what do I do? What do I do now?”
“About what?” she said.
“Everything,” I said.
To her credit, Clarissa thought long and hard about this one. I could hear the door of the closet open where she sat so as not to disturb Sully when he was sleeping, and then his sleepy, muffled voice. I could hear her answer, soothingly, “Soon, soon,” and then Clarissa came back on the phone.
“Sully’s mad, Willie,” she said. “Says I need my sleep more than anything and that I only have two more minutes before he cuts the wire. So here’s what I have to say. About Dwyer, you’re just going to have to wait. Same goes for Stanford, which I kind of think is going to end up all right, since sleeping with students is still pretty bad, and I’m sure the Dwyers don’t want to have a scandal on their hands. About your dad: is there any way that you’re going to get Vi to just tell you who he was?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Well, did Vi say that it was old Marmaduke Temple himself who had the illegitimate child?”
I thought hard. “No,” I said.
“So it could be anyone from the family. To be honest, it usually is close to the more recent end, because I think things like infidelity tend to be forgotten over time. Plus, there has to be a lot more documentation with the more recent ancestors than there would be with the older ones. Begin only a few generations up from you, and then, if you find nothing, work your way back in time. I’d guess your great-grandparents were the culprits, if I had to. Or, that sexy beast of a Jacob Franklin Temple. Looks the type,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “That’s not a bad plan.”
“Now about the baby,” she said, and her voice took on a wistful tone that I didn’t remember Clarissa ever using in her life. It was only later, when I awoke with a startle in the middle of the night, that I remembered the talk she’d had with the genetics counselor at the hospital, how when she came out her face was pale and pinched. She wouldn’t answer when I asked her what he’d said, until, at home, she put a pillow over her face and muttered, No baby for me. If it doesn’t kill me, my genes will kill it, and refused to say any more. Now she said, “Are you sure? I mean, about the baby? Did you take a test?”
I remembered being sick to death on the hard-baked shoulder of a Nebraska road. I remembered the pulse in my gut at dinner that evening. “I’m sure,” I said.
“Do you want it?” she said.
“Oh, Clarissa,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Why bring another child into our messed…”
She sighed into the receiver and said, “Spare me, Willie. Just tell me the truth. Do you want it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of the Lump, growing as we spoke.
“Well, that’s something I just can’t fix right now,” she said. “I’m sorry, Willie. I’ve got an appointment in the morning, and I’m so, so tired, honey. Plus Sully. He’s standing here, ready to rip the phone from my hands.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I’m the worst friend ever. How are you doing? I can’t believe I didn’t ask.”
“Oh, fine, fine,” she said. “Everything’s going great, don’t worry. I need to go,” she said. “Love you, kid. Everything will look better in the morning,” and she was gone.
Remarkable Prettybones
Done in 1814, this charcoal drawing is so fine that it is virtually indistinguishable from a photograph. Remarkable was, apparently, very vain about the drawing, proclaiming that she “never looked quite so lovely since she was a young girlie, dandled on all gents’ knees.”
7
Remarkable Prettybones
I COME TO Templeton in the early times, 1786, when all was terrible rough and hard. I was once a marvelous fair woman with my black eyes and good bosoms, but all that had withered away with my thirtieth year, long before our troubles, before our voyage to America. And I once had silver and a grand house with great windows and fine linens, I did; I once was a lady of my town, almost quite a lady. But we lost it all and come over from Ireland, the Captain and I, when he had troubles with his ships. They said he stole, hundreds and hundreds, from the owners. Not my Captain Prettybones. Base slander and nonsense.
Still his reputation was quite ruined and we set off on a clipper pushing to the new land. But Boston was not the town I’d imagined, not some sort of airy, golden place; and it was filthy, with muck knee-deep and a terrible hanging smoke and poor little Irish urchins dying with their big bloated bellies, as though they couldn’t die equal home on the green swards of Ireland. My Captain staggering home at night with his pockets emptied; pick
ed, he said, by the bad grasping women on the street, though I smelled their smells on his clothing, on his skin, under the rum and dirt. And so the day I heard of this new place, this Templeton where they were practically giving away land, and though it be in the heart of the savage country, I come running home over the streets and packed our belongings, and when my Captain staggered back in, stinking that night, I rapped him over the head with an andiron. He woke on the back of a mule thirty miles from Boston, roaring.
The voyage was hard into the wilderness, the boatman who took us up the Mohawk crooked, but the Captain had stopped his fuss by Cherry Valley and sat, cowed, at last. We come into Templeton, and it did near steal my heart away, it did, the piteousness, the four frame houses and filth and pigs rooting in the muck and smoke hanging over the town from where the men were burning their plots for potash, burning great old trees to nubs. Immediate, we sought out the great Marmaduke Temple. He was in a bit of a house that later became Sherman’s Hotel and Tavern. He had his big muddy boots on the desk, in all his papers, men queued up near down to the lake, but I being a lady pushed to the front and got the deed straight off. Though he had terrible nicked and horny hands from work, not like a gentleman at all, I thought Marmaduke Temple stunning handsome with his bulgy blue eyes and his red hair, with his deep voice and kindly Quaker speech. Captain Prettybones teased me afterwards how it seemed I had an admirer, but No, said I, He’s a man who knows how to behave to ladies, and fixed the Captain with the old stink-eye, and he said naught more to me about it. In two months, we had our little building on the new Second Street, and Captain Prettybones, he’d become a shoemaker, though he never had a chance to make a single boot. In building, he’d put a nail through his thumb, and didn’t tell me of it. By the time I seen it, it was large and red and had a jagged black wound with slime dripping from it. The red reached plain up his arm in long streaks and I knew it was a terror. I ran and fetched Aristabulus Mudge from his new apothecary. Mudge undid the bandages, saw the streaks reaching toward the heart. Closed the door and said to make the poor Captain comfortable, there was naught to do. And he was right, for in a night Captain Prettybones left me a widow, no money, a useless shoemaker shop, and I knowing only how to be a lady, how to run a household, striding about with keys at my waist.
So I sate that night to vigil over the cold body of my Captain and thought where to turn my poor self. Duke Temple, I knew, ate only what his valet cooked for him, and the valet spent his day with the horses, blew his nose on his sleeve. The little house of Duke’s was filthy, with the men missing the spittoons and dragging in their mud and lice and filthy hands. The smell alone would curdle cream. So after I buried my husband in the new cemetery, I went directly to Duke’s house and jostled through the lines of men to the front. There were no women in town then save the Widow Crogan, who owned the Eagle Hotel, and the men allowed me to shove them a little then, for the mere touch of a woman’s hand was distant to them and they longed for it, even from a woman with charms faded as my own. I marched straight to Duke, who bent over his desk like a boy over a matchbox, and said, Master Duke, my husband, he’s gone. Just this morning, said I, did I bury my Captain Prettybones.
Duke looked up over his map and rubbed his temple. Oh, Mrs. Prettybones, he said, I heard the news this morning. I am so very sorry for thy loss.
Yes, said I. It is a tragedy. And then I go on to relate all that I had come from, the fine house with its silver and linens, then the slander, and at last my piteous state. By the end of my sorrowful tale, I was weeping freely into my kerchief and flatter myself to say that even Himself had a tear in his fine blue eye.
Well, well, dear Mrs. Prettybones, he exclaimed at the end of my story, agitated to standing. Whatever can I do for thee, he said.
Thank you kindly, Mr. Temple, I say. I should like to become your housekeeper in the absence of your beautiful and charming wife.
I said this though I did not know my mistress then, but thought that a man such as Duke could not have a wife who was less than spirited and lovely. Imagine my surprise when I at last met Elizabeth Temple! A dear heart to be sure, but a brown little sparrow, and plain and so easily managed. So odd a couple as Duke and she has never been seen the world over, truly. And though I was but a mere higher servant, sometimes I did think it was a shame he had not a spouse who was quite worthy of him, as capable and quick as he.
But in that moment, on the day of my mourning, Duke blinked and let out a roar of laughter that shook the very beams. What a clever idea, he said. Fine, my dear Mrs. Prettybones. Thou shalt be my housekeeper. When canst thee commence?
Now, said I, bold as a magpie. We may talk pay over supper, said I.
Good, good, he said, sitting down. I am eager to eat a woman’s cooking again.
And that was how I found myself a fine living in the little town on a lake. Duke Temple gave me succor in my time of need, and I ran his household from that little house that is now Sherman’s Hotel, to the great, beautiful Temple Manor that the big, brooding slave Mingo built for Duke.
To be sure, all that time I had only been slightly bothered that Master Duke went off to the pubs like a common man, not like a gentleman at all. A mushroom gentleman, they called him, a gentleman sprung up overnight from the dung, though I grew furious when I heard it and the joker went off with such a ringing in his ear he might never hear again. Also there was always talk of the little girlies Duke looked upon too favorably, such nasty gossip. The chargirl at the Eagle. The cobbler’s daughter, Trixie. Even talk of Rosamond Phinney, the belle, though she was just a slip of a girl at the time, that merciless flirt. The only comfort is to think that when a man was great as Himself there would always be talk.
But when Hetty came, I admit it was marvelous difficult. I almost considered leaving the day Duke showed up with the three slaves for me to manage. Mingo was all right, though soft in the head, I suspected, but he fished and built beautifully and did not look at me at all, let alone with the lust I locked my door against. And Cuff, such a darling little Delaware Indian boy, brought up by a minister and his wife, taught to read and write, and then sold off by the parish when the minister and wife died, a common slave. That poor boy was like a child to me, until the day he ran off with a traveling preacher man. I never had more regretted the unformed children I lost from my womb until the day Cuff ran off.
But that black and saucy Hetty was another matter, indeed. I saw she was only out to seduce with her beautiful round face and coral necklace of scars around her throat, and as I was once a pretty girl like Hetty, I knew all the tricks. I kept her busy, cooking and collecting honey and plucking the pears and putting up preserves. I will grant, she was marvelous clean, obsessed, truly, over the last speck of dirt or dust. I had never seen a window gleam the way she could make it gleam or sheets so white as the ones on the beds. But I did not keep her busy enough, in the end, sad to say. I’ll admit, when I saw a special roundness when there should be nothing round at all, I had my suspicions, I did, and am proud to have acted upon them. And on the day my mistress come wrath-wracked into town, near bursting with child herself, and stepped from the carriage, all greasy from her travels, and circled Hetty and saw how rotten the girl was to the core, she threw her out into the street and I laughed and laughed to myself. But Hetty was a cat, landing on her feet, and she married that tanner Jedediah Averell, and he became a rich man. She, though black, almost quite a lady, and I could hardly stand it.
But most terrible of all was the day that came dark and heavy over the lake when that Guvnor of hers was born. I looked out the Manor window and saw Midwife Bledsoe scurrying down the road in the rain, and I knew Hetty’s labor come. And I’d admit to a great and sinful fury, and so after tea, after changing our little Jacob and singing him to sleep, I put on my own bonnet and cape and took a basket with some provisions and went down to the tanner’s on the lake and marched in and went up the stairs where the stink of birth was, all metal and sweat, and went right in, and peeled the swaddl
ing from the child and looked down and saw the red hair, the skin the color of cream tea, the bulgy blue eyes, one drifting off to the side. I put down the basket and covered the baby up again and put him back in the arms of Hetty, who was watching me with a smile flashing under her lips, not on her lips, but under, and went back into the rain. And this I tell as the truth; that even on the day my own Captain Prettybones left me behind in this sorrowful world a widow, I had not felt a cleaving so terrible within me. And though I bless his sinning heart in my prayers, I could not look at Marmaduke the same way again, no, never did I look at him the same again, no.
8
Queen and Crane
BETTER THAN AN alarm clock, the Running Buds. I awoke in the gray dawn when they were still a half a mile away, their footsteps reverberating over the Susquehanna bridge. By the time I found an old pair of running shoes, a suitable tee shirt, and a pair of track shorts (loose black polyester, the shameful Templeton mascot of a “Redskin” in orange on the left thigh), they had already gone a half a mile more. When I emerged onto Lake Street, I could trace their passage in the dew-damp footprints on the asphalt.
In light of my love life, it is perhaps a little sad to admit that I chased those six middle-aged men halfway across town. On my infrequent trips home, I had grown used to joining at least a small part of their runs, springing out of bed when I heard them nearing, catching up to them as quickly as I could. The truth was that other than Vi they were the only friends I had anymore when I returned home to Templeton: my friends in high school were the smart kids, and the smart kids never came home, barely even gracing the village for holidays. After college, my former friends and I lost touch, and the only way I knew what was going on in their lives—their medical residencies, marriages, articles, children—was through Vi, or more frequently, the Buds. The Buds were the town gossips, the watch-dogs, the caretakers. And even back when I was in high school, they made a point of going to as many of my soccer games and track meets as possible. This was partially, I’m sure, because high school sports were the only excitement in town when the air crisped into fall and the tourists disappeared. But it was partially, too, because they adopted me, in their way. Every Fourth of July, they invited me to picnics with their families, and I went without Vi, who was always working. I was taken as a babysitter on family vacations to Disney World and Hilton Head, I was escorted to a celebratory dinner by all six when I won the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest. They paid for a backpacking trip to Europe for my graduation from college. When Vi said I couldn’t accept it, it was too much, they were so sad and pleaded so eloquently that she let me take it.