The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  In another year, I dared putting my shoulder and whole leg out, looking out, feeling the wind. In another year or two, I stood in the shadows under the pines, listening like a doe to hear any footstep, darting in when Davey was still half a mile away. When a question was put to me, if I wanted an extra potato or some maple sugar, I sometimes spoke the opposite of my desires, and held my lie in me, like a warm stone. It made me laugh late at night when I was sleepless. I was shameless, and for weeks afterward, I would act nicely, cleaning the hut well, making beautiful baskets. And then it would slip again; I’d lie; my grandfather would look at me, and I would feel goodness curdle in me, sour.

  During my tenth year, I dared walk twenty paces toward the lake that waved and sang to me. The wind held and released me. I was hungry for its skin on my skin. In the woods, I saw the drunken insects stuck together, and I wondered at this. Outside, the world felt rich with possibility. Inside, I felt some strange heaviness keeping air from my lungs.

  During my eleventh year, I went all the way to the lake itself and felt the warm shallows move over my feet, felt the tiny nibbles of the minnows on the hairs of my ankles, and almost wept with the touch. That day, I waded in to my knees and, so frightened by my daring, didn’t do it again until my twelfth year, when my shift began fitting differently, when my skin turned hot in places and Davey stopped looking at me at all. The wildness rose in me; I chased his eye, imagining during the long winter what would happen if I slipped inside his blanket. Then I would look at my grandfather, and, in shame, think of other things.

  That badness in me grew, hardened. When my grandfather brought home his coins from his baskets, I once took a shining one and buried it under a pine. I made one of Davey’s knives dull, because I could. I took off my shift and slept the long afternoons, skin to fur, until a step nearing woke me, and then I dressed in haste.

  When it at last became unbearable, I went into the world, and that day I felt everything, the sun, the rocks, the small animals in the trees, watching me. I went to the lake and walked in over my head, and watched my hair float up to the surface, watched it weave and spin in the greenish light down there, the nits bubble up.

  That day, when I came out I watched from afar as small figures of people moved on the streets of the town. I squeezed myself between the boulders beside the road and, hidden, watched the people pass, the ladies with their squeezed waists sitting on one side of their horses, the men galloping up feathers of dust. I saw a mother holding her son in her arms, lovers arm in arm, the squeezing of hands when they met; I felt it in my own body each time the people touched. I loved them all, the people, I loved watching them, imagining their words, soft and formless in my ears, but I mostly loved the men. The one with the hunched back and kind face, the fat and very hairy one, the lonely little boy one with the nose like a needle who spoke to himself, the very large one who had red strips in his white powder where his hat pressed in.

  I slipped home, feeling the badness grow in me. I saw my grandfather in my mind, his sad face, but it did not stop me from laughing as I ran. The hounds greeted me, their cold noses sweet on my legs. The hut seemed like less than nothing.

  All afternoon, I sat with the King James, letting the pulse of the words pull me through the hours. Like a window the words were to me, like light itself, and I could see my mother through them. Even as I sat there, with the book in my hands, wind through the window ruffling the thin leaves quietly, I knew I would go out to the lake again. I would steal to the shore again, go in again naked. I would banish my grandfather’s face from my thoughts. The fishes would slide their smooth slide around me, the eels would nibble my hair. The lake weeds would part at my feet; the light would quiver as it passed through the deep. I would go in farther and farther until I walked my way along the rocky bottom to the town. And then I would come out of the water and join the others. I would move into their streets, walk into their lives, and they would turn to me. And the ladies would clap their hands with wonder and the men would embrace me with their strong arms and the children would run around me in circles and everyone would stop and smile. They would reach out their hands; they would touch me. I would pass like a babe from person to person, touching all the people of Templeton. At last, at last, everyone would welcome me in.

  21

  Fame in Failure

  I HAD A hard time, for some reason, returning to the New York State Historical Association library. All that week, whenever I thought of seeing Peter Lieder or Zeke Felcher, a strange shyness washed over me, and I found myself reluctant to do anything that involved leaving the house. Instead of doing the research I needed to do, I called Clarissa for hours. She told me about Sully’s growing silences around her, the lupus slowly being beaten back with her experimental therapy, an assignment she felt strong enough to take. I talked to her about Primus, the Lump growing in me, my father hidden somewhere in Templeton like one of those books where you searched through crowded scenes until you found the little man in the red-striped shirt waving at you. We talked until she fell asleep or until she gave a little impatient laugh and said, “Willie, honey, you don’t have to talk to me all day, you know. I mean, I’m not alone. I read, I sleep, I’ve got my soap operas.”

  And I also read and reread Cinnamon’s and Charlotte’s letters until I couldn’t ignore the solid reality: those two women, though strange, were not the source of my father. When I asked my mother at last one day, she was painting her toenails a suitably Baptist white, sitting in her antique wicker chair. She didn’t look up when she said, “Took you long enough, Williekins. Up up and away. Time to try the next step.”

  “Guvnor Averell?” I said, making a face. Whether or not Cinnamon had made everything up about her father, he was still a frightening man, very cold and stern-looking in the portrait of him on the hallway wall, his one wonky eye glaring in the picture. “Jacob Franklin Temple?”

  “Good job,” she said. “Get to it. Try both of them. You need to be back with Clarissa asap. And school,” she said, putting the brush back in and shaking the bottle, “begins in only two weeks. I saw online that you’re teaching a survey course. Congrats. You’re going back.”

  I stood in the doorway with my arms folded across me, staring at her. “Vi,” I said. “That’d be true if I didn’t have a slight problem. A small child to feed and raise. Right?”

  Now Vi looked up for good and frowned at me. “At last,” she said. “You asked my opinion. Well, Willie, I’ll tell you. I am sorry. You just can’t have the baby,” she said.

  The sunshine on my mother’s head made her graying hairs seem flinty, like wires. She held her face up, watching me as I caught my breath. I took a step into the room and said, “You’re kidding. You’re a religious freak. Don’t tell me you’re advocating abortion?”

  “What I’m advocating,” said Vi, “is responsible parenthood. You are nowhere near ready for a child. And this world does not need one more semi-unwanted child. I’m religious, yes,” she said, and she stood to face me. “But I’m also rational, honey, and a medical professional. In the first trimester, there is nothing wrong with it. The fetus is not viable on its own. I would recommend that you get it out quick, and have one later, when you’re ready. I’m sorry if this hurts your feelings, or is not what you expected me to say,” she said. “But I love you and any future child you are going to have. And this is best for all of us.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, Nellie.”

  My mother held my eye for a beat until she frowned and said, “Don’t think this has anything to do with you and my situation when you were born, Sunshine. In that case, I had nothing, and you were the best thing that happened to me. I was doing lots of drugs, engaging in unprotected sex, living a terrible, unhealthy life. In your case, you have everything. I have worked all my life to give you everything, and so have you. Having a baby right now would be the worst thing to happen to you.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said, but even to myself I sounded unsure. “It’s no
body’s decision but my own.”

  “That’s right. I can make an appointment for you,” she said, patting me on the arm. “I can urge you to do what’s best. But I can’t make the decision for you, sweetheart. You have to do that yourself. Tell me what I can do to help.”

  My mother left the room, then, and it felt as if a subtle, intense pressure left with her. All the time I had been home I had been afraid of this confrontation; I had been afraid of my own resolve to do what I knew was best. It’s true that somewhere in me I wanted to keep the Lump, to hold its wailing newbornness, to watch it develop into a real person. Just as intensely, I wanted it out of me. One step was irresponsible, illogical, totally wrong; the other was so right it screamed its rightness until I clapped my hands over my ears. When I left the room, I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and I saw how drawn and ill I looked.

  SO I STEELED myself. I swung out into the glorious Templeton August with my notebook and pen. I would just get on with my real work. And then, when I came home, I would call my doctor and ask for an appointment. It would be easy, in and out. Surgical. Clean. I would find my father. I would rid myself of Lumpishness. I would only have my broken heart and that cad of a Primus Dwyer left to handle.

  But things do not always happen as we expect them to, and like the heroine of a fairy tale, on the mile walk up to Franklin House, I was stopped three times.

  The first was when a red convertible came slowly down West Lake Road. In it rode three divas from the Opera, in the middle of an improvised aria competition, to see who could out-sing the others.

  “Il destin così defrauda, le speranze de’ mortali,” they sang, louder and louder. “Ah chi mai fra tanti mali, chi mai può la vita amar?”

  The sound was so overwhelming on that sunny country road that I stopped and felt my heart shatter like crystal, but it only skipped a beat. The sheer perfection, the sheer gorgeousness. I felt tears in my eyes, and then the women stopped singing and laughed at one another, and drove on. One pretty Jersey cow and I were left alone in the buzzing morning, gazing at each other, dreamy-faced.

  I was still holding the moment in the pit of my stomach when I crossed up past the country club’s stone gates and saw that standing there, beside the big yellow deep-sea pod, were people sleek as seals in wet suits, gazing at a map on the ground. They looked like crows over carrion. I thought of my hand pressing into the freezing, peach-fuzzed hide of the monster, and felt a wild grief come over me.

  And the last stop came because I was not yet ready to go into the library, and so I fled into the dusty safety of the Franklin House Museum. I was alone; nobody was there to force a ticket on me, and so I ducked into a pretty little room off to the side, and looked down at the lake over the green grass. It was a dim room, walnut-paneled, high-ceilinged. When I turned around, I found that I was caught in the middle of a Mexican standoff.

  There was Marmaduke Temple in his jowly, stern portrait over the mantel; it seemed as if his eyes were resting on me. Then they seemed to swivel across the room and up the wall, to rest on the other side, where the original Jacob Franklin Temple portrait hung, the novelist smirking, the nimbus bright and angry around his head.

  I felt stretched taut between them, the father and his son. I stood in the middle of my ancestors, the landlord, the great novelist, and felt like the rope in a tug-of-war of wills.

  “Cool it, boys,” I said, at last. “Just leave me alone,” and I fled.

  I FOUND MYSELF driven into the library, trying to find sanctuary in a familiar place. But when I came into the dim little place, heartsore and shaken, the little old lady behind the desk looked at me and frowned and said, “Your friend. Peter. He’s out. Don’t ask me. I don’t know why.”

  “Oh,” I said, and though I was relieved, I was also now at a loss. I was counting on Peter’s help. I did a circle in the library, and then came back to the lady’s desk. It was perhaps because of the surrealness of the morning—the singers, the divers, the portraits—that I felt tears in my voice when I said, “Do you have any idea where I could get some information on Jacob Franklin Temple?”

  The woman blinked at me like a toad.

  I waited, figuring no, figuring that she was so old she could barely boil herself a cup of tea.

  And then the goat-woman broke into one of the loveliest, beamiest smiles I had ever seen. She said, “Well, isn’t today your lucky day. You’ve just met one of the goldarn world experts on Jacob Franklin Temple, honey.”

  WE MADE OUR slow way to her little room in the back, where I waited as the old lady dawdled over her hot pot. At last, she sat. “I’m Hazel Pomeroy. I’ve been here for, gosh, ever. And who the heck are you?” she said. She sipped the green tea she had made; I was wrong even there; she did know how to boil tea.

  “Wilhelmina Upton,” I said, sighing a little. “I’m trying to find out if Jacob could have slept around, had a little, well, bastard somewhere.”

  Hazel’s eyes bulged, and for a moment, she looked as if she had so much to say it clogged her up, like a dam choked by windfall branches. At last, she said, “Oh, my. So you’re Wilhelmina Upton? Let me take a look at you.”

  I was used to this: all my history teachers, even in college, were so thrilled to see me, a living fossil from a notorious family, that I was often examined for likeness. She narrowed her eyes and looked me over, and at last shook her head, smiling.

  “You’re much like Marmaduke, you know,” she said. “That reddish glint in the hair, the height, the firm jaw. The pink cheeks. Such a stunner.”

  “Thanks, Hazel,” I said, but she wasn’t finished.

  “Nothing like your old granddaddy George. That there was a piece of work. What a coot,” she said. “He was my fiancé, you know.”

  The world went still then, the motes hung in the beams of light as if they, too, were startled static. Perhaps, I thought, Hazel Pomeroy was the source of my father. Perhaps I was wrong about George, perhaps he fooled around. Perhaps I was looking at a grandmother right here.

  But then Hazel squawked to see the look on my face, and said, “No, not really, honey. I was only sixteen when he married your grandmother. I was just a silly girl. He came home from Yale one summer and was the catch of the year. PhD, a Temple, son of Sy Upton, not ugly, and what have you. He took me for a sundae at Druper’s Five-and-Dime, and I believed that meant we were engaged. I told everyone. Such a mess when I come to find out that only a week later, he’s proposed to your grandmother. Blindsided, all we girls were. Because she was an old lady at the time. Twenty-eight years old, and no looker. No offense, I know she’s your family, but she was ugly as sin, and he was ten years younger than her. I still can’t figure how she got her nippers in him. Later I figured out that he didn’t marry her for her. He married her for being related to that lusty old slave Hetty Averell, for her family. Which is to say, in a queer, twisted way, that he married for his own family, to join the Averells to the Temples. I was heartbroken for all of, oh, a month. Strange how when we’re young, we think we’ll die over things we chuckle about when we’re old.”

  I would have thought that Hazel had said this innocently, in the wandering, sweet way of old people feeling the urge to give the gift of their nostalgia, save for the sly look in her eyes. I wondered how much she guessed about why I was home. I looked away.

  “Anyway,” she said, “didn’t bother me much. All respects to the deceased, but your granddaddy was cold as a toad. I know what they say, but there was no way it was a murder-suicide, either, the way he and Phoebe died. Accident, pure and simple. That man had the worst eyes of any man born to hold a driver’s license. I can’t count the times he ran off the road just driving from Averell Cottage to here. One mile. Drove me nuts all the times I had to pull him out with my old Ram. No, I never missed having him. Had a much better life as a bachelorette, you know,” and she winked at me.

  “Good for you,” I said. “Was George as tedious as I imagine?”

  She blinked and said, “No, he w
as very nice.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  And then she began to smile and said, “And I just lied. You startled me with your ‘tedious’ talk. He was my boss, you know, here at this library. A disaster. I did all the work for this place, you know.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. I noticed my tea had gone cold in my hands and I set it down. “Now, Ms. Pomeroy, what can you tell me about Jacob Franklin Temple?”

  Hazel Pomeroy leaned back in her chair and looked at me with the same sly smile. “You have a few hours, Wilhelmina?”

  “Call me Willie,” I said. “I have a few days.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let me tell you a story.”

  THIS IS WHAT Hazel Pomeroy told me, over endless cups of tea that day:

  Jacob Franklin Temple was the youngest child of seven, all of whom died, save for him and his much older brother, Richard. By the time he was born, Marmaduke was already wealthy. Richard was already a man, so thickly pelted with hair that his eyes were barely discernable in his face, and he had a soft padding between his clothing and his skin. Their mother, Elizabeth, was an invalid, and delicate.

  The myth went that Jacob was born the day his mother at last came to Templeton from Burlington to stay in her husband’s famous settlement. She just made it into the Manor House before he leapt from her, squalling. There was nothing to substantiate that myth, save for the fact that he was a screaming meemie for the rest of his life.

  From the first, Jacob was Marmaduke’s pet project, as Marmaduke came from nowhere and educated himself, Elizabeth could read but not write, and Richard’s education was spotty, at best. Marmaduke was determined that Jacob would be a gentleman, with a gentleman’s education, and so, by the time the boy was two, Jacob could read and write his name. By four, he could speak French like a Frenchman, declaim poetry by heart, do simple arithmetic, already had a good writing hand, and had begun Latin. By the time he was fourteen, his father had been dead for five years and Elizabeth sent the boy to Yale, as per Marmaduke’s wishes.