The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer

by Joyce Reardon

  We must go at once!

  12 SEPTEMBER 1915—ROSE RED

  With John still in Portland getting Adam settled at Cheshire, I took advantage of my independence, and telling the staff we were headed to Sunday church, we were off. Sukeena snuck through the back forest and out to the road where, with me driving a two-horse, the three of us squeezed onto the carriage and headed off for Chinatown! Sukeena, God bless her, had made the arrangements in advance, delivering a letter for me that was posted to Madame Lu. This morning, by return post, I welcomed confirmation that we would be received by the Great Lady at our earliest convenience. The wording of Madame Lu’s note, and the steady hand that did write it, implied a translation, for the English was most correct and sound. (I am under the assumption that one of her young, lithe attendants is also quite versed in the English language and came to her assistance in this matter. This, in turn, warned me that the conversations taken between Tina and me in this woman’s presence were probably better understood than we believed possible or likely. I made note to myself not to say anything to Sukeena that I didn’t want overheard.)

  I must say that fear is entirely connected to familiarity. That is, when I first arrived at the door of Madame Lu’s establishment, I can remember nearly shaking from vexation, given the condition of the place, and feeling intimidated and more than a little afraid. On this, my third visit, I felt no such apprehension whatsoever. To the contrary, I found myself excited, enthralled even, at the prospect of seeing the Great Lady again. Now it is that I can understand Tina’s calm that day, the almost perverse peace she demonstrated upon our arrival.

  For her part, April demonstrated no enthusiasm for the change of environment (something I’d secretly hoped for!). I suspect the condition of Chinatown must have registered in her to some degree, but this failed to manifest itself in any facial expression or noticeable change. Sukeena, April and I (hand in hand) climbed the dimly lighted stairs to the pungent odors of incense, ginger and tea. The Great Lady occupied her throne like a monarch and bid us to take rest upon her woven straw mat. As before, Sukeena remained standing, slightly behind the two of us. A level of formality had developed between her and Madame Lu, if not outward respect.

  “So this is child,” Madame Lu said.

  “April,” I said.

  “Pretty name. Pretty child.”

  “We … I—”

  She cut me off. “Come here, child. Sit with Lu.” She extended her pudgy, swollen hands behind stiff arms that looked like tubular balloons knotted at the elbow. To my complete surprise, my daughter stood, walked the distance and scooted up into the large woman’s lap. For a moment, she seemed to get lost in the Great Lady’s garment, like stepping behind a curtain and then peering out again. I smiled at her. Then my heart stopped: my daughter smiled back at me. It was the first such expression since Douglas Posey’s suicide, and it brought tears to this mother’s eyes. (I am softened by the simplest gifts!)

  The bearing of the Great Lady was formidable. She seemed to fill the entire room all of a sudden. The flames of the candles in the room (and I swear this is true!) all bent toward that throne as if victims of a dozen simultaneous winds, as if water were running past them and down a drain directly beneath the Great Lady’s lacquered chair. The room filled with added light, and for a moment my heart danced in my chest, and I thought I might be faint. She said, “Mother tell me child, that you seen a man take his life.” No beating around the bush for Madame Lu—this was the first that anyone, to my knowledge, had spoken so openly about Douglas’s tragedy, and I feared repercussions. Again to my surprise, April nodded. “Madame Lu understand you no talk since this day. You hold your tongue. Madame Lu think smart child. Good girl, little April.” April looked up at the woman’s swollen cheeks and beady, slit eyes. “You no talk because the question not answered, isn’t that right?”

  I bubbled out my surprise and began to sob as my precious little girl nodded right along with the Great Lady—this was, by all accounts, a conversation, and as such, nothing short of a miracle.

  Lu said, “No one here answered the question for you, did they, Child?”

  April looked over at Sukeena and me and shook her head.

  “Until question answered,” the Chinese woman continued, “no sense in risking anything and ending up like that man—dead as dead can be. Am I right?”

  April nodded vigorously.

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

  The candle flames stood straight up again, the wind suddenly lessened, or perhaps it was gone completely. I worried immediately that Madame Lu had missed her opportunity, and my heart sank like a stone. She read me from her chair and flashed me a look that urged I reconsider, and I realized this woman was inside me: she heard my every thought. I forced an awkward smile.

  Lu asked, “Do you know the question, Mother?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You, Darkie?”

  Sukeena remained impassive. I wasn’t sure where Sukeena was at that moment—I had a feeling that she, too, was inside me, also reading my thoughts. Perhaps protecting me, standing sentry at my door. I struggled to stay conscious.

  “The question,” Madame Lu said privately to April, “is where did the man go? Isn’t it, Child?”

  April looked shocked. I let out a yelp and again was reprimanded by the big woman’s glance. “If he were no longer, where he gone? If still here, why he not talk?” She said quietly, and calmly, “So you no talk.”

  “Where did he go?” April said, speaking for the first time since the tragedy and causing me to sob with joy.

  “To the other side, my child,” Madame Lu said, still calmly. “You seen him there, yes? You talk, you and this man. Talk, with no need to use mouth. He the one tell you no talk to others, yes, Child?”

  “He said they’d never understand.”

  “Ohhhh,” I sobbed into my handkerchief, so overcome with grief and joy that I failed to hear the rest of what was said. It was over quickly, Madame Lu grinning, showing gaps where her teeth were missing. April hopped off her lap, cheerful as a bug, and scurried over to me. We hugged, and she must have thought me queer for my display.

  I waved over Sukeena and requested she complete the business with Madame Lu—I would pay anything, offer anything she requested. Sukeena promised to relay the message. April and I descended the dark stairs, my sweet, loving child already telling me all about the “awful man who jumped from the ladder.”

  If ever I doubted the power of the other side, to-day this mother’s heart was convinced. To-day, I became a convert.

  17 FEBRUARY 1917—ROSE RED

  For the last eighteen months, suspicious again about your role, Dear Diary, in the strange and entangled events of this grand house, I have kept thought and soul to myself, never sharing them with your pages, no matter how great the temptation. No ghosts to look over my shoulder, goes my reasoning, if nothing is being put to paper. Alas, my plan has had little consequence. I sit down here to write in an act of desperation (this is not one of Poe’s gory inventions of fiction: no young girl who can set schools afire; no dog that behaves as if possessed; no giant pendulum swinging to cut one in half!). If there exists some wraith, some bodily spirit here in this room with me, if he or she can hear my thoughts as the wet ink travels from my pen to parchment, if in fact said entity has any modicum of compassion still held in reserve, then you—it!—must certainly heed a mother’s cry: my sweet child has gone missing. Help me!

  I offer anything in return if sign be shown to indicate such an exchange. Money? My own soul? My life. My husband’s. “What’s that?” I ask … a voice in reply? A wind? (It is at this point I notice my east window has slipped open, and I fear the woman’s voice I did detect was nothing more than nature’s idle callings from the forest that surrounds these walls.) Nonetheless, Dear Diary, I do speak again into the privacy of my room, after securing this window shut and locked. “Did you speak to me? Is anyone there?”

  Again—and I swear this on my life—a
rumbling grew from beneath my trembling legs and swept through my ears like a whisper. “Hello?” I call out.

  Another window open! This time in my reading room, a lovely place for meditation and study just off my bedroom chamber, opposite the first of my two dressing rooms. I hurry through, about to shut it against the swirling wind and rain that engulf this awful tomb, when I think that perhaps this is how you speak to me, Rose. A mother’s hysterical anguish? I ask myself. Or is there reason behind this assumption? As your “voice” grows stronger I can picture my sweet April in the bed behind me so vividly, her golden curls thrown back against a pillow, her high little voice whispering to me: “Whales don’t have noses.” Or is it you? “Are you there?” I call out into my chambers. “Are you with me, Rose?” Nothing comes back at me. No sign that I can take to heart. No indication that my girl has only been borrowed, not stolen instead.

  I tremble, my head unstable. I swear I hear the words return: “T … h … e d … o … w … e … r.” Though these words make no sense to me, I am grateful for any sibilance, any sustenance to what previously was discerned as only wind. “The dowry?” I wonder, reminded of my marriage. “The dowager?”

  “Help me, I pray.” I return again to the empty reading room, my head spinning as I turn on my heels, a blur of the books’ leather bindings floor to ceiling, the stained-glass lamp I bought in Venice, the carpet from Constantinople—all these and more I would trade in a beat of the heart for even a sign that my child has been spared, never mind what I would surrender for the child herself—this mother’s life in an instant! Just give me a sign!

  I stand now, the window thrown open to the storm, debating throwing myself to the slate of the garden path below in sacrifice. All I await is the sign. Give me such a sign, and I am yours! A flash of lightning. A cry from the forest beyond.

  I see instead the unsteady flickering of the policemen’s flashlights as they patrol our woods, and wish it were a sign. I hear the thundering voice of my husband, a world away, in the Entry Hall below: “Find her! Find my child!” He is in a fit of rage, ordering staff and police alike (there are fifty police here searching for my April). I fear that like me, John, too, is making his prayers heard to your spirits, Rose, making offerings for an exchange. How this parent’s heart breaks at the thought of any harm coming to my April.

  The main focus of the search began in the Kitchen, where April was last seen playing tea—the enormous architect’s model of the grand house just out of reach. Sukeena reports that the child was playing by herself and seemed quite content at the time. (I fear that John has directed his fears to Sukeena herself, for I am told by Millicent that Sukeena has been sequestered in the staff kitchen, where she is being questioned by the police. Try as I might to intervene, to free her from this unfair suspicion, John sent me to my chambers, and this is one time I dare not challenge my husband, for his mood is aggressive and even frightening.) April was left for a moment as Sukeena neatened the pantry (she believes the pantry another of the house’s portals). When Sukeena turned around April was gone. Oh, how my world is turned upside down all of a sudden! (Indeed it has been quite askew for some time, but only now do I admit to the full effects of such behavior. I would never doubt Sukeena’s explanation of events whatsoever. I trust my friend beyond any other.) She explained also that at no time did April leave the Kitchen nor did she call out. Nor was there any cause for alarm, nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary. When next she looked the Kitchen stood empty, only the tea set and that model, a grotesque representation of our grand house, planted firmly in the center of the kitchen table, the house’s wings and extensions growing from its original form like some tumorous root. Not a lock of hair, not a fiber of clothing. Just the empty room and, of course, Sukeena.

  A moment later a scream: John claims it was Sukeena; Sukeena says it was the house itself.

  I stand at my window, eyeing it as my escape from this pain. I never imagined a heart could endure such torture. I never understood the depth of this great love, how encompassing, how whole and complete. Dare I say it here? Yes, there were times I wished the children would go away. Yes, there were times I longed for that simplicity of husband and wife in the cabin of the Ocean Star with nothing but time between great lavish meals, the best wines, and the intrigues of physical discoveries. But now! Just the thought of such selfishness is enough to make me sick! How gladly I would recapture the slightest whisper of such wishes! How simple that window looks to me. How effortless to end it here.

  I drag the Louis XVI settee to rest before the window and think to remove my shoes before stepping onto her pink and green silk upholstery, my dress held high around my thighs, and I awkwardly squeeze myself into the open frame, looking down between my feet at the looming darkness. I teeter there, half in, half out, whispering prayers repeatedly, the drumming of my blood in my ears, as images of sweet April swirl and fill the void in my chest where once my heart resided. Oh Wind, talk to me now. Summon me now! Say but a single word—J … U … M … P—and you shall own me forever, or what is left of it. I can see beyond the slate rooftop of the Pool House, to the rising wing I commissioned at the instruction of Madame Stravinski. I would haul it all down in a second for the affirmation of life in my precious child. I shudder at the thought of immortality that fails to include my children, fails to include those I love: Sukeena, my mother and father. Who would wish for the curse of the endless extension of a life without family, a life without love? If Rose has taken my dear child, is it because I built too slowly, or because I built at all? Is it because I have shared my bed with the sweet child for nearly two years, or because I allowed my husband to send the boy away to school? How much is a product of those things I control, and how much those I do not?

  Do I confess my sins now, from the pious mount of this open window, the fireflies of flashlights blinking in the woods? “He is unfaithful!” I shout from my pulpit. “I am unfaithful!” I hesitate. I hear a voice. Rose Red? I wonder. I shout, “I live torn by lust, corrupted by a woman’s gentle, loving touch.” I want Sukeena to hear this. I want her to understand. The guilt has been too much to bear. Rose Red has punished us for what we’ve done in secret these many months. She has taken my child to show me the ways of such wickedness. Such sweet wickedness it was! Love, as I have never known. I want my husband to hear, to pierce his heart the way he pierced mine so many years ago.

  Alas, it is not to be. My rumblings from my perch echo from the acres of rooftops and I spot Sukeena through the glass roof of the Solarium. She has broken free of her interrogators and is appealing in cloistered silence to me, with the pained expression of the only one who cares. “Don’t do it!” her expression calls out. “Don’t jump!”

  I look on as a uniformed policeman approaches her in the Solarium, the policeman not seeing me but me seeing him. I look on as Sukeena spots his arrival. She lifts her arms like a musical conductor and throws her head back in a haunting display of the quiet powers she possesses. He retches, gripped by a pain in the stomach, and I am reminded of our encounter in the Cairo market, all those years before. I watch, as impossibly the thorny vines of Sukeena’s remarkable indoor garden, lush as it is with African creepers and exotic botanical varieties from our year abroad, come alive with alarming speed. I watch as that dense greenery runs up the glass as if a thousand snakes, sprouts racing from the soil demonically. I watch as that policeman, already halted in his approach, is suddenly tangled and overcome by the twisting, creeping choke of that instant jungle. As he is consumed. Sukeena shaking her hands invitingly. The density of the tangle overcoming even my view of the events below as the glass is obscured.

  And then, I see the policeman no more. My maid’s delicate hands fall back to her sides. In stunned amazement I watch as the overgrowth recedes as quickly as it came, suddenly alive with color and bloom—a paralyzing red of bougainvillea, orchid and, dare I admit it, roses. More red roses than I have ever laid eyes upon.

  With that canopy removed from overhead, my
friend dares to look once again in my direction. We are quite some distance, and yet her face is close enough to feel her warm breath, to drink her earthy perfume. She shakes her head in denial. She will not allow me to jump, will not allow me to end it. Will not leave April unfound and Adam without a mother, only that monster of a father, my husband, to help him fashion a life, to control her destiny. I am condemned by my love. Of this blue-skinned woman. Of my magical son. Of a driven man I once allowed to impregnate me with his seed and thus spoil my fertility forever. What a fool I feel, exposed like this in an open window, as several of the officers break from the forest with their lights, called by my shouting and ranting and raving.

  And then I see him. John. Below me and to my left, at one of the many doors leading to the garden. Sukeena sees him too, though he does not take note of her. The three of us. Me on the ledge. John, blithering and drunk and terrified he has lost his daughter to this tomb we call home. Sukeena, surrounded by her murderous blush and bloom of a thousand red blossoms.

  I laugh wildly. Hysterically. Maniacally. I laugh for the policemen to hear. I laugh for my husband to be sick. I laugh at the moon and the clouds, the wind in my ears speaking as Rose Red. “She lives,” says the wind. “She lives in the dower …”

  Only then do my ears forgive me, only then do clarity and alacrity impose themselves, a comprehension by the ear prepares me for the understanding that is to follow. It is not “dower,” as I once supposed. The word I am to hear is “tower,” and Rose Red is whispering clearly that this is where my daughter’s future lies—where my daughter now resides.

  The Tower.

  A tower not yet built.

  3 A.M.—ROSE RED (SUKEENA’S CHAMBERS)