The way he said it and shook his head you would have thought “Aurora Paradise” was cause for all of the world’s confusion. He said it again, laughing again.
I said, “When the Tragedy struck”—the capital still sent a pleasant little chill down my back—“I’d have thought she’d have been around.” I put my brownie down.
“Yes, you’d have thought. I wasn’t their doctor and I hardly had anything to do with the Devereaus. No one ever mentioned any relations living other places.”
“Who was the doctor?”
“Well, there was Dr. Jenks back then.”
“Was he doctor to most people?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I guess he had all the patients. I bet it’s hard to get people to switch doctors.” I remembered Aurora yelling around about some “new sawbones” who came to see her once.
“Certainly is.”
“How come you had to go when they found her instead of Dr. Jenks? Wasn’t he the police doctor?” I couldn’t remember what the Sheriff had called that kind of doctor.
“Well, he wasn’t in town that night. Had to go see to some sick family over in Hebrides, as I recall.”
“So she drowned.”
His cigar had gone out and he was trying to puff it alive again as he nodded his head. It looked pretty shredded and awful.
I slid down in my chair and tinkered around with my coffee cup and hoped I sounded casual. “It’s kind of funny. I mean, her being twelve and being out in a boat alone and at night.” I looked at him.
“Who said it was at night?”
“You did. You just did.”
“Oh.” He picked bits of tobacco from his lip.
Into the silence, blue shadows fell and moved, graceful as sheer curtains, across the window behind him. How long had I been here? “It’s kind of, well, funny. Strange.” The clock ticked; I looked over at it. Five-thirty! I would have jumped out of my chair if Dr. McComb hadn’t said just then:
“I thought so too.” He cleared his throat. From his voice and his expression I could tell he felt really uncomfortable.
So I kept fast to my chair, and I didn’t say anything, for he had drawn into one of those quiet inward-looking silences that grown-ups sometimes do when they’re sizing up the past. I did not speak.
He cleared his throat again. “Yes. I thought so, too. Thing was, just like you say, why would that little girl be in that boat? It didn’t make any sense. No sense at all.” He shook his head. “But what could I say? What could I do?” Dr. McComb was not really asking me these questions; maybe he’d even forgot I was there. I did not speak. “Well, the three of them—the older sisters, Rose being gone—they just . . . hung over me. I mean, they just stood there, by the lake, all wrapped in those dark shawls and capes and . . . hung over me. You didn’t know the Devereau girls.” His chin fell slowly, nearly to his chest. And for a moment he seemed to be more my age than his own. Slowly his pale eyes fastened on me and then blinked as if he were bringing my face into focus.
I shook my head. I did not speak.
“It was a long time ago.” He turned over the spoon by his cup, turned it again and again. “The only other person who said he’d been around that night, near the house, was Alonzo Wood. Do you know him?”
My eyes widened. The clock struck off another quarter-hour like it knew I was going to catch it, for I would not be back to get the salads ready for dinner. But even if that B&O freight train had been rushing right through the kitchen wall, with Vera engineering, you couldn’t have pried me away from my seat. Not for anything. “Who?”
“Alonzo. Call him something really silly, like Ulab, or something.”
“Ulub. Ulub and Ubub. The Wood boys? I know them!” I had seldom been so excited in my whole life.
“Well, Alonzo said he was there. I mean, that’s what I think he said. He’d’ve been, oh, maybe in his early teens back then. And his brother, the tall one—”
“Ubub, they call him. I’m not sure about his name. Bob, it might be.”
“Where’d they ever get those ridiculous nicknames?”
I was fidgeting so much, with the anxiety of waiting for information, you would have thought I had to pee. I didn’t want to waste time on nicknames. “From their license plates.”
“License plates?”
“It was a joke, sort of. The letters were all but the same. But go on with your story.” He was looking now at his wristwatch and I was afraid he was going to tell me to get out, to go back to the hotel and do my waitress work. That was silly.
“Well, Alonzo, or U-lub”— he shook his head to let me know how he disapproved of the nickname—“came around to see me. They both did. I guess the brother—Robert?—was older and he was sort of backing him up. You know, lending him encouragement. It seems Alonzo was near the lake, or near the house, that night, and he told a different story.”
I was still as stone. But when he stopped talking I was afraid he’d stopped forever. “Go on. What’d he say?”
Dr. McComb looked at me and smiled slightly, as if this was some kind of checker game and he’d just run roughshod over my reds or blacks. “Well, I don’t know. I couldn’t understand him.”
“What?” I nearly shouted it at him. How could he smile over missing such important news? I just couldn’t believe it.
“If you ever talked to him, you’d know what I mean. I was patient enough, and his brother kept trying to interpret for him, but that’s a case of blind leading blind, you know.”
Then he must have sensed my disappointment. Really, I thought I could cry to think that someone knew and yet it was locked inside of him. Dr. McComb said, “But I did write down some of it. In a notebook. Do you want to see it?”
I was astounded. Did I!
Dr. McComb left the kitchen and I heard him in the living room and it sounded as if he were frenziedly tossing things around. In a few moments he was back. “You’re the only person who’s ever seemed at all interested. Maybe you can make something of it.”
Speechlessly, I nodded as he put the notebook down on the table. It was a plain school notebook, one of those with a mottled black-and-white cardboard cover and a white square for putting in your name. “You mean I can take it with me?”
“Uh-huh, if you want. Thing is—what difference could it make now? That’s forty years ago. Hardly anyone around now who was there then. Aurora Paradise, maybe.”
“Ulub and Ubub,” I said, as I stroked the notebook, cool and smooth under my hand.
SIXTEEN
When the leaves fall, you can see—
The notebook wedged inside my thin jacket, I made it back to the hotel in record time, because Dr. McComb very kindly drove me. I thought he drove very well for a man of his years; his hands didn’t even shake on the steering wheel. I asked him please to drop me off at the end of the drive, as I really didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about where I’d been, and so forth. Not that there was anything wrong with where I’d been, or that my mother wouldn’t approve, but I just didn’t feel like answering a lot of questions. He understood.
The notebook under my mattress and my white uniform on, I ran down the stairs and into the dining room, where Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright were already seated solid as rocks, dinner having begun a half-hour before. Vera was whisking through the dining room, her tray of water and rolls held nimbly on her fingertips. The tray hid my quick entrance from view.
I went to the salad table. Fortunately, Mrs. Davidow wasn’t around in the kitchen. Mrs. Davidow always could find the time to rant at me; my mother, however, counted herself too busy to waste much time bawling me out beyond the knifelike look she gave me which cut me dead—or at least down. She was preparing pork chops for browning in the buttery pan sizzling on the stove—browned and then baked with apples and onions. Cutting bits of bone from a pork chop with the cleaver seemed to sluice off the anger she felt for me as it went whack through meat and bone, as if she were saying, “This chop showed up—” WHA
CK!—“when it was supposed to—” WHACK!—“because this chop is dependable—” WHACK!
I tried to ignore the cleaver by concentrating on what was left to do at the salad table. Anna Paugh had completed about a dozen salads, so there weren’t many more to make. On the iceberg lettuce I arranged tomato quarters, a green pepper ring, and an onion ring. There was a little dish of black olives sitting beside the crock of French dressing, and I decided to be a little creative and carefully cut the olives in half and placed the halves dead center. This green, red, and black palette I thought quite pretty until Vera appeared, slipping up to my elbow and picking each olive half off the salads, onto which she spooned the French dressing for her customers. Then she whisked over to the main table and deftly called out her two orders before she spun out of the kitchen with her tray of salads. Vera stirred up breezes in her brisk turns and pauses. She might have been a ballet dancer, only she wasn’t pretty enough.
Although the salads were not to be “dressed” until the diners chose their salad dressings, I decided to adorn three or four of them with my mother’s Roquefort-dressing-without-equal. I know there are people who hate Roquefort cheese dressing. But they have never tasted my mother’s. It is the picture of simplicity: Roquefort (well, blue cheese, as times are hard) and oil. Just those two ingredients. The trouble is, most people (like Helene Baum) don’t know how to put the two together. The dressing is like velvet. I capped the salads with it and replaced the discarded black olive halves, studding them atop the glossy white dressing. I finished them off with just a powdering of paprika. They looked quite lovely.
Mrs. Fulbright and Miss Bertha were my dining-room charges. Miss Bertha was difficult, and cheap to boot. Vera always knew where the tips were. But her dinner companion, Mrs. Fulbright, was as sweet as could be. She wore black voile and was ancient—she might have been even ninety—and she knew Aurora Paradise and would always ask after her, as if Aurora were in some foreign place rather than upstairs.
Miss Bertha reminded me of a silver snail, with her gray hair worn in a bun, a gray dress of some shiny stuff that reflected light like rain, and a corset like a shell. Her small body seemed hard and compact, armored against the world. She had a really mean streak. Of course, she could hardly hear at all and wore a hearing aid big as a fist with a battery that was always running down. About the only thing that didn’t have to be repeated to her a hundred or so times was the whistle of the passing B&O train. So after several tries of telling her what was out in the kitchen for dinner and having her say “What? . . . what? . . . what?” I’d just yell. Naturally, that would bring Vera fast on her feet and she would later report the incident to my mother, saying, well, she had no trouble at all taking Miss Bertha’s order, and no one paid any attention to me saying, “Of course she could, because I’d just yelled out ‘PORK CHOPS OR MEAT LOAF? PORK CHOPS OR MEAT LOAF?’ ” or whatever happened to be out in the kitchen on a given night. No one ever paid any attention to me.
Will and I were always getting lectured on How to Treat the Aged. It was really irritating. My argument was that the aged had been around for decades longer than me and they should know by now that life was really tough. Whereas I was only twelve and had yet to learn.
I argued. Will smiled. Will would just stand there with his bright brown eyes agleam for all the world as if he just adored these lectures and was soaking up every word, when I knew he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention. His way was to pretend life was just great and then go away and do what he wanted, which included things like going to Miss Bertha when no one else was around and pretending, by moving his mouth, that he was talking. She would get really hysterical about her hearing aid—pounding it, shaking it, and so forth—until Will would calmly take it and give it a little punch or something and then start talking in a slightly louder tone of voice. Miss Bertha thought Will was the Miracle Worker. Most people did. Sonny Smooth.
Instead of the two dozen guests expected, there were only ten or twelve more who showed up, and they all came in fairly close together, so I was able to break away earlier than usual. After my own wonderful dinner of apple-onion-laced pork chops and mashed potatoes, I retrieved the notebook from under my mattress and carried it down to the Pink Elephant, where I burnt the candle at both ends, as the saying goes.
• • •
The notebook was wonderful.
It was full of strange utterances, as if the story had been told by someone in a cave, the words coming through some tunnel in the rocks, distorted by twists and turns. There were a lot of cross-outs, some scattered words and phrases that Dr. McComb had managed to make out. But mostly it was like an indecipherable code.
Indecipherable until now, that is.
When the leaves fall, you can see—
But see what?
—minnows swimming light.
Was Ulub talking about the lake? Was it minnows swimming in the lake? That didn’t make any sense, either.
I had taken the big flashlight from the drawer beneath the front desk where Mrs. Davidow kept a few tools. Down in the Pink Elephant, I lit what stubs of tallow candles there were, dropping their wax in the saucers and drawing the saucers right around the notebook. I spotlighted the words with the flashlight’s beam. Its top was nearly as big around as a car headlight, and it was heavy to hold. But the candles were too low and guttery to shine across the pages, so the flashlight would have to do.
And I had to remember: this was not only Ulub’s stumbling account of what happened (what happened?), but it was his account in combination with his brother’s equally difficult speaking problem, and then strained through Dr. McComb’s understanding of both Ulub and Ubub, for it was he who was deciphering the words. A shadow of a shadow of a shadow.
I refused to be discouraged. Carefully, I read every word—or maybe I should say every marking. Words failed Dr. McComb at certain points and he tried to put in sounds, like little grunts across the page, and sometimes left blanks. There were also a lot of cross-outs. So that
When the leaves fall, you can see minnows swimming light
really was set down
When the leaves fall, you can see minahs minds mends winds minnows swimming lake like light.
It was not long, the notebook story, not much more than three pages, and it stopped abruptly, as if they were all tired out, the three of them. But after a while there were not so many cross-outs, not so many grunts and blank spaces. This was not because Ulub had finally grown a silver tongue, but it seemed like Dr. McComb had got caught up in his story and just supplied words that sounded like what Ulub was saying without all of the agonizing over them or trying to make sense out of them. Although the “minnows” passage certainly made precious little sense. I read on through a rush of images and sounds that I could make nothing of, except to note their movement and color.
The word “raft” ended it so abruptly I felt as if I’d stumbled and fallen, as if my foot had hit a boot scraper and dropped into some dark doorway.
I went back to the first sentence and the cross-outs. What I thought was that the words crossed out must sound like what Ulub and Ubub had said, and Dr. McComb had been looking for a meaning in the sound so he could put down actual words and make some sense out of them. They didn’t make sense, of course, so there were cross-outs.
“Minnows” I was sure didn’t mean tiny fish, nor had Ulub meant anything like fish. The crossed-out words were “minahs,” “minds,” “mends,” and “winds.” “Minds” was probably changed to “mends” as that was nearer the sound. But there was an “o” sound too, so that’s where he’d gotten “minnows.” I looked at “winds.” I thought about that. I tried to be Ulub, pouting up my lips, and hearing an “m” and seeing how close it might sound to a “wuh.”
My eyes snapped open. Windows. Was it “windows”?
When the leaves fall you see windows swimming light
Oh!
When the leaves fall you see windows swim in light!
Could Ulub
have been looking in through a window? But that made perfect sense. For Ulub and Ubub worked around the Devereau house, raking leaves and pruning and stuff during the day, so it was certainly possible that Ulub might have gone back at night.
I was truly excited. For if I began with the fact that Ulub had been peeking through the windows of the house, and had seen something, then other details might fall into place. I sat there with my head in my hands, staring down at the page; the candles flickered wanly and the old flashlight, brilliant as a sun at the start, was now weakening, its batteries dying, I supposed. I shook it, but that only made it fade more. Light was being leeched away, sucked into the shadows that were growing like thick heavy vines up the Pink Elephant’s stuccoed walls.
Oh, if only Mr. Root had been there when Ulub and Ubub told this story!
Well, he wasn’t, so I would have to make do with what I had. And what I had to remember was that this tale was important enough to make the Wood boys actually tell it to Dr. McComb (who they were probably even more afraid of than other La Porte people, given his “position”). So there was no doubt that it was worth getting to the bottom of.
But it was more like the bottom of a dream. For it read, not like a waking experience, but a dream one, where images tangle together and meanings pile on top of one another like a row of cards in Aurora’s solitaire game.
I had the notebook. And I had Ulub. And Mr. Root, the translator. And I could put questions to Ulub, who could at least nod, or say no or yes, or some version of them.
But then I wondered: Should I put poor Ulub through this? Bring it all up again when maybe all the Woods wanted to do was forget it—maybe already had forgot it? I ran my hand over the cool black-and-white cover, thinking. Curiosity, I guess, won out. But it was more than just curiosity: I had to know what had happened to Mary-Evelyn.
I snuffed out the candles and sat in what was left of the dying light of the flash. The flashlight pointed its dim ghost-circle at the wall and in my mind I saw the Girl again as I had seen her that morning. Was it only that morning? It seemed so long ago.
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