THIRTY-FIVE
I do not go off the deep end about fate or God or astrology. Ree-Jane, on the other hand, takes to heart the horoscope column in the Conservative. It’s pretty safe to believe in, since the only future it foretells, no matter what sign you’re born under, is a good one. A great one, to hear Ree-Jane talk about her many future romances, the handsome strangers who will go with her on all of the exotic trips she will be taking, luring her away from all of the careers she will be having.
Ree-Jane reads all of this aloud to me, and, of course, reads me my horoscope, too, even though I’ve told her I don’t believe in it. I am at times cruelly honest with myself (although I don’t make a habit of it), and I must admit the reason I don’t believe in horoscopes and Ree-Jane does is because hers are a lot happier-sounding, lighter and brighter than mine are. Her sign paints a picture of a future that will have her twirling down the nights and days in a white net evening gown aglitter with sequins. (I see it clearly because just such a gown is hanging upstairs in her wardrobe.) But I see myself in my own future wearing thick glasses and mouse-brown sweaters and being incredibly intelligent and looking down my nose at silly pleasures like dances.
So Ree-Jane also likes to read my horoscope to me because my sign always leans toward things like doing good works, being loyal and self-sacrificing—in general, qualities found in nuns and saints, people like Joan of Arc or someone willing to die in an anthill for God. (I have never heard of God stepping in and taking over in cases like Job’s; I guess He’s waiting to see if you’re really serious, but by the time you prove it, it’s too late, anyway.) Even though my own horoscope was lacking in love, money, and fame, it was still complimentary. Still, Ree-Jane managed to turn it into something really awful. She kept on about my fate, and what she called my “karma,” and how I couldn’t escape it.
The reason I bring up astrology and horoscopes is because in Spirit Lake there is a fortuneteller by the name of Mrs. Louderback. Mrs. Louderback is said to be pretty noble herself, because she does not charge for her services. Not officially, that is. She is willing to accept “offerings,” so naturally those people who accept her services “offer” her something so as not to appear cheap. I don’t want to sound spiteful about Mrs. Louderback (or “cynical” might be the word, though it only means smooth spite), for Mrs. Louderback, I’ve heard, is a really nice person who uses her kitchen to tell people their fortunes and for which the “offering” is generally two dollars.
And, after all, who else did I have to consult with? To tell the story of the Girl and anything to do with her—Mary-Evelyn, the evil sisters (which is the way I’d come to think of them), the house, Jude Stemple —this story would fall on deaf ears. No, not deaf exactly, but people would certainly laugh at me. When I saw them in my mind, standing in a circle with me inside, and all of them laughing (including even Will, who ordinarily wouldn’t, but whenever he was around the others he’d kind of “catch” their mood), I also saw this: that they weren’t really laughing out of spite (excepting, of course, Ree-Jane). It was more as if they felt it was their right. My mind would flood with a jumble of images when I thought about this. I saw war-painted Indians whooping in a circle around a fire, calling forth whatever their gods were, or their spirits. I saw people surrounding a goat, fixing pots and pans on its back, then herding it into the hills.
Someone had to be It. Someone had to be. This was not really a punishment; it was more like karma.
Going back to Mrs. Louderback: I’m a practical person. I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, devils, angels, monsters springing from dark closets, and so forth. I don’t mean I test my unbelief. I don’t do things like going into vacant houses on Halloween or walking through cemeteries. But that, again, is simply being practical.
The way Mrs. Louderback works her hobby is for a person to make an appointment for certain afternoon times (as she has her housework to do just like everybody else) and not tell her who it is calling. This struck me as strange, since she probably knows everybody in Spirit Lake on sight. Maybe you aren’t supposed to tell your name to ensure that she won’t in the meantime check up on you, like finding out things that happened in your past so that she can then pretend to guess at those events. I don’t think Mrs. Louderback would cheat in that way, anyway; why would she rush to find out what went on in any of the pasts around Spirit Lake or La Porte? Helene Baum is, I have heard, one of her regular customers. Imagine hearing all about the boring past of Helene Baum. It was probably hard enough to face her across the kitchen table right now in the present.
Ree-Jane went to see Mrs. Louderback several times and always came back looking like the cat that swallowed the cream. I gave up asking her what she’d found out, because all she’d say was that it was wonderful but refused to give me details. Mrs. Davidow also went to her. My mother never did. Mrs. Davidow tried to get her to go, not wanting to appear silly by herself.
I was afraid Mrs. Louderback would think I was a kid pulling a joke on her when I called for my appointment, but she didn’t. She told me I could come at four-thirty.
I spent the day being very nervous. I was afraid of the future. I had heard that Mrs. Louderback would not tell anyone of a truly bad future happening, such as dying next week. That made me feel a little better, but then I was afraid I would just read something bad into her expression if she turned up a suspicious-looking card. I had seen the tarot cards because Ree-Jane (naturally) owns a deck. Unlike Mrs. Louderback, Ree-Jane is always happy to flip over Death and Damnation cards predicting my future. In Ree-Jane’s readings of my future, I would burn at the stake without the reward of people thinking I was a saint and worshiping me. I’d just burn. Naturally, Ree-Jane was lying, for no one’s future could always be the gloomy picture she painted.
But the cards themselves I thought to be fascinating and some of them quite beautiful. It surprised me to find out the meanings for a few of them: the Hanged Man, for instance, who meant something like “rebirth” and not (as I imagined) death from hanging by your foot.
Before my appointment with Mrs. Louderback I went to Britten’s store, legitimately this time, as my mother had told me to pick up a box of cornstarch for tomorrow’s Floating Island. It wouldn’t be needed until then, so I didn’t have to run back with it.
Mr. Britten looked at me over the tops of his black-framed glasses, suspiciously, as always. But since there was no one in the store who looked like a source of Ben Queen information, I didn’t linger over the display cases or hang around the shelves. He knew to put the cornstarch on the Hotel Paradise account, which might or might not get paid before Doomsday. Lola Davidow is very good at juggling bills.
Outside, Mr. Root was occupying his end of the bench. The Woods weren’t around, though. He greeted me with a wink and a nod, then looked all around, as if we belonged to the same secret society and he didn’t want anyone else horning in.
“I thought maybe,” he said, nodding towards the highway, “when that bus pulls in, you know, that there church bus, that maybe I could ask a few questions.” Mr. Root turned his head to the side, away from me, and spat out tobacco, quite delicately. “Thought I might find out whatever happened to Sheba—you know, the one that married one of them Queens? You think maybe we should go back to that house? You and me and the Wood boys?”
He meant to the Devereau house, of course, and I never knew when I might want company, so I told him maybe we should, a little later. After we sat there for another while, Mr. Root soberly chewing and apparently thinking hard (to judge from the furrows in his forehead), and me looking at the woman on the cornstarch box, I decided it was time to be starting for Mrs. Louderback’s. She lived on the other side of the village, across the highway, and down several streets, but it would only take me ten minutes to walk it.
“You be careful now,” Mr. Root said.
I thanked him and went down the embankment in front of Britten’s and across the highway. There was never much traffic on it. I passed by Greg’s ricke
ty restaurant where the pinball machine was, and the lunchroom next door to it where Mrs. Ikleberger served up her potato soup in winter. That was all of the “business area” Spirit Lake had. Britten’s store across the highway, and Greg’s and Mrs. Ikleberger’s. I walked along between rows of big old Victorian houses and smaller, neat cottages, like Marge Byrd’s which had a lot of lattice and climbing flowers across its front. The garden looked weedy, but Marge Byrd wasn’t the type to leave off reading a good book to go out and pull weeds.
I was let in to Mrs. Louderback’s house by some woman—family or friend, I supposed—who told me just to go on into the parlor and that Mrs. Louderback would see me in a few minutes.
The room I entered was cool and dark. It reminded me of Dr. McComb’s house, stuffed with furniture and piled high with shadows. Framed photographs were grouped on one large round table that was covered with a runner of darkly patterned material; the overstuffed chairs were so close together that the arms touched. I wondered if she needed to provide for a lot of people at once, as in a doctor’s waiting room.
But I was the only customer at this time and I was relieved. One thing that had inhibited me was running into Helene Baum, for instance, someone who would blab all over town that I was seeing the fortuneteller. I had already decided that if there were other customers there, I would make it appear that I had only come to deliver the box of cornstarch. I was embarrassed by the thought of anyone else knowing.
Mrs. Louderback is a heavyset woman in her fifties or sixties or seventies (those ages looking pretty much alike to me). She has a lot of gray hair that she wears in a coil, extremely clear skin, and eyes with such pale irises I can’t tell their color. You know right away from her expression that she must be very kindly. On this occasion, she was wearing a bib apron over a cotton housedress, and out of the apron pocket she drew her deck of cards. It was all very homey. We sat down at the kitchen table, which was covered with a red-and-white checked cloth, and on this I set my box of cornstarch. Then I removed it and set it down on the floor, in case it would cause confusion in the spirit world. She knew me, she said, and called me “Jen Graham’s girl,” which surprised me, as I was so used to people thinking I was Lola Davidow’s. I could never understand this, for my family had certainly been around a lot longer than the Davidows. One reason might be that in the last five years, my mother didn’t go into La Porte to do the shopping. Mrs. Davidow always did, and she also went to social events when my mother was just too tired out from all the cooking. So it was the Davidows who got “seen” around town. This, as I have said, caused people to confuse me and Ree-Jane, which naturally made me nauseous.
The cards she drew from her apron pocket were worn from all of her years of telling fortunes. She split the deck in three and told me I must ask a question. Whatever question I wanted.
A question? One question? Questions shot through my mind. Who was the Girl? What had happened to Mary-Evelyn, really? Had Fern Queen really been murdered at Mirror Pond? Would Ree-Jane come to a horrible end? (That last question jumped in, unbidden, among the others. I certainly had no intention of wasting my question on Ree-Jane.) I just sat there, my eyes so hard shut they ached.
She told me that, for instance, I could ask if my life would be a happy one, or if I’d be rich, whether I’d succeed in my work or my profession, whether I was “headed in the right direction”—things like that.
I stared at her and frowned. What? Why should I waste my question on things like that? I wasn’t headed in any direction I knew of. I thought Mrs. Louderback’s examples were, to tell the truth, pretty dumb. But she wasn’t going to wait all day. And it popped into my mind that what was very important at this point was, Should I tell the Sheriff what Jude Stemple had told me? This surprised me, this question. I was mildly shocked that of all the possible ones, I found this to be the one I should ask.
Must I ask this question out loud? She said I could or not. Only if the cards got confused, then perhaps I’d say it out loud.
“If the cards got confused,” she’d said. It occurred to me that Mrs. Louderback was leaving herself a lot of leeway. She had a pretty good thing going, for she was not responsible for the outcome. It was the cards themselves. I did not think this was at all dishonest; I just wished that I could walk into the kitchen late for making salads and when my mother or Vera started in on me, I could say that the cards got confused.
Not wanting to involve the Sheriff, I told her I’d just ask the question in my head. She didn’t mind at all. She told me I was to restack the cards, which I did. Mrs. Louderback slowly turned up three cards: the Queen of Cups, the Hanged Man, and two orphans. Well, that’s what the card looked like to me: a boy and a girl walking in a bad snowstorm dressed in raggedy clothes. It was hard to believe anything good could come of this card. But it didn’t surprise me I got it.
Mrs. Louderback looked at my cards intently. Her lips moved ever so slightly, as if she were trying to put into soft words what she saw as the meaning of these three. She said, “Now, that’s very interesting.” Suddenly she asked, “Has something terrible happened to you? Have you had . . . have you put up with a lot of—”
I was in suspense about myself and leaned closer to the table. My chest dug into its edge, for the chair I sat in was low for me. “A lot of what?” I prompted her, afraid maybe she was sailing off into a world where I could not follow.
Her brow creased with her hard thinking. “Difficulties. Pain. Blame.” She frowned as if she just couldn’t find the right word, so made do with “Having to do for yourself?”
Oh, boy! If she knew the Davidows she wouldn’t be asking that question. If she had to get back and fix salads (keeping my wrist below the table, I checked my watch) in a half-hour, she wouldn’t ask. I nodded. “Yes.”
Mrs. Louderback looked honestly concerned and I was fearful she might have stumbled on one of those bad-news interpretations she always kept to herself. Like death. I shivered in a rash of goose pimples. No, I decided, that really wasn’t it; it wasn’t that she didn’t want to scare me with what she’d seen in the cards. It was more a look of confusion. She really seemed to be overcome by some force.
This wasn’t any seance (she’d made clear), but she certainly seemed to be gripped by something. She was silent for a long time. Her eyes, looking over my shoulder, weren’t focusing on anything but empty air, yet she seemed to be seeing or hearing. She told people she wasn’t a medium, but I was beginning to wonder. Maybe she did have the power to invade the spirit world and didn’t even know it. That could be tough on a person. I turned around just to cast a glance behind me. Of course, I didn’t believe in spirits and so forth, but it never hurt to check. Over the sink was a window, and it was as if on the other side of the clear glass she’d seen a face or a figure or something; yet the clear glass, one pane burnished by sunlight, was empty of anything but the day. She made a sudden gesture with her hand as if to shut something out, or wipe it away.
But now she gave herself a little shake and went on. “This means hardship”—and she placed one finger on the orphans-in-the-storm card. I could have guessed that. “But it means that there are going to be things to overcome to get where you want to go. It won’t be easy, but you’ll be much, much better off for its not being. You’ll come to a state of greater clarity. You’ll learn a lot from things getting in your way, obstacles to overcome. You’ll be better off than someone who gets whatever she wants, and gets it without half trying.”
(I wondered if Ree-Jane had just been here.)
She was looking at me closely. “You’re very resolute.”
“Resolute.” Did that mean the same thing as “resolved”? I didn’t want to ask.
But then she explained. “You never give up.”
“Oh. Well, people tell me I’m really stubborn.” “People” being Mrs. Davidow, Ree-Jane, Vera, my mother.
She actually seemed irritated by these “people.” “No, you aren’t! That’s not what the card means at all. Not givi
ng up is not the same as ‘stubborn,’ so whoever tells you that better go think again.”
I was enormously pleased by this, by her being so sure I wasn’t just “stubborn.” Did I never give up? I couldn’t think clearly of situations where I might have given up or not. But what about the Girl? It was true I wasn’t giving up on her. “Resolute.” I kind of squared my shoulders. I was glad I’d come.
But before Mrs. Louderback could start in on the Hanged Man—who looked really interesting—I saw I only had fifteen minutes to get back to the hotel. I told her I’d have to be leaving, thanked her, and took the two dollars out of my pocket and handed them across to her. She smiled and took one of the bills. “We didn’t do the whole reading, and I always do an hour. One dollar’s plenty.”
It was hard for me to believe Mrs. Louderback would do this for a whole hour, because it was clearly tough on her. I asked her about that.
“Oh, not always, no. Most people’s not got an hour’s worth of gumption in them. They’re boring. You’re not. You’re not one speck boring. Anyone says you are’s a damned fool!”
“I’m not?” These words were music to my ears.
She shook her head slowly, determinedly, eyes shut.
Again, I shoved the second dollar towards her, and she cocked her head. “I told you, one’s plenty.”
“No, it isn’t. And I’m resolute.”
Mrs. Louderback put her head back, laughed, and pounded on the table. It was like I’d said the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Okay, thank you very much.”
I picked up my cornstarch and we walked to the door. She told me she hoped I’d be back for the rest of my reading, and I said I would.
The woman who’d let me in had disappeared. I wondered if things did that around here.
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