Gay Fiction, Volume 1

by Mel Bossa

  The child was born a month too early. God has seen fit to punish me for my lust and greed in wishing to possess the body of…I cannot write his name. Tonight, Constance will write to him in my name to tell him of the disastrous news.

  There are a few more minor entries—then two months of silence. When the diary picks up again, it is with this entry:

  July 21, 1867: Eugene returns tomorrow. I have his last letter in my hand as I write this. I cannot believe what he writes. He thinks we ought not have hurried so into a decision of marriage. We were blinded by our great common affection for our departed Alfred, he writes. He wishes us to reconsider our plans. Dear Lord, that I should have suffered so in pains of childbearing for this!

  When I showed this letter to Constance, she merely laughed at me. “Are you amazed?” she asked, the vixen. “What man wants a wife of such easy virtue?” God help me, but I struck her face for those words. I later repented and asked for forgiveness. But she walked away and has kept to her room.

  The diary goes blank for another two weeks, then:

  August 4, 1867: Eugene and Constance were married two days past at my Aunt Raines Todd’s house in Bristol. They return tomorrow. This last month has been an inferno for me. They have been together in the house all this week, doing I cannot say what, as I never saw them. Eugene never came to my room. Constance will still not accept my apologies.

  This is God’s judgment on me for my lust and anger and wickedness. May I now learn to accept my fate with humility.

  Amity tried. Upon the newlyweds’ return to Nansquett, she greeted them warmly, with the servants all gathered in the formal parlor to toast them with champagne. She later presided over an extravagant wedding dinner, at which a few of her Todd relatives and two of the Wilcombs were in attendance. Outwardly, at least, she seemed to accept the horrifying situation of their entanglement. Inwardly, her torments raged on. As the months went by and Calder and Constance settled into the house, Amity moved to her father’s bedroom under the library turret on the south side of the house, leaving the north side for them. Instead of improving, however, their situation worsened. By the following summer, there were few entries in her diary. All the more of a surprise then to encounter this one:

  June 18, 1868: Today, while inspecting the servants’ cleaning of the Calder suite of rooms, I came upon Eugene shaving at his bureau. He wore no shirt or undergarment, and his trousers hung almost off his hips. He spotted me in his shaving mirror and turned ’round with a smile. I tried to ask if the rooms would be free for cleaning later on. He ignored me and said, “Constance has been in Scituate three days, tending the sick bed of her friend, Anne.” I tried to leave then, but he was too fast for me. He grasped my arm. I wrenched myself away from him, but he would not accept my words of protest and flung me to the dressing-room sofa. He took me then, but I would not let him spend inside me—and instead pulled away at that moment, leaving him to stain my inside petticoats.

  I spent the rest of the day in my rooms, trying not to think of my misfortunes. Alas, I failed.

  June 20, 1868: He is the devil incarnate. Yet I cannot avoid him. As he cannot avoid me. Since that morning I came upon him shaving, he has followed me about the house. He came to me that night and again last night. He tells me that Constance is a young fool and he was a fool to marry her and not me but that he was deceived by her. Whenever he speaks, I know he is lying, but whenever he touches me, I feel as though the fevers of the scarlatina are upon me. He tells me we are bound to each other by bonds greater and more lasting than any he has known—immortal ties. And I—fool that I am—I believe him. God help me. Deliver me from this Satan!

  Amity’s torments and the affair continued for another month, detailed with increasing self-recrimination, unabated passion, and much accompanying calls for heaven’s help. Suddenly, another type of entry—one long missing from Amity’s diary—makes an eerie appearance:

  August 23, 1868: Driven by the intense heat from my rooms to the garden for some refreshment, I was distracted by Saturn, who came to show me a problem with the phaeton he is to drive. It appears the rear wheel on the passenger’s side has been loosened by overuse. The bolt—a twisted mess of forged iron—appears even to my uneducated eye to be frayed in the extreme. I sent him to the general store in Scituate for a new one, but as it is no longer manufactured, we must order directly from the manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts. I warned Saturn to lock up the phaeton and to use only the dogcart until this bolt is repaired.

  August 26, 1868: Constance’s friend Anne was taken quite suddenly today. A boy ran over with a message and has been resting in the spare bedroom from his exertions. He will stay with my Uncle Todd in Nansquett overnight. After dinner, Eugene will drive Constance to Scituate. When Saturn told him the dogcart is the only vehicle fit to be driven, Eugene raged at him and struck the poor old black with his riding crop on the shoulders. Eugene said he would have the phaeton or Saturn’s hide. I signaled to the Negro to not protest. God forgive me, but I think that the bolt may give on the road and throw Constance out.

  August 27, 1868: Once more God has seen fit to punish me.

  As I hoped, the bolt on the phaeton did break off the rear wheel tonight as Eugene drove Constance to Scituate. But a perverse destiny rules my life. For the first wheel’s bolt also snapped under the sudden pressure. The entire coach tipped into a ditch. Not only my sister, but also my beloved, my Eugene… I cannot write the words, but I must, for I am the cause of it… My Eugene too is now dead. So am I cursed. So will I remain cursed.

  And there Amity’s diaries ceased. Or so I thought at first. For she had filled up some dozen volumes of the notebooks, and this entry arrived at almost the final blank page of the volume containing it. Once more, I ranged through her diaries, looking for later entries. All I found were earlier. Could she have ceased to write in her diary after that final catastrophe? It was possible. Yet, she had driven herself to faithfully record all that had happened to her up to that date. Why would she end there? Could an occupation of so many years—since she was a girl of sixteen—suddenly have ended? Somehow I couldn’t believe it.

  I suppose what I really wanted to know, now that I knew what had happened to her from her point of view, was what Amity thought, how she felt, after the deaths of her sister and Captain Calder. For me, fascinating as the other entries had been, none of them really explained to me how she went on living afterward. Had she adjusted to her life, and their deaths? Had she consciously become a recluse? Or had the small-minded society of the town forced her into that role? And most of all, I wanted to know why, after so many years of living, she finally threw herself into the well.

  Living in her house, walking through the same rooms she had walked through, sitting at the same furniture she had sat at, made me feel that I could come closer to understanding Amity now that I had read her diaries. If only more volumes would appear. For I felt—no, I believed for certain—there were more volumes to her diary and that they held the key to her story and its sad conclusion. What I’d already read was what I’d already heard of her life, years ago, on the shore-side porch of Grandpa Lynch’s house. Now I wanted to hear the rest of her story—what I believed would be the real story of Amity Pritchard.

  I went through every volume of the various sets in the library, looking for more volumes of the diary, hoping that somehow or other, another one or two would show up, misplaced, misbound, somewhere. I found nothing. Then I thought of all the various cases still unopened in the large basement under the house and began to search those. I spent entire afternoons going through the furniture drawers, pulling apart the lids of steamer trunks and portmanteaus, half ripping the shredded upholstery off couches and chairs, always expecting to find the missing volumes.

  Naturally I was upset about this and found myself thinking about it with unusual vehemence at all hours of the day. Karen wasn’t much help in cheering me up either. For the first time since we had been together, she could not share my intense i
nterest in something. But of course she had not read the diaries, although I left the last vivid volume open for her. And she had not heard Amity’s story early on as I had: Why should I expect her to be as consumed with it as I was? Yet I did, and I felt that she was not only not interested in Amity, but less than interested in me too, for the first time since we’d married. I accused her to myself of being aloof, distant.

  Naturally her working was responsible for much of this. Since the Nansquett library had reopened, people had begun using it in droves. She’d even had to hire an assistant, Kitty Packer, the spinster sister of Etty, the owner of the dinette off Twill Road, the town’s only claim to a restaurant. Even so, Karen found her work there tiring. And something else was preying on her mind, although she denied it, and just laughed at me when I tried to tease it out of her. But I could see it in her behavior—her sudden absentmindedness, her musings, her inattentiveness; some mornings I would come upon her standing stock—still looking up at the foyer skylight as though lost in another time.

  Yet it was Karen who, without trying, came to provide me with the lost volumes of Amity’s diaries and what was to be the beginning of our own sad drama.

  Chapter 13

  It was on a Wednesday afternoon some three months after Chas’s visit and my discovery of Amity’s intensely revelatory diaries. I had been in and out of the first floor north wing dining room all that day, confirming specifications and plans with a carpenter and a plasterer who were restoring the magnificent oval-shaped room’s beveled moldings. I had finally gotten somewhat settled back into the library when the phone began to ring downstairs. I waited a second after it had stopped, then it rang on my desk.

  “Sit down, Roger! Something wonderful has just happened.”

  “Karen?” I asked. “What? What is it?”

  “Just answer me three questions. I want to be perfectly sure,” she said.

  “All right. Shoot.”

  “The volumes of Amity’s diaries—they’re red morocco with a crosshatch pattern and dove gray vellum paper, yes?”

  “You’ve found more?”

  “Wait a minute. I haven’t finished asking my questions. Do they have a circle watermark with a line across its diameter on the left-hand side of the page?”

  “Wait a second. I’ll check.” I picked up one volume and held a page to the light. I’d never noticed the watermark before. Sure enough, it was a small circle with a line through it. “You have found more volumes!” I exclaimed.

  “I want to be sure, though,” she said, “so that you aren’t disappointed. I know how much you wanted to find one. It’s a single volume only. For the year 1873. Does that sound right?”

  I did some quick calculations. “I guess. Although it isn’t sequential. She was still alive then.”

  “And does she dot her i’s over the following letter?”

  “Yes.” My excitement was growing. “You have found it. It’s Amity’s!”

  “Oh, Roger, I’m so glad.”

  “Where though, where did you find it?”

  “It came from a whole truckload of old books that were in the stacks upstairs here in the library. They were her books. The ones the library originally opened with, even though she had set up the foundation several years before. Well, a lot of it was odd stuff—Victorian novelists you’ve never heard of and a great many very boring-looking sermons by divines once famous. But this one volume looked so much like those you keep on your desk all the time, I thought it might be hers…And it is. I’ll bring it home with me tonight. There! It’s in my cloth bag right now. You know I’ll never forget that anywhere.”

  Karen and I talked another minute or two about other matters, then we hung up. I heard the carpenter call out something below, but he could wait a minute. Another volume of Amity’s diaries! Not in sequence. There were four years still missing. Still it proved that she had gone on to keep diaries, which was what I had assumed. And if this one had turned up, others might turn up too. They might be lying on someone’s bookshelf somewhere in the town without anyone’s knowing about it. They might have been sold as part of a collection and sent to another city. I would have to advertise for them—first in Nansquett, then in the state. Eighteen seventy-three: That was two years before she died. The diary had to be useful in explaining those gaps in her life. Possibly even holding a clue to her death. Perhaps—but did I dare think it?—perhaps in this volume too I would discover a distillation of those years of hers since the deaths of Calder and Constance, in one solid, heady, concentrated draught.

  I did finally remember to go downstairs to discuss with the carpenter his ideas about replacing crown molding for that which had been destroyed over the years. But I felt so exulted by the prospect of another volume of Amity’s diaries that I couldn’t bring myself to go back up to the library and return to the monograph I was working on.

  After an hour or so of restlessness, I decided I really couldn’t wait until Karen came home. I’d have to go to get that last volume immediately—read it through as soon as possible. I felt like someone given the answers to a crossword puzzle they’d been torturing themselves over for months—I simply had to take a peek.

  When I arrived at the Nansquett library, I didn’t spot Karen right away, but Kitty Packer was at the checkout desk, trying to shush a string of pubescent girls, each with an armload of books, telling them to stay in line and that she’d get around to each of them. I went to the other side of the line and leaned over the desk.

  “Mrs. Lynch in?” I asked. I didn’t know Kitty, and I wasn’t eager to start up an acquaintance under these conditions.

  She looked up, irate and flustered at this new call on her limited attention. “Gone for the afternoon,” she said, stamping a book card with great determination, making the bun at the back of her head wobble with her effort.

  “Gone?” I asked to make certain.

  “Gone,” she confirmed. “Next one. Turn all the books the same way, Jean. It’s more work for me otherwise.”

  “Did Mrs. Lynch happen to say where she was going?” I asked.

  Kitty looked up at me for the first time. “Not a word, mister. If you’re a friend, you’ll find her with Mr. Lynch. They left together. As usual.”

  I couldn’t make any sense out of that, unless Kitty thought I was a masher and was trying to bother Karen. Her last words were meant to warn me off.

  “At what time did she leave?” I tried.

  “Around three. If you’d care to leave your name, she’ll be here around noon tomorrow when we open.”

  “No. Thank you, no.”

  I drove back to the house. I suppose I expected to see Karen’s MG parked in the driveway, her just getting out of it, waving the volume of Amity’s diary at me.

  The car wasn’t there. Only the half-ton pickup the workers had driven there. Had Karen gone shopping?

  Of course Kitty might have been mistaken about Karen’s leaving with a man. Or she might have left with an acquaintance, and Kitty had assumed it was me. But the way she had said “as usual” really threw me off: I’d never gone to pick Karen up at the library. Was I correct in thinking Kitty said that to dissuade me from following Karen? Or was it true that Karen did leave the library every day at three? If so, where did she go? She never got home until after six.

  Steeped in questions, I walked in the front door of the house. With plasterers and carpenters coming and going all day, the door was always left open for them.

  As I got into the foyer, I could hear some of the men talking and laughing loudly from the dining room. I was about to go in and ask them if Karen had stopped by only to drive off to find me again, when there was a sudden silence. Then I heard one of the men’s voices raised indignantly, saying, “Well, he’s going to find out sometime. Everyone else in town has known about it for the past three months.”

  “Who’s going to tell him?” the plasterer, Rob, asked. “You, maybe?”

  “No. Maybe a letter. You know one that you don’t sign or somethi
ng like that.”

  I froze with their words, then decided I had to know who they were talking about. I tiptoed back to the front door, slammed it shut, and strode directly into the dining room.

  “How’s it going?” I asked clumsily, focusing on Rob.

  “All right,” he said. Both men hastily turned back to their work, their expressions sour and their faces half-flushed.

  “Any messages or phone calls while I was out?”

  “No, nothing,” Rob said, still uncomfortable.

  I knew now it was me they were talking about.

  “I won’t be back for an hour or so,” I said too quickly. “If you’re done by then, just leave the door unlocked.”

  They said they would, obviously relieved it was such a short encounter with me.

  I lingered in the room for another minute or two, watching them impassively. I was trying to think what I should do next, but I knew all too well.

  Once back in the car, I didn’t hesitate. I drove directly to the address the local phone directory listed for Chas Lynch. I recalled Bud Bianchi earlier saying that Chas had divided his house into a two-family dwelling. The phone book didn’t say which of the two floors he lived on, and I wasn’t certain I really wanted to know either, but I was so afraid of the vague fears that were filling my mind since I’d heard the two men talking in the dining room that I held on to this one idea: Go to Chas’s house, see, just see, confirm for yourself.