But finally I had to leave the household. No use for a nanny in a childless house. Mrs. Crawford wrote me a nice letter, and I found a good position with another family, new in town, who had two boys and a baby girl. I had my hands full with them, and didn’t see much of Mrs. Crawford after that. I stopped by sometimes on my day off, just to see how she was getting along, but it was plain that my visits disturbed her. She had a friend looking after her, so I wasn’t needed.
Winslow gave up looking for me, I suppose. Maybe he didn’t know where to find me, or maybe he stopped caring, found himself another girl, or moved away. I know I didn’t want to see him. The thought of him bothered me the way the sight of me bothered Mrs. Crawford, and I did my best to put him right out of my mind.
I work for a different family now, over on the hill, very near where the Crawfords used to live. And on fine days I take the children for walks, almost the very same steps I used to take with Amanda. It’s been twenty years and more, but still every time we pass that clump of bushes where Winslow first said hello, I stop and walk a little slower, looking around. I don’t guess I hope to see him. But wounds heal, and time takes some of the pain away. I can see that I was just a young girl then, and I’ve tried to be a good Christian. I figure the good Lord has forgiven; maybe Winslow too.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Strangerland
DURING THE EARLY years, he was afraid of the dark. When the lights went off, he lay rigid with terror, aware that the room had changed, and that the secret underworld was heaving up through the invisible seam that bound it to the everyday. He called to his mother, never telling her why; and she came and listened to his excuses about thirst and sleeplessness.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
He nodded.
“You’re not always afraid.”
“The room looks different,” he whispered.
“I guess you’ve seen it, then,” said his mother, letting the rocking chair fall back with her weight.
“Seen what?”
“Why, Strangerland, of course.” She sat forward again. “You’ve never heard of Strangerland?”
He hadn’t; and so she explained it to him. Strangerland was a place where everything was double, where every house, person, and animal had two natures. Superficial inspection didn’t reveal the duality; you wouldn’t find it by looking. It was only at unexpected moments, in glimpses out of the corner of the eye, that things might suddenly shift and lay bare their otherness—their Strangerland quality.
“You’ve seen it tonight,” said his mother. “In the dark. Of course you’re afraid, because everything is strange. But Strangerland can be wonderful, too.” Her voice was low, story-telling, calm. “The first snowfall is Strangerland,” she said. “You get up in the morning, and without knowing how you know, you know something is different. You look out the window, and there it is—a new place, unfamiliar. All the things you know so well buried in white. It’s all of a sudden a place you’ve never seen before.” He poked a hand out of the bedclothes and found her warm dry hand, the nails smooth and polished. “The second snowfall doesn’t count; only the first heavy one, the one that comes in the night. It catches you unaware, and lets you see it—Strangerland.”
She told him adventure stories: about a different little boy, a Strangerland alter ego, fearless and very strong. That other boy saved villages, swam oceans, rode on the backs of eagles. It wasn’t until many years later that he realized his mother had simply condensed all of the common fairy tales into one endless interweaving story, with one perpetual hero.
When he was afraid, he called for her, and she spun him another tale or two, until his eyelids dropped. She stayed with him afterward, so that he awoke in the middle of the night sometimes to see her, sitting patient by his bed, completely idle, not even rocking.
They were alone then, mother and son, moving from thin-walled house to thin-walled house, across three states and back. His mother wore a strong perfume then, and went out to work in the daytime; he stayed at home and kept quiet, or went to another lady’s house and played with her rough children. That part of his childhood concentrated later into just a stretch of colorless, raucous hours, one ear cocked for the sound of his mother’s footstep on the stairs. At four years old, he had learned to cook hot-plate spaghetti, and had it ready for her sometimes when she came home. His world was complicated then, nipped and pincered by rules—NO COOKING IN THE ROOMS—NO CHILDREN UNDER FIVE—and he danced it daily, fanning the fumes of illegal supper out of the boarding-house window, wincing when the lady’s children hit, but not hitting back. He was past five when William Whyte came along to fall in love with Beth. After the adoption, Buddy let his father preserve the fiction that he had always been there. But Buddy knew better, although he didn’t say so. There had been a time before, a time when it was just the two of them, and no Bill Whyte bringing presents.
Strangerland disappeared after they moved into Bill’s Connecticut house; every room was well lit there, and the little boy was growing, and no longer afraid of the dark. Now his mother told him stories about Robinson Crusoe, and Sherlock Holmes; and sometimes Bill read to him from colorful books. Strangerland was something they had clung to, the son and mother, when they were alone and sometimes hungry; they had needed that possibility of magic, of things being more than they seemed. After the move, his mother seemed content with the single-edged world, and those bedtime stories dissolved into memory. He would have even believed she had forgotten all about it, were it not for that one day when he was thirteen, and came home after school, to find her drunken on the sofa.
“Mom, you drink too much,” he’d said, removing the glass from her hand.
(Had he really said this? He’d known more than he credited himself with knowing; such a clue, to have been so easily and totally misplaced in subsequent years.)
“Only sometimes,” said his mother. She reached up and touched his face. “You’re so much like your father.”
“I don’t think so,” said Buddy, but he was pleased. Skinny, he admired William Whyte’s masculine physique and air of imperturbability.
“It’s true,” his mother had told him. “Where’s Bill?”
“You know he’s out of town,” said Buddy. “Or you wouldn’t have drunk so much. He’d worry if he knew.”
“Let me tell you something,” she said. “You never expect what happens to you. All those books people write, saying how they planned it all, they’re lies. Things just happen, good and bad. They just happen to you.” She reached for the glass Buddy was holding; he pulled it away from her. “Don’t play games with me, young man,” she said. He shrugged and gave the glass to her; she took it and held it without drinking. “It all keeps coming back,” she said.
“What does?” Buddy asked, embarrassed to see his mother like this, confidential in her bathrobe, stinking of liquor.
“Strangerland.”
So she did remember. It had given him an odd feeling of displacement listening to his mother reel out the old bedtime story, a different version, out of context and askew.
“When you least expect it,” said his mother. “There it is. Everybody suddenly a stranger. People you know—you don’t know. Everything’s frightening, everything’s dangerous. It looks the same,” she said. “And yet it isn’t.”
As she spoke, the world seemed to waver around Buddy; he felt drunk himself, and scared, listening. He clenched his fists and buried them in his lap.
“Mom,” he’d said at last, breaking into her monologue. The single syllable seemed to recall her.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Come on, I’ll get up now, I’m okay. See, I’m okay.”
She was standing now, bending over him where he had sunk down onto a chair.
“I’m sorry, baby. You’re right, I shouldn’t drink whisky. It makes me so maudlin.”
“What’s that mean?” Buddy had asked; even so disturbed, he was curious.
“
Creepy,” said Beth, after a little interval. “I just get creepy, is all. No more of that.” Her voice became brisk. “Up with you, now. Put on something nice. We’ll go out for dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” he had said, hating himself, but wanting to punish her.
“I’ll let you back the car out,” Beth had said, ignoring his refusal, going away to dress.
He had seen Strangerland again the day of her death. Wrapped in a blanket one of the officers had put around him, still blank in the chair long after they had left, waiting for his aunt to come. Everything changed character then, slipping suddenly from familiar to alien, from benevolent to sinister. Even the furniture had been menacing; and he had ignored the whining of the dog at the door, afraid of any swift treachery, believing in some small, frightened part of him that his old friendly hound might spring at him with jaws gaping. The scary side of Strangerland; he’d met it, and recognized it, then. And buried it again, until now.
He hadn’t been prepared for the Strangerland in Naples. But he’d found it, the other night.
Nothing more frightening than the seemingly benign turned evil. Stumbling after Jack in the dark the other night, Buddy had met again the old fear, and understood how imperfectly he’d conquered it. The woods by Webb’s house had been filled with terror and with cruelty. Jack’s laughter had wounded his pride, and more: it had frightened him deeply, had brought out in a moment all the worries he’d kept locked away since he was small. For a while among the trees that night he’d been alone again, and threatened, and this time no Mama to sit by his bed and watch over him.
The doctor had warned this might happen. There might be a delayed reaction, he’d said, and had suggested counseling, had even recommended a therapist, but Buddy had taken the piece of paper and shoved it into his pocket, later taking it out and screwing it up into a tiny ball and tossing it onto his desk, and then later taking it up again and unfolding and refolding it, spending minutes at a time smoothing and then crumpling, until the name was illegible, just a trail of ink across the broken fibers.
“It won’t make her come back,” he’d told his father finally, cruelly, and the subject of therapy was closed.
Now he wondered how wise it had been, to come to Naples with this time bomb ticking away inside him. But where else might he have gone? Christmas in California had been miserable; his father had even had a girlfriend. Nothing serious, he’d assured Buddy, but his clumsy attempts to hide the evidence of her in the house had indicated otherwise. She’d come to dinner, a gentle young thing in an old-fashioned velvet dress, and she’d paid so much attention to Buddy that he’d been overwhelmed with resentment and retreated into rudeness. Afterward, his father had taken him to task.
“Was it necessary to be so hostile to Debbie?” he’d asked. “She was just interested in you.”
“Too interested,” Buddy had said, knowing he was in the wrong, and yet unable to stop himself.
“Son, I know it’s hard for you,” his father had said, capitulating. “But we have to move on. It’s been almost two years.”
“You act like you’ve forgotten her,” Buddy had shouted, startling both of them.
“I haven’t forgotten her,” Bill Whyte had said, after a pause. “How can you say that? I wanted to spend my life with her. It’s just,” and he’d taken a breath and turned his face slightly away, “she’s gone now. There’s nothing I can do about that.” He’d brought his face back, and Buddy saw the tears there. “There’s nothing we can do. We have to accept that.”
That was Christmas. When Buddy had decided at the last minute to spend spring break in Naples, his father had seemed relieved.
“Sorry you can’t make it this time,” he’d said. “Drive carefully.”
There was no refuge in California. None in New York either, the dorms taunting him with their emptiness, reminding him of the hordes of normal students who had places they were wanted, expected, places they called Home. Something they took for granted, it was peppered throughout their conversations; and backing away from them, he had brought himself here, to this alien village. Patting the camera, telling himself that together they’d find something, learn something, that the project would lay some ghosts to rest, and help him to move on.
He hadn’t expected what he’d found here—the sense of familiarity coupled with eerie imbalance, as though he were Rip van Winkle coming down from the Catskills, looking for home. Knowing that some nugget of the town he sought still lived on, unsure how to find it.
He’d learned something from that nanny, but it hadn’t been the right story. Not the right version. The version he wanted was hidden in Strangerland, and he’d have to make up his mind to go in after it. Or to turn away, and leave it behind forever.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Men and Women
ON THURSDAY, JOAN and I had a dinner engagement. It was a rare thing for us to commit to an outside invitation, and I thought we might cancel it, but Joan insisted on going.
“We always go to the Bruckners,” she said. “I promised Polly I’d help serve. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go. Too many things …”
So we went, dressing nervously beforehand, ready half an hour early, sitting like patient children in the living room, hands folded, watching the clock.
“She won’t need me earlier than six-thirty,” said Joan, rearranging the brooch on her blouse for the tenth time in as many minutes. “Oh, I can’t get this thing right. Will you do it?”
I crossed to where she sat and took up the cameo which had been my mother’s. Ellen had given it to Joan a few Christmases ago, it seeming likely that she would never herself have any daughters. I slipped the pin into the sheer fabric of Joan’s blouse, and clasped it.
“This okay?” I asked. She looked down and nodded. “Let’s go,” I said. “We can drive slowly.”
We were still a little early, but Joan relaxed once we were inside the Bruckners’ house. We had been there often enough to disarm her; she was as familiar with their kitchen as she was with our own.
I wandered into the living room and made small talk with a few of the early guests. All faces I knew, apart from one Bruckner cousin who had travelled from afar and in whose honor the party was being given.
“You can’t believe what it’s like in Boston nowadays,” the cousin said to me. “I left my car in Cambridge for one minute—no more than five—and when I came back the radio was gone.” She paused for commentary.
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“It’s drugs, of course. The revenge and consolation of the underprivileged.” The hyperthyroid wife of a well-known magazine publisher, she was a silly woman, infused with a languid arrogance, as though she had long ago divined all of the modern causes of misery, and found them disappointing. “I love visiting Harry,” she said now, turning her salamander eyes on me. “This town is so precious. It never seems to change, does it? Like a treasure, preserved in amber.”
“Isn’t it usually,” I said, “bugs get preserved in amber?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them enter, Jack and his latest girlfriend. “There’s my,” I said to the Bruckner cousin, “brother. Excuse me for a moment.”
I went toward Jack and just as I drew near saw the shape of Buddy behind him, lingering in the entrance hall.
“I have a little shadow,” I said, in a voice ruthless and low. It was the first we had spoken directly in twenty years.
“Nice to see you, too,” he said. “You remember Caroline.”
I exchanged tight smiles with the blonde, and then Buddy was among us. He was no longer wearing the despairing look I had seen him sporting last. Now he looked wary, as though he had strayed into an enemy camp unwittingly; and crafty, as though he intended to bluff it out.
“Nice place,” he said.
“Tell Harry,” I advised him, indicating our host standing by the drinks table. “He and Polly worked very hard on it.” Speaking, seeming casual, I turned my head to see: Joan was still in the kitchen. I mo
ved with Buddy now, blocking the living room with my body, not seeming to, leading him. “Where’s your camera?”
“Taking a vacation,” said Buddy. “Like you said.” He shot a glance around the room, and lowered his voice. “I don’t think these people would have minded too much, though.”
Surprised at his insight, I nodded. “These people” were the fashionable few of Naples, the new money, the chic, and of anybody in town they would have welcomed the camera, indeed expected it. Their arrival roughly ten years ago had struck a jarring chord in a town where prestige had always been dictated by family lineage and street address. These new aristocrats had brought their own rules. They set themselves up separately from the old guard, without even a token courtship; they had come to Naples for leisure, but they were by nature busy folk. As though by habit, they prospered, buying up rundown houses and renovating them into palaces, dabbling in various business ventures. They summed us up accurately, and soon their craftwork and bait stores were doing a booming business, and there was not one Goldfish Emporium, but three; and they were again complaining of exhaustion. They pulled out again, most of them, after seeing their specialists in the city. With rueful smiles, they extricated themselves from the money-making machines, and turned their attention back to their homes. What had been pleasing now had to be ideal; and diligently they built their dwellings into splendor, sending to Atlanta for upholstery fabric, scouring the countryside for suitable kitsch. They kept company, quite casually, with figures of mild celebrity, and frequently imported them to town on long weekends, in the old English country-house style. They were slightly decadent, highly frivolous, and on the whole very nice.
They brought us a touch of fame—the magazine layouts, the occasional mention in gossip columns—but true to its sturdy ways, Naples was unaffected. In fact, in the core community, where daylight savings was still a heated topic, people like the Bruckners were simply ignored. Joan and I had become friendly with them through complicated circumstances, and had long been accustomed to receiving invitations to their lesser gatherings. I supposed that in their constant sweeps for interesting party guests, they’d seized upon Buddy. And of course, where Buddy went, so did Jack.
Near Canaan Page 26