For a moment, she wondered if Robert North had heard her. Then he laughed. “Except Galen has more talent than the rest of us combined. He got your friend Olivia in this place. Talk about a girl who isn’t a chip off the old block. Matt may have been an asshole, but he was a hell of a writer.”
Etta gasped. It felt as though he’d hurled something at her, and she stepped backward. Matthew Lowther was Olivia’s dad. The dad she never knew. The literature professor.
Robert North seemed to realize that he’d revealed something he shouldn’t have. He spun around and darted toward the door. “Matthew Lowther was her father,” Etta said, mostly because she needed to hear the words aloud. Her voice echoed through the foyer.
Robert North spun around. “You want to be a writer? Stop pretending like you’re Nancy Drew and get to work. How’s that critique coming?”
Etta’s cheeks filled with heat.
“One student messed up his first critique when I was here, and he was back home by Christmas. The most impressive application in the world is not going to help you if you mess this up. Especially if your father can’t write the kind of check that sways Hardin. If this is really your dream like you say it is then forget about Matt. Forget about Olivia.”
He spun around and wrapped his fingers around the iron door handle. The sound of the rain swelled into the foyer as the door swung shut. Etta stared at the row of rain coats and umbrellas hanging from the hooks. Water had pooled beneath them.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember Olivia’s voice.
I’m the product of a one-night-stand. My mom slept with her literature professor.
Does he know about you?
My mom got stoned and forgot to tell him . . .
Etta walked into the great room at the same moment Amanda Watson stepped out of the hallway to the kitchen. Amanda smiled, a tight upturn of her lips. “Are you feeling better?”
“Visiting Carl?” Etta cringed at how high pitched and shaky her own voice sounded.
Mandy blinked. “I stopped in for a quick cup of tea. I slept late today. I’m so embarrassed.” She rolled her eyes and pushing her brunette bob behind her ear. “I was up late studying dactylic hexameter. Opal thinks I should write my next work in it instead of anapestic tetrameter. I was originally thinking that I would compose my next work in trochaic octameter, since I love internal rhyme. But I’m starting to think Opal is right. Dactylic hexameter feels grandiose in a way anapestic tetrameter doesn’t. It lends itself to enjambment, you know.” She let out a nervous giggle. “Oh gosh, listen to me rambling on . . .” Mandy stepped past Etta onto the staircase. Etta watched her for a moment then clutched the banister and followed. Mandy glanced over her shoulder. “It’s just so exciting to think about writing something new after working on After Daisies for so long. And having Opal as a mentor . . . Anyway, you must be excited for your critique?”
“Thrilled.” Etta murmured.
“I’m still recovering from mine.”
They stepped into the long hallway at the top of the stairs, and Etta glanced at the portrait of Vincent Buchanan, fixating on his hands clasped in his lap—old and withered, speckled with age spots, resting atop a book.
“It’s not so bad. Most people are nice.”
Etta flicked her gaze to Mandy. Mandy was already halfway down the hall, her leather backpack bouncing as she walked. She shot a glance at Etta as she thrust the door open, and Etta thought of Chase Quinn and winced. Had she been too harsh on Amanda’s critique? She could hardly remember it.
Reed shot out of his seat when Etta stepped inside the classroom. He crossed the room and stepped to her side. The room buzzed with talking and laughter. Isabella Peña was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
Reed pushed his glasses up with his middle finger. “I have something to report.” Etta stepped toward him to make out the rest of the sentence. “about the mission.”
A giggle escaped from Etta’s chest. “Listen, maybe we should abort the mission.” Another giggle welled through her, like a valve releasing pressure from her chest. Reed pulled the door open and gestured for her to move into the hall. Etta followed him and leaned over, resting her hands on her knees until her laughter subsided. The corners of her mouth ached. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but another bout of laughter surged through her.
The door flung open and Poppy bounded into the hallway. “If something exciting is going on, you guys are in trouble.” She flipped her green scarf around her neck and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m in on this too, remember?”
Etta looked from Reed to Poppy and chortled this time.
“What’s wrong?” Poppy asked.
“Nothing. Except, my critique’s in three days, and I haven’t started my story. And get this, Matthew Lowther is Olivia’s father.” She wiped at her eyes. “He was Robert North’s roommate here in 1985. And he disappeared.”
A strange sound emerged from Reed’s lips. “Like Hans Gretelstien?” he whispered.
Etta met his gaze and then squeezed her eyes shut against the image of Olivia’s face in the stage lights after the play, the way her eyes watered and shifted. She was panicked.
Except Galen has more talent than the rest of us combined. He got your friend Olivia in this place.
“Galen wrote her play,” Etta whispered.
Reed jabbed a book toward Etta. Etta took it and flipped it over. It had no words on the spine or cover.
Reed’s eyes shifted back and forth between Etta and Poppy. “I found it while I was cataloging in the library this morning . . .”
“Wait a minute, I thought theft was in violation of the academy rules.” Poppy giggled.
Etta opened the book. The binding was stiff. The type was typeset crooked on the title page:
Dreams of the Rising Sun: the early imagination of Vincent Buchanan.
Etta dropped her gaze to the middle of the page and gasped.
A Dissertation.
By Matthew Kenneth Lowther.
Presented to the Department of Literature and the Graduate School of Yale University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
June 1981.
Her hands began to tremble.
* * *
Etta read Matthew Lowther’s dissertation during the afternoon mandatory writing session. She’d successfully avoided academic writing since she’d graduated from UM. Fortunately Matthew Lowther’s dissertation read more like a magazine feature than a dissertation. And within pages, Etta realized she’d known almost nothing about the life of the academy’s famous founder.
Vincent Buchanan was born on August 20, 1909 in Buffalo, New York. He was the youngest of five children—three much older brothers: Ambrose, Elias, and William—and a sister, Dorothy, who was born just eleven months before him. He hardly knew Ambrose and Elias. They enlisted in the army the day the United States entered World War I in 1917 when Vincent was just seven. Both perished in Europe’s trenches.
For the first eleven years of his life, Vincent and his family lived in Buffalo as the Buchanan family had for generations. Then in June of 1920, as the first Olympics in eight years got underway in Antwerp, Belgium, Vincent’s father packed up everything the family owned. They boarded the Nickel Plate Road at the train depot in Buffalo, which took them to Chicago, and then they rode the Union and Pacific Portland Rose to Portland, Oregon.
Vincent’s father got a job in the warehouse of the Pacific Coast Biscuit Company. Vincent’s mother Edith was a homemaker, but she began exhibiting increasingly troubling symptoms after they moved to Portland. She stayed in the darkened refuge of her bedroom most days, and started mailing letters to her mother, who’d been dead for over a decade. She grew increasingly detached from eleven-year-old Vincent and thirteen-year-old Dottie, as everyone called Vincent’s sister. In October of 1921, Edith Ann Buchanan moved out of Vincent’s house and never returned. She died on January ninth, 1922, at forty-six years of age, in the Orego
n State Mental Hospital in Salem. What she succumbed to, Matthew Lowther did not say. He was more interested in young Vincent Buchanan and his increasing obsession with Japan.
Sometimes an accidental moment, a fleeting event, a mistake, can change the course of an entire life. For Vincent Buchanan that instant was October 4, 1922. His brother William, a delivery driver for Schlesser Brothers’ Meats, drove by as Vincent was walking home from school. Vincent begged William to take him on a ride in the Schlesser brothers’ 1920 Model H International delivery truck. William finally acquiesced and let his brother climb in. The last stop on William’s delivery route that day was Tanaka Grocery in Japantown.
William, 56, a retired machinist living in Portland, Oregon, recounts the day vividly 33 years later. “I couldn’t pull the damn kid out of that store. He walked around and touched everything—the silk slippers, the wooden shoes, the kimonos. He even touched one of the dead ducks hanging upside down in the window. It was embarrassing the way he gaped at the Orientals, just trying to do their shopping. I told him to mind his business.
The kid would give me the silent treatment all night if I ran that stop without him, so I started meeting him outside his school at 3:45. It was out of my way, but it made the kid happy, and there wasn’t a lot to be happy about those days . . .”
“Can I have a word with you?”
Etta snapped her head up. Director Hardin’s head was inches from hers. She heard the slap of something hitting the floor then realized it was her own notebook and Matthew Lowther’s dissertation. Her pen slid from her fingers, bounced, and rolled across the wooden planks. Etta leaped to her feet, squatted, and grabbed for the dissertation. A loose page stuck out from the middle of the book. Was it coming apart?
No. It was an envelope.
Etta pushed it back into the pages and shoved the dissertation into her bag. She retrieved her notebook and pen and followed Hardin out of the classroom and down the spiral stairs to the second floor. Teddy didn’t stop typing when Hardin led Etta into the administration office, but she could feel his eyes on her as she followed Hardin across the room, past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the upholstery chairs, the table stacked with Poets & Scribes, and into his office. The rain drumming against the windows vibrated the panes.
Etta stepped toward the chairs across from Hardin’s desk, and jumped backward. A long blonde braid swung across the back of one of the chairs. Etta met Opal Waters’ gray gaze.
Hardin closed the door behind Etta, circled his desk, and sat down. “Please sit, Ms. Lawrence.”
Etta’s gaze went to the window—the swirl of streaky gray, the condensation bubbling the inside of the glass. She sat next to Opal, but stayed on the edge of the seat, her bag still slung across her shoulder.
Hardin rested his hands on the arms of his chair and gazed at a point behind Etta. It was almost as though he was waiting for Etta to talk, and as the silence spread out, Etta considered blurting out an excuse for reading during the mandatory writing session. But something—perhaps Opal Waters’ gray eyes on her—told her she was here for something more serious than reading during class.
Chapter Nineteen
“Are you feeling better?” Opal spoke first. Etta managed a nod. Director Hardin cleared his throat. He gestured toward a paperback volume on his desk that Etta recognized as the Buchanan Academy Rules and Regulations, a tome she’d received in the mail days after she’d received her acceptance letter. “You are familiar with the Regulations, Ms. Lawrence.”
Etta nodded.
“So you are aware that students are required to attend all classes, workshops, mandatory writing sessions, meals, and impromptu events, readings, and speeches, except on Sundays, which have been set aside as free days.” Hardin rapped his fingers against his desk. “We have been fortunate, in that we’ve never had a serious illness strike one of our students. We attribute our residents’ health to their engagement in the creative process, the environment of learning, the salubrious nature of literature, and to the fresh air and beauty of the grounds.”
Etta dropped her gaze to the floor.
“I will remind you of our policy on illness.” She heard the thin pages of the book slap against each other. “Page sixty-one: To protect all residents, any illness must be reported to the director or his assistant within twenty-four hours, either in person or by proxy.”
The room grew silent, and Etta lifted her gaze to meet Hardin’s. He stared at her over his spectacles. “You can understand how this is particularly urgent if the illness is of a contagious manner. We have an agreement with Dr. Herbert Mansheim, a general practitioner in Jackson. He can be here in less than forty minutes. Shall I phone him?”
Etta tried to shake her head. “I’m fine . . .”
Hardin brushed his hand through his wispy hair. “I will not belabor the point, except to say that we take the codes seriously here. With Vincent no longer with us, they are all we have to ensure his legacy remains unspoiled. I am willing to overlook one transgression, especially under the circumstances.” He closed the book and rested his hand on it; his gaze drifted toward the window. “We also have arrangements with a psychiatrist—Dr. Evelyn Ryder of Portland, who has counseled many of our students over the years. Perhaps you would like to talk to her?”
Etta glanced down and saw Opal’s slender fingers reaching for hers. She instinctively drew her hand away. Then she tried to smile, but Opal looked away, her hand fluttering to her lap.
After a moment, Opal spoke: “I’ve consulted with Dr. Ryder myself. She’s a good listener, and she can prescribe medication for depression, whether it’s seasonal or . . .” Her words trailed off.
Etta stared at the blue veins laced beneath the poet’s pale flesh. She thought about extending her hand toward Opal’s, but hesitated. “You were depressed?”
“When I heard of my father’s passing, the isolation of the lodge . . . I’ve lived here on and off for thirty years, you understand, and it’s always been a sanctuary, a muse—but it became, well . . . It was nothing really. Listen, you may have heard that sadness is part of the artist’s soul, that it breeds imagination or makes you see the world more clearly, but it’s simply not so. Dr. Ryder can help you, maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
The vein that threaded up Opal’s brow to her hairline was just barely visible. Etta thought of Petra’s words. Vincent followed that pallid poet around with drool collecting at the sides of his mouth, and I swear that waif didn’t look any older than fourteen at the time. A tendril of hair had come loose from Opal’s braid and fallen across her cheek. Etta glanced at the director, and followed his gaze toward the window. She became aware again of the sound of the rain, softly drumming against the panes.
“Did Olivia talk to her?” Etta asked.
Hardin took off his spectacles and set them on the desk. He closed his eyes and massaged his temple. Without his glasses, he looked tired, the flesh below his eyes sagging into his cheek bones. “I’m sorry, but I cannot discuss Ms. Saxon’s medical condition.”
Hardin looked as though he might say something more, but Opal spoke next: “Did Olivia seem depressed to you?”
“She cried sometimes,” Etta said, thinking of Olivia’s muffled sobs in the night. Why hadn’t she asked Olivia about it? Of course, they were strangers at first, but later, she could have asked. She should have.
“Did Olivia confide in you?” Opal asked.
Etta opened her mouth to say no, and then thought better of it.
After a moment, Opal continued, “Being the confidant of someone who is unstable is not easy. Perhaps that is what brought on your own troubles.”
Etta stared at the books on the shelves behind Hardin. Did Etta have troubles? She hadn’t eaten in days, she’d hardly slept, she couldn’t write, and she’d gotten Reed and Poppy involved in something she could hardly put into words, something that didn’t make sense even to her.
“It may help to get it off your chest, I mean, whatever it is Olivia confided in you,�
� Opal said.
Etta met Opal’s gaze. “Olivia thought Jordan was in love with someone else.” Etta only said it to watch Opal’s reaction, but Opal’s eyes revealed nothing. The poet brushed the strand of hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear.
“Did Ms. Saxon and Mr. Waterhouse have a . . .” Hardin cleared his throat. “Were they violating the regulations?”
“Where is Olivia?” Etta sensed the meeting wouldn’t last much longer, and she’d regretted not asking Hardin last time she’d been sitting across from him.
“I understand it is difficult, but you must try to move past this. I will have Theodore telephone Dr. Ryder. You can meet with her in my office. I’m confident she can help you work through any lingering” —he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling— “emotions.”
Etta nodded, because she wasn’t sure what else she could do. But her heart hammered against her chest. Did she need help? Or medication? She clutched the strap of her bag against her shoulder.
“One more thing.” Opal smiled at her—a tight, close-mouthed smile. “We’re looking forward to your critique. What’s the title of your story?”
Etta bit the inside of her lip. “Cherry Blossom,” she whispered, because it was the only thing she could think of.
Etta’s pulse raced as she stepped into the hallway outside the administrative office. At the bottom of the stairs, the commotion of lunchtime drifted from the dining room. Etta slipped to the back side of the staircase and stepped into the shadows. The stairs matched the architecture so well with its unfinished log banisters, wide plank steps, and general rustic splendor that Etta assumed it had been built with the rest of the lodge during the Depression, but according to Carl, Vincent Buchanan had added the staircase when he acquired the lodge in the late fifties. He’d been enamored with the lighthouses on the Oregon Coast when he was a child and had wanted to emulate the feeling of spiraling toward light.
Etta crouched. The air was stale and dusty. Some words were etched into the baseboard. Etta leaned closer and ran her finger over them: WPA 1936. Then she pulled Matthew Lowther’s dissertation from her bag and fingered the envelope that protruded from its pages.
The Garden of Dead Dreams Page 14