by Ed Ifkovic
Finally, the disaster drew to a piddling close. Julie, perhaps sensing the awful tension at the table, whisked away the dishes and unceremoniously plopped a towering cocoanut chocolate cake in the center of the table, served with piping hot coffee. I ate a small piece and drank too much coffee.
When she cleared the table, frowning at the untouched cake, Julia asked if there was anything else. Martha, touching Julia’s hand, answered, “No, dear, thank you. You can go home to your son.” Julia left the room. Martha turned to me. “Julia usually leaves around five or six, catching the River Road bus. She stayed late tonight for you.”
I smiled, but oddly felt to blame for something.
When she left, I said, “Something about Julia looks familiar.”
Carlotta grinned and slurred her comment. “Good eye, Edna. She’s Eben’s daughter.”
Martha spoke in a loud, amused voice. “Another story for you, Edna. Father and daughter. A sad story. They haven’t spoken to each other in fifteen years.”
CHAPTER TWO
I rose early on Saturday morning, before six o’clock, after a restless slumber that was interrupted by fitful nightmares: I was trapped in a sagging, red-painted Connecticut barn, among lowing cows and pushy sheep. Outside, hidden in groves of hemlock, Indians whooped and settlers blasted muskets. Wild birds crashed into windows. I sat up in bed, shivering.
Sitting alone in the kitchen, I listened to the creaking of old wood as morning breezes rattled the clapboards. The Inn was still. Leaving my room, I’d heard the uneasy breathing of Martha, a spinster’s slumber. In a back bedroom off the downstairs hallway Carlotta’s fierce snoring occasionally shattered the quiet. Like a Wisconsin lumberjack, I mused. Then the silence again. I glanced out the back window. The day was as crisp as a sheet hung to dry, the sky a blue-gray slate, the rising sun a gigantic sunflower. I decided to walk the grounds.
In that early morning hour, the fields pale with gathering sunlight, I strolled the dusty lanes, moving away from the three homes, headed away from the thick woods of Hemlock Ridge. Distant roosters cock-a-doodled, morning doves cooed in the faraway forest, and a blue jay squawked on a low branch of an evergreen as I walked by. Serenity, for me, this brief reprieve from the Inn’s disquiet. A solitary motorcar sped by, the driver peering out at me, a frown on his face. A horse-drawn hay wagon clip-clopped past, all over the road, and the driver was a sleepy boy of thirteen or fourteen, with a straw hat pulled down over his brow. I had to step off the lane, standing in foot high grass, black-eyed Susan rubbing my shins. Looking back at the three homes at the end of the lane, particularly the Inn in the middle, I played with the idea of life at the close of the eighteenth century, the fiery period of Tory and Patriot, when the Inn lay in a similar early morning blue light. The early breezes of autumn, the acrid smell of wood burning in fireplaces, the horse-drawn carriages depositing weary travelers on the arduous trek from Boston to New York. Or New Haven to Albany, perhaps Eben’s ancestors hosting.
So Eben and his daughter hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. Interesting. Just what was the meaning of that?
Tired from hiking up the hill, reaching Caleb’s Rise, I rested on a tree stump near the entrance to the thicket where Eben had stopped the Pierce-Arrow the afternoon before, that shelter of scrub oak and swamp maple, cluttered with overhanging vine. From that vantage point the Inn and its adjoining neighbors seemed idyllic, a glossy postcard, a Currier and Ives print of utter and unabashed romanticism. Indian Summer in Connecticut: the dazzling sun and creeping warmth, the bright sun spotlighting the multi-colored leaves, that lazy moment before winter, a gasp of illusionary summer soon to be gone, swept beneath ice and snow and bitter cold, an unforgiving landscape. Idly, I stared through a welter of tangled bittersweet vine, hanging overhead, up and down the trunks of trees, and I plucked sprays of it, the deep yellow berries now sprung open from the chill and sun, revealing the meaty dark orange bead within, a shock of unexpected color under the drab exterior. I’d take the bouquet back to my room.
Back in the country kitchen Martha sat at the table, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper. “I thought you were still asleep,” she said, smiling.
“I need my morning constitutional. And to soak in the breathtaking scenery.”
“Splendid, isn’t it? Indian Summer is the best moment this Inn knows.”
I thrust out the tangle of bittersweet. Martha grinned impishly. “You’d best not leave that spray in sight.”
That stopped me cold. “What?”
“Lotta has declared it her least favorite plant.”
“For goodness sake, why?” My hands encircled the colorful bunch, tightened around it. Some garish fruit broke, landed on the floor.
“Her ex-husband Jason once told me that she’d said it was a plant that kept secrets. All summer long it’s drab and unassuming, like it’s holding its breath. Then it pulls back its surface in the fall and it’s a Roman orgy of fleshy rawness. He said she didn’t like the surprise. Her favorite flower is the rose, bold and beautiful in daylight.” She smiled. “Herself, in other words.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I stared at the bittersweet.
“Well, that’s Lotta.” Martha shook her head. “A woman of definite if bizarre opinions.”
But I carried the bittersweet to my room, tucked it over a picture frame, and returned to the kitchen for coffee. Martha hadn’t moved. “Carlotta’s still sleeping?” I asked.
“Lotta likes her red wine and it takes away her mornings.” She frowned. “Lotta drinks late at night. She’ll be up around noon with a throbbing headache and a jaundiced view of her surroundings.” She paused and stared into my face. “I’m sorry about last night.”
I waved my hand in the air, dismissing it.
“No,” she continued, “it was ungracious of us. Of her, frankly. You see, after her divorce many, many years ago, Jason got confused and pursued me. Me, the dowdy sister. Miss Square Dance at the Grange Hall. I’m not sure why. But Lotta has never forgiven him nor me. And now it’s come back to haunt us with the return of Jason.”
I didn’t want to discuss their unhappy lives, sensing that something ugly and festering permeated the household. “You’ve always lived at the Inn?” I began, letting Martha know I was changing the subject.
Martha looked surprised, smiled wryly. “I would have thought a novelist would be interested in the sordid lives of friends.”
I made a harrumph sound, just like I imagined Parthy Ann Hawks would emit, my indomitable matriarch of Show Boat, a woman who tolerated no deviation from her disciplined world. “People’s illicit trysts, recollected in tranquility, halt civilized conversation.”
Martha grinned and sat back, played with her coffee cup. “Yes, Miss Ferber, I was, in fact, born in this rundown Inn. As was my baby sister Carlotta, the sister I—and only I—call Lotta. By that time it was beginning its lamentable journey to the state of decrepitude you now see. After us, the deluge.”
“And you never left?”
“Never. I went to a girls’ finishing school. Miss Porter’s in Farmington, all lace and lorgnette, but Father decided education for girls was indelicate. His word: indelicate. I fought to stay there. But when Mother died, I had to return here to manage the house, and I never left. After father died, I attended classes at the Normal School in Danbury and eventually became the administrator at a local academy for girls. I was there for a lifetime. There, and here. I had nowhere else to go.”
“Sounds like a rich life. Purposeful,” I offered. But I remembered Carlotta talking of Martha’s unpopularity at the school . . . of her being forced to leave.
A thin line of tight lips. “It wasn’t.”
“How did your father react to Carlotta’s move to New York?”
She chuckled. “Having never recovered from the battle to remove me from Miss Porter’s, he had to face Carlotta’s surprising rebellion. Always the high-spirited, melodramatic girl, histrionics in her blood from God knows where, well, when she announ
ced that she was leaving the village of Rawley’s Depot for Broadway, it was as though the world ended. You can just imagine. After all, she was my father’s darling, the pretty baby. I was his work drudge after our mother died. Father’s stroke three years later probably was the result of that move. He lay in a semi-coma for two more years and then died. He never spoke again, although sometimes I’d see him mouth a word.”
“What word?”
“Carlotta.” She sighed. “There was no living with a daughter on the boards.”
“I imagine it was a gutsy move for a fine young respectable girl back then.”
“Lotta spent her whole life running away from that one word. Respectable.”
Everyone, of course, knows the meteoric story of Carlotta Small, who became the darling of turn-of-the-century gaslit Broadway. Any aficionado of theater has heard it many times over. A girl from nowhere, barely out of her teens, with her sleek exotic looks, her deep ebony eyes, was cast in a bit part in The Falconer in 1899, was picked out of the wings by Samuel Gowd—yes, that Samuel Gowd—and made the surprise lead of The Farmer’s Daughter, a sentimental melodrama. Overnight success. The toast of the town. Her picture in the rotogravures, in Dramatic Mirror, in Stage, even on those ridiculous trade cards men collected. That play ran nearly two years, Carlotta becoming the most recognized actress in New York, and the most sought after. She followed that play with Sweet Danger, an insipid rendering of an unreadable Ella Wheeler Wilcox novel. No matter. Though the lines were static and excruciatingly forced, Carlotta brought something to the stage, some joive de vive, some spark, some gripping intensity. H. H. Boyesen in Munsey’s said she was a female Edwin Booth, infused with the gentle humanity of Joseph Jefferson.
Then, in 1906, at the pinnacle of her celebrity, sitting in a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, the only woman with a reserved table at Delmonico’s, she left it all, just walked away, mysterious, an action earth-shattering to the legions of swells and giddy girls and johnnies who nightly begged for autographs outside her stage door, thrusting roses into her arms. But perhaps it was time to leave: already the stories of her indiscreet drinking had seeped into the gossip sheets. Ralph Wilder, in “The Talk of the Town” in the Journal, sniped at her in so many columns, but he’d never liked her. Of course, that fussy esthete never liked anyone, doubtless the gossipy father of the soon-to-emerge Aleck Woollcott, I often thought. Carlotta had already begun her journey through short-lived marriages, each one lasting just about a year. Her first husband, long forgotten, a Broadway dancer, had killed himself by leaping from the roof of the penthouse, leaving Carlotta behind, unhappily pregnant. By the time the son was born, she was already engaged to Jason Fargo. Back in Connecticut, hiding at the Inn, she refused reporters’ queries, the pesky interviewers, the stage managers who begged for her return.
Broadway legend whispered that there were days she never got out of bed.
Martha was speaking. “All Carlotta’s moves were considered gutsy. Three marriages, Edna. My God. By the time she was thirty? The last two ending in divorce. You know what happened to the first husband.” Her eyes narrowed. “So sad, that boy.”
I nodded. “And you never married.”
The question seemed to surprise Martha, who chuckled. “Please. A waste of time. Well, neither have you, I gather.”
Having entered my forties, I had resigned myself to a similar spinsterhood, which I welcomed like a warm bath on a chilly autumn night. “I’m owned by my typewriter,” I announced, a little too glibly.
“The surprise was when Lotta went back to the stage,” Martha went on.
Of course, I knew that. That’s when I met her. After the Great War Carlotta suddenly decided to take a New York pied a terre, and that fall she appeared in a Sam Harris review, The Slave to Love, which faltered, struggled, bombed in New Haven and Philadelphia, but then, oddly, seemed to find a following on Broadway. Some critics praised her, themselves surprised. Her fans flocked back. Then, suddenly, she abandoned New York. Again.
In those years, however, she’d acquired a reputation as a spirited partier, a delightful dinner guest, constantly seen about the city, hailing taxis, walking arm-in-arm with George Jean Nathan, laughing too loudly in restaurants. But she returned to Connecticut after three years, though she traveled back and forth, part of the theater season’s entertainment, the Pierce-Arrow conspicuously parked around town, usually illegally. She’d become a raconteur, a wit, and the attractive non-working actress every swell wanted on his arm at an opening. Third row, center. She was often at my dinner parties, which were, I profess immodestly, highly successful, what with my talent for placing guests around my table: an actress next to a columnist, a comedian next to an editor, George Kaufman next to Fannie Hurst, Theodosia Garrison next to Carl Laemmle if he happened to be in town, Charles Hanson Towne next to Bert Boylen. Harold Ross, with his infectious laugh.
“Will she ever go back again?” I asked now.
Martha shook her head. “No.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s too old.”
“Fiftyish?”
“I know. But she’s too frightened.”
“Of what?”
“Of . . .” She stopped. “Enough about Lotta. I’ve lived my life in her shadow as it is.” She smiled. “At least let me enjoy breakfast without her.”
I walked to the counter to refill my coffee, and, lingering, glanced out the back window. Eben was in the distance, near his modest cottage, sawing a limb from an old apple tree. “Eben Travers is a strange bird,” I commented.
“He’s actually a dear. We get along, the two of us. Always have. He despises Lotta because she patronizes him, sees him as feeble-minded help.”
“Yet he works for her.”
“He works for us. We both own this Inn, Edna. We both inherited it from our father. The two of us.” She spoke with such vehemence that I started, turned to look at her. Martha’s face was red.
“I’m sorry.”
“No matter,” she stammered. “I don’t mean to explode. It’s just that Lotta tells everyone it’s hers. ‘My Inn’ is the way she terms it. A reporter once described me as the help. It rankles, Edna, I must tell you.”
“With good reason,” I agreed, sitting back down. I sympathized, quite. I had my own wars with my own older sister Fanny, recently ensconced on my dime in New York. Fanny—and our mother. I understood pain and trial and anguish, I’d be the first to tell you. Headstrong women, all three of us, I thought: difficult, demanding, at times maddening.
Martha went on. “Rawley’s Depot was settled back in the late 1600s by three families: Eben’s, ours, and Josiah Rawley. His descendants are all gone, drunks and fools who headed out West for gold but just found death and accident.”
I took a sip of coffee and nibbled on a crumbly muffin. “I am curious about Julia, Eben’s daughter.”
“They haven’t spoke for over fifteen years.”
“I know. Your parting shot last night. But why?”
“Simple. She married Stanley Lupinski’s wayward son. A proper Yankee girl wedding a Polack, and a nasty one at that. A Connecticut tragedy.”
Intriguing, I thought, this plot in the making. “So?”
“Well, think about it, Edna. Catholic and Protestant. Long heritage and upstart newcomer. Stanley’s son was a notorious local drunk, but a charmer who beat her, then abandoned her with a little boy who’s now around fifteen or so, and the bad seed husband got himself killed in a bar fight in Danbury. But Eben never forgave his daughter for her marriage. And Stanley never forgave his son, even after the boy’s death, it seems. So Julia works for us and lives in a small walk-up apartment one town over. She takes the local bus that drops her off on River Road, and she walks over, crossing within yards of her father’s cottage. If he’s in the yard when she’s headed back to catch the bus, he grunts, standing there, staring, judgmental, spitting out that foul tobacco. She looks straight-ahead. It’s quite the local drama, those two.�
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I started to say something about how sad it was, but I heard movement in the hallway, a plodding footfall, Carlotta emerging at late morning. She entered the kitchen, a terrycloth robe wrapped around her. She clutched at the collars, pulling it close to her neck. “Coffee,” she moaned. “My head is killing me.”
“I told you that wine you drink is swill,” Martha announced. She turned to me. “There’s a speakeasy out Danbury way, and Lotta knows the man who operates it. Prohibition be damned. The fermented grape is more plentiful at this table than in France.”
“And in every other home in America.” Carlotta rubbed her forehead and poured herself coffee. “Since the Volstead Act, drinking has increased to epic proportions in America, especially among women of breeding.”
Martha muttered. “And others, too.”
Carlotta ignored her. “I appreciate the taste of good red wine. Thank God for Canada.”
Martha said nothing.
“Good morning, Edna.” Carlotta sat down and tried to smile. “You can’t say we haven’t given you a rousing welcome, with me and Martha sniping at each other.”
“I was told to expect it,” I blurted out, too sharply, thinking of George Kaufman’s comment.
“How cruel,” Carlotta roared. “Your acid tongue has preceded your visit to my home.” Martha also chuckled.
Despite the tensions between the two sisters, Martha noticed Carlotta’s cup was empty. She got up, poured her another cup of coffee, placed it before her, and pushed a buttered roll across the table. Carlotta sipped the coffee, but stared at the buttery roll as though it would turn her stomach.
Carlotta sat back. “Dear Edna, I’m afraid you’ll have to endure dinner tonight with all the assembled gawkers and sycophants I know. But after tonight, I promise you, your week will be one of solitude, writing, research, soaking in the local world, everything I promised you for your novel. You’ll be left alone. I swear.”