by Ed Ifkovic
“Or,” I said, “that your fiancée, Delia, is an aspiring actress.”
Peter waved his hand in the air. “Delia, the actress. My God. Have you seen her act? I have. Well, there’s no future there.”
“But she seems . . .”
“I really don’t want to talk about Delia or her acting. I love her, I suppose I want to marry her, though sometimes I feel she’s with me because of my connections to Mother and to Broadway. I know that’s cynical, but so be it. I know her faults, but what can I say? I do love her.” A sly grin. “Most days. But these notions of hers are . . .” He paused. “Never mind.”
He sat back down after pouring himself another cup of coffee. “I’ll be going. Let her sleep it off. That way she won’t annoy you.” He nodded at me. “Tell her I stopped in.”
“I thought Martha would be up,” I said. “The early bird.”
“Not always. She does have her days when she can’t get out of bed. Life gets her down. But she’s probably out in the gardens out back. Most mornings in summer she likes to putter before the sun gets too hot. Even on cold fall days, digging for late potatoes. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Carlotta Small, the night owl. Martha Small, the morning dove.” He said the words so lovingly I looked at him. For some reason his face looked sad, forlorn. He turned away, stood up, placed the coffee cup in the sink.
He left without saying goodbye.
I returned to my room, where I spent the next hours typing my notes, going through the pamphlets lent by Miss Dangerfield, piling up the pages on my desk. Good stuff, I thought: engrossing, revealing. Lives lived on hard, unforgiving soil. I became so absorbed I neglected to watch the time. At midday, peckish, I went downstairs, but still the house was quiet, with neither Carlotta nor Martha in sight—or even the housekeeper Julia who usually arrived at mid-morning. The house had a lazy, drifting feel to it. I buttered some bread, slathered some boysenberry jam on the slices, drank a cup of tea, and then decided on a walk. Words tumbled through my head, facts and descriptions from my research, a jumble of images and sensations, now transferred to my typed sheets, but now roiling and grinding in my head. I needed some cool, crisp October air.
I didn’t wander very far, finding myself tired and edgy, unhappy, and not really understanding why. Walking by Millicent Wright’s home I heard rapping on the front window, Millicent herself up against the plate glass, her face shining in the sunlight. She pushed up the window a bit. “Edna, Edna, stop in.”
I approached the front of her house and heard her struggling with the front door. Finally, pushing, she stood there, an old woman tottering on a cane, but with a wide, welcoming smile. “Come in, come in.”
Seated in the old parlor, I found myself staring at the ancient woman. Dressed in a dark smock, a thick ebony brocade frayed at the hem, with faded lace trim, she looked the Victorian dowager, a woman from another century. With that wrinkled, lined face, with her faint wispy blond-white hair, Millicent Wright seemed an anachronism, Miss Haversham perhaps, or a Puritan matron. “I know I’m bothering you,” she said, though there was no apology in her voice. “I saw you passing by.”
I smiled. “I don’t want to tire you out, Millicent.”
She poohpoohed my remark, waving the cane. “Don’t see me as a helpless invalid,” she insisted. “I may not leave these narrow rooms, but that doesn’t mean I’ve turned my back on life.”
She offered tea, which I refused, and Millicent seemed relieved, because I noticed she had difficulty moving. Her ancient bones creaked and groaned as she moved to the armchair. She sighed, content, pulled a shawl around her shoulders. Millicent was in a chatty mood, I realized. And, it seemed, an inveterate gossip—to my delight. She began chatting about the season, then my visit, then the house, some church members who visited her regularly and bored her silly, the grocery boy who shopped for her, her doctor, the local minister who sipped her sherry, and she only raised her voice when she mentioned her nephew, Johnny Marx, the town constable. “I hope his presence here didn’t distress you. He tends to be a little full of himself, that lad.”
“Not at all.”
From my chair I could glance out the front window, and I watched as Stanley Lupinski walked by, some ungainly mongrel dog at his side, running ahead, darting back. Millicent saw me looking.
“A strange man, that Mr. Lupinski.” She nodded toward the front window.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“All bluster and anger, but a man capable of surprising tenderness.”
“He strikes me as an oddball.”
She laughed. “We’re all oddballs out here. The Yankees are squirrelly and scrawny, probably the result of unobserved inbreeding decades past. The newcomers, like Lupinski, are convinced they have to dislike us, distrust us. Fight us. Perhaps because we make them so unwelcome—mock them as stupid. It’s all very foolish.”
Lupinski disappeared out of sight. “You said he’s shown tenderness.” I was curious.
“Stanley is all swagger and bravado, a moody man, almost hostile. But some years back when I was able to leave the house—that is, to stroll up the lane, much like on a day like today, all autumn-like and crisp—he’d ignore me, make grunting sounds as I passed. But when I became home-bound, I’d sometimes hear him knocking on the door, I’d see him standing there and then leaving quickly. When I opened the door, I’d find a basket of peaches or tomatoes or string beans. Once even a nutty cake that served me well for a week. But he was never there when I opened the door. And any attempt to thank him—I’d call him from the window—was met with silence and a turning away.”
“A strange man.”
“But, Edna, I think a kind man, though sad. It’s just that he doesn’t know what to do with us old-timers, stuck here like outposts of a dead civilization.”
“And then his son married Eben’s daughter.”
Millicent chuckled for a bit. “The scandal of the century. I’d seen it all happen, that growing love affair, taking all parties by surprise. I mean, here you have a cocky young Polish boy, strapping and aggressive, a reflection of his proud father, but simple-minded and callous, a hellion, falling head over heels in love with a pretty Yankee girl, Eben’s daughter, Julia, no less. A Connecticut version of Abie’s Irish Rose, let me tell you. Running off to get married. The fighting, the screaming. The disaster. A marriage that could never work. He was a boy never meant to marry.”
“And now Julia cooks and clean for Carlotta and Martha.”
“How else can she support herself these days? She, with that young boy of hers, whom I’ve never seen. Hidden away somewhere. A boy that should know his grandfathers. Who should understand his forebears.” She sighed. “The gods were against that union.”
“Probably Eben and Stanley didn’t help matters.”
“I’ve witnessed verbal skirmishes between him and Eben Travers, of course, played out directly in front of my house. As though I’d requested a nasty little one-act play to be performed on my front steps. The two men don’t much relish each other.”
I started to rise. “I’m taking your time . . .”
She spoke quickly. “Edna, I’ll tell you when I want you to leave. I’m an honest woman. When I need you to leave, I’ll tell you. Honesty is the only thing you can get away with at my age.” She chuckled again. “And at my age I have no time to waste with fools and other lesser sorts. You, I want here.”
I smiled, pleased. I surveyed the large room, my eyes resting on a large oil painting situated over the fireplace, a dull oil with an imposing man, in military garb, a painting encased in an ornate gold frame. Millicent spotted me looking.
“Everything in this house goes back a century or more. That painting is of my great-grandfather, Ezra Thaddeus Wright, an early settler to Connecticut, come down from Deerfield, Massachusetts. It was painted by his son, a man of considerable talent but with a dilettante’s energy. He painted this and a few others, and then decided that life in the far West held more promise. He left, abandoning a w
ife and five children, and was never heard from again. Family lore always said he was killed in a gunfight in Nevada, at the silver mines. But there is no proof of that. Just a wonderful story. In fact, I’ve told it so often I sometimes think I made it up when I was a young girl.” She laughed. “But there are no longer children to pass on those stories to. So I’m telling you.”
I stared at the tremendous oil, at the severe-looking man, haughty and proud, a man probably in his forties when he was portrayed on canvas; a dapper though robust man in his uniform—Civil War?—with a penetrating stare, looking out at you, judgmental, a newspaper folded under his hand, suggesting a man of the world, or of business, or of a battlefield conquered. Spectacles on a table next to him.
“An imposing man,” I admitted.
“A tyrant, stories say. But look around you, Edna. Go into the library and look at the left wall. I’ll sit here.”
I did as told, and stared at a wall of mounted arrowheads. Quartz, flint, chipped, intact. “What’s this?” I asked.
“Over the decades, as the fields were farmed, hundreds of arrowheads were collected, leading some to believe that the valley was used as an Indian camp by the Eastern Pequots, possibly a village. Half-formed arrowheads, chips of flint, a working quarry perhaps. As a girl I learned that you found them by walking out after a spring shower, after the first plowing, and there, on top of the soil, lay the relics. It was wonderful.”
The library was a room lined with leatherbound volumes, musty and dark, but the quiet was broken by the sound of Stanley’s mutt yipping in the yard. Looking out, I saw Stanley across the lane, by the state forest, calling to the dog. But the dog was tramping through some neglected flowerbeds, circling, jumping, yapping. Stanley’s voice was insistent, to no avail.
“That pesky dog,” Millicent said when I returned to the parlor, “chases after the squirrels like he thinks he can catch them. Stanley insists he’s a hunting dog. I’ve told him no—that dog can only hunt his tail.” She changed the topic abruptly. “Is Carlotta up and about?”
I hesitated. “Well, not when I left the house.”
“Martha said she was ailing.”
I wondered about that. Ailing? Carlotta hadn’t mentioned that when she’d called Martha the previous night. Carlotta had simply said she had an errand to run. And then she and I had driven to Westport. Had Martha lied?
“Martha brought you supper last night, I assume.”
“Yes, and she actually sat and chatted.”
“You make it seem like that’s unusual.”
“Well, it is. My choice, I’m afraid. I must tell you frankly that Carlotta is my favorite, and I suppose it’ suggests weak character to favor one person over another. I can’t help it. Martha and I have never been friendly, you could say. Not since she was a young girl, many years ago.”
I leaned in. “Why is that?”
Millicent tapped her forefinger against the arm of the chair, meditative, slow. “Well, Martha and I had our differences—when we were both much younger women, of course. Now it seems trivial, this distance between us. Yet somehow the old reserve—on my part—can’t seem to disappear. But years back I found fault with her behavior, her truthfulness.”
“You’re saying she lied to you?”
“Among other things.” She swallowed, seemed to change her mind, closing up. “Never mind, this is an old lady gossiping foolishly, and to a visitor to the neighborhood. Talk about your bad character. Please pay me no mind.”
I wanted more. “I was with Carlotta yesterday afternoon when she called Martha to ask her to bring your supper.”
“Yes, I was expecting Carlotta, who’s fairly consistent. Martha is loath to do so, but she does, and faithfully, when need be. But last night Martha was talky as a magpie. And the subject was you.”
“Me!”
Millicent laughed. “Everyone is enjoying your visit, Martha included. Martha especially. She’s a big fan. As am I.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.”
“Of course, I expect when you return to New York Martha will resume her perfunctory dropping off of Carlotta’s obligation, with a few grunts and how-you-do’s. You see, Carlotta loves our visits because I listen to her exaggerated stories. She and I are very much alike.”
That struck me as impossible. Millicent, the aging spinster, tightlaced and serene, a throwback to a puritanical sensibility, a woman who seemed impatient with flightiness; Carlotta, the flamboyant actress out New York, many times wed, once widowed, twice divorced, often scatter-brained, overly effusive, chaotic. I announced, cavalierly, ‘I would have thought Martha would be more to your liking, Millicent. The small-town girl, the homebody. Alice-sit-by-the-fire.”
Millicent stared at me with those riveting steely blues of her. She didn’t blink. “You have it all wrong, Edna. Carlotta, as far as I’m concerned, is the last surviving Puritan.”
I was stunned. “What does that mean?”
But it was as though a switch had been pulled, a curtain dropped, for Millicent seemed to fade, sinking into her armchair. She looked tired, tired. “Pardon me, dear Edna, but I must nap now.”
I said my goodbye quietly and started to leave through the kitchen. I surmised that Carlotta and Martha would be wondering where I’d gotten to. Stepping out the back door, onto the thick slate-stone steps, I was taken with the beauty of the day: Millicent’s careless, overgrown gardens, a grove of leaning white birch saplings, an old white trellis covered with thick, choking rose vines. The sky was a periwinkle blue, speckled with clouds, and I wanted to stay in Millicent’s yard, wandering the old pathways. Along the boundary of the properties were shabby lines of old stone fences, caving in, granite boulders marking the property lines. Stone fences that went deep into the wood, up to the river, and then up over the mountains. Here, I thought, was wilderness coming back through rocky soil no longer tended to, allowed to seep back into underbrush and sugar maple saplings, down to the marshy land near the river, with leafy skunk cabbage and spindly marsh marigold. I decided to walk along the stone wall, near to where Eben’s tenant house was, and then return to the Inn.
The moment I stepped into the yard, wending my way through a meandering, ill-kept garden path, I was confronted with Stanley’s annoying, barking dog, a yellow mongrel, who circled me, threatening, sniffing. I feared he would attack, though the barking was more plaintive than ferocious. I stepped back. The beast would approach, tentative, curious, then back away, as though afraid of me. Still, dogs and I had very little acquaintance, and I preferred to maintain that boundary between the canine world and myself. So I stood there, uncertain. And then I heard Stanley’s raspy, angry voice, still out front, calling the mutt, whose name I learned was Wolf. Appropriate, I thought—a wild beast. The Call of the Wild. I could hear Stanley’s voice getting louder as he felt compelled to enter Millicent’s backyard.
For a moment Wolf ran to the side of the house, out of sight, and sensing a moment of escape, I hurriedly turned off the path, deciding to return to the Inn, cutting through a copse of white birch saplings, growing wild by the cellar door.
Bustling through a clump of thick azaleas, bunched together by that bolted door that no one obviously used any more, I heard Wolf bark, begin to approach me. Irritated, I stepped lively, feet rustling fallen brown leaves. But I tripped on a stone and almost toppled, grabbing for the wall.
It was then, looking down into a pile of windblown leaves just yards from the back door, that I spotted the body of a woman lying in my path.
CHAPTER SIX
I sat in the kitchen of the Inn, numb now, short of breath, and realized I’d been sitting for an hour, unmoving, afraid to move, dreading any shift of my body. I wanted to stay frozen there, a statue. When I closed my eyes, I saw the body before me, lying there, just lying there. So much had happened in that static hour. My screams had attracted Stanley who hurried to my rescue, reprimanded his dog Wolf, whose barking had been his own indignation at the presence of a body in his path, it
seemed. And Stanley had made the telephone call from Millicent’s parlor, rousing the woman who was already lying down.
I had stayed with Millicent, but those next few minutes were a blur. I was a woman of strong and purposeful self-possession, with a hearty constitution, and I considered myself steely and resilient, a woman who could tackle most of life’s aberrations and mishaps. Yet my scream had been involuntary, without a choice in the matter. It wasn’t like me to play the winsome Victorian damsel, fainting away, the fragile maiden in need of smelling salts.
But the suddenness had startled me, and horribly. That, and the undeniable fact that my shoe had kicked the body.
With Stanley leaning over, with one oddly comforting hand on my shoulder, we’d stared into the blank dead face of Martha Small. I already knew it was she—not by her face, which was hidden by bushes—but by her dress and shoes. Martha wardrobe. Martha shoes. Sensible, conservative Martha. The Edwardian lady at home. Dead, however.
I had backed away, and stopped screaming.
Now, an hour later, all the alarums sounded, followed by a frenzy of police activity—even the volunteer fire department showed up, to my amazement—I sat alone in the kitchen of the Inn, listening to the frightful moaning of Carlotta, lying on a settee in the parlor, sedated by the family doctor. Carlotta had heard the commotion in Millicent’s yard, the sailing in of authority and ambulance, but her boozy hangover had made her lethargic, lazy. Idly, she’d left her bedroom and walked to the kitchen door, peered out, just in time to see me stumbling back to the Inn, putting distance between the body and myself.
“What is it?” she’d asked, trancelike.
“It’s Martha,” I said. “She’s dead.”
She seemed not to comprehend. “Dead? What?”
I repeated my awful line and walked past her, feeling the need to tuck myself into the folds of the Inn. I turned to face her. “I’m so sorry, Carlotta. But Martha is lying in the bushes behind Millicent’s house. She’s dead.”