Grange House Page 2

  Under this blanketing velvet dark containing its faraway men and cigars, I yearned for color, a bright sweep of red flames to flare into being. It wasn’t clarity or vision I wanted, no—say instead that I had come to perceive there was something I lacked. That year, I had begun to read books as though begging entry, leaning to the pages as if pressing my ear to a door. Then it seemed the pages would sing out some strange song and, slight music that it was, I’d feel an answering swell of dim comprehension, though I knew that mine was the echo of the song, not the song itself. Sorrow; Rage; even a high, vaunting Gladness—these were foreign breezes from countries to which I had never voyaged, so each book became my little craft, each page a sail set out to catch those distant winds upon which Brontë, Pliny, Chapman, Ovid, all, indiscriminate, seemed to play. And I would sit at my window and strain into the dark behind the glass, longing to see through into the heat of my life, into the knowledge that I, too, would possess something at the heart of me to tell; that there was a promise held out for me. For me alone.

  “Good night, Miss Maisie Thomas.” Miss Grange’s soft voice stole around the column, a kind of tired laughter underneath the sound. I felt caught out. I turned to my friend.

  “Good night, Miss Grange.”

  But she had already vanished through the dark doorway, and I could just hear Papa’s muffled voice inside, pausing in his conversation to bid her good night as she passed by. In my mind’s eye, I followed the tidy figure as she mounted slowly to her room, imagining the light on her table rising, seeing her draw back the curtain to stand at her window. And my eyes refocused with hers, staring out at the white collars pocking the dark lawn. One separated from the crowd with a casual laugh backward over his shoulder. It appeared he had a meeting. My heart throbbed. I strained my eyes into the dark, but the lights from inside the house cast an obscuring perimeter. I stepped around to the corner of the piazza, which ran in front of the now-darkened dining room, and peered out.

  There! There was a white dress.

  It waited. The collar approached. I could hear the long legs of the man switch through the grasses. The two were meeting in a near corner of one of the fields that stretched by the side of the front lawn. I watched the collar bend, like a star gliding down to the waiting sea. I watched the two white arms rise.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My father believed I should be possessed of the rudiments of a classical education. He believed so in distinct opposition to my mother, who, herself fluent in French and Italian, was certain that the duress of a more concentrated regime would constrict the development of my other “charms,” thereby insisting upon small bunkers of learning to be established in the drawing room—the sewing table, the tea table, the piano—like in importance to the several Stations of the Cross.

  Nonetheless, Papa had persevered, setting my reading each week and establishing himself every afternoon at the top of our house in Brooklyn, where my dolls had given pride of place to the scratched covers of his boyhood schoolbooks stacked upon the old round table in the center of the room. “Commence,” he would say on entering, then seat himself in an easy chair by the window, tapping the sill with his long fingers. He carried into me the whiff of commerce—cigars and pipes and the sweet smell of his luncheon port still lingering in the air about him. And as I stood before him, reciting the Latin he had chosen, I watched him draw deeper and deeper into the old words I recited, closing his eyes and nodding to the cart-track rhythms and repetitions as I pulled him along upon the stories of another time, the brisk edges of his day falling from him as I spoke.

  Having heard me, he would sit a bit in silence, until my words had nudged loose an answering scrap of poetry in him. Though he had been trained to follow first one path and then another, my course followed the accidents of his own intellectual meanderings. A reverie he sunk into while walking home across the Brooklyn Bridge would lead him backward to Schiller and then over across the waters into Wordsworth’s sublime perceptions—and so he brought me the German and the Englishman as fellow countrymen in a realm of thought. He’d rise and cross to where I sat, pull a book from off the shelves, and we’d begin to read together.

  One afternoon that past spring, we were bent over a piece of work in silence, my eyes following as Papa traced the words upon his page, his finger beating time upon the table so I might hear the underlying song, when Mama suddenly entered. We were both so intent, we did not hear her. And when she gave a little cough, we must have turned twin pairs of blank brown eyes upon her, blinking like animals rustled from their cave by a crack of light.

  “I do believe you hardly see me,” she said slowly to us, making as if to leave.

  Murmuring her name, Papa leapt to his feet and led her to the table. “We were reading,” I offered.

  “Yes,” she said, refusing to sit. “Mr. Colgate waits downstairs.”

  “Mr. Colgate?” Papa was mystified.

  “Yes”—she looked down at me with a significant smile—“Mr. Colgate. The younger.”

  “Ah,” said Papa. And then they both smiled down at me.

  With this same unpleasant sensation of having been suddenly thrust out into the cold, I awoke the next morning at Grange House. Pulling the tossed bedclothes back up about me, I turned my head and looked out the window by my bed to see what manner of day lay in store. Behind the covering of gauzy white curtains hung a dense fog, from which the dark shapes of trees poked like bony fingers out of tattered gloves, promising a day passed with a good book downstairs upon the long settee.

  Just as I turned away from the window, it seemed as though the fog billowed, a darker shade of gray surging forward for an instant, then retreating. I drew up on my elbow and lifted the curtain—there was nothing but a blank repeating quiet, a veritable sound of gray. No! It came again. Then the darker gray drifted slowly free.

  I pushed off my covers and knelt upon the bed, my hands on either side of the window for balance, fixing the moving spot, a dull patter in my head. The fog blew between the dark trunks, leaving soft clumps upon the low branches like old women’s hair. The foghorn called out its lonely note. I blinked to make certain of what I saw. Through the fog, the dark smudge advanced toward the edge of the trees, and then—so whole and sudden as if sprung from Mr. Collins’s pen—I saw it was a figure, clad in gray.

  It looked up at the House with such mortal longing, I nearly cried aloud—and for several long moments, the pale face shrouded by its gray cloak stood staring, though I could not discern the features that gazed so fixedly upon us. It remained eerily still while the fog passed cross. Then the figure lifted up a hand and simply waved. Without hesitation, my own hand lifted in reply.

  The door opened behind me and there came a little shriek. “Why ever are you standing up in your bed, miss?”

  “Hush,” I replied, not turning from my post, though what I had seen disappeared again beneath the covering shroud of fog.

  “Ah, it’s that way this morning, is it?”

  “There is someone out there, Jessie,” I said quietly, still not wishing to turn my eyes away.

  “Aye, and there’s the good Lord up above, thank heavens for us all.”

  The fog was lifting slightly, I could see the tree line ridging round toward Grange House point, the sharp tips just freed of the covering gray. Nothing now greeted my attention, yet I crouched upon my bed in my white shift, staring through the curtains.

  “It was a girl,” I whispered, still watching the empty door of the boathouse. “Or was it a woman?” I reflected aloud. Jessie titched and moved from my side, but I remained where I knelt, unable to shake free the vision of that solitary gray creature upon the lawn.

  After a time, there came such clatter and bang behind me, I sat back from the curtain and turned round. Her freckled brow drawn into a sharp crease, Jessie prepared my wardrobe with terrible concentration, drawing the thin white dress from out of the shadows of the armoire, bearing it in her arms gently as a child, to lay it across the foot of my bed in rea
diness for the lace collar and cuffs, both of which she pulled from the silken lining of the cedar drawers.

  “What a lady you are making me,” I remarked, a bit testily.

  “’Tis only just your clothing, miss,” she answered, fastening the green-gold trim to the waist sash upon the dress, the arms dutifully stretched on either side of the cinched fabric.

  “No, no. Jessie, please to look at her,” I said, nearly as disquieted by this languid linen shape upon the bed as by the apparition in the fog. “How exhausted she is already.” Jessie snapped two petticoats in the air beside me and did not reply. I watched the slight dust shaken free from the bouncing skirts. And with that done, she ended further discussion, gesturing for me to turn my back so she could brush out my hair.

  Dressed for the day, I descended the carpeted stairs, pausing at the stairway turn to look out the vast window there, my thoughts in a jumble. The fog crossed swiftly now across the morning, and below the covering gray, the bright green of the lawn had begun to assert itself.

  Several guests sat already at breakfast. An older man with enormous white mustaches I had noticed the previous night crumbled a roll into his coffee with one hand while the other traced the lines of a letter that lay open in front of him. A hideously unattractive woman sat beside him, though lively eyes peered out the window into the brightening morning from her heavyset, rather mannish features. At another table sat a tidy little mother with her two fair children and their dark-haired governess, a plain Jane of a woman.

  Had none of them seen the gray figure? I looked round at the ordinary gathering. Not a one betrayed the slightest hint of the unease I felt. For though I liked a story, I reflected, taking my chair, the longing in that figure’s pose rather more unnerved than thrilled—as if a character had reached out a hand from the pages of a book and pointed, direct to me.

  “Shall we order a picnic for today, Maisie?” Mama asked, replacing my inborn thoughts with the airy vision of her lilac silk as she took the chair opposite. I grimaced.

  “Now Maisie, you’ll stretch your skin if you make such a face, and it will hang in pockets around your chin, making you jowly before you reach twenty-five.”

  I dutifully adjusted my face, resolving to continue my own thoughts.

  “But what sort of picnic, I wonder, hot or cold …” Mama paused.

  “Cold,” I answered, and the inward door swung slowly shut.

  “Yes, that is best.” Mama nodded at the new girl serving coffee, accepting the Sèvres cup into her hands with an appreciative sigh.

  “When I arose this morning”—I leaned forward so none but Mama would hear—“I parted my curtains and saw someone moving through the trees down by the boathouse.”

  “Saw someone?” Her butter knife did not pause.

  “Someone ghostly,” I added.

  “That was very likely your own papa gone out for his row,” replied Mama, now looking up at me. And then past me as her face shifted slightly, lifted a bit. “Ah, Mr. Cutting! Yes, of course you may join us.”

  The man bowed a thanks to her, nodded at me, then settled in the chair next to mine.

  “It could not have been Papa,” I pursued; “I’m almost certain I saw a woman’s face.”

  “That is enough, Maisie,” Mama said firmly, and smiled at the headmaster. Then into the consequent silence she plunged, talking of picnics. I watched my mother’s animated hands outline the shape of the wicker basket needed for our party, banishing to air whatever visions I might have seen. Mr. Cutting listened with great attention, breaking in now and then to exclaim at Mama’s plans, until, well into his second cup of coffee, he prodded the conversation round to his own excursions “en plein air” into the sublime regions of the Alps. I looked round. The other breakfasters were mopping up their crumbs, twirling their napcloths into the shining rings, and rising—papers or fancywork in hand—to set forward into the day. Mama barely noticed as I departed, taking up my hat and wrap from their hook by the door.

  My boots did not make a sound as I descended the wooden steps of the piazza, pulled into the damp. Now the fog hung loosely atop the trees, and I could feel the first heat of a sun struggling to pierce that vaporous buffer.

  I wandered down toward the dock and through the boathouse’s weathered gray interior, passing by the unpainted boards hung with life preservers, cast-off buoys, and skeins of rope wound sailor-fashion in tight circles out onto the wide surface of the pier built up high above the wharf, where several lobster traps were stacked against the wooden railings. Behind these, the scene was a wash of gray and black, the color of trees and grass and the white flashes of birch abandoned to this ribbon of sea still overhung with the thick gray. No wind blew motion into the water, and so, though the morning was damp, it was not chill, but rather edgeless. And though Mr. Homer would never paint so soft a scene, to me, such silence entranced. To me, the gray hollow beckoned.

  I heard the creak of oarlocks as oars turned in the metal cups, crossing and dipping, the water dropping off the blades in even sheets. Then advancing toward me out of that hollow, two rowboats came in slow tandem, side by side. And this time, it was no apparition, nor billow in the dense air. I could not see why the boats should be hobbled together, nor why with two men rowing they should come so slowly—and this eerie, dripping, slow, and quiet approach froze me to my spot. Two boys sat perfectly still in the bow of one boat, watching the water for rocks and calling out directions to the rowers, their small, scared voices chiming like warning bells. I saw it was Papa in one dinghy, and in the other I recognized Bartholomew Hunnowell. He had shed his jacket, and his shirt glowed against the dark band of that motionless sea. Each man had shipped his inboard oar, rowing forward with the outer, their two backs reaching and pulling together as they made their careful progress in to shore—and then, at last, I saw what they carried.

  Slung across the sterns lay a man and a woman—the cold arms clasped around each other and round what must have been the snapped mast of their wrecked boat. And the length of mast and man had forced the rescuers to sling the drowned pair awkwardly between the boats—half in one, half in the other—though I saw Mr. Hunnowell’s jacket was laid on the seat beneath their shoulders, looking for all the world as if he had meant to soften the hard ride.

  When they reached the wharf, the boys grabbed the rings on the pilings and pulled the doubled load in. Papa and Mr. Hunnowell shipped their oars and sat a moment conferring, the boys holding tightly to the dock in silence. Still, none of them had seen me, and I took care they did not discover me now.

  “We must loose them from the mast,” Papa said.

  Mr. Hunnowell nodded in agreement and directed the boys to tie the boats up and then to run fast as they might up the hill to the House for help. I could see the boys linger after they had slipped the lines through the dock rings, and so again, and this time more gently, Mr. Hunnowell directed them to go. I stepped back from the edge of the pier so the men should not see me if they followed the boys up the gangway with their eyes. The boys passed me by without a sound, racing each other across the pier and into the boathouse, their feet pounding upon the wooden planks and then vanishing up the dew-sopped lawn.

  I drew close to the top and looked down again. Standing side by side, each still in his boat, Papa and Bart Hunnowell considered the drowned pair. I could not see the man’s face, but his dark shirt had a great tear and the shocking white of his bare back reminded me of a small boy’s—though I could see he had been powerful once, and lithe. I glimpsed very little of the woman beneath him, save her bare arm reaching up across his back, her hand clinging even now to the neck of her beloved. He had wrapped himself around her and then clung fast to the mast, and thus to loose them from the mast was to break the two of them apart.

  Clearly, neither Papa nor Mr. Hunnowell wished to do this, for they hesitated, standing silently above the pair. At least Bart Hunowell gently touched the man’s hand as if in greeting, and Papa began to pull the stout mast from the dead
man’s grasp so it might fall over the side of his boat. Hand over hand, Papa eased it through until the mast slid free and quietly sank back into the water.

  But the mast had served to link the boats, and now the sterns of the two dinghies began to yawn apart. Mr. Hunnowell reached forward to grab the clasped torsos of the man and woman, just as Papa’s boat swung wide and the bottom half of the bodies plunged into that freezing water. Suddenly Mr. Hunnowell was pitched into the sinking stern of his boat, clutched in a terrible embrace and the full weight of the dead dragging him down with them.

  I gasped and stepped onto the gangway.

  “Maisie!” Papa shouted to me, and I ran the remaining feet down to the dock and knelt there, reaching to grab hold of Mr. Hunnowell’s shirt just as Papa caught the dinghy’s side to stop the desperate tipping. For an eerie moment, we five of us, living and dead, clung together, trying to stay gravity’s pull. Softly, the balance tipped.

  “Are you able to hold them?” Mr. Hunnowell grunted to Papa.

  Papa lay down upon the stern seat of his boat and stretched himself over the gap between the boats, to catch hold beneath the man’s arms. The woman’s head lolled to the side, though still her face remained obscured by her hair. Papa nodded, and Mr. Hunnowell let go of the drowned; he turned and reached up to grab my outstretched hand and pulled himself up onto the dock.

  “Thank you,” he said to me, catching his breath. I nodded, suddenly shy. He rolled onto his stomach, taking care to hook his feet into the iron rings behind us at the other edge of the dock, reached back down with one hand and caught the woman’s wrists firmly in his grip, so Papa did not bear all.

  “Get some help, Maisie,” Papa said. “I do not see how we can bring them onto the dock.”