Grange House Page 4

  As I issued from the sitting room, I chanced to hear Ruth’s voice twittering away still from one of the piazza swings. I could not make out what she chattered on about, and I turned toward the stairs, until my gait was arrested by the sound of my own name rising to me from the mud of her conversation. I paused in my step. And then quite clearly, I heard, “Maisie Thomas?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “But he is famously undependable.”

  “Nevertheless, I think they would make quite a good match.”

  “stuff!” I said aloud to the empty hallway, and quickly ran up the stairs to the head of the passageway. A breeze stirred the white curtains in the windows at the end of the passage. Before me was all light and color, and the hush of shut rooms. No one was about. I stopped, my hand upon the newel post, suddenly unable to take a step farther into that silence, as though I had stumbled upon the fold between the earthly and the heavenly world, and the House around me bore mute witness. Who was I, standing there? The quiet passageway regarded me.

  A door was shut somewhere in the back regions of the house. Then came a sound of footsteps that returned me to myself. Here I was, after all—Maisie Thomas. I crossed over, stepping softly down the carpeted hall, and opened the door to my bedroom. My parents’ room lay directly adjacent to mine, an armoire disguising the door connecting the two rooms. The Grange who had built this house had been a thrifty man, for the walls, though numerous, were not thick. I was long accustomed to falling off to sleep in the summers to the sound of my parents’ muffled conversations, and, in particular, to my father’s voice, his words often unintelligible but his tone insistent and amused.

  Once I overheard Great-Aunt Julia remark dryly that my father’s love for my mother “certainly was lively.” I did not understand her meaning and watched my parents closely to see if I might observe the nature of that liveliness. It is true that my parents were a handsome couple: Though my father was twenty years my mother’s senior, his shock of white hair curled above his pleasing ruddy face like a fleecy cloud and made an admirable contrast to my mother’s jet black hair and darker complexion. I cannot think of the two of them together without imagining my father pacing back and forth in front of my mother’s seated figure, gesticulating as he told her a story pulled from his day, or outlining a design for some new project. Lively, my papa certainly was—and often I heard my mother give him back a delighted silvery laugh when they thought they were alone.

  Jessie had already prepared the room for the change to dinner, and my sheerest blue linen dress lay stretched upon my bed. But the lingering light at the open window drew me, and the salt air bade me breathe. I put my hands upon the sill and closed my eyes, the light slanting cross my lids like a warm hand.

  “Must Maisie marry?” I heard Papa ask distinctly, his question lazing in the air outside my window. My eyes flew open. Mama’s reply was indistinguishable from the breeze through the pines. I pushed the window up as wide as I could without making any sound.

  “I know that, my love. And she has your charms—all of them.”

  Again, my mother murmured a hazy reply.

  “Nonsense, Libby. She shall stay with us at Two Pierpont, type my contracts, continue her studies, and live happily between us as she always has.” Now I heard the teasing note in Papa’s voice. The whiff of his pipe accompanied his words as they reached me there at the window next to his. A breeze slapped the line against the flagpole, and the sound beat out until it seemed to gather shape in my ear—marry, marry—like the hum of a distant train approaching, growing louder and louder.

  Flushed and annoyed, I turned and walked around my room, seeking distraction. I picked up the hairbrush and began vaguely to take out my pins, then stopped abruptly, my eye stuck upon the blue cover of The Mill on the Floss. My eyes filled again, for the ghosts and the girls. I looked in the glass and started to find that I had half-undressed myself—my hair come loose from its Psyche knot and lying down about my shoulders, my dress opened at the neck and cuffs.

  Leaning into this sight, I regarded the face there. Her thick hair was parted down the center and hung loosely on either side of her face before it was caught up at the nape of her neck, her pale skin shining out from amidst that luxuriant dark mass, giving the effect of a lit stage appearing from behind the parting curtains. Her dark brown eyes were round and bright, and they stared back with a hunger I recognized, looking directly at me, her hand holding her hair from her neck so the white length gleamed in the mirror. The shoulders a little high. The eyebrows a trifle thick. The soft lines of her chin and mouth below a cool eye, considering.

  “And what do you want, my princess?” I whispered to the girl in the glass. But she broke into pieces at the sound of her own voice, and the image of beauty shivered into my flushed cheeks, my crystal earrings, the unbrushed hair curling and untidy around my face. The first dinner bell sounded below. “I renounce all of it,” I said aloud and portentously, though my hands still did their business, reaching for the buttons behind, pulling my tea gown from off my shoulders, and letting the gray silk slide from me, leaving it to pool around my boots on the floor. I stepped from it and turned to take up the dinner dress Jessie had readied. Again I regarded myself, my hands fastening and arranging, my eyes steady on my task. I pulled my hair up and off my forehead, sweeping it back with a dark green ribbon upon which I had sewn three tiny periwinkles last summer. The second bell sounded.

  “Maisie?” Mama called from the passage. “Are you ready?” In answer, I opened the door to them, and without speaking, turned back into the room to lower the gas by the dressing table. I caught Papa’s stare as I passed by the mirror, and suddenly I wanted it all to stop—this silvery slide into men’s eyes, into the story told generation after generation of breathless lovers brought into the hushed house where efficient, silent women polish the brasses of a twilight dream. I leaned and looked again at the girl in the glass and shivered. Wasn’t I just like Halcy after all? For here I was—dressed to play the romantic heroine. How easily was I cast. Stop! I wanted to call to Mama and Papa. But my parents had begun to descend the stairs, and all I could do was to follow them.

  The guests were assembled in the sitting room, awaiting the summons to dinner, the entire party, it seemed, now bent on forgetting, or not mentioning, the tragedy of the morning. My gaze lit on Cynthia and Ruth arranged together in the far corner in a diorama of fetching young womanhood, slowly turning the pages of one of Mr. Audubon’s big picture books, exclaiming at the mysteries of the nature painted there and wondering aloud at the various names. I could see they played at a charming lack of interest in the several young men standing by the fireplace. Dr. Lewes and his wife conversed with the Harringtons, and it was to this group that my own parents moved. I drifted to the piano behind Cynthia and Ruth and stood there awkwardly, fingering sheet music with a great degree of absorption.

  “Oh look!” I heard Cynthia exclaim, and I turned round.

  An elderly woman flanked by two strikingly fair young men had appeared in the doorway. And much to my surprise, Papa rushed forward to greet the trio, shaking one man’s hand vigorously and bowing to the woman. A brief conversation ensued and then Papa led the three over to Mama and the Harringtons.

  “May I present Mrs. Lanman of Boston?” Papa said. Mr. Harrington bowed to the lady. “And her two sons, Mr. David Lanman”—the smaller one bowed self-consciously—“and Mr. Jonathan Lanman.” The latter took Mr. Harrington’s offered hand and nodded politely to the female members of the group.

  “Mr. Jonathan Lanman,” Papa announced, “is a new partner in the line. He will be the fourth man in the New York office.”

  Mr. Harrington congratulated Mr. Lanman on his post. “And,” he continued jovially, “what a glorious stroke to join the fray down on Wall Street, rather than to continue languishing among those Boston straitlaces!”

  Mrs. Lanman smiled, but her son stiffened visibly. “My father was of old Boston stock, sir, and I was proud to ‘lan
guish’ there, as you say.”

  “Well, Jonathan, I think no offense was meant.” My father chuckled. “Just another indication, I’m afraid, of how ill-mannered we southerners are in the babel of Manhattan.”

  Mama leapt into the breach. “And Mr. Lanman,” she said, addressing the younger brother, “are you also an aspiring shipping magnate?” He blushed and mumbled, “No, ma’am.” And despite Mama’s welcoming attention, he did not elaborate, indeed seemed incapable of continuing any sort of conversation. Mrs. Lanman, however, turned toward Mama, asking some small question about the weather here, and Papa took the opportunity to engage Jonathan Lanman in a slight business matter.

  I turned away to look out upon the twilight, the sharp tops of the trees cutting a ragged black line along the sky streaked with clouds and the leftover color of the day. Leaning my forehead into the glass, I was aware of Cynthia’s figure standing beside me, shed of Ruth for a rare moment and able to rest quietly there.

  There was a moon that evening, just rising, a bright white orb in the darkening sky. We both lifted our eyes to it and watched in silence as it topped the tree line of the near cove.

  “Mother, I will,” said Cynthia, and then she turned to me, her face grown unexpectedly solemn. “Do you remember that phrase, Maisie?”

  I shook my head, mystified.

  She smiled and turned back round to that moon, resting both her elbows upon the sill, her face tilted up to the light. “It is what Jane Eyre calls back to the moon, on the dreadful night where she is in danger of losing her soul.”

  “To Rochester?”

  Cynthia nodded.

  I smiled. “I detest that scene. I think she should have stayed with him the whole while, and never left.”

  “And never met the Rivers?”

  “Never left the side of the man she loved.”

  Cynthia frowned at me over her shoulder. “She would have forfeited her soul!”

  “Because her lover was married to a madwoman?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged, enjoying the consternation I caused in Cynthia, then grandly proclaimed, “Love is love; there is altogether too much fuss made about marriage.”

  “Maisie!”

  I had shocked her, and when the bell rang us into dinner, she hurriedly joined her parents. I lingered at the window for an instant, looking back up at the moon. My daughter, flee temptation, the moon had cried. And Jane Eyre had answered, Mother, I will. But that night, the sky appeared to me filled with motherless daughters, and the moon’s face seemed to be Halcy’s peering down.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Grange House slowed and quieted in the days following Halcy’s and Henry’s deaths, the afterclap of their loss heard in the hush belowstairs and all about the House, as if a breath were taken but not released—until the plain pine coffin drew slowly forward through the front door.

  I watched the three women of Grange House pass by in the open cart bearing Halcy to her grave. At opposite ends of the cart bench, Cook and Miss Grange sat mute and frozen, struck into a strange resemblance by their uncompromising sorrow. Between them sat Mrs. French, who could not keep herself from leaning over to Cook and whispering encouragements with each forward step of the horse, though Cook stared straight ahead, unhearing. Just as the cart vanished from sight, I saw Miss Grange look back once, as if she had been called. Then she turned right round and placed her hand upon Halcy’s coffin, and she left it there as they passed through the trees upon the road toward Middle Haven.

  The following morning, I arose and instinctively lifted the curtain to look down the lawn, as if I might spot Halcy there. The blue waters shone back like shook foil. July arched overhead. I let fall the gauzy stuff.

  And that day passed, and then the next, and another, until a full week had gone by since she had drowned. With slow returning life, the House started up, its meals eaten, small excursions ventured upon, the fires in the evening banked, then stirred again at dawn. Gently, inexorably, the terrible incident was carried under by the quiet force of summer. Gradually, the guests grew familiar and lazy, the city politesse thrown off and formal names, like hats and gloves, set by and left, to be taken up again in autumn. Eatons, Harringtons, Hunnowells, Havemeyers, Lamonts, Phillips, McGoverns: All became loose dots upon a landscape of summer, dark trousers tucked into high clamming boots, shell aprons tied over white cambric blouses—groups that met and formed, walked out or sat, accompanying one another across the green lawn.

  One afternoon, I stood deep among the raspberry bushes at the side of the House, pulling the ripe berries from their stems, the juice staining my fingers in a vain protest. My hands ventured carefully among the thorny stems and green leaves, determined to overcome the watchdog vines in search of my prize. The heavy droning of the bees hung about me, partners in delight at the sun and the rich smell of the earth and the fruit. I knew myself to be the only picker at that hour, and I said a silent congratulation on my enterprise as the bowl behind me filled.

  “But then, what is it you mean to do?” Mrs. Hunnowell’s voice burst out upon the piazza above me. I crouched farther down so as to pick unremarked.

  “Do, Mater? Whatever do you mean?” Mr. Hunnowell teased.

  “With your time, Bart. Your time. It is several years since you returned from Tunisia—this letter of your father’s is a grand proposal.”

  He snorted. “Why ever not? Your books were a great success.”

  Now there came an overly dramatic sigh—still, he was light.

  “They certainly were,” Mrs. Hunnowell insisted. “Why not capitalize? If you don’t wish to take up Father’s business in the Far East, then why not pen a little collection of tales, such as gentlemen do—”

  “Gentlemen,” Bart broke in hurriedly, “can rarely spare the time to write.”

  “Oh?” Now Mrs. Hunnowell was affronted. “And what of Sir Walter Scott?”

  “Sir Walter Scott wrote the same story over and over and over again.” Bart had seated himself on the verandah railing. “Adventure! Romance! Country! Tra la! In any event, Mater”—the slack, teasing voice suddenly tightened with regret—“I am no writer. I cannot plot. I can only watch—and comment.”

  “Well, dear,” his mother began brightly, “‘They also serve who stand and—’” I looked up. Bart Hunnowell had departed mother and conversation and was halfway down the lawn.

  A terrific racket broke out just then upon the piazza. Mrs. French had gathered the children staying at Grange House to pick raspberries for a tea cake, and as they ran down the wooden steps of the House with their bowls in their hands, descending on the patch and on my solitude, I rose up and watched. Mrs. French stood at the front of the piazza, directing three of the children toward a clump of bushes farther down the lawn, waving with one hand distractedly as she held her dog in the other.

  Hattie and Sylvia Havemeyer strayed shyly toward me, clutching their bowls to their chests.

  “Do you have some berries, Maisie?” they whispered.

  “Berries? There aren’t any berries around here,” I said firmly, and stepped in front of their view of my full bowl. They halted, nonplussed. Sylvia fidgeted with her apron; the older of the two, she wasn’t quite sure whether they had suddenly entered into a game of my design or whether, in fact, there were no berries at all. She opened her mouth to ask again; then suddenly, both she and her sister shouted with laughter, dropping their bowls and clapping their hands at something behind me.

  I whirled round to catch Bart Hunnowell holding aloft my bowl of fruit and making a great show of eating the berries one at a time, throwing a raspberry up into the air and then tossing his head back to catch the falling fruit directly into his open mouth. I moved to grab my bowl from him, but he nimbly sidestepped my reach and started away across the lawn in front of the House to the bordering fields, the bowl held high above his head. The girls started running back down the lawn to catch him, and the other little ones, seeing a game, ran after. Suddenly, he stopped, turned around
, and waved at me, as if to challenge me to come after my own harvest. In spite of myself, I smiled—against the dulling yellows of the field grasses, his masculine form breathed color and life, and his brown arms, raised higher than the reaching hands of the jumping children, made of his body a taut and sturdy line, a mast amidst the swell of childish bodies hurling themselves against him. In that moment, and seen safely at a distance, Bart Hunnowell appeared to me to be burning with the pure flame—more, to be the single flame itself—filled with a vital warmth, of life. Of living. I smiled.

  Jonathan Lanman stepped out upon the piazza just at that moment and stopped, one foot upon the top stair, arrested by the happy chaos in the fields, his hands in his pockets and his mouth pursed in what might have been a silent whistle. He stood looking at the group in the fields for a good long while, his head cocked a bit to one side, as though he were in a picture gallery, changing his stance every so often for a better viewing. His clothing abetted this appearance, for though the day was warm, still he wore his jacket and tie. But there was a passion in the manner of his gaze that belied the calm appearance of a merely appraising gallerygoer—he stared at the children as though he saw through them into a grander arrangement, as though they represented something larger than themselves. Could he see it, too? Life, sheer abundant summer life, careening joyous and wild before us in the field.

  The sight, with its infectious joy, made me bold, and suddenly I wished to speak aloud of it to this man, for Papa clearly held him in high regard, and the past weeks had left me not insensible to the good sort he was. Often I had observed him handing his mother into her chair, or sailing with his brother, and I had noted how easily he managed the turn from family man to businessman as he discussed office topics with my father. In my presence, however, he remained quite silent, forever polite, a bit grave, and thus somewhat tantalizing.