The Widow's House Read online

  “It looks like the House of Usher,” I said to Jess as Katrine stomped on ahead.

  “Yes!” he said, his face shining with a thin sheen of sweat and unmistakable excitement. “It’s wonderful!”

  For not the first time in our marriage I noticed that for all Jess’s writerly powers of observation he tended to overlook some things—little things like the trail of bread crumbs he left on the kitchen counter after making his toast in the morning; bigger things like our mounting credit card debt. Right now he was clearly seeing a magical fairy-tale castle while I saw a large crumbling bio-habitat for mice and bats. Or perhaps he saw the big picture—the possibilities—while my eye was drawn to the imperfections, the flaws.

  “Would the caretakers live in the house?” I asked Katrine when we caught up to her at a side door.

  “Oh no!” Katrine said. “Mr. Montague likes his privacy. There’s a caretaker’s cottage down by the river. It’s quite cozy—and in much better shape than the main house,” she added in a lower voice.

  “What were you thinking, Clare,” Jess muttered in my ear. “Us field hands don’t live in the big house.”

  I suppressed a giggle as Katrine led us around to the addition on the north side. We passed under the old apple tree to a heavy oak door. She pushed it open and we stepped down into a dim, cool space. It was what my mother would have called the mudroom—which shared space with the washer and dryer in my childhood home—but which Katrine referred to as the boot hall. An assortment of boots and shoes that looked like they dated back to the mid-fifties lined the cocoa-matted floor. The walls were thatched so thickly with jackets, coats, dog leashes, canvas bags, leather satchels, and various gardening tools that the room had narrowed to a clogged corridor.

  “Should we take off our shoes?” I asked, doubtfully looking down at the grimy matting, caked with what looked like decades’ worth of mud.

  Katrine laughed. “Gawd no! You’ll step on a nail and need a tetanus shot. That’s all Mr. Montague needs. He can barely afford to heat this big place. He lives downstairs in a basement apartment”—she pointed to a doorway half hidden between the hanging coats—“but in honor of you two he’s opened up the library for us today. He’s waiting there.”

  “The Library,” Jess mouthed as we followed Katrine out of the boot hall and into an equally dark and cluttered corridor (this one lined with stacks of newspapers and empty bottles). “Where we shall take some more tea.”

  “I’ve had nothing yet,” I answered, recognizing Jess’s prompt from Alice in Wonderland, “so I can’t take more.”

  “You mean you can’t take less,” Jess finished in his Mad Hatter’s voice, “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

  I smiled and relaxed a bit. Quoting from Alice in Wonderland was always a sign that Jess was in a good mood. This was a game to him, an adventure. He was already turning it into a story to tell our Williamsburg friends at dinner. Our visit to the famous writer in his decaying mansion. I could see his eyes, hungrily scanning the dim hallway for details, cataloging the stuffed deer heads and peeling wallpaper and age-mottled prints of family ancestors. I paused in front of one sepia-tinted photograph of a young girl in a flimsy white dress crowned with a wreath of blossoms, wearing a sash that read “Apple Blossom Queen 192-,” the last digit obscured by the curve of her waist, and remembered that the town still crowned an Apple Blossom Queen each spring when I was in grade school. The Montagues owned orchards, which might explain the floral pattern of apple blossoms on the sliding pocket doors in front of which Katrine and Jess were waiting.

  Katrine knocked briskly on the doors and then slid them open to some inaudible summons within. As the doors opened onto the sun-filled room I caught, for a moment, the scent of apple blossoms on a spring breeze, a smell completely at odds with the damp, mildewed corridors through which we’d just passed.

  But then so was this room. When my eyes adjusted to the light I saw that we were in an octagonal room. Glass doors opened onto a stone terrace and a view of the sunken gardens bathed in the late afternoon light. Was the scent coming from those gardens? Only it was far too late in the season for apple blossoms and the apple orchards were on the other side of the house. I sniffed the air again, but the scent was gone. I must have imagined it because of the painted blossoms on the door, a motif that was echoed in the painted fire screen and plaster frieze on the high domed ceiling.

  “I see you’re admiring the room,” a man’s voice said.

  He was seated in a wing-backed chair behind a desk, the chair partly turned toward the glass doors so that I hadn’t seen him at first. He leaned into the slanted sunlight and motioned for us to come forward. As I walked across the room my feet sank into the thick carpet. Looking down, I saw that it was an oriental rug figured in the same pattern of apple blossoms.

  When I looked up I discovered that the man behind the desk was staring at me. “It’s Clare, isn’t it?” he asked, holding out a thin, trembling hand. “Clare Jackson. You were in my fiction workshop the last year I taught over at Bailey.”

  I took his hand, which felt like dry paper, and looked down at the man in the chair. My surprise at his recognizing me was nothing to my surprise at not recognizing him. Thirteen years ago, Alden Montague had been a hearty bear of a man. True, his hair had been white then, but he’d looked like Ernest Hemingway about to set off on a safari. This man had shrunk to half his former size and the full white hair was reduced to a wispy aureole around a sunken yellowish face. He really was ill. Still, his grip on my hand was strong and his eyes were the same icicle-sharp blue that I remembered skewering a hapless student who had uttered some foolish, ill-considered remark.

  “It’s Clare Martin now,” I said, stepping a little to the side so he’d see Jess. “You remember Jess, don’t you? He was in your class too.”

  For a moment I was afraid he didn’t. That would be the worst thing, I realized. Jess could tolerate disdain, criticism, even a vitriolic attack, but to be forgotten was Jess’s biggest fear. He once confided in me that he had a recurring nightmare of wandering through an empty house that was full of mirrors, but that when he looked in them they were blank. He cast no reflection.

  But then Alden Montague’s cavernous face split open into a wolfish grin. “Jess Martin! I’d hardly forget my most famous student. Come here, boy. Let me see you. You’re even more dashing than your author photo.”

  I felt, as Jess brushed past me to clasp Monty’s outstretched hand, how tense his muscles were and I recalled the way he’d struck out at the snake. For a moment I had the wild idea that he was going to strike Monty, but he took his hand instead.

  “Hardly the most famous student, sir, and perhaps mostly famous for a certain review in the Times.”

  “Heh, heh,” Monty laughed as he pulled Jess into a tenuous embrace. Jess still hovered a good six inches above the chair, his back tensed. “I believe I said you had the promise to write the best novel of your generation, son. I just didn’t think you’d done it yet. But you will. I feel it in my bones.”

  With that I saw Jess’s back muscles relax and he folded himself into the old man’s embrace. When he stood back up I saw that his face, washed in the golden light of the setting sun, was full of joy. This was why we were here—not because of any caretaker’s job—but because Jess had been waiting all these years for his mentor’s approval.

  “Well then,” Monty said, slapping his thin knees. “What do you say you finish your magnum opus here? I think that would be poetic justice, don’t you? I’d like to see my legacy confirmed before I die.”

  I turned away from them and went to look at the view as Jess half sat on the edge of the desk and they began working out the details of “the arrangement.” I knew there was nothing I could do or say to stop it, nor would I want to. To see that look on Jess’s face again was worth living with snakes and bats. It was the perfect solution, I thought, as I watched the sun begin to set over the Catskills, the river turning bloodred as it sank, to
all our problems.

  Chapter Two

  Before we left that day Monty took us for a tour of the house—a shadowy, dusk-lit tour because most of the rooms no longer had working lights.

  “I’m afraid the river damp plays havoc with the old copper wiring,” he said, chuckling amiably as if the climate were a worthy and entertaining adversary.

  The rooms were arranged in a circle, each room connected to the next as well as opening onto a central rotunda. “My great-grandfather subscribed to the theory that the octagonal shape magnified vital energy,” Monty lectured. “I know it sounds like hogwash but I’ve gotten some good writing done in this house.”

  After the library, though, the state of upkeep declined as though whatever “vital energy” generated by the house’s octagonal shape had withered and died. The parlor to the south of the library was papered in the same apple blossom print (“Designed by Candace Wheeler,” Monty told us proudly) but there were extra blooms in the pattern that I suspected were mold. At least it was furnished. Other rooms had furniture in them but not arranged to make the space livable. One room contained nothing but straight-backed chairs (“We had a girl from the college once who was going to upholster them but then she got an internship at Sotheby’s . . .”), one had an array of rocking horses lined up as though at a starting gate, their eyes milky in the dim light. Another room held boxes of papers that Monty airily referred to as “the family archives.”

  “I’m working on a book about the family,” he said as he took us up the grand staircase that now seemed to float in the murk of the central rotunda. The domed skylight that once lit the space was covered with a layer of green pollen, giving the stairwell a subaqueous pallor, an impression reinforced by the coralline configurations of mildew on the plaster moldings and the cobwebs that hung from the ceiling like seaweed.

  “So you’ve given up fiction?” Jess asked.

  I tensed, knowing what Jess thought of novelists who turned to memoir, but Monty only laughed and replied good-naturedly, “Yes, the last resort of the failing imagination, I’m afraid. But if you knew my family’s history you wouldn’t say I’d given up on fiction, lad. Untangling the layers of lies and omissions is like deconstructing a Henry James novel. But then you probably know something about it, Clare, seeing as you’re a local girl.”

  I was looking away at a portrait so dark I couldn’t make out the subject, so Monty didn’t see me wince. Local. It had been a while since anyone had called me that—or since it had meant anything negative. Buy Local, bumper stickers exhorted now. Think global, act local. It didn’t mean rube, charity case, or dimwit, I reminded myself, turning to Monty with a frown that he could interpret as polite embarrassment.

  “My father always said the villagers made up stories about the river folk because they were bored with their own lives.” I didn’t mention that he’d say it when my mother and her sisters were sitting around the kitchen table telling those stories. Or that his grandmother had been in service in one of the old houses.

  “Your family had that little orchard on Apple Ring Road, didn’t they?” Monty asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, supposing that fifty acres was little to a man who lived on five hundred. “They sold it in the Depression, but my grandfather stayed on as manager and my father after him.”

  “I don’t imagine he had much time or use for the foolish goings-on of the river folk, as you called us.”

  “No,” Jess answered for me. “Clare’s too high-minded for gossip. I’m always trying to explain that’s how we writers make our livelihood. Gossip and lies.”

  “Well, you’ll find plenty of both here,” Monty said, gesturing to the oil portrait I’d been trying to make out. “That’s my father, Alden Bayard Montague. Bay, as he was called. You may have heard of him—”

  “Didn’t he die in a shooting accident?” Katrine asked, peering at the murky portrait.

  “You’re being polite, Miss Vanderberg. It was ruled an accident by the police, but everyone knows it was the curse that killed him.”

  “Curse?” we all obligingly echoed. Although we were on the landing of a decaying mansion we might as well have been back in Monty’s Senior Fiction Seminar. He’d always been able to command the attention of his audience.

  “Ah, the curse, you have to hear about the curse, but first . . .” He was already striding around to the other side of the circular gallery, surprisingly fast for a man who’d looked at death’s door downstairs. Perhaps the house still had some pockets of “vital energy” after all.

  “Don’t let Mr. Montague scare you with his talk of ghosts,” Katrine said, lingering behind. “These old river families all lay claim to ghosts right along with their membership in the DAR and Colonial Dames.”

  I laughed. Of all the things I’d had to worry about lately—unpaid bills, finding affordable health insurance, bolstering Jess’s mood—ghosts seemed quaint. “I just don’t want him to get Jess going,” I said. “He’s got such a vivid imagination.”

  “Oh, he’d have to, wouldn’t he?” Katrine said, widening her blue eyes at me. “It must be pretty exciting living with a writer. Do you ever worry he’ll put you in his books?”

  She obviously hadn’t read Jess’s work.

  “Jess would tell you he doesn’t borrow from reality; he remakes it,” I said, parroting one of his interviews.

  “Oh,” Katrine said, “like God.” Then she turned to follow the men. She was smarter than she looked. Before I left the landing, I spared one last look for Alden Bayard Montague. It had grown even darker under the dirty skylight, but Bayard’s face loomed out of the gloom like a bloated fish belly bobbing to the surface of a pond. He had the bland, broad features of a Dutch patroon (despite the Frenchified name, the Montagues, like most of the old families around here, were mostly Dutch). Only the wide sensual mouth suggested his French lineage. His eyes, though, were cold as the ice floes that jammed the river in winter. I found myself shivering as if an icy breeze had blown in off the river and found its way onto the airless rotunda. The cobwebs and strips of wallpaper hanging from the ceiling, though, were still and limp. There was no draft, just the chill of those dead eyes. I turned and walked away from them to find Jess and the others.

  They were in a room on the west side of the octagon—a room that caught the last bit of evening light, perhaps because it was papered in a pale parched yellow that seemed to drink the light thirstily. The paper was unfigured except for white dots and a frieze that ran waist-high around the room. It made me think of that awful story Monty had had us read in his class about the woman who goes crazy from seeing figures in her wallpaper and ends up creeping around the floor trying to get inside the pattern. Looking closer, I saw that this pattern was an innocent parade of clowns and circus animals.

  “It’s a nursery,” I said.

  “My nursery, as it so happens,” Monty said, “only I didn’t use it past infancy. You see, Bayard married my mother, Minerva Delano Noyes—a second cousin of the Roosevelt Delanos—in the summer of 1929. She was soon—some would say suspiciously soon—with child. Old Bay was . . . well, let’s just say he had a way with the ladies.”

  He smirked at Jess, who flicked his eyes toward me, but answered accommodatingly. “A ladies’ man, got it.”

  “In fact,” Monty continued, standing with his back to the windows, his hands clasped behind him, so that he was silhouetted against the deepening indigo in the west, “he rather had an eye for the village ladies. He especially liked to judge the May Fair competition in which the daughters of the local farmers competed to be crowned Apple Blossom Queen. Perhaps one of your ancestors competed, Clare.”

  “My mother never said,” I lied. What she’d said was that it was a barbaric ritual that paraded farmers’ daughters like livestock in front of the local gentry. But then my mother was plain and probably had never even been asked to compete. “But I’ve seen pictures in the library and I noticed one in your hallway as we came through.”

  “Ah
,” he crooned. “Always the keen observer, Clare. I’m surprised with your beauty you aren’t descended from a former Apple Blossom Queen—”

  “Clare’s adopted,” Jess said. “So she got her beauty on her own.”

  I rolled my eyes like any good wife indulgent of her husband’s flattery, afraid to show how pleased I was. It had been a while since Jess had called me beautiful. It made up for his mentioning that I was adopted, which I didn’t like to tell people, but I knew it was one of Jess’s favorite facts about me. He said it made me like a character out of Dickens.

  “Oh!” Monty said, momentarily thrown, then quickly recovering himself. “But you see my point remains. You might be the descendant of one of the local Apple Blossom Queens and not know it. At any rate, Bay came down from Harvard in May of ’29 to crown the Apple Blossom Queen. After the crowning, the girl was lifted into a wagon, bestrewn with apple blossoms, toasted by the local populace and the river folk with apple cider, and paraded through town in a gay procession.”

  “Sounds positively medieval,” Jess remarked. “Let me guess, did they end the ceremony by burning her in a wicker basket along with a goat and corn sheaves to assure the fertility of the community?”

  “No,” Monty said gravely, “but that spring my father, having had a bit too much hard cider, took it into his head to drive off with the cart—and the Apple Blossom Queen. They disappeared in a cloud of dust on the Old Post Road and weren’t seen again for a week.”

  “Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” I said, thinking that I had heard this story before. Or read it. “Only with apples instead of strawberries.”

  “Exactly.” Monty beamed at me. “And with, I’m afraid, the same outcome.”

  “She got pregnant,” I said. Yes, I must have read it. It had the feel of a story out of one of those tourist books they sold in the town drugstore: Legends of the Catskills or Haunted Hudson Valley.