The Ghost Orchid Read online

  Milo Latham told her that while he’d given his wife free rein in the planning of the gardens, he had maintained control over the architectural style of the house. The divergence of their tastes can be clearly seen in the contrast between the two. While Aurora loved Italy, Milo admired the Swiss and the English. And so the imposing mansion, looming over the gardens like the snow-covered Alps over northern Italy, is an eclectic mix of wood-framed Tudor and Swiss chalet, its rough-hewn spruce beams a testimony to Milo Latham’s lumber dynasty. A stone balustrade at the edge of the terrace stands like a border between the two realms, with even a matronly sentinel posted as border guard. For a moment Corinth thinks this figure is a statue as well—she holds herself so stiffly and her gray hair is the color of stone—but then she unfolds her hands from above her waist and, as her gaze falls on Corinth, her eyes widen.

  Corinth, too, is surprised, but before she can say anything, the woman turns or, rather, pivots like one of those clockwork automata Corinth has seen in town squares in Germany, and precedes Corinth through a pair of open glass doors.

  It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim room after the bright glare of sunlight on the marble terrace. She can just make out, at the far end of the long, narrow room, a figure seated in a wood-framed chair by the fireplace. Corinth is surprised to see that the fire is lit on such a warm day, but as she steps forward she sees that she was mistaken: what she had taken for flames is the streaming hair of a little girl—perhaps seven or eight years old, Corinth thinks—who is sitting cross-legged on a rug before the unlit grate, her long hair obscuring her face as she leans over a drawing tablet. When Corinth takes another step, the girl looks up from beneath her curtain of hair and Corinth is startled by something familiar in the girl, but then she realizes it’s only that the girl’s pose is the same as that of the statue of the captive Indian maid. She even has the same slanted eyes and the same look of cunning.

  “That will be all, Norris,” the woman in the chair says. Corinth listens for the sound of retreating footsteps, but hears nothing. The only way she knows the housekeeper has gone is by the absence of the fountain’s gurgle when the glass doors have closed behind her.

  “Come and sit by me,” says the woman, indicating an ottoman at her feet, “so I can see you. I want to see if the descriptions I’ve heard of you are accurate.”

  Corinth comes forward—pulling her skirts close to her as she passes the seated child, who doesn’t make any effort to get out of the way—and sits on the ottoman, lifting her eyes to meet the pale blue eyes of the mistress of the house. Aurora Latham takes her time observing her, and so, although she knows it might be politer to look away, Corinth has time to study her hostess. The first thing she notices is her eyes. They’re a blue so pale they aren’t so much the color of the sky as the color of sky reflected in water—not so much a color as the ghost of a color. Her hair is a lighter version of the child’s auburn hair, her skin a pure milky white.

  It is said in town that Aurora Latham is ill, that the deaths of her three children last year dealt the final blow to an already frail constitution. And yet, for all her pallor and thinness, she doesn’t look ill. She looks, Corinth thinks, like a woman haunted.

  “She’s much prettier than the last one,” the little girl says. “Can she make noises with her knees and toes like—”

  “Hush, Alice. Go sit with Mrs. Ramsdale for a little while.”

  Corinth turns her head and sees, in a dimly lit recessed alcove, a woman in an amethyst silk dress sitting at a library table writing . . . or, rather, she is holding a pen poised above a sheet of paper, her head tilted to show her fine Grecian profile to advantage, her eyes demurely lowered, so that her thick black eyelashes cast a shadow on the white porcelain of her cheekbones. A pose meant to indicate a woman of high society engaged in literary pursuits, and yet, Corinth can tell that the woman is acutely aware of her presence, while Corinth, until this moment, didn’t even know she was there. It’s not like her to enter a room without taking note of all its occupants. It must be the effect of passing all those statues in the garden: it’s made her lose her sense of what’s real and what’s not. She’ll have to be more careful.

  “But she is prettier,” Alice says sulkily as she gathers up her pencils and her pad.

  Aurora Latham looks up from her daughter to Corinth. “Yes,” she says slowly, drawing out the word, “but I’d heard your hair described as chestnut and it’s really more mahogany.” Aurora narrows her eyes—crinkling the skin beneath them, which is bluer than the eyes themselves—as if she had ordered a set of dining room chairs only to find they’d been fashioned out of the wrong wood. “But then, perhaps the persons who described you hadn’t seen you in a well-lit room.”

  Corinth smiles what she hopes is a cool, placid smile and says, “The harsh glare of light is not conducive to communicating with the spirit world. Electric light especially is thought to interfere with the currents upon which the spirits travel.”

  “So you will do a séance, then? And bring back James and Cynthia and Tam?” the girl asks.

  “Alice, I thought I asked you to go to Mrs. Ramsdale.”

  “Can I just show her my picture first?”

  “Very well,” Aurora says to the child, and then, lifting those transparent eyes to Corinth: “She’s made such progress under Mr. Campbell’s tutelage. Will you indulge her?”

  Corinth smiles without speaking, because the question is, of course, unanswerable. It’s not her place to indulge her hostess’s child nor deny her anything she might want. Alice rises and holds out the tablet.

  The pencil drawing is actually quite good. A dashing young man in fringed buckskin is battling with some sort of great-winged beast while a frightened-looking girl tied to a tree looks on. Corinth recognizes the Indian maiden from the maze fountain—the same ripe figure straining against the same buckskin dress, one sleeve of which is torn to reveal a rounded shoulder and bare bosom. Corinth lifts her eyes from the picture to the little girl, reassessing her age. It’s only her small stature, she sees now, that made her appear younger. She’s closer to eight or nine than seven.

  “Will the brave young warrior save the lady?” Corinth asks.

  “She’s not a lady; she’s only a stinking savage—”

  “That will be enough now, Alice. Leave me and Miss Blackwell alone. You’ll have to excuse my daughter,” Aurora Latham says as Alice, with an exaggerated sigh, drags herself into the darkened alcove and scrunches herself into a narrow ledge beneath one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “Since her brothers and sister have gone, my husband has made a bit of a pet out of her and my husband spent a great deal of his early life in the north woods of New York State—a noble wilderness from which Mr. Latham wrested the origins of his fortune, but not, I’m afraid, an environment conducive to refinement and culture.”

  Aurora lifts a long pale hand and twirls it over her shoulder to indicate the land north of the house—the thousands of acres of woods and lakes of the Adirondacks that stretch from here to the Canadian border. The house sits with its back to the woods, the terraced gardens sloping down, southward to the Hudson River and, by implication, toward the city and civilization. One can feel, though, the deep shadow of all those woods encroaching on the sunlit terrace, and Corinth, even though she sits with her back to the glass doors, has a sudden unbidden vision of the garden overgrown—the statues destroyed, the marble terraces crumbling, the hedges in the maze breaking free of their orderly, clipped shapes and transforming into great shaggy beasts like the one in young Alice’s picture.

  She takes a deep breath and, willing the vision to vanish, remarks, “Yes, I understand that Mr. Latham is in the lumber business.”

  “It’s where he made his fortune, in logging and in the glove factories west of here in Fulton County and in many other investments, which I cannot pretend to follow. His interests are . . . eclectic. He’s compelled to spend more and more time attending to business in the city, but he still li
kes to attend the log drive in the spring and watch his logs come into the Big Boom at Glens Falls. He used to take the boys up to the camp on hunting trips . . .”

  “So will he be joining the party here this summer?” Corinth asks, even though she knows she might be risking too much by asking such a direct question. But Aurora’s description of Latham’s lumber interests has only intensified her vision of a devastated garden—only now she pictures a river choked with logs bursting over the rim of the northern ridge and laying waste to the smiling nymphs and gape-mouthed satyrs. “I ask because I like to know who will be present in the circle.”

  “I’m afraid my husband is not a believer, Miss Blackwell. He agreed to ask you here as an indulgence to me.” Aurora closes her eyes briefly, as if modest of such an uxorious husband. “He has declared that he will not attend your séances, but he will join us tonight at dinner. I’m afraid he’s been delayed in the city . . . ah . . .”

  Aurora lifts her head just as Corinth hears the latch turn in the doors behind her. A breeze, smelling of pine and sawdust, touches the nape of her neck and chills the pockets of sweat still drying beneath the buttons down the back of her dress. She can feel the cool surface of the bone buttons like a set of fingers drumming into her spine and she cannot, for a moment, force herself to turn around. What if the vision inside her head—the ruined garden, the broken dam, the deluge of splintered wood—isn’t just inside her head?

  When she turns to follow her hostess’s gaze, though, she sees that beyond the darkened figure silhouetted in the doorway the garden lies placid and calm beneath the receding light of a summer afternoon. Corinth prepares her face to meet her host, but as the man steps into the room she sees he’s much too young and slim to be Milo Latham. It takes her only a moment longer to recognize who he is.

  Chapter Three

  “Corinth looked up, surprised to see her old friend Tom Quinn silhouetted in the French doors.”

  I say the line out loud for the third time, and then push back my chair, put my feet up on the desk, and stare out the window. This is where I’ve gotten stuck each draft. The problem is that I can’t decide whether Corinth Blackwell would have been surprised to see Tom Quinn at Bosco or if she knew very well that he would be there.

  The anonymous writer of the pamphlet I found at my mother’s house reported (on the authority of “sundry guests who were present at the séances that summer”) that Tom Quinn and Corinth Blackwell pretended not to know each other when they met at Bosco in 1893, but that there was reason to believe that they had once been “intimate.” I can’t tell what the pamphlet writer, who could be maddeningly opaque at times, meant by this word or upon what evidence the deduction was based, but I suspect that while Corinth didn’t expect to meet Tom Quinn at Bosco, they had been lovers before that summer. Would the sight of him, then, have aroused her old feelings for him? It is a difficult moment to pull off and I am beginning to despair of ever doing it.

  For not the first time I consider abandoning the book altogether. My old teacher Richard Scully was right. It’s really too hard and too big for a first book. There’s all the period detail—the minutiae of clothing and food and customs—and then there’s the ever-present threat that the use of those details will sound phony and the book will come out like one of those overheated bodice rippers that Bethesda Graham so disparaged last night.

  I thought that being at Bosco would inspire me to re-create the nineteenth-century scenes. After all, that is what Bosco is famous for: inspiration. From my window on the west corner of the house I can see one of the surviving Muse statues on the first terrace. Originally there were three Muses on each of the three terraces—a phalanx guarding the wellspring of inspiration that was supposed to flourish here at Bosco. Certainly Zalman Bronsky doesn’t seem to be lacking in inspiration this morning. There he is now, looking, in his loose linen smock and floppy hat, very Monet-at-Giverny, heading down the old fountain allée, saluting one of the Muses as he passes by, a spring in his step. He announced over breakfast that he planned to take a “sonnet walk” this morning. And he thanked me again for that line about the eloquence of water.

  As his green hat vanishes into the tangled overgrowth below the second terrace, I wonder if I shouldn’t try writing outside as well. It worked yesterday, at least for a while, when I sat in the grove at the western edge of the first terrace. Deep in the ilex grove I was able to imagine, for just a moment, what the hill must have looked like when the gardens were intact, the hedges clipped in neat geometrical shapes, all the statues standing, and the water flowing from terrace to terrace. I imagined Corinth Blackwell climbing that hill against the flow of all that water, approaching the house that would ruin her. I started to write, but then I was seized by the feeling that there was someone watching me, as if I had conjured up the ghost of Corinth Blackwell by the force of my imagination and she would, at any moment, appear before me. I closed my eyes then and banished the image from my mind. It was a foolish idea in the first place—Corinth Blackwell no doubt approached the house for the first time like everybody else, through the porte cochere off the main drive. After a few minutes my heartbeat slowed to normal; my fear was gone, but so was the little trickle of inspiration.

  It was just as Nat Loomis said last night on the terrace about the springs that had dried up: Not a particularly good omen for those who’ve come to drink at the wellspring of the Muses. Or, as I imagine Bethesda might say to me, maybe the problem is that there is no Muse of historical romance present on the grounds. Apparently Nat’s muse is with him this morning. I can hear the clatter of typewriter keys coming from his room next door. I’d read once in an interview he’d given that he used a manual typewriter to “make a physical connection to the words.” All morning the sound of the typewriter has summoned in my mind an image of Nat, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up above his forearms, the light from the garden catching the red highlights in his tousled brown hair. It’s an image, I decide as I pack up my laptop, a bit too physical for me. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from getting any work done.

  As I pass Nat’s room his door flies open and he sticks out his head, unbrushed hair standing on end. “Oh,” he says, sounding disappointed, “I thought you were the lunch delivery.”

  “Sorry,” I say, “I’m just going down to pick up mine and take it outdoors . . . Uh . . . do you want me to get yours?” Bosco tradition dictates that the tin lunch boxes are left sometime after breakfast in the dining room for the guests to pick up. I’ve noticed, though, that Nat has a different arrangement.

  “No,” he says, “Daria will deliver it when it’s ready. Mine takes a little longer because I have some special dietary requirements . . .” He leans closer and whispers, “Actually, it’s just that I couldn’t stomach those school box lunches anymore, so I told Diana that my ayurvedic nutritionist said I had to have hot food.” He winks at me and I nod admiringly at his connivance. Really, though, I love the lunches here—the diagonally cut tuna sandwiches, the scraped carrot sticks and homemade sugar cookies. The thermos of lemonade or hot cocoa. They’re exactly the kind of lunches I always begged my mother to make instead of her lumpy misshapen sandwiches made from homemade bread and pasty tahini spread.

  “Well . . .” I say, taking a step backward, “I don’t want to keep you from your work.” And, I think to myself, we’re breaking the rules talking between nine and five.

  Nat nods. “Yeah, yeah . . . I’m having a good morning . . .” He starts to close the door but before he can, I happen to look inside his room and notice that the paper sticking out of his typewriter is a piece of Bosco stationery. I can recognize the engraved insignia of a Grecian Muse pouring water from an amphora beneath a pine tree. Is he typing his novel on Bosco stationery, I wonder, or has all that earnest pounding on his typewriter been letter writing?

  “Good luck,” I say. He looks up before shutting the door and gives me a curious look. Who am I, after all, to be wishing Nat Loomis luck on his novel? But then he
grins and thanks me, and I suddenly have a good idea what the letter’s about. He’s writing his publisher for an advance on his advance.

  “I’ll need it . . . Ah . . . at least now I’ll have sustenance,” he adds, looking over my shoulder. I turn and see Daria Tate approaching us, swinging Nat’s tin lunchbox on her index finger.

  “Yeah, substanance, you could call it that,” she says as she passes by me. I hear Nat shush her, and then Daria giggles and the door to Nat’s room closes on both of them. I turn to leave, but then stop, sniffing the air. There’s something there, perhaps that ghostly vanilla scent from last night. Maybe it’s a scent that Daria wears. But no, I realize, it’s just the more earthy smell of marijuana seeping out from beneath Nat’s door.

  I try the arbor on the west side of the allée, where I sat yesterday, but Bethesda’s gotten there first. Although it’s silly, I can’t help thinking that Bethesda took it because she knows it is my favorite spot. Why does a biographer need the inspiration of working out of doors, anyway? Shouldn’t she be in the library reading letters from the archives? It seems, though, that everyone has decided to work in the gardens today. As I head down the hill—taking a narrow set of stone steps that winds down the west side of the hill rather than following the central fountain allée—I hear a whispering that at first I think is the wind, and then water, and then finally realize is Zalman Bronsky pacing up and down the middle terrace, repeating the same line over and over again.