The Widow's House Read online

  “Yes, and her dear old dad came to Riven House with his disgraced daughter, demanding restitution. To give my father credit, he always claimed afterward that he was willing to marry the girl, but his father, Birdsill Alden Montague, said he’d cut him off without a penny. Old Birdie sent the farmer packing with a deed for a hundred acres of apple trees and shipped my father off to New York, where he was paraded in front of that year’s crop of debutantes. He was soon married to his second cousin twice removed, little Minnie Noyes, my mother.”

  “What happened to the apple blossom girl?” I asked even though I thought I remembered the end of this story.

  “Her father married her off to the son of the farmer who owned the adjoining farm. Not a bad settlement for the time, considering he could have washed his hands of her.”

  “I suppose it depends how she liked the farmer’s son,” I said, thinking of my mother’s bitterness at being married to a farmer. She would have loved to have gotten out of the old farmhouse I grew up in and moved to that split-level faux Colonial Jess had stuck his nose up at. “Not everyone takes to farming.”

  “Events would suggest she did not,” Monty said. “It’s hard once you’ve tasted champagne to go back to beer and I imagine my father gave her plenty of champagne that week they spent together. But what choice did she have? An unmarried mother today has it hard enough. Imagine what it would have been like in 1930.”

  I caught Jess’s eye but then looked away. We both knew we were thinking of the fight we’d had in college.

  “She could have given the baby up for adoption,” Katrine said. “There was an orphanage and home for wayward girls right here in Concord. St. Anne’s—”

  “Ah, imagine knowing you had a child in this world but not being able to hold it and watch it grow up,” Monty said, shaking his head and looking so sad that I wondered if he regretted never having children. I looked at Jess, but this time he was the one to look away as Monty went on with his story. “In the end she might have been better off giving the baby to St. Anne’s. She married the farmer’s son and had the baby on a cold night in February in the middle of an ice storm. The roads were so bad the midwife couldn’t get to her. Her husband helped her best as he could I suppose, poor fellow, but must have fallen asleep after the baby was born. When he woke up she and the baby were gone. She must have been half out of her mind. She took the baby, wrapped in a blanket, and carried it to the steps of this house where she laid it down and left it. Maybe she thought someone would hear it cry, but the night was loud with the crack of trees breaking under the weight of the ice. As for the girl, she walked around the back of the house and out onto the frozen pond. Halfway across, the ice broke and she went down under it. They found her in the morning, frozen under the ice, her eyes staring up at the sky.”

  Monty shook his head. It had grown so dark in the room that I couldn’t see his expression.

  “And the baby?” I asked.

  “The kitchen maid found it in the morning,” he said, looking up, no smile on his face now. “Her scream so shocked my mother, who was pregnant with me at the time, that she went into premature labor. Luckily, the housekeeper was trained as a midwife, or no doubt I would have suffered the same fate as the apple blossom girl’s baby. I survived . . . but the experience changed my mother. She’d sustained an injury to her back during childbirth and was given laudanum for the pain. She began having delusions that the apple blossom girl haunted the house and was jealous of her and her baby. She said she saw the girl’s ghost standing above the weir at the end of the pond and standing on the terrace looking up at the nursery window. Then she refused to take care of me because she said I wasn’t hers. She thought her real baby had been taken away and I was a fairy changeling. She became so agitated that my father feared she’d hurt me. She must have been suffering from postpartum psychosis, but of course no one knew about that then. They sent her away for a rest to the Hudson River Mental Hospital.”

  “I wouldn’t call that a restful place,” I said, rubbing my arms to banish a sudden chill.

  “Neither would Minnie, I’m afraid. When she came back she shot my father with his own revolver. It was ruled an accident, but everyone knew by then that Minnie was mad. The villagers saw her wandering the house and grounds in her widow’s weeds—even after she was found dead in the bathtub, her wrists slit.”

  “How dreadful!” Katrine said.

  “Yes. That’s when the locals started calling the place Riven House. I was shipped off to live with cousins in Hartford. The old place was left to molder and decay. Technically it belonged to me, but I didn’t have much interest in it. After college I went to Europe and started writing. It was only when I got the position at Bailey College that I decided to live here again. Since my retirement I’ve been hoping to put the place to rights . . .”

  He looked around the darkening room and then at us as if he’d forgotten for a moment to whom he’d been telling this story. I’d seen that look in class sometimes. It had always made me nervous that he had lost the thread of his lesson, but he always found it again and he did now. “That must seem crazy, eh? To come back to a house where so much bad has happened. But a place like this . . . once it gets into your blood, you’re never free of it.”

  Chapter Three

  In the weeks that followed I thought about what Alden Montague had said about places getting into the blood. Was Concord in my blood? I had done everything I could to get away from the small town where I’d grown up. Sure, the view from those river mansions was beautiful, but the view from the tiny farmhouse where I’d grown up was mostly of mud, ice, and snow. Monty’s story had brought back memories, though, of apple blossoms in the spring and apple picking in the fall. I was sure that I’d heard it before and thought that I had even written something about it at some time—back when I was still writing. Maybe moving back upstate would reignite that creative spark.

  I was sorry, though, to be leaving our Brooklyn apartment. It was the first floor of a Williamsburg loft that Jess and I had bought with the money from his first advance. We’d considered ourselves modest not buying a whole brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time, but Jess had fallen in love with the high ceilings, vast space, and arched windows, as well as its proximity to the burgeoning café and art scene in Williamsburg.

  “We’ll just wait out the old folks on the second floor and buy them out when I sell the second book.”

  Now the “old folks”—a CUNY professor and his psychologist wife—bought us out for their son and his wife, who had recently graduated from Bennington. We were lucky to sell so quickly and smoothly in the current market—our friends told us horror stories of buyers demanding extensive work before signing—but I had a hard time watching the Bennington couple measuring our living room for their Ikea bookcases and West Elm coffee tables.

  “I wish we could afford something like this,” the wife, a design student at Pratt, said, running her hand over our dining room table. “It’s a Bend Becker, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I admitted, stroking the reclaimed barn oak that had been polished to a satiny sheen. “But he wasn’t so well known when he made this for us.”

  “It’s a custom piece!” she exclaimed, her voice warbling with excitement. “Copper, did you hear that? Bend Becker made their dining room table.”

  Copper, who’d cornered Jess into a discussion about the current state of publishing, said, “Shit, man, a Bend Becker. I bet you write on that table for inspiration. I don’t suppose you’d want to sell it? I mean, it does kind of go with the space.”

  I was sure that Jess would say something about inspiration coming from the head, not a block of insensate wood, but I was surprised to hear him ask instead, “How much would you give me for it?”

  The wife—whose name, unbelievably enough, was Penny (“We knew we were, like, meant for each other because of our names, although of course his real name’s Copernicus and mine’s Penelope”)—had gotten
up to whisper in her husband’s ear. He had then, in a cracking voice, offered us five times what we’d paid for the table. I still thought Jess would turn it down—he had written the last (burned) draft of the second novel on it—but instead he said, “Wow. I wish my career were doing as well as old Bend’s. You have yourself a deal.”

  When they had gone I asked him why he hadn’t asked me if I wanted to sell the table. He blinked, surprised at the question, then said, “I thought you hated that table. You were furious at me for spending so much on it. We had a terrible fight and then . . . oh . . .”

  I tilted my head and looked up at him sideways, fingering the wood.

  “. . . and then we made up on it,” he finished with a crooked grin. He ducked his head and burrowed it in my neck. “Whoops. I’m sorry, Clare. Do you want me to tell them we changed our minds? Shall we tell them . . .” he said, nibbling on my ear, “that we can’t get rid of the Bend Becker because it’s where we always have our makeup sex?”

  I slid onto the table and tugged his head up by his hair. He gasped at how hard I pulled.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “We can have sex for a week at the Mercer for what they’re paying for this table.”

  He grinned back at me, my coconspirator, and pulled my hips toward him over the slick surface. “Then let’s say we give the Bend Becker a proper send-off.”

  I WOULD HAVE sold the Bend Becker, which really was a monstrosity and would have cost a fortune to move, and every other stick of furniture we owned to get Jess back in my bed. We’d barely made love for months—practically a year, if I were being completely honest. At first I’d attributed the drop in his libido to writer’s block and then, when he started writing, to his preoccupation with the new book. Then I wondered if he was having an affair. He disappeared sometimes for hours—seeking the muse, he’d say, not giving any more specifics.

  “Is the muse that tattooed barista at Sweetleaf’s?” I’d asked nastily when he came back late one night smelling of clove cigarettes and dark roast coffee.

  He’d slept in his study after that.

  Now, though, our tryst on the table (as Jess dubbed it) lit a match to our dry spell. We made love in our bed again that night and in the morning he slipped into the shower with me and slid inside me from behind as suddenly as he’d struck that snake. If I hadn’t had to deliver a galley in Manhattan we might have stayed in bed all day. When I got home he’d set the table with candles and the white Jasper Conran china that his editor had given us as a housewarming present, and takeout from Samurai Mama. We didn’t make it past the kuro edamame. We made love more times in twenty-four hours than we had in a year.

  It had been the anxiety over money, I saw now, even though Jess had pretended not to be worried. That had been my job: fretting over the diminishing savings account, taking more freelance editorial jobs to pay the bills. Jess always said he’d be happy to live in a shack. Now he seemed almost gleeful to see our possessions go in boxes to the vintage stores on Wythe Avenue and the Salvation Army. Even our books he tossed eagerly into cardboard boxes bound for the Strand—the signed ones from the dozens of readings we’d attended over the years, the review copies publishers sent him, the expensive art tomes he’d bought when, for a year, he’d thought his protagonist was a painter. The only books he kept were the classics—mostly what he’d read in Monty’s class—and the remaining copies of his first novel, which he’d bought up rather than see them pulped. The shaking off of possessions and debt made him a new man. He even suggested we have a dinner party—something we hadn’t done in longer than we hadn’t had sex.

  I invited Jess’s agent, Ansel, his Dutch animal rights activist wife, Hanneke, my old publishing friend Marika, her partner, Duma, and our poet friends Abe and Yuriko, who both taught at Brooklyn College.

  “Quite the literary salon,” Jess said when I listed the guests. “What does Duma do?”

  “She’s in PR at Hachette and writes YA.”

  “Why A?” Jess asked. “Why not B?”

  I swatted him with a dishcloth and went back to marinating tofu. Because of Hanneke the meal would have to be vegan, but I wanted Jess to see Ansel before we left—or rather, wanted Ansel to see how good Jess was looking and hear how well the book was coming along. When I’d gone to drop off the galley at Broadway Books I had stopped by Marika’s office and heard that there was a rumor going around that Jess had shown Ansel his latest book and Ansel had told him he couldn’t sell it.

  “That’s completely untrue,” I said. “Jess didn’t even show me the book before burning it.”

  Marika lifted an elegant eyebrow. “Do you want me to spread that story around instead?”

  No, I didn’t. I thanked Marika for telling me—and for sending so much work my way over the last two years—and walked back to the elevators, passing through the beehive cubicles where I’d started as an assistant thirteen years ago and worked for five years until Jess had fallen out with his editor. It had been too uncomfortable to stay, but Marika had steered enough freelance work my way to make looking for another job unnecessary. Which was for the best anyway now that we were moving. I could keep up the freelance copyediting remotely. I didn’t miss working in an office, I told myself, even though I’d enjoyed the camaraderie at first—all the underpaid college graduates working long hours and hanging out at each other’s cramped and overpriced apartments as if they were a continuation of our college dorm rooms, drinking at bars, telling each other after enough drinks what novels we planned to write like it was a dirty secret you were supposed to keep to yourself. But then Jess had published his book and that had made a difference—but not as much of a difference as when Jess had a loud fight with his editor at Craft and lobbed a cast iron terrine of creamed spinach at him. After the Craft incident (“The closest he’ll come to actually working in the craft,” Jess had gotten fond of saying) I’d pass these same cubicles and hear them whispering—or hear a sudden silence—as I went by. Even now I could hear it—the story of Jess’s rejected book passing from cubicle to cubicle all around the city. No, I didn’t miss it. I’d FedEx the next set of galleys “from the country,” as the editor I’d worked for used to say when she was at her Litchfield house.

  But first I had to put a stop to the rumors. So I invited Ansel and vegan Hanneke and Abe and Yuriko, who would tweet about it (poets loved Twitter), and Marika so she’d see I’d been telling the truth and Duma—well, Duma because she came with Marika and a YA author wouldn’t bother Jess like a real novelist might.

  At first it went well. Everyone wanted to hear about Old Monty and his decaying mansion and Jess reveled in the story. “He’s like Miss Havisham up there. I swear all the clocks are stopped at the exact hour his last book was published.”

  “Is he still writing?” Ansel asked.

  “He mentioned some kind of memoir about his family and went on about the magical properties of the octagonal house,” Jess said. “Even his desk is shaped like an octagon. Monty claims the shape generates energy that has a positive influence on the brain.”

  “In other words, he’s gone completely bonkers,” Marika said, spearing an artichoke leaf left-handed and gesturing with it. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to put yourself and Clare at the mercy of this monomaniac’s whims?”

  “Oh, he loves Clare,” Jess replied, beaming at me. “He’s always maintained that Clare’s the one with the real talent in this family.”

  I felt myself grow warm under the lamp of Jess’s praise.

  “Well, I’ve always said that too,” Marika replied tartly.

  “Do you write?” Duma asked me.

  “Not anymore,” I said quickly. “I prefer to edit other people’s work.”

  “And she does so brilliantly,” Marika said.

  “It’s a waste,” Jess said, oblivious to the fact that he was talking about Marika’s profession. “I think living in Riven House is going to have a galvanizing effect on Clare.”

  “We’re not actually living in th
e main house,” I explained to the table, hoping to change the subject. It was one thing for me to dream of apple blossoms and writing again and another to voice that hope. “We’re going to live in the caretaker’s cottage by the river.”

  “How bucolic!” Ansel said. “Is it in better repair than the main house?”

  “We didn’t actually get to see it,” I admitted, sorry now I’d brought it up after all.

  “Yeah,” Jess said, saving me from explaining. “By the time Old Monty was done scaring Clare half to death with a preposterous ghost story it was too dark to go look at it.”

  “It didn’t scare me,” I lied. I’d been dreaming about the story and those dreams were scary. “It was just sad.”

  “Of course sad,” Yuriko, who’d been quiet all night, said. “Ghosts are always sad. That’s why they’re ghosts. They come back because they were wronged.”

  “Don’t get Yuriko started on ghosts,” Abe said, smiling fondly at his wife. “Japanese ghost stories are all about wronged women seeking revenge. I think she tells them to me to keep me in line.”

  “Then you’ll love this one—” Jess began.

  “Let Clare tell it,” Hanneke said. “I can see she was the one most affected by it.”

  “By all means,” Jess said, emptying the dregs of a wine bottle into his glass and then getting up to get another one. “Go ahead, Clare. I’ve heard it.”

  “Oh, it’s probably just something Monty made up,” I said, hoping to deflect the table’s interest. “It has all the earmarks of the Gothic stories we read in his class. A local village girl seduced by a rakish millionaire, she gets pregnant—”

  “Poor thing,” Hanneke interjected. “Of course there was no birth control or abortion.”

  “Don’t get Hanneke started on health care,” Ansel sighed.