The Widow's House Read online

  If it was mice I should find out and put out traps. I took out a flat-edged screwdriver from the tool drawer and began chipping away at the paint. As I worked the bell seemed to ring louder, frantic, as if whatever was trapped inside sensed its chance for freedom. When I’d cleared the paint around the edges I saw that the cabinet opened from the bottom. I dug my fingernails under the bottom ridge and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. For a moment I pictured someone on the other side, holding the door down—a thought so horrible I started to back away—but then it flew open so suddenly I tore a fingernail and stumbled backward. A gust of air wafted against my face, so foul it felt like a solid presence, a hand brushing against my face. But there was nothing there except an empty space and a brick wall. I stepped closer and leaned into the opening, angling my head to look up . . . into blackness. The cabinet went up and up into the house. Of course, I realized, it was the dumbwaiter. Lots of old houses had them, to save the servants carrying trays upstairs or, more likely, so the master and mistress didn’t have to see their servants carrying the trays upstairs. They had another name, I remembered from some old book I’d read: The Silent Servant.

  But this dumbwaiter wasn’t silent. That bell was still ringing. And it was coming from up above.

  As if someone was summoning a servant.

  All those old houses are wired with bells, my father once told me, so those rich people don’t need but to lift a finger to have their every need and whim attended to. My grandmother turned into a bitter old shrew working for those people.

  Being summoned by such a sound would grate on your nerves, I thought as I followed the imperious ringing into the rotunda and up the stairs. It must be one of the old servant’s bells set off by the wind. I’ll put a stop to that, I mentally told Old Bay at the top of the stairs. He seemed to retreat further into his chiaroscuro gloom, as if afraid to meet my eye. I followed the sound around the gallery and into the yellow room. The nursery. Of course, it made sense to have a dumbwaiter in the nursery, but where was it? I stood in the doorway, listening and looking around the room, the parade of circus animals looking back at me with feigned innocence, as if they were hiding something. The only break I saw as the little door that led to the back of the closet in Jess’s study. But the sound wasn’t coming from there; it was coming from the closet on the other side of the room.

  I crossed the room and opened the closet door, but I didn’t see a dumbwaiter, only a bulge in the plaster, like a tumor growing from the inner organs of the house. The bell was coming from there.

  I knelt down on the dusty floor, and pressed my ear to the bulge. At first all I heard was a dull roar, as if the house with its convolutions of interlocking rooms and spiral stairs was a hollow conch shell that mimicked the sound of the ocean. But then I made out something else beneath the roar. A baby crying . . . a bell ringing . . . and then even more horribly, my own name.

  I was so startled I rocked back on my heels. And heard my name again. Only it wasn’t coming from the bulge. It was coming from behind me. I turned around quickly, my skin prickling with the sense of being watched . . . of being touched, as the dirty air from the dumbwaiter had seemed to touch me—

  But there was no one in the room. I heard my name again and realized it was coming from the open window. Had it been open when I came in here? It must have been. Maybe that’s where the ringing was coming from. The breeze had set the old glass in the window chiming. I looked back at the bulge in the plaster but no sound was coming from it now. It must have something to do with the house’s acoustics, I thought, getting up and walking toward the window. One of its tricks, as Monty had put it.

  The window was in a deep eave that had been fitted out with a cupboard and window seat. As I leaned over the window seat I saw Monty and Jess sitting on the terrace in the coppery autumnal light. The old venerable professor shares his wisdom with the young disciple. Monty sat back in his Adirondack chair, at ease; Jess leaned forward, elbows on knees. He laughed at something Monty said and leaned back, taking a sip of amber-colored scotch (with the fall Monty had switched from Beefeater to twelve-year-old Macallan), his forearms bared by rolled shirtsleeves. I hadn’t seen Jess look this happy and healthy in years. We’d made the right choice coming up here. This place was good for Jess.

  I knelt down on the dusty floor, tucking my apron under my knees, and rested my arms on the window seat to look out across the gardens to the river and the Catskills, blue in the distance. Of course if it was good for Jess it was good for me, but when I breathed in the smell of apples I felt a restlessness tugging at me, an undercurrent like that smell of blood, like a bell ringing deep inside the house. What was I here for besides cleaning and cooking? I might as well have been a servant.

  But I had chosen those chores, I reminded myself. Jess had wanted to come here to inspire me to write again, and Monty had given me my notebook, which I had put away unopened in a drawer.

  And set about scouring the kitchen and baking pies. Because cleaning—or any mindless physical labor like picking apples or peeling two bushels of them—emptied my mind.

  What did I need emptied from my mind?

  Clare.

  The sound of my own name in my husband’s voice drew my attention to the terrace. A trick of the breeze had carried his voice up to the window where I sat. I leaned forward to hear what he was saying, feeling both a pang of guilt at the idea of eavesdropping and a queasy thrill at the prospect of hearing my husband’s unguarded thoughts. But I’d missed whatever Jess had said about me. Instead I heard Monty ask, “Where has she gotten to?”

  “From the intoxicating aromas I’d say she’s in the kitchen,” Jess said.

  Were they only talking about me because they were wanting their dinner?

  “I do hope she isn’t working herself too hard,” Monty said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have encouraged her to start on cleaning the kitchen. Once you start working on this house it’s hard to stop.”

  “It’s not the house,” Jess said. “Clare likes to keep herself busy. It’s how she was raised.”

  “Ah, that’s right, her parents were farmers—”

  “They were sadists,” Jess said savagely. “Her mother used to put tacks in the tablecloth to keep her from putting her elbows on the table.”

  I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. I’d told Jess that story in the first year we knew each other, but it wasn’t something I liked other people to know. The blood was rushing so loudly in my ears I missed what Jess said next. All I heard was a shocked murmur from Monty.

  “Of course they didn’t understand her.” Jess’s voice, raised in outrage, lifted clear up to the second-story window. “She was smarter than them so they thought she was a freak.”

  Had I ever said that? It was true that Bill and Trudy Jackson hadn’t known what to do with a shy, bookish child. Trudy would have liked a pretty blond doll she could dress up in frilly dresses and ribbons. Bill would have liked a boy. But a freak?

  “They burned her books . . .”

  Now he was really exaggerating. Trudy had thrown out my copy of The Bell Jar in eighth grade because she’d heard that Sylvia Plath had killed herself and she thought that reading her was making me morbid and moody. The book just happened to end up on the fire because we burned our trash.

  “. . . and forbade her to write.”

  Only because it was taking time from my chores. Jess had grown up in a suburban neighborhood in Massapequa. His “chores” had consisted of taking out the garbage and mowing a lawn the size of a New York studio apartment. Mine had included milking two dozen cows, mucking out the barn, picking apples in the fall, hauling firewood in the winter, working at the farm stand, watering and weeding three acres of vegetables, then picking and canning bushels of tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, and raspberries. If I holed myself up in the barn loft to scribble in my notebook that meant more work for my father, whose heart was bad. When my father had a fatal heart attack in my senior year of college my mother didn’t exactly say it w
as my fault, but she did forbid me to read a poem at his funeral because “he might be alive if I had spent more time helping and less time foolin’ around with books.” When I told Jess all this he had actually seemed jealous.

  “It’s like Dickens and the blacking factory,” he’d said. “What great material!”

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised when he said to Monty now, “Writing about all that is what kept her together in college. It worried me when she stopped. Now I wonder if it’s not my fault.”

  I heard Monty’s murmured echo of his last two words. “Your fault?”

  The rattle of ice told me Jess was taking a long drink before answering. (At some point I’d closed my eyes to concentrate.) I could hear the whisky in his voice when he continued. “When I started working on my book senior year I gave Clare chapters to read. She urged me on. I don’t think I would have been able to write it without her—without her faith in me.”

  “Ah,” Monty said. “It’s a gift to have a reader like that.”

  “Yes. She always asked the right questions to get me to the next chapter. I sometimes felt like she was reading my mind, that she understood the characters better than I did myself, especially the girl . . .”

  “Rachel Bartley.”

  Jess laughed and took another drink. “Of course you remember. In your review you said she was the only lifelike character in the book.”

  “The most true to life,” Monty gently corrected. He was right. I knew the line by heart because I’d had to correct Jess myself in the months after the review came out. More than the damning last line it was the part that bothered him the most because—

  “You were right, though, because Rachel was Clare. I stole her from Clare.”

  Monty made a tsking sound. I heard the clink of glass and the splash of liquid as he refilled their glasses. “It’s what writers do. We borrow from the people around us. We can’t help it. Clare of all people must understand.”

  “Clare has never complained,” Jess said quickly, but with a sharpness that made it sound like a failing on my part. “But she stopped writing after that. Don’t you see? I stole her childhood. I sucked it out of her. Like a vampire. I did more harm to her than her parents did.”

  Monty murmured something conciliatory that I couldn’t make out. It didn’t matter. When Jess decided to take himself to task for some imagined fault no one could talk him out of it. It was why I always forgave him for being so hard on other people; he was hardest on himself.

  But I’d never known he blamed himself for my not writing. He was, of course, completely wrong. I’d loved the year that Jess was writing his first book, handing me pages as soon as he wrote them. I’d never felt closer to him. And yes, I’d recognized myself in the character Rachel and felt a queasy pang when she’d died at the end of the book—as if Jess had killed a part of me. But I saw that it was the right artistic choice and I’d been flattered—no, more than flattered; I’d felt seen for the first time in my life. I hadn’t stopped writing because he’d stolen my material. I’d stopped because I didn’t need to write anymore. Ushering Rachel into life had made me feel whole.

  Did that make me the vampire?

  No wonder Jess had stopped writing. He blamed himself for my stopping. Well, I could change that, couldn’t I? I could write . . . something. Anything. There were a dozen unfinished stories in that notebook Monty had given back to me. I would start there. It didn’t have to be any good—a little voice whispered that it might be better if it wasn’t too good—all I had to do was convince Jess that I was writing again.

  I opened my eyes, blinking at the darkening view. The sun had dipped beneath the line of mountains across the river. The cypresses that edged the garden cast long shadows over the lawn like accusatory fingers pointing at me. How long had I been lingering here (lollygagging, my mother would say) while dinner got cold and the men sat hungry on the terrace? I could hear the sound of their voices, but not what they were saying. The wind had shifted, carrying their voices out into the twilight garden and the river beyond, where they would flow down to the sea.

  I rubbed at my face and was surprised to find that it was wet and covered with a white chalky substance. Flour from the pies? I wondered. But I’d washed my hands before leaving the kitchen. I looked around the window seat and saw what had happened. While I’d been eavesdropping I’d picked at the loose wallpaper. It was a bad habit I had, which was the real reason my mother had put tacks in the tablecloth—to keep me from unraveling the fabric while I ate. Here I had peeled loose a whole patch of the yellow wallpaper, covering my hands with the dried paste.

  I wiped my hands on my apron and tried to pat the paper back, but it only came loose in my hands, exposing the bare plaster wall beneath—but not entirely bare. There were long scratches in the plaster. Had I made those? But then there would be plaster under my fingernails if I had. These scratches were deep. They looked like they had been made by someone trying to dig herself out of the room.

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t sleep well that night. It didn’t help that Sunny’s crying baby woke me in the middle of the night—at 3:36 according to the digital alarm clock—and went on for hours, filtering into my dreams whenever I drifted off along with the sound of that invisible bell chiming in the dumbwaiter and images of those scratches in the plaster. The bell must have been some trick of the wind. As for the scratches . . . they must have been made by Monty’s mother, Minnie. No wonder they’d sent her to a mental hospital.

  When I fell back asleep I dreamed that I was in the nursery closet scratching at the lump of plaster because a baby was trapped inside the walls. I had to reach it before it suffocated. I woke in a sweat, my hands beating against the pillow as if I were the child trapped in wet plaster.

  Jess caught my hands and held them against his chest. “Clare, it’s all right—you were dreaming—Clare . . .” He said my name over and over, holding my hands against his chest with one hand and stroking my face with the other until my breathing steadied and I came out of the dream.

  “It was an awful dream,” I told him.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  So I did. I told him about the scratches in the nursery and then the dream. How a baby was trapped in the wall and I had to get it out . . .

  He gathered me into his arms and pressed my face against his chest. His skin was warm and moist, even though the night had turned cool. “That was an awful dream. Monty’s mother must have made those marks. She was nuts, remember? You came up with the part about the baby trapped in the wall because you have such a powerful imagination. You have to use it, Clare. If you don’t use it, it uses you.”

  He held me until I fell back to sleep and, mercifully, slept until morning without dreams. When I woke up I could tell by the light that it was late. Jess had gotten up already and left a note on my pillow.

  Thought you could use the extra sleep, he’d written, there’s coffee in the pot. I promise I, not the ghost baby, made it.

  He’d drawn little handprints on the paper.

  Ha, I thought, getting up, very funny. But truthfully it made me feel better to have him make fun of it. In the morning light the whole thing did seem silly. A ghost baby caught in the wall—what a horror movie cliché! But he was right about one thing. If I didn’t use my imagination, it would use me. And the thought of being used by anything made me feel queasy.

  After I showered I poured myself the coffee Jess had left in the Braun and took my notebook out of the drawer where I’d hidden it (from whom?). But where should I read it? I’d gotten into the habit of leaving the house in the morning so Jess could write. He’d gone out for a walk now, but he’d probably be back, and I knew he didn’t like anyone around when he was working. I could go to the gardens, but there was a chill in the air and I’d had a creeping dislike of the gardens since that first day when I’d seen the mirage of the figure standing beside the pond. Those cypresses looked funereal and the boxwood maze smelled like cat pee. I was sure that Mo
nty wouldn’t mind me using a room in the house, but I didn’t like the idea of reading my old notebook where he might see me. What if it was terrible? What if he had written something in it that upset me? I knew it was foolish, but I felt self-conscious about having him witness my reading the notebook.

  My first sip of the reheated stale coffee decided me. I’d go to Cassie’s. It was an oddly public choice given my reluctance to have a witness, but I’d noticed when I went in there for coffee that it was the sort of place where students and professors sat for hours with their laptops and notebooks. It was a congenial working environment that would be a safe place in which to read the notebook. And neither Monty nor Jess ever went there.

  I brought a manuscript I was copyediting and the Muriel Spark biography I was reading, the notebook sandwiched between them in a canvas book bag as if camouflaged. I got a large pumpkin spice latte and an apple cider donut from Scraggly Goatee—who told me when I asked that the Harvest Moon festival had been “awesome”—and staked out a big upholstered chair in the corner. On the couch across from me a heavily tattooed girl was tapping on her laptop, nodding her head in time to the music coming from her iPod. A fiftyish woman with gray-blond hair was correcting a stack of papers while sipping jasmine-scented tea. Everyone seemed to be in their own worlds. I took a bite of the apple cider donut, which I’d bought more out of nostalgia than anything else, and was disappointed that it didn’t taste anything like the ones my mother used to make for the farm stand—or anything like apples, either—and slid the notebook out of the bag.

  I sat for another moment staring at my own name on the cover as if examining it for signs of forgery. It was clearly my own handwriting—funny how that stayed the same, like a fingerprint—only a bit larger than the cramped script I used now. Hardly surprising, I supposed; a decade of writing notes in the margins of other people’s manuscripts would lead to writing smaller. Or perhaps I’d only written larger on the outside of the notebook, as if it were a title that called for a larger font. Clare Jackson! Starring in Professor Montague’s Senior Seminar! I had been pretty full of myself getting picked for the class, like I was the shiniest apple on the highest bough.