Constance (9 page)

Oh, Ravenswood. That goddamn house. How I hated it. To me it was hell. I hadn’t known a day of happiness in that house since Harriet died. I’d once believed that when at last I left I would never return. Ha. It pulled me back. It sucked me in. We turned off the river road and into the drive. It was late afternoon and the fog was rolling up from the river. The pines were shrouded but not the tower. It had a peaked cone on top and a spire with a weathervane. It was an absurd piece of folly, built by
Daddy’s grandfather. It even had stained-glass windows. At the front of the house there was a long porch supported by a row of columns badly in need of a coat of paint, as was everything else. And not just paint: Roof shingles fell off every winter and the top floor was in a perpetual state of dripping damp. There was also a screened verandah in poor repair with rotting wicker tables and chairs dangerous to sit in. As Sidney parked by the barn a few crows lifted from the rooftop and disappeared noisily into the fog. Cue the monster. Daddy appeared.

Inside the house it was no better. There was a long dark hall with a hardwood floor and two huge hideous Victorian chests of drawers pushed against the walls with rubbish heaped on top, old books, unopened mail, keys to doors to rooms nobody ever entered anymore. Portraits of the forgotten dead hung from thin wires attached to the molding. There were large patches of damp on the ceiling. The drawing room was off to the left with windows facing south toward the river. Halfway down the hall was the front staircase, a curving thing of dark heavy wood. Everywhere you looked there was dark heavy wood, and it sure as hell darkened our spirits too. Beyond the staircase stood a grandfather clock, defunct, of course, and a door giving on to a narrow corridor with a lavatory under the back stairs, and the kitchen beyond, and then the back parts of the house. Oh, rally, my sinking heart, for Christ’s sake, I thought. It’s fucking Christmas.

As a child I tried to have as little as possible to do with the front of the house, and Iris was the same. We used the back stairs, and if we had to be indoors we made ourselves at home in the servants’ rooms and the tower, which was unoccupied, until Mildred Knapp moved in and took it over for herself. There was a rounded archway that connected the front and back stairs on
the second floor and we treated it as a border crossing. The front of the house was a foreign country with all its hideous furniture and rotting drapes, its big Chinese vases and marble busts of great men that I taught Iris to spit at when nobody was looking. Daddy got in a great temper one time when he found fresh spit all over Franklin Roosevelt. No, the back part of the house was our sovereign nation, a small but plucky republic, population two girls plus dogs. Also a collection of stuffed birds, crows mostly, or birds of the crow kind, corvines. There was even a raven. We assembled them in what we called the Crow Room. It was where we held meetings, Iris and I. From the window we could watch real crows drinking rainwater that had collected in old mossy urns and troughs in the garden below. The sounds of the household were muffled up there. All we’d hear was the faint chiming of some old clock, the distant barking of a dog. Daddy shouting. We also had great sweeping panoramic vistas of the river. Nobody used those rooms except Iris and me.

I spent much of my childhood gazing out of the windows up there. The garden at the back of the house was sad. It was un-tended because Daddy couldn’t afford any ground staff, or so he claimed. Poison ivy clung to everything. It twined its leaves like funeral wreaths around old statues of nymphs and satyrs. There were creeping vines too, and old bits of rusting iron fence.

But the romance of it was the stand of tall dark pine trees that gave the house its name, although I think I never actually saw a raven, only crows. Then below the wood was a swampy stretch beside the railroad tracks and the river. And of course the blue Catskills on the other side. I was vague with Sidney about how long we’d had the place. In fact it had been in the
family since 1861, when it was just a modest villa. It was Daddy’s grandfather who turned it into a gothic horror house. This was old Augustus Schuyler.
Eccentric
was an understatement, applied to him.

That first night of the holiday we ate in the kitchen, a long, low-ceilinged room with glass-fronted wooden cabinets containing crockery and glassware. There was an ancient wood-burning stove against the back wall. This was Mildred Knapp’s domain. I talked to her that first night before she went off to the tower. She told me what I already knew, that the old man didn’t have enough to occupy himself. He was bored and often depressed. She said that if it wasn’t for her he wouldn’t see anybody. So nobody visits him anymore, I said.

—There’s not so many of us left who knew him in the old days, said Mildred.

I went back into the kitchen. It was the only warm room in the house. The boiler had never been replaced. It was loud and unreliable and now there was a problem with the radiators. A man from the village had told Daddy they had to be drained but that he couldn’t do it until after the holiday. So we were dependent for warmth on electric heaters and log fires. More than anything in the world I hate being cold. I felt it more acutely than the rest of them. I was wearing my winter coat indoors, and my scarf and gloves. Daddy displayed a grim satisfaction in our predicament. He’d been having trouble with the heating all winter, he said. I told him he should have come down to the city.

—Better here, he said.

He imagined it would be some sort of adventure, to live in a cold house in midwinter. Blazing fires and thick sweaters, a scene from his youth, I guess.

—It’s intolerable. I’m frozen. We all are.

—Frozen?

—Yes, Daddy,
frozen.

The reality of three adults and a small boy in discomfort rudely awakened him. His tone became brusque. It was an old man’s folly and his irritation with himself was painful to observe. I told Sidney that after Harriet died I’d found it hard at first to spend time in the kitchen. If there was a room in the house where her ghost resided, that was it. He asked me if I believed in ghosts and I told him I did. I said the Hudson Valley was infested with them, positively swarming with them. But how long can you avoid a kitchen? That night Howard was happy enough in the big armchair by the woodstove. He never complained. He could amuse himself for hours with a piece of string or better still a mousetrap. He’d found one in his bedroom and brought it downstairs. A little later I heard a small gasp. He’d sprung the trap on his thumbnail. But he made no further noise. Carefully he released his thumb, then put it in his mouth and sucked it.

—Howard, I whispered, did that hurt?

He looked up at me, and still sucking his thumb he nodded his head several times. The nail would turn black in a day or two. What a brave boy. Then Daddy wanted to know how Iris was.

—I’ve seen her better, I said.

—It’ll be easier for her soon.

—How?

I wasn’t paying attention. I was still gazing at Howard.

—When she’s finished her hospital training. Then you remember what it’s like to sleep again.

He didn’t realize that Iris wouldn’t be starting medical school until next fall—if then. If ever! Sidney turned to me, frowning. He didn’t like these mistakes Daddy was making. First the radiators, now Iris.

—She’ll tell you when she gets here, I said.

He was sitting forward in an old wing chair by the wood-stove. He was staring at the floor, his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging loose between them. Even at seventy he was a graceful man, cold and mean and graceful, like one of Sidney’s dead poets.
He walks in beauty, like the night.
Ha. It was the long arms and legs, the long fingers and the spareness of his frame. He’d always had that grace. Sidney said it lent him authority and he’d needed it, doctoring in the Hudson Valley.

—You two love each other?

He was still staring at the kitchen floor, and for a second I thought he meant Sidney and me. But he was talking about Iris. Of course we did, I said.

—There’s something I have to tell you.

—Sure.

—Tomorrow then.

As we lay awake that night in a cold bed I asked Sidney what he thought Daddy wanted to tell me. He said it was his will. He didn’t want his daughters to have a falling-out over his will. That was why he needed to know we loved each other. I asked him to turn over. Then I pressed myself against his back. I wanted all the warmth he could give me.

The day dawned clear and cold and it wasn’t easy to get out of bed. Mine was a large bedroom with a fireplace with a mantel and various paintings on the wall chosen by me for their ugliness. There was a large selection of ugly paintings in the attic.
Old carpets were laid overlapping on the floorboards and the bed had been around for at least a hundred years. But the room had a western exposure so you could see the Hudson when you woke up, if you left a gap between the drapes. We could hear Howard in the corridor outside our room. I pulled on my bathrobe and stood at the window. Sidney said he was starting to appreciate the Hudson Valley: There was sublimity here, he said. The mood of the river had changed. Yesterday there’d been a kind of calm drift, today it was tossing up white crests where the wind whipped across it. I asked him what the word
sublimity
meant.

—The effect of novelty on ignorance. That’s Dr. Johnson.

—But what do you think?

—It’s a word we use to represent the unrepresentable.

Not bad. Suddenly the bedroom door was flung open. There was Howard, in a rare state of excitement, clapping his hands and shouting about the
cold!

—Come here! I cried. Into bed with me!

Later, in the kitchen, I expected Daddy to suggest we have our talk but he said nothing about it so I said nothing either. I think he hadn’t slept well. He’d told me once that having slept well all his life he was finding it difficult. We’d been sitting at the kitchen table first thing in the morning, this was in September, Labor Day. I was attempting to be friendly. He’d wake at four, he said, and be unable to get back. But he wouldn’t take anything that might help him sleep. I asked him whether he’d prescribed sleeping pills for his patients.

—Certainly I did but I won’t use them myself.

—Why not?

He was slow in speech and he liked to be precise. He found
it difficult to look at me when we talked of anything at all personal. As in this conversation.

—I don’t want to have to depend on the things.

—Does it matter?

Up came his head then, and as the early sun caught his face I had the full blaze of those cold pale eyes of his.

—Constance, this may surprise you but I prefer not to be addicted to any substance.

—What do you think about at four in the morning?

—I think foolish thoughts. I think about futility and I become fearful. I feel afraid.

—Of death?

—Yes, of death.

I never know what the best next step is when a conversation reaches this point.

—I guess that’s what God’s for, I said. Isn’t that what God’s for, Daddy, to give us the illusion of something still to come?

Widowed and alone, godless, somber in temperament and determined to see through his harsh dreadful nights without sleeping pills, he brushed this idea aside. When I asked him the next morning how he’d slept he made a brief evasive response the meaning of which was clear: off-limits. Mind your own business. He regretted speaking to me about it and it wouldn’t happen again.

Later I mentioned the conversation to Iris.

—Oh, he’s terrified of dying, she said.

—But he’s seen so much of it.

—It doesn’t help. It starts to wear off when it gets light outside.

I could imagine it. Sleepless at dead of night the mind is
vulnerable to a host of demons, and only much later did I discover what his looked like. But now he wanted to talk to me, and because he seemed unable to broach the topic Sidney thought it must be about his will. Sidney said that to a man who fears death a conversation about your last will and testament is not a joyous prospect.

He chose his moment on Christmas afternoon. We’d had our big meal in the middle of the day. Sidney had taken Howard for a walk in the woods. He wanted him tired out so he’d go to bed early and sleep through the night. Daddy had built a fire in the drawing room. I hated that room most of all. Dusty Victorian furniture and tall windows that no longer fitted their frames. Ancient velvet drapes to keep out the wind, a grand piano at the far end that nobody ever played. Carpets that still smelled of dog and urine. He’d been feeding the fire for hours. It crackled and spat, it flung embers over the fireguard that left scorch marks on the rug. He sat close to the hearth in his armchair. I was lying on the couch with a blanket spread over my legs. We each had a book. Everything was quiet. The light was fading from the sky and then I heard the beginnings of a whisper as the windows shivered and the wind came gusting down the chimney. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. He wasn’t reading either. He asked me when Iris was coming.

He’d been told this already but I said she’d be on the early train and I’d go in and pick her up from the station. Familiar information is a comfort to the old.

—Constance, I have to tell you something, he then said.

—Sure, Daddy.

A silence. Then he told me.

—I’m not your father.

I had to ask him to repeat it. I picked up the poker from the hearth and thrust it into the fire. Flames went surging up the chimney as the logs shifted. I saw cathedrals in there, penitentiaries, infernos. I was in shock. A world had started to collapse but I didn’t know that because it hadn’t gathered momentum yet.

—Constance, leave the fire alone.

—It’s getting cold in here.

I didn’t intend a reference to anything other than the temperature of the room. I was still in my overcoat. I thought: Sidney will be back with Howard soon, and the boy will be chilled. He should be taken home tonight. We should all go home tonight. But why had it taken him so long to tell me? And thinking this, I realized it confirmed a message I’d been hearing all my life, and a kind of dam burst inside me. I cried out, but why now?
Why now?—
and he said he felt I should know the truth before it was too late.