“Chard and Waters kept secret their hidden treasure and hatched a plot with Captain Robert Davies of the Plough to smuggle the ambergris on board and then so on to England, and it was Davies who recruited Edwin Kendall, a man privy to Governor Moore’s council, to join the conspiracy. As all such plots, it was spoiled by their greed and fear, and they were turned in by Kendall and made to give over their treasure to the Virginia Company.”
“While Davies was forgiven upon his promise to sin no more, Chard was sentenced to the gallows. A scaffold was erected, but it was a ruse by the governor to ensure that order be kept. Chard was let off without severe punishment, and the ambergris was sent back to England upon the Plough, though truth be told, Mr. Davies and Mr. Kendall managed to steal some little chunks and sell them for 600 sovereigns, and though a warrant was writ for their arrest, Davies escaped to Ireland and Kendall to Scotland and then to Nova Scotia with settlers of 1622.”
Shaking her head, Dolly exclaimed, “Men.” And then she spat on the floor. “Whatever happened to the real rogues?”
“Carter and Waters were named to the council of Governor Moore, and after Moore departed for England three years later, Mr. Carter was one of the leaders of the colony. Mr. Waters left for Virginia and built a farm, only to perish on Good Friday of 1622 at the hands of the Powhatan.”
The old man asked, “What became of Mr. Chard?”
“Moore kept him in hard labor till 1615, and then he went off to the West Indies on a pirate ship, plundering in the Caribbean and as far east as Tunis. A mate of his, a Frenchman named du Chene, killed him one drunken night for coveting a girl he had taken from west Africa.”
I offered a bromide at the conclusion of her tale. “A kind of poetic justice, don’t you think?”
In two strides, Jane reached the corner by the toilet and grasped the pole of the harpoon, brandishing the broken end like a battering ram. “Justice?” She reared back as if to poke the ragged splinters through my chest. “What justice can you possibly see in the life of a young girl cut short by the greed and envy of one man?”
Had not my protector stepped between the two of us, she would have impaled me on the stick, but the old man stopped her with a gesture and soothed her with a word. Her purple face paled to pink as the blood rushed out of her head, and dizzy, she again handed over the harpoon and collapsed to sit on the toilet.
“My friend.” The old man took me aside. “Perhaps your temporary absence would diffuse this tempest. What say you, ladies, that we retire for the time being?”
Dolly and Jane sidled up to him, hooked an arm in the separate crooks of his two elbows. They took turns whispering some startling words into each ear.
“Do you have a place where we might enjoy a private interlude?”
My first thought was of my bedroom, but then I remembered the various women still slumbering, presumably, on the bed. I suggested my office two doors down, but he seemed wary of leaving the ladies behind, and instead, sequestered them in the bathtub behind the shower curtain. He spoke once more to me in a low, suggestive tone. “They are going to teach me … certain things.”
“Certain things?”
“You know.… Certain things of a delicate nature. Certain things suggested by her story. Discreet matters.”
“I see. Certain things.”
“Not all of us are men of the world, like you.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I come from a very respectable family. I’ve often speculated, however, as to other certain things.”
Completely baffled by his reasoning, I could only nod.
“Be a good lad,” he said, “and fix us something to eat while we are indisposed. We are bound to be famished.”
“Do you have anything particular in mind?”
He stroked his chin as if contemplating a small Vandyke beard. “I am not picky, though if you had some turtle soup.”
“I think not.”
“Any slumgullion will do. A little dejeuner to take the edge off, eh?” And with that, he pushed me from the room.
Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard. The line from the nursery rhyme attended my way past the closed doors on the upper floor, and down the darkened stairway, but when I reached the bottom landing, the rest of the ditty had escaped my mind, and furthermore, I had forgotten the reason for my journey. Perhaps it was the bump to my coconut, or perhaps the visits from these strange people with their twisted histories had jarred my short-term memory, or perhaps events from long ago now jostled with contemporary thought, but the purpose of my presence in that spot at that hour had vanished. As often when searching for a missing item—my wallet or watch or keys—I tried to reason my way out of confusion by going back in time.
Our memories are best recalled by the houses of our lives. My parents’ home, where my brother and I were raised, holds within its walls the memories of childhood, and any attempt at reconstructing my younger self also requires rebuilding that home in my mind. As a boy, I used to sit for hours at my father’s desk in his study and draw. My mother would leave these huge sheets of brown paper, the kind you get at the post office for wrapping parcels, maybe four feet long. So that the edges wouldn’t curl, I’d stack building blocks to hold down each end. Every day after school, I filled every inch of that space. One time I drew a whole city block. Every window and door, all the bricks perfect and in place. Or I would make a map of invisible countries, mystery cities. Lay out where the park would be, the baseball stadium, all the roads and bridges. Later, as a college student and then as an intern and junior associate, I lived in a series of apartments, boxlike studios or once a charming pied-à-terre, but those cells were not conducive to anything but a few hours’ sleep. When my brother and I bought this house to share, I had at last some dreamscape. Attached to this house are the reveries of a woman. Even now I can picture her here, moving like a phantom through the labyrinth of rooms, gracing the space with her laughter. At rest on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, her feet beneath the curled and napping cat. Drying her hair in the kitchen after being caught in the rain. Surrounded by constellations of fireflies on a warm night in June. I have everything of her but a name. Where is she now, and what has become of her? Who is she? For that matter, who are these strangers in this space? The possibility that the man who met me in the bathroom is the ghost of my father seems less and less likely, and if not, then who is he and what does he want?
Something to eat, of course. The old man was, at that moment, upstairs with Dolly and Jane doing who knows what. But I remembered: he was hungry and wanted his dinner. The cobwebs cleared, I paused at the front door, the kitchen to my left, and to my right the living room sat like a tomb. The cat cried out softly, so I poked my head around the corner to see him atop the television, the end of his tail a perfect circle around the LED clock. With a kiss I beckoned him, and he came straightaway, arching his back and rubbing against me in a comforting manner. I picked him up and walked to the kitchen.
The second line came to me: To fetch her poor dog a bone. I switched on the light and the room radiated in stark clarity. Someone had come in during the middle of the night, in the interim between this and my previous visit, and had cleaned the joint, a thorough scrubbing, the countertops glistening, the stovetop sparkling, and every appliance, breadbasket, knife rack, and all else neat and ordered, giving the kitchen an artificial quality as if a model one or a prop set for the stage or a photo shoot. Behind the facade of cupboards and cabinets, all was bare, not one box, bag, or can of food, not so much as a spice jar or box of baking soda. The refrigerator, too, had been emptied and sanitized. “Sorry, puss,” I told him. “When she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so her poor doggie had none.”
The cat mewed hungrily. I scooped him in my arms and headed for the basement where I kept an additional store, canned goods, coffee, tea, and a freezer filled with food that did not normally fit in the pantry or the cupboards. Under the weak light of a hanging bulb, the room was dim but reassurin
gly recognizable: the washer and dryer, the stack of old design and architectural textbooks and other mementos of my former life, and on the table next to my toolbox and odd pieces of wood sat the surplus foodstuff. I spied a can of tuna and pocketed it for the cat. A dizzying array of canned soups and fruits and vegetables rose in a pyramid. “What did the old man want?” I asked myself. “Not turtle soup, but something else …”
“Slumgullion,” said the cat.
Without hesitation, I began to scan the labels. “Never heard of slumgullion—” And then it occurred to me that the cat should not have spoken. He crouched among the pears and beans in the normal, catlike manner, his ears pricked as if listening. His tail twitched under my scrutiny. “What did you just say?”
A low, mocking purr issued from deep inside him like the gears and cogs of a clock. I redoubled my search for slumgullion, but it obviously was not there, so taking a can at random, I held it up for his consideration, but the cat looked first at it and then at me with a blank and incurious stare, and I began to feel a little foolish for thinking that cats could read. With a flick of the wrist, I turned it round to look at the label: cream of mushroom.
“Ick,” said the cat. “Try the mulligatawny.” His lips—do cats have lips?—did not move as the syllables exited, and he seemed to be communicating telepathically in a high feline voice that sounded vaguely Australian. Clearly it was the cat talking and not merely the echo of my imagination.
“How did you do that?”
Once again, he adopted a passive mood, and his expression remained sphinxlike. I found a family-sized can of Trader Joe’s Mulligatawny Soup and then went to the freezer for a package of heat-’n’-serve naan to accompany it, and with a nod to Harpo, I went back upstairs to the kitchen to heat the meal. A few minutes into the preparation, the cat followed me into the room, creeping underfoot in expectation. The soup bubbled in the pot and the oven timer ticked off the minutes till the bread was hot. “What is it, boy? Cat got your tongue?” The bell dinged, and I fished out the tuna in the pocket of my robe. I opened the tin and plopped the whole mess into a dish and set it on the floor for him. Loading three bowls and three spoons on a tray, along with the pot of soup and a basket of bread, I swept it up on my hand and shoulder like a waiter to bring dinner to my guests.
“Thanks for your help,” I called out over my shoulder.
“Thanks for the tunafish, mate,” Harpo said.
Breathless and stiff from the heavy load, I arrived at the bathroom to find the threesome waiting patiently. They appeared just as I had left them, the old man bundled into the terrycloth robe, and Dolly and Jane in their nightgowns, composed and unruffled, as if they had merely taken a brief stroll in my absence. Dolly and my father still had the third eye drawn on their eyelids, and Jane had bound her wild braids into a single coil held in place by another rope of her hair. Her long elegant neck lay bare. Tattooed along the left side was a small Chinese dragon, its fanged mouth open beneath her ear as if to strike. Drawn to the scent of chicken and curry, the three crowded around and triggered for me a wee bit of claustrophobia. No logical place existed for me to lay down my burden, so I covered the sink with the tray and lifted the lid to the pot of soup. “I hope you all like mulligatawny.”
“Excellent,” the old man said.
I asked, “Would you not be more comfortable dining in the dining room? Perhaps the kitchen, which is now spotlessly clean?”
Dolly ladled a heaping bowl while Jane attacked the naan, tearing a piece in half and shoving the warm bread into her mouth. With the wiggle of a crooked finger, the old man bade me come closer. We huddled under the open window. “A word, bucko, if you don’t mind. It’s not me that wants to eat in the bathroom, but the girls. They’re allergic to cats. If I’m not mistaken, there’s one of them beasts on the premises.”
“Harpo? How did you know?”
“Have you ever heard of an aura, mac? Every living thing has a wave of energy they carry with them. As much a living part of you as your skin or your hair. Or in the case of a cat, its fur. And as you move through the world, you shed bits and pieces—”
“Like dandruff? Or cat dander? Many people are allergic to cat dander.”
“More like the scent of a woman who just left the room, or the memory of a person brought back upon hearing some old love song. The sound of mandolins, or Proust’s madeleines, or the taste of boyhood in a peach ice cream cone. The ineffable essence. The cat’s been here.”
“Well, he doesn’t shed.”
“The aura you leave behind is not the same thing as forensic evidence.”
The discussion of the cat reminded me of our conversation in the basement, and the old man seemed a likely source for explanation. “But the cat can talk,” I said. “He recommended the mulligatawny. What do you think of that?”
The old man peeled back the window curtain and looked intently at the black night. “I think there’s something wrong in your head.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you have said all night.” In fact, the knock on my nut could explain a great many of the events of that early morning as an elaborate sequence of hallucinations, from the man with feathers in his mouth to the talking cat to the mystery of 4:52. I stole another peek at Dolly and Jane, both barefoot in their diaphanous nightgowns, seated face-to-face in the empty bathtub, eating curry soup. The dragon on Jane’s neck had changed positions, so that now the head pointed to her bosom and the tail wound round her ear. The women appeared real enough. And the man with his back to me, who peered out into the fathomless night, he seemed quite solid. I tapped him on the shoulder to confirm my suspicions, but I may have hit bone for he felt hard as stone and fixed as a statue. When he finally acknowledged my persistence, he spoke as if suddenly remembering a broken-off conversation.
“So you were telling me about this house.”
I was not following his train of thought and was still at the station when he was miles down the track, but I sputtered and started. “Well, I know it’s not quite the house you’d expect of an architect.”
From the bathtub, Dolly chimed in, “I had no idea you were an architect.”
“Would we know,” Jane added at once, “any of your designs? A house of cards, perhaps?”
The sad truth was that nothing I had planned had ever been built. “I guess I should say I work in an architectural firm, but I’m kind of a finishing man, doing the small details of big plans. Home offices, day care playrooms. I once did a prototype of the office of the future …”
Dolly and Jane giggled like schoolgirls. “Frank Lloyd Wrong,” Jane muttered to her friend.
“We bought this house when the market started going up, an investment really. My brother and I—” My own sentence stopped me. For the life of me I could not place my brother, not his face nor his name nor anything about him, though he must exist, for how else could I have afforded to buy this house? Brushing the matter aside, I continued. “There’s nine rooms in all, your standard center hall colonial, built around 1922. The master bedroom and the nursery, which as you know, I converted into a study. I put in that archway myself. And then the bedroom upstairs in the front, which was my brother’s—” What had become of my brother? Where had he gone, like my mother, like my father? Like the woman I love? “And downstairs, the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then there’s the basement and the attic, not a room proper, but nine spaces in any case. If you count the bathroom we’re in, which at the moment seems to be the heart of it all. Cozy, not much, but home—”
The old man cleared his throat and set down his empty bowl, the spoon clattering against the sides. “Very trenchant, but I was referring to the one distinctive architectural detail of the place, the unusual feature you earlier mentioned.”
Like a four-year-old, Dolly leapt to stand and raised her arm, waving her hand like a butterfly. “I know, I know,” she said. “Tell us about the singing windows. You said you came home last night and heard singing coming from the windows.”
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“The bicycles heaped on the lawn,” the old man said, “like an orgy of chrome and rubber. And the house with singing windows. Verdi, I believe you said.”
The beginning of the story seemed so long ago and longer still the events it narrates, so that I had trouble, momentarily, remembering where I had left off. “Not the house itself, but a person inside the house singing that could be heard through the windows. And not Verdi, but the ‘Laughing Song’ from Die Fledermaus, to the best of my recollection.”
“You’re absolutely sure it was the Strauss?” Dolly asked.
The old man simply ignored my uncertainty. He gaped at the mirror over my shoulder and flicked with his fingertip at a spot on his forehead as if trying to remove some fleck on his skin which he noticed in the reflection. Facing him, I saw nothing but a deeply furrowed brow, free of all dirt or blemish.
“There was a piano playing,” I said. “And a woman singing that very distinct song—‘Mein Herr Marquis’—with the laughing chorus, and she rode the register with such delightful inflection that it was, well, infectious, and I found myself laughing, too, as I came to the door, despite the fact that the presence of someone inside the house was both puzzling and disconcerting. I followed the melody up the stairs and into my brother’s room. My former brother’s room …”
Jane offered her help. “Your brother’s former room?”
“That one,” I answered. “Opening the door, I was taken aback by the sight of a recital going on in that space. A woman, the mezzo, stood next to the piano, her hands folded under her breast as she sang, and another woman played the piano, her back to me and the audience, which itself was composed of a number of other women seated in two rows of chairs arranged in a semicircle. A span of a few seconds intervened between the moment I entered and when everyone noticed me and stopped what they were doing. Stuck in the threshold, I was simply stunned. It seemed like they were putting on a show for my benefit. Elaborate stagecraft, fancy costumes, and the striking beauty of every woman onstage.”