The Owl’s exit, however, is what brought me my freedom, in a roundabout way.
It was the secretary’s duty to notify local parents of the date when we’d celebrate all the birthdays that fell within that month. It was a catchall party, at which “Happy Birthday” was sung once and cacophonously, as each family shouted out its own child’s name. I never had a parent present, and so during the clanging singsong of other children’s names, Eppitt and I would whisper each other’s, as appropriate.
Dear Harr-i-et.
Dear E-ppitt.
This parental notification had always been done by post, but the Owl’s departure had been so abrupt that this task popped up unexpectedly for the Good Wheel, forcing her to call those with telephones in their homes rather than sending a letter.
It was July, a full nine months since my picture had been in the paper, which I’m now sure my father had hidden from my mother. The Good Wheel knew that I was allowed into Brumus’s office when he was out and that I filled the room with the smell of paste. She didn’t know that the only number she should contact for the Wolf family was Mr. Wolf’s office number. When there was no answer, she slid her finger to the next number, for my parents’ home phone. There was a scribbled note beside the number, indicating that it was to be used only in an extreme emergency, but she missed it. Perhaps her leg bite was throbbing.
I try to imagine the scene that follows from my mother’s perspective.
My parents lived in the house I live in now, though it was more hidden by tall trees then and an overgrown hedge that blocked the front bay window. My mother, a near shut-in by this point, preferred the dark confines of her bedroom, as do I. She often mistook the house’s creaks and radiator moans for intruders, thieves. She didn’t know that her daughter had been stolen, and yet she had a fear of burglars. The house’s front and back doors were double-bolted at all times, the windows latched.
The phone rarely rang. But one summer morning before my fourteenth birthday, the phone sounded out. My mother didn’t usually answer. But there it was, so close, so loud and jangling—insistent.
She lifted the receiver to make it stop. And then, a reactive instinct, she said, “Hello?”
The Good Wheel explained that she was phoning from the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children to see if Mr. and Mrs. Wolf would be attending their daughter’s birthday party, a small event that she’d be enjoying with the other children born that month.
“I have no children. Why would you say such a thing? Is this a trick?”
“No, ma’am, it isn’t a trick. I work at the school and I have your number on the birthday list. It’s printed plainly right here next to your daughter’s name: Harriet Wolf, July 11.”
Mary Wolf, my sweet mother, let the static fill the phone and then hung up. The phone’s ring was now in her head, a frantic echo. She hadn’t named me. Someone at the school had been given the duty. But the birth date was undeniably right.
She called her husband at work and he answered—he was back from lunch now. In fact, he’d missed the Good Wheel’s call by mere minutes. “Who is Harriet Wolf?” my mother asked him.
My father coughed. “What? Who?”
“Do I have a living daughter at the Maryland School? Do I? Tell me.”
He tried to divert her. “Why would you say that? What would possess you?”
She told him breathlessly about the phone, its ringing, how she had answered it and the voice on the other end of the line—what words were spoken.
“It must be a hoax,” he said. “The way you’re boarded up in that house, you’re a target for such awful play.”
But she persisted. “Tell me. You must tell me. I’ll drive out there myself!”
“You don’t drive!”
“I will get in a car and drive there! Tell me what I already know!”
Finally he admitted it. “Yes, darling,” he said. “Yes, you do.”
She said, “I could feel it!” I imagine that she felt it in her body—like the Electric Girl. A pulse buzzing throughout her chest, her limbs.
Mrs. Funk found me making my bed, tucking the blanket under the mattress with a straight hand. “Dear girl, they’re coming for you!”
“Coming for me? Who?”
“Your parents, of course!”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re coming now to take you home!”
“I don’t understand. My father and my mother?” The idea of seeing my mother was a new thrill. I could barely speak but finally blurted, “Now?”
“They’ll be here shortly. In an hour or so!”
It was a Tuesday afternoon. Eppitt would be waiting for me under the Duck Porch after dinner. What if I didn’t show up? What if he heard that I was gone? Just like that! Without him!
“I have to tell someone,” I said.
“Dr. Brumus knows,” Mrs. Funk said. “He and your father are old friends.” I knew that they were acquaintances, but old friends? It felt like a betrayal, a collusion.
“No,” I said. “I have to find someone else.” I walked toward the door. “Excuse me.”
“Harriet!” Mrs. Funk said. “Where are you going? You have to pack your things.”
I started running then, down the wide set of stairs, through the bare foyer, across the lawn. I knew that Mrs. Funk might be watching me from an upstairs window and I slipped around the far side of the administrative building. Once out of view, I slid along the wall to the edge of the Duck Porch and crawled underneath it.
Eppitt wasn’t there. It wasn’t our time to meet. Did I expect him to know, deep down, and show up? The ground was damp. It had been raining off and on for a few days.
I was desperately happy—they were coming to bring me home! I was terrified. This was the only place I’d ever known. And I was heartbroken because I’d be leaving Eppitt behind, wouldn’t I? I tried to keep my crying quiet, but it was no use. The sobs contracted my ribs and forced loud barks from my throat. I picked up a handful of dirt and put it in my mouth. I tasted it, crunched the grit in my teeth, and bore down on it.
I saw a pair of suede lace-ups, hemmed pant cuffs, a fat hand in the dirt, and then Brumus’s face. He squinted into the dark. He saw me there—tear-streaked, snotty, my mouth smeared with dirt. “Jesus, Harriet!” He reached out his hand. “Come on out.”
I shook my head.
“Harriet, you’ve got to get washed up. Your parents are on their way.”
I muttered, “Eppitt Clapp.”
“What’s that?”
I said it again.
“That boy from King’s who does the washing?”
I nodded miserably.
“Harriet,” he whispered. “I hope you haven’t ruined yourself on his account!”
“I want to see him.”
“Harriet,” Dr. Brumus said. “You’re going to live a completely different life. A beautiful one. The one you were always meant to have. There’s no place for a boy like Eppitt Clapp in that life. Be reasonable.”
“I want to see him,” I repeated.
“There’s no time. Look at you!”
“A note,” I said stubbornly, my cheeks still laced with dirt.
“You want to give him a note? He can’t read, darling. You know this.” He was speaking to me very sweetly.
“Yes he can. I taught him.”
Brumus looked at me doubtfully. “Fine. You can write him a note. I’ll see that Mrs. Funk delivers it.”
And then Mrs. Funk’s shoes appeared, square-toed, boxy with the meat of her ankles puffed around the tight lacing.
Brumus shoved his hand at me again. I crawled out on my own.
“Be quick,” Brumus said. And Mrs. Funk steered me back to my cottage with a firm hand on my shoulder.
The cottage was empty. Under Mrs. Funk’s watchful eye, I washed my face in the rusty sink, packed my small bundle of things, and wrote my note to Eppitt. I couldn’t say that I loved him—Mrs. Funk would surely read the note. And I couldn’t call h
im my husband. That might get him in trouble. I wrote as little as I could. “I will never be the Wolf Woman,” I jotted. “Locusts are falling from the sky or butterflies are swarming. Find me.” I pulled my box out from under my cot and found the little wound piece of string—our marriage pact—and wrapped the note in the string. It had the piece of paper I’d pasted to it: “E. C. and H. W. 1913. Marriage.” I hoped Mrs. Funk wouldn’t brood over the word “marriage,” and I hoped he would understand. Keep your promise—that’s what I meant. Keep it.
I handed the note to Mrs. Funk. “Promise you’ll give it to him.”
“I promise.” She fit it in the wide pocket of her apron. “Little Girl Jesus of the Dreaming Wounds,” she said. “I always knew, didn’t I?”
She’d discovered me, really. I was hers, in a way. She was mine.
Soon I was standing on the lawn. Children watched from windows. A few had stumbled from the laundry and looked on between sheets. Others had stalled in rows being shuttled one place or another. The groundskeepers; the nurses, including Nurse Oonagh; the Good Wheel; the guards, including Mr. Gillup; and Mrs. Funk—they were all out on the lawn, in loose clumps. Brumus showed up and stood at my side. They were all relieved to be seeing me off. I shamed them because my presence had exposed that it’s a cruel twist of fate, whether you’re a genius or a moron, to end up where you do in life. My departure helped them believe that the world could work properly.
Where was Eppitt? I stood stiff like a soldier, but pivoted now and then to search for him. I didn’t see him anywhere.
A black car chugged up the long drive. A woman stepped out, not waiting for my father to open the door for her.
My mother. She wore a long skirt, a white blouse. Her hair was pinned up, her face pale. She was beautiful, red-lipped. She walked to me with her hands reaching forward, as if trying to catch me before I fell. But I didn’t fall. I stood my ground, and she hugged me. “My girl,” she said, “my sweet girl!” Her Irish lilt surprised me, as did the whole of her. I was thinking, These are my mother’s eyes. These are her hands. This is her mouth, her voice. Right there on the lawn in front of the administration building. This recognition of the truth—she had loved me all along. It was like I was a bird, wheeling through air.
My father shook my hand as if we’d never met, as if he’d never given me an empty book.
In my first scrapbook there is only one photograph that wasn’t snipped from a newspaper. That photograph was taken by the former nurse, now the secretary, who’d made the error that gave me my freedom. The Good Wheel was an amateur photographer, as it turns out.
The photograph isn’t high quality. She positioned the four of us—my parents, me, and Dr. Brumus—so that our backs were to the sun, our faces shadowed. In her nervousness, she jiggled the camera stand while the shutter was opening, just enough to blur us, and a finger, or a bit of hair or ribbon, blots all but our fuzzy, dark faces and our upper bodies, floating. My father had cocked his head, his chin raised. My mother squinted even though the sun was at her back. She was unaccustomed to so much light. I was wide-eyed. Brumus is the only one grinning broadly, his face about to burst with emotion—joy or more simply relief?
After the photograph, Dr. Brumus cupped my face in his hands and kissed my forehead, a benediction. “Go home,” he whispered to me. “Thank God and go home.”
I climbed in the backseat of the car and looked out the window, searching for Eppitt one more time. There, in a circular six-paned window at the top of King’s Cottage, I found him, his face trapped behind the glass.
Eppitt raised a hand.
Would he read the note? Would he keep the pact? Find me.
He waved as if he were on a dock and I on a ship, being cast out to sea. And that’s how it felt. This ship would take me back to my motherland.
Chapter Ten
Home
Ruth
I start to walk to the side door of my grandmother’s house, where I lived for the majority of my childhood. It’s the door that opens to the kitchen, the door I always used, but too much time has passed. I’m a guest now. I turn halfway up the driveway and take the flagstone path to the front door instead.
It’s late afternoon. I stand under the dormer. I see four holes drilled into the brick facade where there was once some kind of placard—a warning to solicitors posted by Eleanor, most likely. Hello, old lion’s head knocker. I’m home.
I glance back at the dogs, staring at me from the airport rental car, a Mustang convertible, top down, an upgrade that I flirted for, which is completely unlike me. I felt weirdly single on the flight, maybe the result of the groping I’d gotten in security. I hadn’t been felt up so awkwardly and without warning since an eighth-grade dance.
Then there were all those men set loose in the world, their neckties like leashes, as if they’d busted free from their owners—suburban power-walking wives. And I was set loose too, carrying two Pomeranians in matching doggy carriers bought earlier that day at PetSmart. The dogs made me feel foreign to myself. What kind of eccentric carries matching Pompoms onto a plane? But I was free from my stifled existence as faculty wife. No one talked to me about my husband’s departmental politics or literary theory. I was anonymous, and still vaguely pretty.
The guy at the rental-car desk was a little younger, smiley, with one timid row of tattoos on his pink, nearly hairless forearm—heart, spade, club, diamond—as if he were a poker player. I smiled back and got upgraded all the way to a Mustang convertible. I’d never driven a convertible before. It feels like a ridiculous excess that I should be embarrassed by, but I love seeing it parked in my mother’s driveway. I’ve always rebelled against her frugality, emotional and otherwise.
The Pomeranians are in the passenger seat, paws poised on the open window frame.
I lift the knocker and tap a few times, but no answer.
Up above is my old bedroom window, the one that I climbed out of at sixteen and onto the dormer roof over this very front door, before jumping to the ground, in the dark—me, with my short angry haircut, my eyeliner, Converse high-tops, and backpack. I ran across the lawn and down the street, under one streetlight and then the next, and I never came back.
In five years, Hailey will be sixteen. At winter break, she was almost as tall as I am. Would she ever think of slipping out in the night and running away?
I put my hand on the knob and turn it. To my surprise, it’s unlocked. This would never happen under Eleanor’s watchful eye—proof that Eleanor is actually in the hospital, a fact that I haven’t fully accepted until now.
The front door opens to the living room, with one coat closet tucked under the stairs. I turn directly into the kitchen, the heart of things—oblong Tupperware containers in descending order on the counter, same linoleum smelling of lemons, the toaster oven and the toaster sleeping under its quilted cover, like a birdcage at night.
My grandmother was born here. I know the exact bedroom. It’s where she lived out her final years, an agoraphobe. Maybe a pyro. Maybe a little addicted to Valium. Maybe still a genius, a closet writer who’d given up on her audience. They certainly never gave up on her.
For so long, Harriet Wolf was only a name that I dropped, if the company was educated enough. In my personal statement for graduate school applications, I noted that I had grown up with her and that my childhood “was steeped in living, breathing, literary lore.” When I arrived at graduate school, I told only one person and let the story circulate. Soon enough, everyone knew. I realized that I’d been drawn to a degree in literature for this sole reason: to get my legacy in front of the right audience. I also thought that I’d have some talent for literature—if not as a writer (I’d tried in my early twenties) then as a critic. That turned out not to be the case.
In the daily life of my childhood, the fact that my grandmother was a writer of note rarely surfaced. There were inquiries, of course—literary events, keynotes, graduation speeches—but my mother shut them down. It came up predictably dur
ing parent-teacher conferences. My grades were lackluster across the board. But the English teachers would always comment that my ability with language was in there somewhere! What with the family history, how couldn’t it be? It was their job to draw it out. I haven’t progressed beyond the third chapter of my dissertation on Salinger, another famous shut-in—shut-ins were my territory, after all. The dissertation sits in a cramped box in a closet, which seems to be the perfect treatment of Salinger, to my mind.
But here, now, in the kitchen, I remember my grandmother. Her hair in two strange knot buns, hornish on her head. She terrified me. She was gaunt and brittle but with veins that bulged on her hands like on a weight lifter’s. She had a small tongue that popped out to wet her lips, lizard-like. Eventually she cloistered herself on the second floor. Why did Tilton and Eleanor call her Wee-ette? I can’t recall; it likely had something to do with her being so shrunken, so wee. I recall my mother shoving me toward the shut door of Wee-ette’s bedroom, where her mother had given birth to her in some bloody fashion, and where, we all knew but never mentioned, the old woman would one day die. “Amuse her!” Eleanor demanded. The command to smile became one of my greatest pet peeves. Later, it was one of the first things Ron ever said to me: “Why so glum? Smile a little!” I stared blankly and said, “Earn it.” Did the world owe me something? Did everyone have to earn my affection? Ron would say it was one of my uglier flaws.
I lift the green wall-hung phone—its ringlet cord still there—and have a momentary urge to call Ron and make him guess what phone I’m calling from. He wouldn’t remember our conversation about this phone, of course. If I questioned him about it, he would call it one of my love tests, and he would fail it. “But you set me up to fail,” he’d admonish me. “So you win! You’re right!”
I’m not ready to talk to Ron anyway, test or no test. I think of my own father. At least he made a clean break of it. He was already a ghost by the time we moved back into this house. Before every divorce, there’s a period of reckoning, and I’m in it. My previous divorce was about failure and loss. This one is shaping up to be about the future—loneliness?—and my ability to fend it off or not.