He’s seen me through the rearview mirror, I think. He’s waiting for me. I set out down the hill, trying to hurry to make up for the unintended insult, but the light coat of snow has made the road slippery and the cloud of exhaust fumes from the Olds, condensing in the cold air, obscures my footing. I concentrate on the Olds’s red taillights as I frame words of apology in my head. We weren’t making fun of your Texas accent? No, that just sounded condescending. Nat and I had been laughing about the whole porte cochere thing . . . but that made it sound as if we’ve gotten really chummy. And so what? What did I have to apologize for when obviously David and Bethesda had been plotting how to handle the “bones” question on their own?
I stop dead in the middle of the road. What if David’s not waiting for me at all? What if he just stopped the car to . . . what? It’s an odd place to stop, unless . . .
Something draws my attention away from the car at the bottom of the hill and into the woods just beyond where the car has stopped. I’ve been staring so long at the red taillights that they’ve burned an afterimage into my retinas—a hazy reddish blob that hovers under the old ilex trees. I see there’s a gap in the trees here—a path like the one Bethesda led me on earlier today. Of course, Bethesda knows all the secret paths around the garden, and so does David. What if they’d agreed to meet here?
The reddish blob swells as my eyes fill with tears. What an idiot I’ve been! Here I thought David was interested in me when all the time it was Bethesda.
I blink and the reddish blob wavers and thins, turning into a girlish shape that darts between the tangled branches of the ilexes. For a moment I think of the spectral girl who’d led me up the hill today, and it’s a testimony to my jealousy that I find myself hoping that the girl in the trees is a ghost. But no, although my vision is still blurred from the tears that fill my eyes, and staring at the taillights, I can see it’s Bethesda moving stealthily through the woods. Of course it’s Bethesda he’s waiting for, not me. I turn away and creep back up the hill, staying in the shadows so that no one will see my humiliation.
The snow does not stop David from his plans to excavate the well the next morning. At breakfast, once Diana Tate leaves to order a hospital bed for Zalman and Daria is sent back to the office to answer the phones, David announces his plans to remove the bones first and asks for a volunteer to help him. I see him look in my direction, but I keep my eyes down, studying the way the brown sugar I’ve just spooned into my oatmeal is melting into the milk. After a moment of silence, Bethesda offers to help.
“Thanks,” David says. “I’ll need a burlap sack to put the bones in. There should be one in the pantry.”
We all look toward the kitchen, where we can hear the sounds of the cook making our lunches. “I’ll distract Mrs. Hervey,” Nat says.
“I guess that leaves me to get the sack,” I say. “Shall I bring it down to the crypt?”
“Oh, we won’t need it until after lunch,” Bethesda says. “Why don’t you watch Zalman this morning?”
I look toward David. If he really wants me there, he could say he needs the sack sooner, but he says nothing. Which must mean he wants the morning alone with Bethesda. When I look away from David, I see that Bethesda has been watching me. I never noticed how pale her eyes are, the same color as the milky blue in the teacup she lowers from her lips now in order to smile at me.
While I’m unloading potatoes from a sack in the pantry, I can hear Nat talking to the cook. I notice that Nat remembers not only the names of Mrs. Hervey’s three children but the ages and names of their children—one of whom, Danielle Nicole, is working as a housemaid this winter at Bosco.
“That’ll make six generations of Herveys that’s worked here at Bosco,” the cook tells Nat, “which’ll have us beating out the Tates.”
“Really? I didn’t know that Diana’s family worked here. Was she related to Evelyn White, the first director?”
Mrs. Hervey sniffs. “No, Diana was Miss White’s assistant, but Diana’s grandfather was a gardener and his mother was housekeeper for Mrs. Latham . . .”
Sneaking out of the pantry behind Mrs. Hervey’s back, I give Nat a wave so he can make his escape, but I hear him accepting Mrs. Hervey’s offer of tea and fresh-baked brownies and what Mrs. Hervey refers to as “a nice long chat.”
From Zalman’s room on the first floor, I watch David and Bethesda leave from the side door and enter the path that leads down to the children’s cemetery. “I think it’s wrong to move those bones without contacting the police first,” I say, plumping up Zalman’s pillows so he can sit up and drink the tea I’ve brought for him. I give the last pillow a hard punch, remembering how Bethesda had pretended to be reluctant to help David and then volunteered anyway.
Zalman nods sympathetically, but after he’s taken a sip of tea, he asks me a question on an entirely different subject. “Do you find that you have particularly vivid dreams here at Bosco?”
I can feel the color leave my face. It had taken me a long time to get to sleep after climbing back up the hill, but when I did, I’d had the dream about the statues again, only this time when the girl in the maze turned, her stone face was so worn down that I could see that there were bones beneath the marble.
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“Last night I could have sworn there was a white dog on my bed, lying over my broken leg.” Zalman points to the lumpy mass beneath his bedspread.
“Did you have a white dog when you were growing up?” I ask, thinking that Zalman’s dream seems comfortingly benign compared to my nightmares.
“No, we lived in an apartment building in Riverdale that didn’t allow dogs.” And then, leaning forward in bed, he confides in a whisper, “I think it was Madame Blavatsky’s dog who came to visit me last night.”
“Madame Blavatsky’s dog?”
“She was a famous medium—”
“Yes, I know who she was. My mother is a big fan of hers. She even belongs to the Theosophical Society, which Madame Blavatsky founded. You see, my mother thinks she’s a medium—”
“Of course she is,” Zalman says to my bewilderment. I check the vial of painkillers that Zalman brought home from the hospital to see how many are still there. “I’m sure she’s heard of the white dog. I learned about it when I was an undergraduate at Penn. I was writing my thesis on Yeats’s forays into spiritualism, and I wandered into a little cafe on Sansom Street one day, and imagine my surprise when I read on the menu that the cafe—the White Dog Cafe—was the former home of Madame Blavatsky! A serendipitous coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
I look up from counting Percocets (Zalman appears to have taken only one since last night) and nod in agreement. Zalman’s eyes are glittering and his hair is standing up in wispy fluffs from his pink scalp. I lay a hand on his forehead to see if he’s got a fever, but his brow is cool.
“The story on the menu explained that Madame Blavatsky had injured her leg and that her doctors wanted to amputate. ‘Imagine my leg going to the spirit world without me,’ she retorted. And then within days her leg was miraculously healed. She said a white ‘pup’ from the spirit world came to her each night and lay on her leg to heal it. Now it’s come to heal my leg. What do you think of that?”
“I think I’ll bring my laptop down here today,” I say, patting Zalman’s quilt, “in case you need anything.” And in case you lapse into delirium. “If that’s okay with you.”
“Of course, shayna maidela, but you can’t fool me.” Zalman wags a reproving finger at me. “I know the real reason is so you can see the white dog for yourself.”
When I go back to my room to retrieve my laptop, I notice that the theatrical poster listing Tom Quinn and Corinth Blackwell has fallen from the window frame and slipped under my desk. I pick it up and see that on the back of it there’s a message written in pale, faded ink. “Cory,” it reads, “I’m leaving Bosco tonight. If you want to go with me, meet me in the Rose Garden at midnight.—Q” Below the florid Q is another line: “We?
??ll follow the rivers north.” So the poster must have been in Corinth’s possession at some time, but why would she leave it behind? David said he found it in the attic in an old trunk. Is it Corinth’s trunk? And if her trunk is still here, might that prove she never left Bosco at all? That the bones in the well are hers?
Although I’m nervous about leaving Zalman unattended, I decide to take a quick trip up to the attic. Hurrying up the stairs, I admit to myself that I’m hoping that I won’t find Corinth’s trunk. Since we found the bones yesterday, I’ve been fighting the idea that they could be Corinth’s. I can picture the stone lid closing over her, picture it as though from inside the well. I can feel the last breath of air slip out between the cracks and hear the muttering of the spring boiling up to claim her bones. The image is so real to me that when I reach the attic, I’m gasping for breath as if I myself were trapped in the well. The four narrow beds that line the north wall like shrouded mummies cast a funereal gloom over the room. I quickly cross to the south side, threading my way between discarded furniture and books and toys that lie in disordered heaps, nearly tripping over an ancient rocking horse whose baleful eye looks up at me through a tangle of decaying pink ribbons, and wrench open a window. I rest my arms on the windowsill and draw in breath after chill breath, trying to dispel the awful claustrophobia of my vision.
“I’m leaving Bosco tonight,” Tom Quinn had written. “If you want to go with me, meet me in the Rose Garden at midnight.” Had she ignored his message or had she gone and been betrayed by Tom and left in the well to die? To have never left here, to have been trapped here at Bosco for all time. It’s not the end I want to envision for Corinth Blackwell . . .
Even though it’s beautiful here. From this height I can see the entire garden spread out below me, the newly fallen snow masking the signs of age and decay. I can see all the way down into the giardino segreto, where the statue of the Indian maiden crouches in a shimmering pool of snow that glitters like water as it catches the sunlight. The wind whips the snow up into plumes like sprays of water, and suddenly I can see Bosco as it must have looked when the fountains were on—the flash of water everywhere. But still, as beautiful as it might have been, what I want to picture is a coach waiting at the drive at the bottom of the gardens and Corinth Blackwell getting into it. Leaving Bosco forever. Following the rivers north, as Tom Quinn had promised. I almost do see it, a black shape coalescing out of the shadows at the bottom of the hill; but then instead I see myself, standing in the road last night, breathing in exhaust fumes while David waited in the commodious Olds for Bethesda.
I turn away from the window and see the open trunk just next to the toppled rocking horse. I kneel down beside it and lift up a dark blue dress. Two letters are stitched inside the collar: CB.
I go through the rest of the trunk and find a leather satchel that holds a curious assortment of wires and picks. I saw one like it in Lily Dale, at the home of a medium who my mother said was a fraud. “This is how she tilts tables,” my mother said sadly—lies of any kind saddened my mother so much that I had early on given up telling even the smallest ones, since my mother could detect them immediately.
I look inside the cuffs of the dress sleeves and find the sewn-in pockets that would have held the wires Corinth used to perform her levitating acts. When I’m done, I fold all the clothes away and, taking only the satchel with me, close the trunk. As I head back downstairs, I wonder why the contents of the trunk sadden me so. After all, the evidence that Corinth was a fake supports the way I’m writing my book—it’s what I’ve always believed, that even mediums like my mother, who don’t practice intentional fraud, are merely responding to subconscious messages from their clients. So what if Corinth has turned out to be a more egregious fraud. It’s just as ridiculous to feel that Corinth has betrayed me as it is to feel that David has. But that’s exactly how I do feel.
I stop on the first-floor landing and look out the window. Although the sun has transformed the garden into a glittering mirage of its former glory, I can imagine that before long the garden will disappear beneath the snow, the paths will be impassable, even the roads out difficult to navigate. I’ve heard that guests are sometimes snowbound at Bosco for days . . . weeks, even. As I knock on Zalman’s door, I try to shake off the gloom that has descended on me—if only for Zalman’s sake—but as I turn the knob (Zalman must be asleep, as he doesn’t answer my knock), I can’t help feeling that before long the snow will seal us all inside Bosco just as the stone lid sealed Corinth into the marble well.
When I push open Zalman’s door, a gust of cold air hits me so forcibly I take a step backward. The wind snakes by me as though it were escaping from the poet’s room. I step inside and cross right away to the open window. A drift of crystalline snow has mounded on the sill, and as I struggle to get the window closed, it blows up in my face in a malicious little whirlwind that stings my cheeks and hangs in the air a moment before dispersing into the garden.
“Who in the world left this open?” I ask, turning to face Zalman’s bed.
Zalman is sitting straight up in bed, a red paisley shawl draped over his shoulders, his eyes bright and his cheeks an alarming shade of pink. I hurry over to him and lay my hand on his forehead, which is, to my surprise, cool. Looking closer at him, I see that the pink in his cheeks is makeup: two stripes of rouge applied like Indian war paint.
“The children came to pay me a visit,” he says. “I’m afraid I’ve been a victim of their little tricks.”
And suddenly I realize what it was Zalman said last night when I came back to the crypt with Nat and David. It wasn’t “We have visitors”; it was “We had visitors.” No wonder Bethesda looked so dazed.
“Zalman,” I say as I scrub the paint off his cheeks with a damp wash towel, “did the children visit you and Bethesda yesterday in the crypt?”
“Oh, no,” Zalman says. “It was their mother.”
“Their mother? You mean Aurora Latham? Is Aurora Latham here now?” I look around as if the founder of Bosco were to be found lurking in the corners of Zalman’s room. Somehow the idea of seeing the ghost of Aurora Latham is far more frightening to me than seeing the children.
“Oh, no,” Zalman says, patting my hand reassuringly, “she’s not here. She’s with Miss Graham.”
Chapter Sixteen
On her way back up to the house Corinth is drenched again and again by sprays of water that spring out of the fountain allée and arc across her path. The water pressure, now that Lantini has removed the stones from the well, has clearly been restored, but still the fountains are behaving erratically. The smooth cascade thrashes against the carved marble borders as if live trout were struggling upstream against the current. The jets that leap out of the fountain slap her with the weight and muscle of live fish. When she gets to the second terrace, she tries to turn down into the ilex grove, but a geyser erupts from between two paving stones and fans out in front of her, each drop of water refracting the bright sunlight into a rainbow that shimmers in the air, like a peacock displaying its tail. She can even see, as the water hangs suspended for a fraction of a second longer than seems possible, the eyes of the peacock’s tail, and then, as the mirage vanishes, she feels the eyes following her. The children’s eyes.
No, that’s one thing she can’t bear. She continues up the main path, her head bowed to the ground against the onslaught of water. Giochi d’acqua. Water tricks, indeed! She remembers what Aurora told her this morning—that James was the ringleader, enticing Tam and Cynthia into his little rebellions, to do his little tricks. Were these geysers some of James’s little tricks, then? And the arrow through Frank Campbell’s heart? Was that one of his little tricks, as well? She remembers the fingers on her wrist last night and the sound of children’s voices in the grotto—more than three children. What if James had found in death more accomplices for his tricks? What if he had found a whole tribe of ghost siblings to do his bidding? Did she really want to summon that host forth in yet another sé
ance?
As if in answer to her question, someone somewhere starts to hum. Her skin, already chilled by her soakings, prickles, but then she realizes that the sound is coming from the pipes of the fountains. She remembers that the fountains at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli were designed to produce music—a music said to represent the voice of the Tiburtine Sibyl chanting her prophecies for great Rome. Of course Aurora, who had commissioned statues to cry, would want her fountains to sing. Maybe that’s all this is. The giochi d’acqua, the singing fountains—all tricks to bring back her children, to make her believe they are still with her. I’m afraid I wasn’t always the best of mothers, she said. From how she treats Alice, Corinth can believe it. Maybe this resurrection is supposed to somehow appease her guilt.
If so, Aurora will have to wrestle with her guilt on her own, as Corinth has done all these years since she laid her own child to rest under the tea-colored water of the bogs behind Milo Latham’s cabin on the Sacandaga. She won’t be the one to summon that horde of spirits, her little tea-colored one among them. She’ll go to Tom Quinn now and tell him she’s ready to leave Bosco, and Milo Latham, for good.
As she climbs the last steps to the last terrace, she feels strengthened in her resolution enough to hum along with the fountains, a simple tune that she soon remembers the words to:
Ring-a-ring o’ roses
A pocket full of posies.
At the top of the fountain allée one last spray of water fans out in front of her, this one seeming to spring, not from the fountain, but out of thin air.
Ashes, ashes, the fountains sing as the water droplets form into the shape of a girl, her skirt billowing in a final curtsy as she drops to the ground.
We all fall down.