He smiled at me. “Not at all, my dear. Far better to clear the cobwebs—as you’ve been doing. I’ve been thinking about this house. You know that its octagonal design was inspired by Orson Squire Fowler.”
“Wasn’t he that phrenologist guy?” Jess asked, taking a sip of his scotch. He looked relieved that the subject had moved away from Minnie’s postpartum delusions.
“Yes, he also wrote a book exhorting the adoption of the octagonal house. He believed that just as men’s skulls correspond to their characters, so men’s habitations correspond to their intellect. Which I suppose makes me an old ruin,” he chuckled.
“This house isn’t a ruin,” I objected. “And neither are you. You both just need a little . . . maintenance.”
Monty threw back his head and laughed heartily. “Thank you, Clare. I believe you’re right—and that you are doing both the house and me a world of good.”
I smiled back at him, his regard warming me even more than the fire or the scotch. But then Jess asked, “If a man’s home is a reflection of his personality, what does that say about a homeless man?” and I felt cold, remembering Jess’s dream of wandering through a house full of mirrors that didn’t show his reflection.
“This is your home,” Monty said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I hope you both know that.”
Jess was sitting far back in a wing-backed chair, his face in shadow, so I couldn’t read his expression. But I felt his reluctance to take generosity at face value. His parents had been critical and unsupportive—suspicious of relying on something as ephemeral as writing for a living—which had only made it harder when we fell into financial trouble to keep in touch with them; Jess hated the thought that they had been right. Our loveless childhoods were something that Jess and I had in common. I knew what it was like not to trust love when it came along. I was afraid now that Jess would say something cruel to Monty’s magnanimity, but after a moment he leaned forward into the firelight and held up his half-empty glass.
“Let’s drink to second acts then, F. Scott be damned, for Riven House and its ragtag crew of writers.”
We clinked glasses, the chime of the heavy Waterford crystal reverberating in the quiet room and, I imagined, spreading out into the house, banishing cobwebs and shadows.
For Mary, too, I thought to myself. I would give her a second act by telling her story. When I met Monty’s eye he nodded and I felt sure he knew what I was thinking.
The next day, as I was gathering the empty tumblers from the library, Monty grabbed me by the hand and pulled out a chair beside his desk. “Let me show you what I’ve found about her,” he said without preamble.
He didn’t have to say her name. I knew he meant Mary Foley. He opened an old accounting ledger to a page on which the Concord Gazette article about her death had been neatly glued. There was also the article about her crowning as Apple Blossom Queen below it and, in elegant old-fashioned script, a notation.
Fifty acres, one hundred apple trees bearing, deeded to John Foley on May 12, 1929, by Birdsill Montague in exchange for the maidenhood of one Mary Foley.
The line made me feel cold despite the sun on my back and the fire in the grate.
“Who wrote this?”
“My father,” Monty answered. “It’s the only mention he makes of Mary Foley in all his correspondence and notebooks. Unless you count . . . well, turn the page.”
I did, the old paper crackling like autumn leaves. The next page was an ordinary ledger with household expenditures and revenue from the orchards and hay fields arrayed in neat columns. Even at a cursory glance, it wasn’t hard to see that the revenue was hardly enough to offset the lavish expenditures of the household. But more poignant than the faltering finances was the dried flower that had been pressed between the pages, an apple blossom, its petals faded to palest pink.
“He loved her,” I said, looking up at Monty, whose eyes were glittering in the sunlight.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, “but he certainly was haunted by her.”
“Haunted?” I repeated in a whisper. Jess was upstairs writing in his new study, but he sometimes wandered around when he was writing—walking helped him think, he said—and I didn’t want him to hear Monty and me talking about ghosts.
Monty smiled. I thought he was going to make fun of me the way he used to mock a student’s naïve unreasoned remark, but instead he said, “You sense her here, don’t you?”
A shiver passed through me, but I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of more—that Monty had also sensed Mary Foley’s ghost, or that Jess would hear us. “Jess thinks that it’s crazy—ghosts, apparitions . . .”
“Jess has an admirably rational mind,” Monty said. “It’s why he writes so lucidly. But he doesn’t see very far into the dark. Not like you, Clare. It was your vision that gave his first book its heart—”
“No,” I said automatically.
Monty held up his hands, palms out, as if I were about to tackle him. I hadn’t meant to sound so angry. “Very well, we’ll leave that. But you will admit that you see things that Jess does not.”
“Jess misses things when he’s writing,” I began. “He can’t be bothered with everyday details—”
“That’s not what I meant,” Monty said. “I mean things not of this world.”
“Oh, well, there are things I’ve imagined . . .” I told him about the figure standing on the weir the first day and her reappearance the night before the storm when the sound of a baby crying had woken me, and then how I’d seen her standing on the weir after the flood. “But those were just things I conjured up out of mist and imagination.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And what time did you say the crying woke you up?”
“3:36,” I said, wishing I’d never admitted to any of it.
He got up and snatched a book from a shelf and handed it to me, open to a page. I turned it over to read the title. Ghosts Along the Hudson. There was a picture of a ruined mansion on the cover, wreathed in fog, a double exposure “apparition” floating above an overgrown rose garden. I was surprised Monty owned such a book. I turned back to the page he’d opened it to and read a passage that had been underlined in blue ink. It was an account of “The Riven House Ghost” purported to have been related by a caretaker in the 1960s whose wife had been woken every night by the sound of a baby crying, always at the same time.
3:36
“Maybe I read this,” I said, looking back at the cover. “I wrote a story about the apple blossom girl so I’d probably read something about her. This looks like a book the library would have had.”
“And you think you remembered it so well you made yourself wake up every night at the same time?”
“It’s possible . . .” I began, but the skeptical look in Monty’s eyes stopped me.
“Is that really what you think, Clare?” he asked me gently, but firmly.
“I . . . don’t know what I think,” I said.
“Don’t know or don’t want to know?”
I remembered him doing this in class, challenging a student’s assumptions until he proved his point.
“It’s just that . . . if I thought what I saw was real . . . well, that would mean I was crazy, wouldn’t it?”
“Isn’t it crazier to deny the evidence of what you see with your own eyes?”
Instead of answering I asked him a question. “Have you seen . . . her?”
“No,” he said. “But I’ve felt her. Felt her wanting someone to tell her story. I’ve been trying to do it myself . . .” He looked at the scattered papers on his desk and smiled ruefully. “But I’m afraid I’m not the right person for the job. I think you are and that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m here because of Jess,” I said, feeling a prickling of unease. “I thought you needed a caretaker. I thought you wanted Jess.”
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” he said, dismissing my concerns as irrelevant. As if it wouldn’t kill Jess to think it was me Monty wanted here instead
of him. “It’s Mary Foley who brought you here.”
I thought of all the events that had led to Jess and me coming to Riven House two months ago—our failing finances, the crisis in our marriage, Jess’s struggles with his second novel, the fights and tearful scenes we’d had last winter, the rising prices of real estate in the Hudson Valley, Jess’s disdain of split-levels and aluminum siding. Could a disembodied ghost of a nineteen-year-old girl who had died over eighty years ago possibly engineer all that? But despite the outlandishness of the proposition, I felt that everything in my whole life—Great-Granny Jackson’s nighttime visitations, my lonely childhood, that feeling of being an outsider, the sunlit days in the apple orchards, meeting Jess, leaving Dunstan for him as Mary had left her farmer fiancé to ride off with Bayard Montague . . . all of it had led to being here at Riven House.
“If Jess thinks I’m seeing things he’ll worry,” I said. “I had a breakdown . . . senior year . . .”
“Clare,” Monty said, leaning forward and taking my hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It was at the end of the year. You . . .” I faltered, not liking to bring up the scandal that had ended Monty’s teaching career at Bailey when a student told the administration that Monty had made sexual advances toward her.
“I was having my own difficulties,” he finished for me. “An unlucky year for us both, then. Was it . . . I don’t mean to pry . . . Did it have to do with Jess?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I said quickly. And then in a rush, “I’d gotten pregnant. Jess was upset of course. Neither of us was in any shape to be parents. It would have ruined Jess’s chances to write . . .”
“Oh, my dear,” Monty said, squeezing my hands. “I used to think the same thing myself, but now I see how foolish the notion is—as if a creation of paper could ever take the place of a flesh and blood child. Did you . . .”
“No,” I said. “I lost the baby.” Even your body knew it wasn’t the right time. “It was probably for the best, only . . .”
“Of course it must have been a terrible experience for you! I hope Jess was supportive.”
“Jess was wonderful! He took me to the hospital, he stayed with me, even when I started . . . raving. They said it was a kind of postpartum depression brought on by hormones and the pain pills they gave me. I don’t do well with drugs—or being in a hospital; I’ve always been scared of them—but I got this terrible idea in my head that I had made it happen.”
Monty nodded. “I’m sure it’s quite normal to feel guilty in those circumstances. Especially if you had felt ambivalent about the pregnancy—”
“But you see,” I interrupted him, “I’d made things happen before. Little things . . .” Threads unraveling in the tablecloth, Charity Jane’s pencil snapping during her exam. “Usually when I was angry.” Plates flying from the china cabinet . . .
“Doors slamming? Things breaking?”
“Yes,” I said, looking up at Monty. His eyes were glittering feverishly and his color looked bad. I was afraid I was upsetting him, but it was such a relief to be taken seriously that I went on. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“No,” he said, “I think you’re a sensitive, for lack of a better word. I know because I am too—or was. In my youth I saw things and made things happen, as you put it, but that gift—or curse—has faded with age. But you, I saw it in you right away that first day of class when you plucked the story of the apple blossom girl right out of my head.”
“Plucked it out of your head?”
“I’d been thinking about the story when I came in and then you wrote about it. Oh, I’m not saying you stole it, Clare. Don’t look at me as though I’d accused you of plagiarism. The words, the framing, were all your own. I suspect that the truly great writers all have a touch of the psychic about them. And you have more than a touch. That’s why you will be able to tell her story.”
“But don’t you want to do it yourself? You said you’ve been working on it.”
He shook his head. “I’m an old man, Clare. It’s time I stepped aside and let youth step in. It will be enough for me to see my legacy continue in you. I would be honored to a part of the process, though, to hear your ideas, be a sounding board.”
“I’d like that,” I said, squeezing Monty’s hands. “Only I’m afraid that Jess might not understand. That he might worry if he thought I was working on something that might trigger another episode.” And that he’d be jealous that Monty had chosen me and not him, I thought but didn’t say.
“He’s so engrossed in his own work he’ll never notice,” Monty said. “It will be our little secret.”
I hesitated. Jess would be angry if he knew I was entering into a secret pact with Monty, not to mention how hurt he would be if he knew Monty had chosen me as his legacy and not him. Which was exactly what I had to protect him from. Jess couldn’t know that Monty regarded me as the better writer. And if I tried to explain that Mary Foley wanted me to tell her story he would think I was having another breakdown and I couldn’t put him through that again. When I’d told him after the miscarriage that I had made it happen, just as I’d summoned Great-Granny Jackson’s ghost and made all the plates break in the china cabinet, he had looked so frightened for me that he’d never left my side again. I sometimes wondered if he had married me because he felt responsible for my breakdown—as if I were a bit of bric-a-brac that he’d had to buy because he’d broken it.
It was better he didn’t know.
“Yes,” I told Monty. “It will be our secret.”
Monty clinked the empty glass he held against the one in my hand. In the silence of the house I thought I heard an answering echo—a bell chiming, the shiver of glass in the windowpanes—as if the house had joined in our pact.
Chapter Twelve
It wasn’t hard to keep our secret from Jess. He’d entered into the “deep stage” of writing that made him nearly oblivious to everything going on around him. He wouldn’t say what he was working on. He believed, as Hemingway had, that talking about a book could kill it, but I could tell by his behavior that he was on to something. He stopped sleeping regularly, getting up in the middle of the night and sneaking out of our room to work in Minnie’s Mourning Room—or work somewhere, I presumed. I heard him wandering around the gallery, down the stairs, and then in circles around the first floor, murmuring lines under his breath, his footsteps fading into the distance as if he were the ghost haunting Riven House, doomed to vanish at first light. He was often gone when I woke up, out walking, I presumed. He said that the sound of Monty’s typewriter drove him crazy. I chided him that coming all the way from Monty’s basement it wasn’t really so loud.
“It’s the idea of it,” Jess shot back. “It’s as if he uses a manual typewriter to make sure we can all hear that he’s being productive.”
In the past when Jess had gotten so engrossed in his writing I’d felt envious and abandoned, but now I was glad that he was so distracted. It meant I could work on my own research without him noticing how much time I’d started spending with Monty.
I usually started out in the morning reading aloud to him what I’d written the day before. He’d listen, make a comment or two, and ask a few questions. He was interested in what came from research and what came from my “own head.” Not, I learned, because he held the latter in less regard.
“The trouble I’ve had writing about Mary over the years is that we know so little about her and I haven’t been able to fill in those gaps with my imagination. But you seem to have a direct pipeline to her.”
“I think it’s because we have a lot in common,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable with Monty’s assertion that I could do something he couldn’t. “We both grew up on apple orchards, we both got the Bailey scholarship, only she couldn’t go. I think of her life as what would have happened if I’d gotten pregnant in high school instead of college—and if Jess had left me the way Bayard left Mary.”
“Yes, the similarities are interesting
,” Monty said, looking at me speculatively. “You even look a little like her.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, blushing. I’d thought the same thing myself, but hadn’t wanted to admit it. It wasn’t just that Mary Foley was beautiful, it was that as an adopted child I’d learned to guard myself against finding resemblances in strangers. It was too easy to convince myself that I was really some famous movie star’s daughter whom she’d had to give up in order to pursue her career or the long-lost daughter of my eighth grade English teacher who’d taken the job at Concord High School just so she could be close to me and encourage me in my writing.
“In fact,” Monty went on, “you might be related to her. Do you know anything about your birth mother?”
“No,” I said. “My parents never told me anything about her. The only thing I ever overheard about her was . . .” I hesitated.
“Yes?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “That she was in the Hudson Mental Hospital when she had me.”
“Oh,” Monty said, looking embarrassed. Finally I’d come up with a detail that shocked him.
“Besides, I don’t want the story to be about me. It’s about Mary. I’m going to the library today to read through the 1920s papers and to look at the school records to see if she’s ever mentioned.”
“Well, it pays to be thorough,” Monty said, sliding my pages into a folder on his desk. He kept the pages I gave him each day to reread and gave them back to me the next day with notes. “But don’t let the research slow you down. Research can be a trap, as I well know . . .” He looked ruefully at the piles of paper on his desk, then grinned at me. “Do you want to see my antidote to writer’s block?”
I hesitated—the question sounded almost unsavory—but Monty was already opening his desk drawer and lifting something out of it, something heavy and metal.
“It was my grandfather’s service revolver, a souvenir of the Mexican-American War.”