As she followed him into the mudroom, it came to her. Zeus. The god was Zeus. Uncle Marsden was nothing like Zeus, he was more like…Hephaestus? Was that the blacksmith god? Saga had loved the Greek myths when she was little, known all the gods and muses and famously doomed mortals by heart. She’d like to know them again. She would have to find that book. It had a yellow cover; that much she remembered, but not where she had last seen it. Had it even survived the move from her mother’s house? It might be in one of the boxes on the third floor. She would have to look—if she could remember to look. She took out her notebook to write a reminder.
“Did you do what you needed to do with those creatures? Poor things,” said Uncle Marsden as he took off his rubber boots.
“Yes. But I have to go back in at the end of the week. They’re with my friend Stan, but I want to keep an eye on them. Until he finds them homes.”
“Is that where you stay? With this Stan fellow? Who in Constantinople is this Stan fellow?”
“I stay there sometimes,” she lied. “But he’s not a boyfriend, so please, no lectures.”
Oh, Stan might have liked that, no doubt about it. Stan wasn’t really even a “friend”—in terms of personality, he was a jerk—but there was no reason to worry Uncle Marsden with the details of her history with Stan. Stan was a big drinker, and basically, Saga had decided, he didn’t much care for people. Drunk or sober, however, he was devoted to the animals he rescued.
Uncle Marsden growled again, but quietly. Gradually, he was giving up the struggle of trying to reason with her or find out where she stayed when she went into the city. She knew he suspected that he wouldn’t like the answer, and it was true: he wouldn’t. Last year, when he’d told her that her secrecy was dangerous, she’d told him it wasn’t secrecy. It was just that she needed some of her life to remain private, all her own. “If I don’t make a boundary or two,” she had explained, “I’ll have to keep reminding you I’m thirty-three years old, I’m not a child.” Poor Uncle Marsden had to agree.
She hadn’t had a seizure in two years, so he couldn’t very well use this caution, either, as an argument to keep her close to home. They had a complicated alliance but one they both loved. At times—late nights, on the front porch when it was warm, by the front fireplace when it was not—she fancied that this must be a little bit like marriage.
She caught him eyeing the borrowed shirt she wore, but all he said was “I’m going to assume you were not in Maine these past few days. Though God knows that might be safer.” He looked again and, this time, pointed at the shirt. “Lobster, lobster…nice idea there. How about lobster on Friday? Just for a change of pace.”
“I’d love that,” she said. Briefly, she wondered why she was clutching her notebook. She put it back in her knapsack and hung the knapsack on a hook. She dropped the plastic bag containing her wet clothes beside the washing machine. For a moment, on the train, Saga had completely forgotten what the bag contained. She had been surprised, when she opened it, to see her yellow dress and her tweed jacket, the remains of a suit she’d bought for job interviews in her previous life.
Inside the house, heat rose contentiously through the antique vents like the mumblings of a hungry stomach. Saga walked carefully through the kitchen and the rooms beyond, turning on lamps. Just to see where you were going, you had to turn on half a dozen. Because of the outdated wiring, Uncle Marsden insisted on weak bulbs, and most of the shades had turned cloudy and yellow with age. “Can I make you a drink?” she called out.
“You may, my dear!”
She went to the bar in the parlor and stood on the library stool to reach the shelf with the bourbon and the cherries. “Shirley Temple for me,” she said when Uncle Marsden passed her on his way upstairs. Even when he hadn’t been in the garden, he changed his clothes for dinner.
He leaned across the banister. “And forty lashes. As if they’d do a bit of good.”
Saga looked out the front windows at the house across the street. Standing at the door was the giant schnauzer who lived there. He never barked or scratched, just showed up and waited. Saga didn’t need to look at a clock; this meant it was probably five to six. Every night, precisely at six, the porch lights flanking the door winked on, and Commodore Perry was admitted to his house. That was the kind of life Saga kept thinking she longed for. Really, though, it was the kind of life she could have right here, for the time being, if she chose—a life of perfect safety, ample comfort, and easy kindness amid all these deep, lumpy sofas and thick-limbed tables in rooms as grand as circus tents.
Uncle Marsden’s house was so nice, so intensely, so magically nice—not magazine nice but fairy-tale nice. Saga had loved it forever, all the way back to when she was a little girl and came for summer visits with her parents. Even then she had wished she could live here, and not just because it would be wonderful to live near the beach. Uncle Marsden’s house had lots of funny forgotten stairways and cupboards and chutes, just the way a person had blood vessels and organs (some of them essential, some nearly obsolete) hidden beneath all that skin. It had a dumbwaiter that still worked, though no one used it—or not since Saga and her cousins had been children, pretending, when the adults weren’t around, that it was an elevator, a spaceship, a diving bell. In the old smoking den, Uncle Marsden had installed blue lamps and a purring humidifier. This was where he kept his personal plant collection; he called this room the Salon of Mosses. It smelled exactly like a forest.
There were chandeliers that might have come from Cinderella (though Cinderella would have kept them free of cobwebs), and halfway up the front stairs, which changed direction twice, there was a deep windowseat, as if you just might need to rest on your way to bed—which, for a while, Saga did.
Everything was big and old: the tall imposing beds, the crooked raftered ceilings, the Arabian rugs—worn from plush reds to dusty pinks—and the front porch, which felt like the sheltered deck of a ship, cluttered end to end with sagging wicker chairs and flocks of pillows with sun-faded faces, their undersides peppered with mildew. It was the kind of house people called stately, with rooms on the highest floor that Uncle Marsden referred to as “maids’ rooms” even though he’d never had any maids, or any that Saga knew about. Three of these rooms were filled with boxes and unused furniture, and when you opened their doors, the smell of mothballs hit you hard and made you sneeze, but the fourth room had a bed, a dresser, a cracked-leather armchair, and a painting of a tulip field in Holland (complete with rickety windmill). In one corner stood a tiny green sink, and out the one protruding window—this was the best part—there was a view of the ocean and some tree-tufted islands in the distance. This was the only room in the house where you could really see, not just hear, the ocean, and Uncle Marsden had given it to Saga.
That long-ago wish of Saga’s—getting to live here—hadn’t come true in the best of ways, but she sometimes got a kick out of the fact that it had come true when so many others had not. She didn’t like to think about how long it would stay true, though unless Uncle Marsden lived practically forever, she would almost certainly have to think about that. Saga had moved in just over a year ago, when her mother died. Uncle Marsden had sold his sister’s house and furniture and put the money in a bank account for Saga. “No question, my dear, you’ll move in with me,” he had said right up front, before the funeral. Saga, too proud to say that she could not live alone, had never felt such relief. Uncle Marsden was, if not a god, a saint for sure.
On a good day, the only serious drawback to Saga’s altered life was Uncle Marsden’s allergy to cats and dogs—which meant she couldn’t have so much as a single kitten in the house. Two years ago, for several months, she had fed a group of feral cats behind the garage, cats abandoned by the fickle kinds of people who came to stay in the summer cabins a few miles down the beach and somehow thought that pets, like bathing suits, were a seasonal thing. But Uncle Marsden’s snooty neighbors had put an end to that. It broke Saga’s heart to have to catch them—wh
ich wasn’t hard, since most of them had come to trust her—and drive them over to the shelter, a few at a time. She would rather have driven them back to the overturned boat where they had gathered and managed to survive before she became their caretaker (and then their betrayer), but she knew that nothing would have stopped them from returning to the garage, and she did not want to make trouble for her uncle.
Uncle Marsden told people that Saga had wanted to be a vet and that it was such a tragedy her accident had made this impossible. This wasn’t really true, or not completely. Saga had loved animals from the time she was little, and when she was eight or ten, she told all the grown-ups that’s what she wanted to be, a vet, maybe a zoo vet. But by the time she finished high school, she knew full well that she didn’t have the kind of brains it took to ace all those science courses. Because vet school, she’d found out, was harder to get into than med school, and once you got there, you had to learn how to be a doctor not just for one species, like human doctors did, but for a whole bunch of species—pigs and horses and cows, even if you knew from the start you just wanted to care for dogs and cats (never mind zebras and camels and snakes!). As part of your schooling, Saga had heard, you had to slice open ponies, just to explore their insides, and cut the beaks off chickens the way they did on factory farms. Well, that would have done Saga in. Learning science was peanuts compared to that.
When she was in college—nowhere like Yale, where Uncle Marsden taught—she’d gone to a career workshop and decided that travel agent would be a great job, so that’s what she’d set her mind on, taking classes in French and business and even a little modern history. So that was the profession which now, because of the accident, she could no longer pursue. There were just too many details you had to keep straight. In fact, it was exactly the sort of job for which she was now least qualified. Sometimes that seemed funny, too. Almost funny.
But Saga held back from correcting Uncle Marsden. She understood that for him, a tenured professor at a fancy university, to say that his beloved niece had been thwarted from a career as a travel agent by a serious head injury would have been…well, it wasn’t tragic enough. And anyway, a lot of the time when she heard him tell his version, she wasn’t even in the same room. The very network of passageways and hollow compartments that made the house seem so alive also made it a place where conversations traveled unlikely distances—like straight up the dumbwaiter shaft to the heating vent on the floor in Saga’s room. So if she was up there and people were talking just a little loud in the kitchen, she’d hear most of it without trying, or wanting, to.
This was how she’d sometimes hear her cousins Pansy and Michael and Frida discussing her. To her face, they all treated her as if they loved and cared about her as much as their father did, but actually, when Saga was absent, Frida was the only one who ever came to her defense. They all worried, and you had to admit this was logical, about what would happen when Uncle Marsden died. Would they have to look after Saga? Absurd—especially since surely there was some kind of work she could do to support herself; Uncle Marsden hadn’t tried hard enough to help her find it.
But Michael, she’d found out, made merciless fun of her.
One morning last summer, before she had gone down for breakfast, she’d heard Michael’s voice, like the voice of a pompous ghost, reverberate through the floor: “Rubber bands, twisties—twisties!—tinfoil, wax paper, and stuff…can openers, corkscrews, et cetera.…Oh, I like this one: large utensils except wooden spoons, wooden spoons go in jar beside laundry door!” Laughter—mostly his.
Michael was reading out loud, to his sisters, from the labels Saga had placed around the kitchen to help her remember where to put things away, and where to find them again. (The antique cupboards had glass panes, so there she had only to look right through to see the dishes and food inside.) She cooked and cleaned for Uncle Marsden, though at first he told her she shouldn’t feel obliged to do anything special; all he needed was her charming company. But Saga liked organizing tasks in ways that made her feel like anyone else and that might, despite what some doctors said, sharpen her mind again. Uncle Marsden had also nailed a big blackboard on the one blank wall, taking down a rooster weather vane that had been there as long as Saga could remember. (She’d been told that most of the long memories were just fine in her head—but how could anybody know for sure? How could she, much less anyone else, know what she’d once remembered and no longer did?) On that board, Saga and Uncle Marsden wrote down telephone messages, events for the week, and things to shop for, anything that might slip their minds.
Tactful Uncle Marsden claimed that in fact he’d been lost in this room before they added the labels and the board. And it was true that his wife, Liz, had been entirely in charge of the kitchen until she died. Uncle Marsden was as old-fashioned as those wavy-windowed cupboards, cooking out of cans when he had to cook, which was only when no one else was there to do it for him. (Chili overdose, Saga called it, when she came back from being away and saw all those cans in the recycling box.) Left on his own, he’d pile dishes in the sink till none remained in the cupboard. Pansy had scolded him for assuming that “some female” would come along and wash them, but Saga defended him. He was seventy-five years old. If men his age could cook and clean, they were gay or they were chefs.
When Aunt Liz had ruled over the kitchen, she kept a radio on, a neverending backdrop of NPR, even when others were there to keep her company. If you stayed for long in the house, it began to feel like a stream that flowed beyond some unseen window, a stream of news delivered with accuracy and taste (Cory Flintoff’s pious voice had never deserted Saga); of book reviews, bluegrass, Bach, and curious jokes about Scandinavian people; of “all things considered”—or at least all appropriate and dignified things. When Saga moved in, she found this patchwork of information, especially the news in the morning, its words words words, an assault on her tender senses, but she did not feel she had the right to complain. One morning, when Uncle Marsden saw her turn the volume down, he walked across the room and pulled out the plug. “You know what?” he said. “I loved my wife dearly, but this, I never liked this. Who wants to start the day with shootings, lootings, and stock market plunges?” To Saga’s quiet delight, that was the end of radio in the house; soon after, they decided to do away with the TV as well. They agreed that nothing was lovelier, more soothing and peaceful, than to hear the ocean in the distance, to gauge the state of their own modest world by the changing rhythms of wind and water rather than by the voices of reporters, even if they did sound like heroes from leather-bound novels.
The morning of Michael’s ridicule, Saga heard Uncle Marsden argue that her presence kept him from turning too far inward, possibly losing his marbles—and he had always liked her. He would never, he said, take in a “student boarder,” as Michael had suggested. What a preposterous idea. “And aren’t you afraid that said individual would hang around till I became senile and then dupe me into leaving everything I owned to him or her, not you? Some small-time Basia Johnson? Say, why don’t I let a room to a comely buxom blonde from my department who can tend my garden and my doddering but still intact libido, then marry me on the sly and sell this place to a developer when I croak? White elephants like this make fabulous upscale condos, you know. Just have a look at what those sharks from Hartford are threatening to do down the beach!”
Saga loved it when Uncle Marsden stood up to his children like that. It always silenced them. She hoped he would live to be a hundred. She fed him lots of salads and green vegetables and slipped tofu into his soups; gratefully, he ate what was put before him. For her absences, she stocked up on cans of organic chili and bacon made of free-range turkey. All he asked was to have a big rare steak and a banana split every Friday night, the night he “went to town.” Literally speaking, he almost never went to town, except to give an occasional lecture. Mostly he stayed right there: reading, gardening, poking about in his collection of mosses, fixing all the things in the house that, as if in a rela
y, were constantly busting, one right after another.
She typed for him, too. Though he didn’t have to—at least, not to keep his title at Yale—he still published articles in scholarly horticulture journals. He knew a lot about intimate relationships between plants and dirt and snails. People in the neighborhood referred to him as the Famous Snail Guy or sometimes the Famous Salad Guy, because a long time ago he had made some discovery that revolutionized the productivity of lettuce growers, repelling snails and other pests without the use of dangerous chemicals.
Saga had no trouble reading her uncle’s prehistoric cursive; it looked so much like her mother’s had looked, the siblings having been taught by the same lone teacher in the one-room schoolhouse back in rural Wisconsin. So she’d take his handwritten yellow pages and type them up. This took longer for her than it once would have, since she was still relearning the layout of the keyboard and sometimes had to hunt for letters one by one. But Uncle Marsden had never known how to type, and now that he was semi-retired, he shared his New Haven secretary with, as he put it, the “faculty sproutlings.”
It was Uncle Marsden’s idea that she make labels, just like the ones she’d made in the kitchen, to put on all the drawers and pigeonholes of the captain’s desk he used like a miniature warehouse. It would help them both, he said.
Well, last weekend Michael had shown up with his wife, Denise, and you didn’t need the dumbwaiter or the servants’ stairway to hear his bellowing through the entire house. “Jesus H. Christ, this piece is Federal, Dad! You let her put these labels on the wood? They’ll rip off the original varnish. Jesus!”
“And whose desk is it, Michael? Is it mine, or is it already yours?” she’d heard Uncle Marsden calmly reply.
“Don’t you give a damn about anything? This desk isn’t ‘yours.’ It’s been passed down through the family and happens merely to be in your care at this moment in time!”