Crying Child (18 page)

It wasn’t that brilliant a deduction. To a doctor, the physical signs of fatigue and distress must have been plain on both our faces. But Will, that gullible male, looked at her as if she had just accurately read his palm.

7

WILL TOOK HIS “SISTER” TO TOWN FOR LUNCH. ITwas a perfectly reasonable thing to do; we hadn’t expected her for lunch, and Will had to make some gesture of brotherly affection. But as I watched them glide off in Anne’s car, I wanted to spit or stamp or do something equally childish.

I turned to see Jed behind me. As usual, he was leaning on his rake, and his eyes were amused.

“That the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Good-looking woman.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry,” Jed said. “You’ve got at least ten advantages.”

“What are they?”

“Ten years.”

I laughed unwillingly.

“Four or five, maybe.”

“Unless she started medical school at the age of twelve, she’s got to be well over thirty. But I guess that’s not so important. What do you think of her? As a doctor, I mean?”

“She’s good,” I said. “I hate to admit it, so that probably means she’s even better than I think. She made one suggestion that absolutely floored me because it was so sensible. If Mary hears things here that distress her, maybe we ought to take her away. Go back to New York.”

“Hmmph.” Jed’s eyebrows drew together. “To tell the truth, I was surprised one of you hadn’t brought that up before this.”

“You thought of it? You would…. I don’t know why I’m so stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid, you’re worried. Sure, I thought of getting Mary away from here. I still think it would be a good idea. Only it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“She won’t go,” Jed said.

He went off, to do something to the roses—mulch them or feed them or prune them—whatever it is you do to roses in the spring—and I wandered aimlessly around the grounds for a while. I felt depressed. All my fine resolutions and clever plans
seemed hopeless. I kept thinking about the two professional skeptics, admiring each other over the Inn’s lobster bisque and, no doubt, laughing themselves sick over the superstitious stupidity of the rest of us.

When I finally forced myself back into the house I found Ran in the kitchen, with Mrs. Willard standing over him trying to make him eat. I joined him, not because I was hungry but because I didn’t have the strength to argue with Mrs. Willard about eating.

“How’s Mary?” I asked.

“She threw me out,” Ran said. “Okay, I know she isn’t supposed to be left alone. But what am I supposed to do when she pretends she doesn’t remember a thing about last night? Maybe she isn’t pretending. I tell you, Jo, when she looks at me with those big brown eyes I start to wonder whether I’m the one who’s imagining things.”

“You aren’t,” I said. “Believe me, you aren’t. I’ll go up to her.”

“I wouldn’t. She says she wants to rest this afternoon to get ready for Will’s sister.”

“The lady has arrived,” I said, and told Ran about the conversation with Anne. He didn’t seem to be much interested, he was too preoccupied with the change in Mary.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” he said helplessly. “She keeps saying she’s tired, but she
doesn’t look…You’d think, after a night like that one, that she’d be a wreck, physically and every other way. But no. I tell you, Jo, it’s like five different women in the same body. You don’t think—”

“No,” I said firmly. “You’re on the wrong track. Maybe I’d better tell you what we discussed this morning. Mrs. Willard—you don’t mind…?”

“Such a fuss about nothing.” Mrs. Willard sounded grudging, but I noticed that she followed my recital with poorly concealed interest. When I had finished, Ran’s first reaction pleased and touched me. He reached for Mrs. Willard’s big work-worn hand and squeezed it.

“Bertha, I’m sorry. I never knew.”

“I keep telling you, you’re all making a big thing out of it,” she said gruffly. “The question is, what are you going to do now?”

“It’s a good question,” Ran said wryly. “I’m not quarreling with your conclusions, Jo, but I’ll be damned if I can see what they lead to, in terms of action.”

“Anne suggested we take Mary away from here,” I said. Ran’s face lit up. I hated to spoil his hope, but I had to. “I’m not sure she’ll go, Ran. Or that, if she does, it will solve the problem.”

“It’s worth a try,” Ran said.

“Maybe.” I stood up, leaving my barely touched plate. “In the meantime, I’m going to delve into
your family secrets via some old papers. Do you mind?”

“Trying to lay the ghost?” Ran smiled at me. “Just don’t get your hopes up. I don’t remember anything in the family history that could account for this.”

“Anyhow, I can sit up there with my door open and keep an eye on the hall.”

“That’s good,” Mrs. Willard said. “And I think I’ll give that linen closet a good cleaning. It’s been needing it for a long time.”

“And you can watch the other end of the hall,” Ran said grimly. “Thanks. Both of you.”

“Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air,” I suggested. “You look like a ghost yourself.”

“Maybe I will. I might go to town and see if I can find the doctors. I’m curious as to what wild tale Will is telling the lady.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Ran drove off, and I went upstairs. As Jed had promised, the trunk had been brought to my room. It was a squat, dark, leather-bound box about three feet long by a foot and a half high. There was brass trim, now tarnished, around its top. I felt my sagging spirits lift at the very sight of it squatting there, and when I sat down on the floor beside it and lifted the lid I was conscious of a prickle of anticipation.

I don’t know what I expected to find. Or rather,
I do know, but I hate to admit it—one of those documents so popular in the sensational fiction of the last century. The “manuscript”—they were almost always “manuscripts”—appeared in chapter fifty and cleared up all the miscellaneous mysteries that had filled the first forty-nine chapters. They had titles like “The Strange Experience of Mr. W—B—,” or “The Confession of Lady Audley.”

Consciously, of course, I wasn’t that naïve. But I was disappointed as the time dragged on and I found nothing that seemed to have the slightest bearing on our problem.

It was an interesting collection, in its way. Everything was thrown in helter-skelter; there were letters, baby books, albums, and even a recipe book, its yellowing pages filled with recipes that started out “Take twelve eggs and a pound of butter.” They were indeed the good old days.

There were photographs of grim-faced men and sour-looking women, standing or sitting stiffly—all, I suspected, more or less unidentifiable by now. It was sad how quickly people’s memories faded; I remembered going through an old album of Mother’s with Mary, and hearing her puzzle over the snapshots of pudgy babies and laughing girls in flapper costume.

Not a cheerful thought…I put the photographs to one side; they were all too recent to come from the period I was interested in.

I found one useful document: a family tree, which looked as if it might have been drawn up by one of the great-aunts. Ran’s was the last name on it. I thought, Mary will be interested in this; and then I realized how it might strike her, with Ran’s name at the bottom of the sheet, the last of the Frasers, and likely to remain so. It made me feel rather bad for a moment. And then I felt a stir of annoyance, not only at myself for thinking that way, but at the stupid sentimentality of the whole idea. The last of the Frasers—and so what if he was? It was the first time I had considered Mary’s desire for children as anything but pathetic. Now I found myself thinking that she had a lot of other things to be thankful for; and that if she was really that keen on kids there were a lot of nice babies who didn’t have parents and whose assorted genes had potentialities just as desirable as the sacred genes of the Frasers. All this mystique about old families and blue blood and William the Conqueror…What was so great about William the Conqueror anyhow? He was just a bloody-minded illiterate killer like all the other antique kings people are so anxious to add to their family trees. How many people do you know who brag about being descended from Chaucer or Erasmus?

The Fraser family tree was useful, though. Without it I’d never have been able to understand
some of the other material. There was a sheaf of letters from a girl named Angela, to a Prudence Fraser, and I found Prudence on the chart. She was Hezekiah’s granddaughter, the child of his eldest son Jeremiah. They were entertaining letters, full of gossip about beaux and pretty clothes and parties, and a social historian might have found them fascinating. But they were of no use to me.

Most of the other letters were dull. I found several dated to the years between 1860 and 1864. They were addressed to a woman named Mercy, from her daughter-in-law in Providence. I felt a stir of interest when I realized that Mercy was Hezekiah’s wife. What really struck me about those letters, though, was the fact that there were so few references to the war. To most of us those dates immediately conjure up a single overwhelming historical event; and though Mercy and Abigail mentioned bandage rolling and hospital duty, they discussed these things in the same tone in which a modern woman might describe her bridge afternoons. I decided that they must have been very dull women. Then I remembered the letters I had written to Mary during the past year. How often had I discussed current events?

I did wonder about the dates. If Mercy was still alive and kicking in 1864, 1 thought she must have been a pretty old lady. But when I consulted the genealogy I found that she wasn’t all
that old. Her husband had been born in 1800 and had died in 1846….

That date made me wonder again. It was the same as the date on Miss Smith’s tombstone. Did the coincidence mean anything? Maybe, but I couldn’t even begin to guess what it might mean. It was interesting, though, to realize that “old” Hezekiah had only been forty-six when he died. I had been thinking of him as doddering, with long white whiskers down to his knees. But he had been vigorous and, no doubt, virile, up to the moment of his death. I wondered how he had died. Clearly not of old age. Maybe his wife had poisoned him. If he had been the reprobate his descendants seemed to think he was, she might have had good reason.

Mercy, née Barnes, had been born in 1811. I stopped to figure it out, and realized that she was only seventeen when she married Hezekiah in 1828. He had been twenty-eight. It seemed rather late in life for a man of that era to marry. I recalled someone’s telling me that the Captain had been a self-made man, and I began to see him more clearly. Proud, arrogant, even; determined to make his fortune and establish his name before he took a wife; able, at that stage in life, to woo and win a bride from a respectable old family. He hadn’t wasted any time once he got going; his son Jeremiah had been born in the year following his marriage. Mercy had been eighteen.

I thought of the gently bred girl from Boston, only seventeen years old, coming to this remote place to live as the wife of a man like Hezekiah. Twenty-eight doesn’t sound old; but by that time he had been at sea for at least ten years, probably longer, and the reputation that lived on as a family legend could not have described a gentle person. I found myself feeling rather sorry for Mercy. Her first baby at eighteen, and then—I glanced at the genealogy—more babies at two-year intervals thereafter. If the Captain hadn’t been gone so much, it probably would have been every year. Nine children, all with good solid biblical names like those of their parents. Five of them had survived infancy. Not a bad average for those days; but it wouldn’t help, as you watched a baby die of diphtheria or measles, to know that you were still ahead of the average. No wonder the women of the letters had sounded stilted and cold. They had to be, to survive.

I was romancing a little, by that time. But it’s amazing how much you can get out of a few bare names and dates.

I was well through the loose top layer in the trunk by then, and I hadn’t found a thing. Then, on the bottom, I saw a pile of books. There were over a dozen of them, and they half filled the trunk. I reached eagerly for the topmost book. It looked like a diary.

It wasn’t a diary, it was a ledger, tall and narrow, bound in red cloth which had faded badly. My spirits sank as I opened it and scanned the entries. “One yard of cotton cloth for a bonnet for Hepzibah, ten cents.” “Two pounds of tallow candles for the servants, seven cents.” It went on in the same vein, page after page of it, and not even the date—1837—at the top of the first page could arouse my interest. These were Mercy’s account books. Young she may have been, but she was not the fragile little piece of fluff I had pictured; she had sailed right into the housekeeping and had done it with vigor. Every penny was tabulated, and the entries showed that she was a woman of a saving disposition. Tallow candles for the servants—wax for the gentry.