Family Secrets (74 page)

She had been independent too. She remembered when she had asked Papa if she could quit her job and come to work in the office with him. How well they had always gotten along, she and Papa! He had told her she was just like him. That was the highest compliment she had ever been given, could ever hope for. To be like Papa, the genius, the philanthropist, the visionary. He was a great man among little men. Would he have said let Paris have her house in France? Would he have been saddened to see them go away from Windflower, one by one, or would he have understood the need of each to find his own frontier the way he, Papa, had when he was young? But Papa had done it all for them. He had sought out a new frontier so he could make a home for his family, not so he could seek adventure for adventure’s sake. It was different now. People were different. What did they want?

Carefully, Lavinia checked each lamp to make sure it had been unplugged from the wall, and then she pulled out the plug of the television set. They said it was better for the set to do that if you didn’t use it for a long time. Should they take it to the city? No, they would be back someday soon, and those things didn’t spoil. She knew they would be back. Paris would get tired of her house in France, she would be lonely, she would find it too much trouble. All her life Paris had had things done for her, so she would hate having to do for herself. In a strange country, in a strange language, she would find it too hard. She would come back. She had to come back!

Lavinia went into the kitchen and checked to see that the refrigerator was unplugged and a fresh box of charcoal still rested inside on a shelf so it would stay fresh and sweet. Those canned goods in the cupboard, she would have to phone Molly Forbes and tell her to take them. You shouldn’t keep those things around too long. They always left a few things, just to have something for the first day, but they could bring new supplies up with them when they came back.

Upstairs in her bedroom Lavinia looked through the closets to see if there was anything she wanted. There were a few dresses she liked, but they were quite old and maybe she should leave them here and get new ones for Israel. She wanted to look nice there; they would be eating out every night and staying in the best hotels. She went into Paris’ room and looked through the closets. There were some dresses from … oh, it must be about 1952. Nice country cocktail dresses, ones she had bought for Paris to wear to family dinners so she could look pretty. And there was the straw basket Paris had bought once on a trip to Mexico. Lavinia didn’t like to throw things out because you never knew when you could use them again or give them to somebody. The wallpaper was so faded she could hardly see the pattern. She remembered how thrilled with it Paris had been when she saw it. “Just what I wanted!” she had cried happily. It was like being a detective, going back into memories and trying to find out when it all first started coming apart. How could you tell which was the first moment, if that moment would have mattered if it hadn’t been followed by others?

“Should I take this jacket?” Jonah called to her through the open door of the suite. After Paris had moved into The Big House Lavinia had found the key and opened the door again between their two rooms.

“Wait a minute, let me look. No, that’s for the country. We’ll get you some nice new clothes. Leave that here for when we come back.”

Come back, come back. Would they come back? Of course they would. The place would be empty this summer but then everything would straighten out. Lavinia would keep after Paris; she wouldn’t give up. She never gave up, and finally she always got what she wanted, didn’t she?

They had lunch in the kitchen, sandwiches and fruit Lavinia had brought in a paper bag from the city, and she made instant coffee she had brought too. Their driver went into the nearby town to have lunch at the new Howard Johnson’s, or was it McDonald’s? Lavinia couldn’t remember because they never went to those places. They were nice for people with young children, but she had no need of them. She wrapped up the garbage carefully to take back with them in the car to the city because there was no garbage collection during the winter except for Molly Forbes’ house, and Lavinia didn’t want to bother her. She put on her coat and went out to the front porch. There was Molly, her nose reddened from the cold, running down the hill toward the icy stream with her dogs. How those dogs loved her! It was nice for her that she had the dogs during the desolate winters. Soon, in a month, the place would start to look more alive, more livable, as those dead-looking trees began to wake up and the ground turned from frozen stone to wakening earth. There would be green things. Who would take care of her garden?

Lavinia went back into the house and checked the thermostat. She had turned it up when they came in so they could take off their coats, and now she turned it down again, just warm enough so the water pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst. The drapes were drawn against the sun that would come back in the spring and fade the carpets. She had covered the furniture with clean sheets the way she always did at the end of every summer, and it all looked colorless and anonymous. It made her impatient to be out of there. It didn’t look like her house this way. All her plants were in her apartment in the city, and this house seemed so still, waiting, asleep like the winter ground outside. What had she forgotten? Her past was there, memories, but she would never forget them. She would take them with her wherever she went.

She went out to the car after carefully closing the door so she could hear the lock catch. Now where was Jonah? What a nuisance! Then she saw him, striding cheerfully toward the house, his cheeks pink and healthy from the chill air.

“The ice is melted in the river,” he said happily, “and I saw fish.”

“Well? We always had fish.”

“Remember when I used to take Paris fishing, when she was a little girl?”

“I still would never trust that fish enough to eat,” Lavinia said. “You never know where it’s been.”

“Molly is fishing,” Jonah said. “I saw her.”

“Let her.” Molly was a country woman. She would know which fish were fit to eat and which were not. If she wanted to take chances that was her business.

“We didn’t lose any trees this winter during the snow,” Jonah said. “Except one and it was dead anyway.”

“We’ll use it for firewood in Paris’ house,” Lavinia said. “Paris likes a fire.”

“Firewood is better when it’s aged a while,” Jonah said, nodding.

There would still be the three of them, Lavinia was thinking. If everyone in the family wanted to go their separate ways, let them, but there would still be she and Jonah and Paris. She would keep them together. She would talk to Paris on the phone all spring and fall and winter in New York, and they would get together. If they just could have dinner together once a week, she wouldn’t demand more, although she would have liked more. Her own little family, the three of them, was the most important. And she would keep up with the others as she always did, on the phone. Someone had to hold the family together. Someone had to care. You had to work at it, you had to hold on, you could never give up. She’d always said that.

Lavinia and Jonah settled into the back seat of the black car and the driver started down the long driveway away from Windflower. When she looked back out of the window the last house she could see, as always, was The Big House. It looked so sturdy there against the white sky, at the top of the hill. She imagined to herself that Papa still lived there, and for a moment she felt happy.

Epilogue

Almost half of The Valley belongs to one deserted estate: Windflower. There is the sign, “Windflower—Service,” and then much later, “Windflower,” although you can see no house, only a road that seems to stretch for miles. On either side of the main entrance are stone walls, then there are the acres of grass surrounded by the electrified barbed wire that could stun a large animal and kill a small one. The grass is high now in the outer field, studded with the tiny white flowers that gave the estate its name. “No Trespassing” signs are tacked up on the large trees near the entrance, but no one pays much attention to them any more. Most people think the place is a public park. The families who live in the new houses along Hill Avenue come to picnic here sometimes, or to ride their sleds down the hills in winter. The pond is fine for ice skating on cold winter days, and in summer the little boys come to fish in the lake and to dare each other to walk across the slippery stones on top of the waterfall.

The houses are empty here, except for the one where the caretaker lives, and they have been empty for so long that the local people just ignore them, as if they were another useless convenience like the pool house by the empty swimming pool or the ivy-choked pavilion by the lake. The tennis court has no net and no tapes, but sometimes there are little paw prints in the en-tout-cas, what is left of it. Small animals live here freely now, skunks and woodchucks and rabbits and raccoons. Nobody ever kills them except occasionally a car on the road in the fog. Once there were timid deer that came to drink from the edge of the lake at dawn, but they are long gone, and so are the horses that ran and played in the lower field. The stables across the road are still there, that boarded the neighborhood horses, but now there is only one horse in the corral, wearing a muzzle and fixing you with a mean eye. The horses from the riding academy on Green Street still cut across the bridle path that runs along the edge of the woods in Windflower. The bridle path came with the estate, and the Saffrons left it open as a gesture of good will, although no one ever knew it belonged to anybody because the estate was so large.

It is summer now, and the trees are in full leaf, enormous trees, old but still rich with sap. It has not been an excessively hot summer yet, so the waterfall is still full, and in the stillness you can hear it clearly. A little car comes up the road and turns in at the Windflower entrance. At the sound of it there comes another sound from somewhere behind the top of the hill, the barking of dogs to announce the presence of strangers. A young man is driving the car: John Bergman, and he is nineteen years old and it is his car, his first car, bought with his own money, carefully saved. With him are two other young men, his friends from college. They have brought fishing rods with them, and an assortment of lures and hooks, because John has told them that he knows a place where the fishing is good, where he used to come around sometimes when he was a kid. Their names are Terry and Peter, and they, like everyone else at school, look up to John because he has about him a quality of leadership, of differentness. There are secrets in him. He is golden. If John tells you he knows a place where there are fish you know you will catch them.

John parks his car in the driveway beside an enormous deserted house. The house is so covered with ivy that you cannot even peer into the windows. There are tufts of wild grass growing between the chunks of broken gravel in the driveway, and almost without thinking John reaches down and plucks one out.

“Hey, this is some place!” Terry says admiringly. “That looks like a haunted house.”

“It’s definitely haunted,” John says, and laughs.

The three of them start walking down the hill with their fishing gear and a woman comes toward them from somewhere, surrounded by lively dogs. She is Molly Forbes, and when she sees John she recognizes him even though she hasn’t seen him for years and years, and her face lights up with pleasure at what a fine young man he’s turned out to be. He motions to his friends to stay there and walks up to her quickly, just as she is about to greet him.

“Pretend you don’t know me,” John whispers. She nods. She understands.

The dogs are jumping all over him now in greeting, and Molly is telling them: “Stop it, stop it, down now, you be good, sit pretty, sit.” She and John glance at each other and years of memories pass between them in that moment, different for each of them and yet much the same. He smiles at her and goes back to his friends.

“She said it was okay,” he tells them, and they go down to the lake.

Too fascinated to fish, Terry and Peter lay their gear down on the cracked cement of the old pavilion floor and go chattering through the ruins. “Look at the gargoyles,” Terry says, pointing at two funny faded statues which might be gargoyles or elves, depending on your point of view. “Somebody must have painted them once, look, you can still see the colors.”

“They had electricity here,” Peter remarks, pointing out the remains of old wires. “I wonder if they lived here.”

“No, they couldn’t have lived here. It has no sides. They would have lived in those three houses up on the hill. They must have just had parties here.”

“What a great place to have parties!”

John is kneeling at the edge of the lake, looking down into the depths to see where the fish are hiding. He sees them, and stands up, pleased. “It’s full of fish,” he says. “I think they’re bass.”

“We could cook them in that fireplace,” Peter says.

Terry is looking at the waterfall, leaning over the iron railing, almost hypnotized. He pulls his glance away and looks out over the vista; the river, the little curved wooden bridge, the broad expanse of rolling hills covered now with long, thick grass and tiny white flowers. He has never seen such a place and is sorry he didn’t bring his camera. You could get some good shots here. It’s really beautiful. “Why don’t we go look at the houses?”

“I don’t want to do that,” John says.

“Okay.”

John and Peter are baiting their hooks now, deciding which is the best place to start to fish. Terry is still looking admiringly at the view.

“I wonder if they had a good time here,” he says, and then he shrugs, because after all it has nothing to do with him, and he goes to join his friends.

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Copyright © 1974 by Rona Jaffe