The Callender Papers (22 page)

I stood before it, and I wept. Whether from joy, sorrow, or simple admiration, I could not say.

My father stood suddenly beside me. He passed me a handkerchief. “Blow your nose,” he instructed me.

“You told me you didn't paint portraits,” I said to him.

“I told you, if you remember, that I didn't paint what I didn't understand,” he corrected me. “Children are relatively simple to understand.”

“I'm
not
a child,” I reminded him.

He looked at me without answering.

“And she isn't.” I indicated the woman in the portrait.

“No,” he agreed.

I looked up at him in surprise: had I made my point so easily? His dark eyes studied me. For a long time we looked at one another so. At last, “All right, in some respects I am a child,” I admitted. “But I am twelve, almost thirteen.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I couldn't paint you now.”

“Of course,” I said, “at some later date you might want to.”

That caused him to smile, and I had to smile back at him. We turned to go into the house, where there was so much that needed settling.

What is left to tell? All the important things are left, it seems. What is important changes when the disastrous events have completed themselves. Or maybe Aunt Constance is right, that it is the consequences of what you do that matter most.

Mr. Callender, my uncle, never spoke again. The doctors said there was no reason for his loss of speech, no medical reason. He could have spoken, had he wanted to, but he refused. Perhaps it was because he could no longer move his legs and so he sullenly refused to help himself in any way. Perhaps it was because he had hoped for so much, gambled for it and then lost. He was confined to a wheelchair. Dr. McWilliams said he always would be, until he died. The specialists in Boston agreed, as did those in London and Vienna. As I said, I never saw any of
them again, but my father and I have taken care for them.

When Mr. Callender was well enough, he and his family journeyed to Europe. They live now at a small hotel in Germany, near an Alpine spa, the mineral waters of which are supposed sometimes to produce miracles. We send money to Mrs. Callender, more than enough, through a bank in Munich. She writes once or twice a year, to say all is well with them. Joseph has become responsible for the family and manages the properties they decided to purchase with their half of the Callender estate. Victoria attends concerts and balls and has several suitors. Benjamin has been apprenticed to a bank in Munich. With each letter, Mrs. Callender sounds clearer in mind, happier, stronger. One letter, sent over a year and a half after the accident, closed with a strange remark. The second accident at the bridge, she said, had been the first good thing to happen for her family.

She is right, I think. I can see it now, although I couldn't at the time. Mr. Callender's presence was like a distorting mirror to his children and his wife. He twisted them, somehow, altered them. He was like a dark cloud holding them in its shadow. They were all afraid of him, especially his wife. When he became
helpless, they all emerged into a kind of sunlight. Mrs. Callender more and more returned to the character she must once have had, not particularly clever or able, but kind and generous and loving. Although she keeps the children from him, she will never leave him. She loves him. Even now, I can understand that.

Mac has learned to pass Latin and has decided to study medicine when he finishes Harvard. He has not changed, except to grow taller. His voice is deeper. He is still a little wild at heart and probably always will be.

I have not grown accustomed to being an heiress. My father says he hopes I never will. At the end of that summer, Aunt Constance and I returned to Cambridge. My father moved there during the winter. I lived with him then, but missed my life at school. I missed the little girls, my garden, my Saturday walks, and the quiet conversations in Aunt Constance's study. I missed the close companionship of my aunt. We did not live far from the school, and I continued my attendance there, so I wasn't separated from her. And I did enjoy the new life I was leading, the new companionship with my father. It is, sometimes, as if he and I have always been together, as if those ten years apart lasted no more than a day. Sometimes, of course, when one or the other of us has been especially
cross or difficult, I catch him looking at me as if the ten years' separation was not nearly long enough. I know I sometimes look at him that way—sometimes. He paints, and his fame grows. We go back to the Berkshires each summer. I have grown accustomed to him, and he has grown accustomed to me. We do well together, as Mrs. Bywall says. She has reason to know, because she keeps both houses for him.

The most important consequence took the longest to bring about. I don't know why it wasn't as clear to them as it was to me what should be done. But Aunt Constance always believes in thinking carefully about things. My father finally persuaded her to marry him, which had always seemed to me the obvious step. When I chide either of them with this, they remind me that I am a child and do not understand everything. I suspect I understand more than they think, but do not tell them that. For instance, I suspect that Aunt Constance was afraid he would ask her to give up the school, which he would never dream of doing. He does not want a dependent female making demands on him. I also suspect that she was embarrassed, after so many years of proud spinsterhood, to marry at all.

My father persevered, as he puts it, cautiously and
carefully. When I told him, that first winter we spent together in Cambridge, that she had once said they were two of a kind, he first roared with laughter and then fell silent. “I see,” he said. I think he did see. We think alike, my father and I.

Books by Cynthia Voigt

Homecoming

Dicey's Song

Winner of the 1983 Newbery Medal

A Solitary Blue

1984 Newbery Honor Book

Tell Me If the Lovers Are Lovers

Elske

The Vandemark Mummy

Building Blocks

The Runner

Jackaroo

Izzy, Willy-Nilly

Come a Stranger

Stories About Rosie

Sons from Afar

Tree by Leaf

Seventeen Against the Dealer

On Fortune's Wheel

First Aladdin Paperbacks edition March 2000

Text copyright © 1983 by Cynthia Voigt

Aladdin Paperbacks

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The text for this book was set in Adobe Garamond

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Voigt, Cynthia.

The Callender papers.

Summary: In nineteenth-century Massachusetts, orphan Jean, employed to sort out the family papers of a reclusive artist, becomes curious about the mysterious, long-ago death of his wife and the subsequent disappearance of their young child.

[1.Mystery and detective stories. 2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Massachusetts—Fiction] I. Title.

PZ7.V874Cal 1983   [Fic]   82-13797

ISBN 978-0-689-30971-7 (hc.)

ISBN 978-0-689-83283-3 (Aladdin pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-4424-8924-0 (eBook)