The Monsters of Templeton (15 page)

And I was not sick, not the way I had imagined...scooped me up and undressed me, button by button...there was heat there...and more...and the two Sarahs battled with herself, the one disgusted, the other avid...even for the pain, there was a great deal of pain...my lipstick smeared on his face...awoke to see him gazing at me in the dawn light, moving a curl back behind my ear...it is true...he does love me...I have seen him so often in company since, Templeton's prettiest girls all around, dressed up as much as they can...and his eyes never leave my face...

...but even then, I knew I would be filled with this new person until the wedding, this warm person with happiness inside of her...and then that person would leave me, even then I knew this...I will be cold, and sad again after this...until the wedding, I will see no more of my private people, hear nothing more, the words in my mouth will be appropriate and good, and no more ghosts will rise in the water...I knew we would be married in Kingfisher Tower on Point Judith in the autumn, and the maple leaves will swirl in the water, gold, and red, and green...we will be married and I already have a child in me, growing, I am certain, I can feel this...Templeton will already have been revitalized, my father's coffers emptied, but soon to be refilled with rent from the Baseball Museum...I will be married on that Autumn day, and the woman who possesses me even now, the happy girl who cannot stop kissing this handsome man...the girl who that morning a week ago walked back to Edgewater, sore as the first time she ever rode Western (why did I ever try to ride Western?), walking back in the sweet, dim dawn with him, hand in hand, in the early fog...who sat with him, giggling, at the breakfast table until her parents awoke and came down...who surprised her parents with her happiness, with her sanity that morning...this girl will leave on my wedding day...this was not the man I was meant to marry, not the genius, not the artist...I will feel his vulgarity keenly, and he won't know why I spurn him, but will only want me more.

And I know that soon after the wedding, the voices will return, slowly. The child I have in me already will be born, maybe more. And the ghosts in the lake will rise and follow me, calling, until the day...when I will be too weak to resist, and I will walk into the lake...until then, though, there is Sy, the solidity of him...yes, and though it won't last, this morning, writing here, Sy snoring in my bed behind me and I, just about to awaken him so that he can sneak from the house and back to the hotel...right now, right now, I am strange. It is strange. This life is strange. For now, only for now, I am happy.

Hannah Clarke, years before she married Henry Franklin Temple.She is pictured in Baden-Baden, on a grand European tour with her mother (right). In about a week, while they're touring Luzerne, she will meet an Italian waiter at the hotel and will steal out with him for what she believes to be an innocent midnight boat ride. Unfortunately, he had other plans; he kidnapped her, and she was rescued three days later in Vienna, an episode that never failed to send her into terrific fits of giggles, even up to her ninth decade of life.

Chapter
10

Leavings: Or, What Is Left Behind

ALL THAT NIGHT, I read three hundred pages of wildness in my great-grandmother's tight sepia script, and in the morning it was as if Templeton had fallen under an enchantment.

As I sat there, stunned, watching the distant sunrise rub the dark from the sky, I felt almost as if Sarah's Templeton were layered atop my own; as if a sheet of tracing paper had settled upon the rooftops of my village, and on it was a detailed drawing of a simpler Templeton. Some houses, some stores, some streets I knew had disappeared, and fields and copses and other buildings took their place; paint flaked off the oldest buildings, layer by layer; great trees contracted until they were tiny saplings and then seeds; old men spun younger and firmer until they shrank rapidly and weren't even a glimmer in an eye. I could feel the pull of the ghosts in the lake, knew that if I looked out onto the lawn those terrible private people of whom Sarah spoke would be standing there, in military lines all the way down the lawn, all looking up into my window, deep holes for eyes.

But then, at the base of Lakefront Park, a truck rumbled to life and shattered the spell. The truck coughed, and then the brakes squealed off. The monster, I realized, had begun to move.

I ran down the hall of my ancestors, feeling their many little eyes upon my back. I opened the door and flew onto the front lawn. All down Lake Street, Templetonians were hurrying out of their doors, slippers missing, bathrobes flapping, hair mussed. The truck came into view, turned left onto Lake Street, roaring. It straightened itself out and began to speed up.

In silence, we watched as the monster drew near. We looked at the tarp that covered the corpse, how, in the wind, one corner opened to reveal a delicate hand curled on its chest. We did not speak to one another, we did not acknowledge we were standing there, neighbors, watching; that we, just by watching, were made complicit in giving the great beast up for study. And we did not breathe in the murky dank rot but held our breath to watch until the truck passed us and pulled away. We watched until the monster was too far down the street to see. Some of us leapt into cars to follow.

In the silent cortege of cars behind the departing Glimmey, there were no tourists, no summer visitors, only native Templetonians. And I saw that one of the escorts was Ezekiel Felcher. His tow truck glowed yellow, and he was inside, singing to himself, holding his hat to his heart.

I turned to go back inside to find Vi standing on the flagstone porch, clutching her batik robe around her. "It feels strange this morning," she said, studiously not looking at me. "Templeton. It seems a little emptier, perhaps. I think."

I only nodded at her and went in.

THAT MORNING, BEFORE going to bed to sleep off my long night, I sat at the old farmhouse table with Vi. She bowed her head over her cornflakes and said a long, silent prayer, and when she looked up and sprinkled sugar on her cereal, I said, "Vi. That's really not so good for you. Extra sugar." I looked at her mound of a belly, the great twin bergs of her breasts and said, "You never had that stuff when I was growing up. And as a nurse you should know better."

She frowned and put the spoon down. "Not your business."

"I want my mother to be healthy. It is my business."

"I am forty-six years old, Williekins," she said. "I suffered through organic peanut butter and tofu for far too long when you were little, and by golly, if I want my cereal to be a little sweet in my middle age, it'll be a little sweet." Her face had flushed and she was looking fierce.

"Wait," I said, beginning to laugh, "I always thought you did all that organic vegetarian stuff because you liked it."

"Oh, my goodness, no," she said. "No, no. I did it for you. For your health."

"For me?" I said. "For me? It was for me that you handed out apples on Halloween? That the first time I tasted a glazed cruller at Petra Tanner's I almost puked? That you'd said I was allergic to processed sugar, and when people brought in birthday cupcakes in kindergarten, I had to sit there eating carrot sticks while everyone else chomped into cake? That was for me?"

She gave a little humph and said nothing.

"Well, thanks so much," I said. But somehow the Lump made itself present again, a little twisting twinge in my gut, and I no longer wanted to follow the path of my argument to its end. Instead, I said, "It must've been painful for you, too. Sign of an excellent mother."

"Damn tooting," she said and dug into her cereal with vigor.

"Anyway," I said, "I just wanted to run this by you. My progress, I mean, on the father front. Or lack thereof. But you said you wanted to know last night, so here goes." I took a deep breath, and she looked at me with interest. "One," I said, testing her. "My father is not the product of any extramarital shenanigans on the part of your parents. He's not, say, a half-brother, in any way."

She stopped chewing and cocked her head and said, "No. I did not sleep with my brother, Willie, thank you very much."

"Right," I said. "I thought that'd be a little odd. And, two: your mother's parents didn't have anything to do with it either. At least Claudia Starkweather, Hetty the slave's great-great-granddaughter, didn't. I'm just basing that on a hunch from her wedding photograph. Your grandparents didn't seem the type. They seemed. Well, celibate."

Vi blinked and said, "I'm guessing you're doing this backward. Most recent ancestors to least recent, correct? You've ruled out my parents, so on to my grandparents?"

"Yes," I said. "Clarissa told me that's what she'd do. I thought it was smart."

My mother nodded slowly and said, as if she were very, very distant from me, "She's a clever girl, my Clarissa."

"Am I right, though? Can you tell me if Claudia Starkweather was the source of the illegitimacy?"

"She wasn't the source," she said, still musing. "Nope, she wasn't."

"Okay. And so I looked at the other side of the family, your dad's parents, Sy and Sarah. So, here I'm making an assumption that whatever happened there must've been adultery, because she seemed pretty virginal before Sy. Frigid, almost. But, I don't really think there was adultery, of course; nothing that easy. Though I did find out some pretty crazy stuff, Vi. Apparently, Sarah was insane. Schizophrenic, I'd say--she saw ghosts and heard voices and things like that. And she bartered herself away to Sy because Templeton was really suffering in the Depression and he wouldn't let the baseball museum come to town unless she married him."

"Oh, my," said Vi. "So the rumors are true, then."

"Yup," I said.

My mother clicked her tongue and put her spoon down. "I hate that," she said, "though, if you think about it, that's not so different from what traditional marriage was supposed to be. Women like cattle to be given from one man to another. Disgusting, really."

I looked at the woman before me, suddenly feeling warm; the old Vi was still in there with the new religious freak. When I was little, she'd wear inflammatory tee shirts to PTA meetings that said A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A FISHHOOK and SCREW PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY. PLEASE, SOMEBODY, SCREW HER. There was one time, during a movie at the grand stone library--we went to every free, educational event in town when I was a child--when the camera panned over a sleeping San Francisco, wreathed in fog, and I saw Vi's eyes fill and threaten to overspill with tears. I felt longing rolling off her in waves, and knew, at that moment, at barely seven years old, that she would have been much, much happier in a larger place, somewhere cosmopolitan, surrounded by people like her. I sat in the dark and held my breath and prayed to whatever secular god I believed in then for the welling in my mother's eyes to not become actual tears, to stay where they were, because if they did, I would know that she was giving up more than she could bear to give up so that I could be raised in Templeton. I watched, in terrible suspense, but they didn't spill. At the last minute, she looked at me in the darkness, and smiled, and when she looked back at the screen her eyes had dried. Now, this morning, I watched her metal cross swing and swing, and, remembering the hippie of my youth, said, "Vi, how do you reconcile your old feminism with your new Christianity?"

"'I am large, I contain multitudes.'" She laughed at my expression and said, "I read, too, Sunshine." I smiled at her. When I was little, she'd have a line for everything: on watching boys jump off the docks at Fairy Springs, she'd blink and say: "'How the boys/with dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out/are earth-world, airworld, waterworld, thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.' Hopkins." Or, walking home on a dark winter's night from a school play, my mother would see Cartwright Field glinting in the pale light and mutter, "'Studded with stars in ball and crown, the Stadium is an adastrium,'" and take my hand and squeeze it, saying, "Marianne Moore." Now, as she stood to rinse out her bowl, my mother still looked pleased at herself for quoting Whitman.

"Vi?" I said. "Sarah's journal cuts off really suddenly. Just after she gets engaged to Sy. Do you have any idea what happened to her? You said you'd asked your great-grandmother and she might've been bats, but what did she say?"

"Well," my mother said. "As far as I know, after she gets engaged, she gets married. She has my father, and he comes out a month prematurely. And then, when he's two months old, she does a Virginia Woolf, walks into the lake with rocks in her pockets. Drowns, of course. When I was a stupid kid, about nine, I think, I asked my great-grandmother, Sarah's mother, about her. Hannah Clarke Temple. I'd seen that picture of Sarah upstairs, the one from her graduation, and thought she was so gorgeous. My great-grandmother was this wrinkled old dowager who wore huge pearls like hen's eggs around her neck and glared at everyone and tried to hit at dogs and birds and small children with her cane. For a minute I thought she was going to brain me, but instead she just spoke long and fast, in this little whisper, and said she'd never seen her daughter so happy, never, not even as a little girl, than when she was engaged to Sy. She was a beam of light, her dark, sad daughter. And then, as soon as my father was born, it was as if a switch went off. She fell darker and darker, until she seemed buried under this thick, velvety cloud of sadness. And my great-grandmother knew it was coming and that nothing she did could stop it."

"Why?" I said. "How did she know?"

"The housemaid had found a list of all the people who had ever died in the lake in Sarah's room, that's how," said Vi. "They found it when she came home after she spent the summer with her half-brothers in Manhattan. Sarah had done her research. My great-grandmother was horrified. Burnt the thing. Sad," Vi said. "For a long time I thought it'd make a good poem."