The Monsters of Templeton (39 page)

At last I sighed and stopped pretending to sleep. "What are you wearing?" I said.

She looked down at herself, and flicked off a few pieces of lint. "This?" she said. "John made it for me for Christmas. It's very warm."

"He knits?" I said.

"Idle hands," she said, "are the devil's playthings. Speaking of which," and she shook my foot underneath my coverlet. "You devil. Up and at 'em. Four days left until you go back to Palo Alto. Only four days to finish your little quest."

"Nope. I can't go back to California," I said. "I just can't, Vi."

My mother sat on the bed, and it creaked and dipped under her weight. "Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton," she said. "You have to go back. Finish your dissertation, get the heck out of Dodge. I didn't send you to school for more than half my life to have you wimp out just before the end. No way."

"But, Vi," I said. "Primus is there."

"You're stronger than he is," she said. "And I frankly don't care. I can't believe I'm trying to convince you to leave Templeton after all this time that I was afraid you'd never come back, but you have to go back to Stanford, Willie. You're not a quitter. You'd be devastated if you let yourself quit. You'd never recover."

"But what about Clarissa?" I said. "Now that she's coming, she needs me here."

My mother made a flatulent noise with her lips. "Come on," she said. "She needs anything but you here. She needs quiet and calm and someone paying attention only to her. I can take care of her well enough. Trust me."

I thought about this for a moment, wondering at the wash of relief that came over me. I looked at Vi, but her face, somehow, seemed less tired than it was even a month ago, when I returned in all my shame to Templeton, as if my many troubles had rejuvenated her.

"You love a challenge," I said. "Don't you."

She gave me a wry little moue. "I am happiest when I'm fighting for something," she said. "And you get that from me."

"And you don't mind taking care of Clarissa?"

"I love Clarissa," she said.

"Ah. Now I see what this is," I said, sitting up at last. "Your favorite daughter's coming back, so you can get rid of the rogue one. I see how it goes. You're replacing me with a better candidate."

Vi snorted. "I didn't look at it like that until now," she said. "But now that you say it, I guess that's what I am doing. I can't wait. A kid who will give me all the respect I deserve. It's a dream come true." She pulled the comforter from the bed, and waited until I stood, grumbling, and pulled some sweatpants on.

My mother watched me, twisting the comforter in her hands, until I turned around and frowned at her. "What?" I said.

"Nothing," she said. "Just that I have to go to work soon, and I want to make sure you'll be okay."

"I'll be okay," I said.

"You sure?" she said. "Anything I can do to help?"

"No, Vi," I said. "It'll help me to get to work again. Take my mind off. Things."

"That was exactly what I was about to say," Vi said, turning to leave. "You're getting smarter in your old age. I made you cinnamon buns. They're still warm."

"And you're getting nicer in your old age," I called out, and listened to her footsteps on the squeaking stairs. I ran out to the top of the stairs when she reached the bottom and called down. "Vi?" I said. She looked up at me, her jowls disappearing as she craned upward.

"I'm sorry if I didn't say this before," I said. "I am very happy that you are happy. That you've finally let yourself be happy."

My mother bent her head, and I watched from above as her loafy braid moved up and seemed to clad her neck in armor. "Thank you," she said quietly. And when she looked up, she beamed at me such a sunny smile that I, too, felt my heart take wing, a little.

IT WAS A Saturday, still early when I called Hazel Pomeroy at her house. I imagined her shuffling to the telephone in her little cottage beside the lake, in a threadbare paisley wrapper, grumbling. She didn't answer the phone with any standard hello, but, rather, a honk of a "What?"

"Ms. Hazel Pomeroy," I said. "It's Willie Upton. Sorry to bother you, but I have something to read to you, if I can."

Hazel heaved a great sigh and said, "Let me fetch my tea." There was a clunk of the phone on the counter, and a very long expanse of time before Hazel came back.

"Had I known you had to boil the water, Hazel, I would have called back," I said when I heard her breath again in the receiver.

"Nah," she said. "I'm an old lady and forgot about you. Pure luck I came out when I did and saw the phone off the hook. Now, read to me. Go on."

I read her the story aloud, and at the end, she said, "Shadows and Fragments, huh. I know it well. Well, what do you want me to say about it?"

"Nothing. It's just. Well, you told me to read between the lines, and it seems there's a lot going on between these particular lines. Do you think maybe Richard's the ursine guy JFT's talking about? Do you think it's possible?" My heart raced; I felt extraordinarily close to the end of the puzzle.

She sighed. "Oh, Willie," she said, "I could have told you all this long ago. I truly don't think anything like that happened. I think that story's all a fabrication, wish fulfillment, in a way. All his life, Jacob was very, very angry with his brother, you see. For being the firstborn, for being his father's favorite. And then, after Jacob spent the family fortune, Richard called Jacob home from Europe and treated him almost as if he were this naughty little boy, and Jacob just plumb resented it. I think he wrote that little vignette as if to imply his brother had done something bad, but Jacob could never really see it through to the end. Too ludicrous. That's why it ended up in Shadows and Fragments, and not some novel."

"Fine," I said. "But the story has to come from somewhere, right? Just because it isn't literally true doesn't mean that Richard didn't have some illegitimate offspring or anything. I mean, even if it didn't happen, something like this could've happened, right? Or he really did have an affair with Adah Phinney or something."

"Well," said Hazel, "if you know as much as I do about that family, I think it's pretty dang unlikely. Richard was, I think, almost a pure soul; Marmaduke always said that his eldest boy had the best heart of any man alive. From all accounts back then, he was chaste, to the point that he barely even talked to a woman who wasn't his mother, and he was so afraid of them, they say, that his wife, Anna, had to hound him for months before he ever looked her full in the face. Plus, Adah Phinney, it turns out, had an Oneonta marriage license from that autumn she ran away. I wondered about that, too, and dug it up a few decades back--appears she took off with a man named Gar Wilson. Some young rake, I suppose."

"But maybe some part of it is true. Maybe he was right and Richard just snapped, absconded with some girl," I persisted, though I felt all my careful theories beginning to crumble into dust. "That Lucille Smalley, the one who never came back."

"No," said Hazel. "Learn to listen better. It is impossible."

"But why?" I said.

"Because, Wilhelmina Upton, I also happen to know that by the time that episode happened in Templeton, the strawberry-picking party, Richard was already dead. So there," said Hazel. There was a very long silence, then, and I could hear Hazel's quick breath in the receiver. "Oh, crap," I said, sadly. "Back to square one."

"Well, Willie," said Hazel. "That's life. Now, it is odd that you call me up with this story because I've been thinking, and though your idea about Richard is obviously wrong, I have my hunches that you're in the right area."

"Right area for what?" I said, suspicious.

"The Temple link to whoever your father is, of course," she snapped.

I blinked at my window, brazen with light, until I heard Hazel realize what she'd just given away. She clucked to herself, "Drats, Hazel Pomeroy," she scolded herself. "Loose lips, sinking ships, as usual."

"Who told you I was looking for my father?"

"Your pal Peter Lieder," she said. "He knows about my research into your family. It slipped out one day."

"Damn him," I said.

"Listen, honey," she said. "I've always had my suspicions that your mother was hiding something. I just never knew the extent of it. Now, do you or do you not want to hear about who I think is your 'randy' ancestor, as you put it?"

I groaned. "Of course I do," I said. "Who is it? Guvnor Averell?"

"Maybe," she said. "Who knows how much you'd be able to dig up on him, though. He wasn't literate, I suspect. I was thinking more along the lines of Marmaduke."

I actually lost my breath for a moment. "You're kidding," I said. "Really? Marmaduke?" I thought of Hetty, and how Guvnor had red hair and freckles and Marmaduke's fierce glare; if it had happened once, it could possibly have happened again. I couldn't believe I didn't think of this sooner. But then, upon reflection, I wasn't completely sold. Hetty could have been his one mistake in his whole life, the warm bed in a cold winter after Elizabeth had refused Templeton for the nth year in a row. I said, "But wasn't he a Quaker?"

"Yes, but"--Hazel's voice fell into a whisper, as if there were eavesdroppers on the line--"but here's something nobody knows, kid. Here's something that you won't hear from anyone but me. This is a doozie. Marmaduke didn't die of pneumonia, as all the books have it. Marmaduke was murdered, Willie."

My breath caught in the back of my throat, and I couldn't say anything at all. At last, I found my voice and said, "Murdered?"

"Wilhelmina," said Hazel. "Come to my house whenever you can. I have something to show you."

OUTSIDE, TEMPLETON WAS still a pigeon gray, but over the far hills a sunburst split the seams of the clouds and blazed one stamp of trees a strange green-gold. I had dressed in a short yellow sundress from high school because I felt so sad and only that dress seemed to hold an element of light in it. As I walked in the damp mist, I thought of Marmaduke Temple. I knew no more than when I started but couldn't stop now, with all my many ancestors mounted in the hall of infamy in Averell Cottage, waiting with their silverfish eyes for me to discover the deepest family secret of them all.

Hazel's cottage was a tiny green-black hut on the east side of the lake near Pomeroy Hall, a former summer camp with a sign made of nailed sticks above the door that proclaimed it Camp We-no-kow-to-hawk-naw.

I knocked on the door, and inside could hear Hazel cuss under her breath and shuffle endlessly toward the door. At last, she fumbled with three distinctly different locks, and when she thrust open the door, she was wearing a wispy white nightgown buttoned to her chin and slippers in the shape of frogs. She squinted at me. "You all right?" she said. "You look pale."

"I'm fine," I said. "Camp We-no-kow-to-hawk-naw?"

"Gibberish," she said, letting me in. Her place smelled surprisingly lovely, like apples and rich dark soil, with only a small note of old lady mixed in. "Family that built this place in 1880 got the money for it by selling off a prize heifer. We no cow to hock now. Silly. Sit, sit. I made some brownies," she said, and as I sat on one of her uncomfortable leather and carved-walnut chairs, she put before me a plate full of suspiciously perfect confections. They smelled like chemicals.

"No thanks," I said. "Nice of you, though. Now, what's this about Marmaduke being murdered? And how does nobody know of it but you? A murder's a huge thing to hush up, Hazel."

Hazel shuffled to the hard leather seat opposite mine. When she sat, the googly eyes in the frog slippers rolled and rolled. "Think, Wilhelmina," she said with a snort of impatience. "Nobody witnessed the murder. They say it was nighttime and it snowed the night he was killed, covered the bloodstains. People back then were loyal to the seigneur of the town, and Marmaduke sure was that. The juiciest stuff is passed along by word of mouth. But still," she said, pulling with a flourish a manila portfolio out from under some papers on her table, "some things slipped out into print. Take a gander at this."

Hazel spread open the portfolio. Inside there was a yellowed, brittle piece of paper with the Freeman's Journal spelled out across the top in the same old-time font. But this really was an antique Freeman's Journal, and I looked up at Hazel, surprised. "You stole this from the library?" I said.

"Big deal," she said, her mouth full of brownie. "They have microfiche now. Go ahead and read it," and I did, as much to escape the roil of dark wet matter in her mouth as from curiosity.

EDITORIAL FROM THE FREEMAN'S JOURNAL, DECEMBER 6, 1799

Attention, Templetonians! Look about you with consternation; guard carefully your vote; keep your wives and children from hearing facile rhetoric, for among us there is an impostor. A man who seeks to betray the class he was born into, who seeks to destroy the underpinnings of this grand new democracy of ours. A man who came from nothing, who married his first money, who shrewdly built his land and his fortune until he was one of the richest men in this new country. For he, of all people, is campaigning for the party that wants an American aristocracy, that wants to keep the common men under their heels. He, who should be grateful to the good yeomen of the county for the wealth they had brought him, is a rank Federalist.

"Of whom do you speak, Phinney?" the good reader of this journal now perhaps asks, rattling the paper in vexation. I needn't have to pronounce it, but in the small chance one does not recognize the man in the portrait above, this villain, this Benedict Arnold, is none other than the landlord Marmaduke Temple.