The Monsters of Templeton (26 page)

They nodded, letting it go.

The door opened, and my mother walked in, then, in her nursing scrubs, seeming heavy, sad. She glanced up and gave a little startled yip, and then looked wildly from face to face. "What?" she said. "What is it?"

"Oh," I said, playing with her a little, "just my prayer group." The Buds chuckled uncertainly, then stood as one.

"We were just going," said Tom Irving. "Nice to see you, Vi." And then, with a great number of shouts about how I must come running with them, and they were glad to see me, and that we'll catch up more next time, the Buds filed out the door. I saw, at last, the source of their discomfort; Reverend Milky was standing there in the mudroom, and the Buds ducked their eyes and said "Morning, Reverend Melkovitch" as each one passed by.

"Well," said Vi, sitting in her chair at the farmhouse table, and rubbing the arch of her foot, "that was unexpected. Come in, John. I'll start breakfast soon."

Reverend Milky appeared sheepishly in the kitchen, and gave me a little nod. He was wearing what was almost a parody of hiking clothing, with a great fleece vest and too-short shorts showing his powdery thighs, replete with bluish veins. His red, hoary toes corkscrewed out of the kind of sandals that looked as if they were made from tires and old fan belts. And it was all, of course, topped with the great iron cross, his own personal millstone. "Willie," he said. "Nice to see you again."

"Yeah," I said. "All right, then. See you later."

"Wait," called my mother as I walked away. "I invited John over so that we could all have a nice breakfast together before I went to sleep for the day. What do you say, Willie? Feel like huevos rancheros?" Vi shoved a strand of greasy hair behind her ear, and tried to look eager, alert.

But I looked at Reverend Milky and said, "No, thanks, Vi. I think I'll skip. Not so hungry right now." But all the way upstairs, my mother's face as it had just looked, flat, disappointed, hovered before me, and I walked two or three circuits around the room before I came back downstairs again. "But I'll take some coffee," I said and sat at the table, opposite the Holy Milk. As she passed on her way to the kitchen, my mother gave me such a smile of relief that I was glad for a moment to look at the good reverend's pasty little face before me.

"So," I said as my mother rustled around the kitchen.

"So," he agreed.

"Going for a hike?" I said.

"Indeed," he said. "I hear you are quite the hiker, as well."

"I was," I said. "Then I moved to San Francisco. The mountains aren't that far, but you get so into your life in the city, all that excitement, all that movement, you find yourself lucky to go out into the hills once in a while and trot around. To be honest, I have so little time, I hardly ever go anymore."

He looked disappointed in me, and said, "But God's good earth is what he gave us to forget our worldly cares."

I just said, "Huh," for the sake of my tired mother moving in the kitchen beyond the doorframe, without pointing out that the earth is the world, and he was spouting nonsense. And that's all we could find to say to each other--the Bible-beater, the prodigal harlot daughter--until Vi returned with the platter in her hands, talking lightly about Glimmey. And after she prayed, as we ate our way through the spicy eggs--I found I was hungry after all--she talked of miracles and monsters, of paradoxical mashes of fish and mammal. I looked at her and saw the biggest paradox of my life, my great, proud mother holding the hand of a person she only would have scorned a year ago.

I will never, I vowed to the Lump, watching my mother, be so lonely I date in desperation. My mother might have seen the ghost of pity move on my face, because she narrowed her eyes and gazed at me sternly for a moment. "How are Cinnamon and Charlotte?" she said. "Making progress?" This meant, I knew: if you're not going to be pleasant, you can scram, you brat, so, with relief, I stood.

"Thanks for the food, Vivienne. So nice to see you again, Reverend. Hope you have a good hike. Don't get eaten by a bear," I said. Halfway through the dining room, I heard his worried voice saying, "Nobody ever told me there are bears here," and when I sat back down to my letters I was still chortling to myself. The ghost had reappeared as a small purple knot pulsing in the corner of the mirror. I said, "And we're off again," and turned over the next letter in the bunch, this one in Charlotte's hand.

Chapter
18

Cinnamon and Charlotte, Part Two

From the Desk of Charlotte Temple, Franklin House, Blackbird Bay, Templeton The Seventh of January, 1862

My darling Cinnamon,

You must forgive my silence, for I was visiting with my eldest sister in her country-house in Rye, and was working there on a new book (as only you know). I have just returned, and even now, my maid is still unpacking my things. I am glad you are feeling better, and the tincture is calming you the way it should. You alarmed me with the talk of your husbands, but I do believe you were in a half-dream at that moment, and should not be taken seriously.

Well, you have asked me to report to you anything I may have heard about your sister: I do believe I heard something. I had stopped in at the Reverend Belvedere on my way into town, to deliver a letter from my sister. Over tea, the old gossip told me two things. The first is that Schneider, at the bakery, in the early morning of the day of the blizzard, reported seeing a vision when he stepped outside to cool his head. It was, he said, a parade of strange ghosts, decked all in white, ranged in order from massive to tiny and wading up Second Street in the hip-deep snow.

The other bit I heard was that the Vanderhees bachelor brothers--those two old Yorkers--had suddenly sold the Leatherstocking Hotel. You do remember the Leatherstocking, I am sure: the brothers had bought old Widow Croghan's hotel in the beginning of the century and just recently updated it. Every room has a mural depicting a scene from one of my father's Leatherstocking books: Natty Bumppo leaping down a waterfall, Chingachgook scalping a Huron, Natty weeping at the slaughter of Passenger Pigeons, et cetera. It was all very beautiful. The two men came to see me, to bid adieu, though even after so many years here, they can barely speak English. When I asked them who had bought their hotel, they looked at one another. "Large man," they said. "Smell like woman." This does fit the description of your sister, I believe.

A secret before I must speak with my waiting housekeeper: Monsieur Le Quoi has been very attentive since I took your good advice, and gave him a little bonbon I made with my own hands. We have walked together eleven times, and my French has gotten so much better. He has taken to kissing my hand when we part, and it burns my skin, Cinnamon, burns through my glove, burns when I am away from him and burns anew when I see him again.

Oh, Cinnamon, my heart is full of gratitude to you, my dearest friend, and your forced absence weighs heavily on me.

With great affection, Charlotte Temple

January 9th, 1862 [rough draft, unfinished]

Dearest Charlotte,

I feel as if I'm breaking. There is something wrong with me. I do not know what it is, only that you can help me, somehow. I need to tell you something terrible, you see. The world is dark and mean. I don't know what I...

January 14th, 1862 [rough draft, unfinished]

Dear Charlotte,

Why don't you write? Why don't you write? Are you too in love to write? Aren't you my friend, don't you know how sad I am, how lonely? Don't you know anything? You think you are in love--you are not--you are in love with your father, Charlotte, and what you see in Monsieur Le Quoi is only your...

Averell Cottage January 17, 1862

Charlotte---

It is very late--I cannot sleep, have not been able to sleep for so long now, for a month, since Ginger returned--not without the tinctures, I can't sleep. I feel I am going mad. Charlotte, my husbands are in the shadows--I am so tired--they are around my bed when I try to sleep. I see them all there, looking down at me--they are in every reflection, in the dark spaces, husbands in the black window panes, husbands in the reflection of the moon on the lake, husbands swimming under the dark ice with the Glimmerglass Monster. Remember when we saw him, Charlotte--that day when we were walking along the shore, having just begun to know one another, and only twenty feet away, he emerged and looked at us, smiled his black teeth, then went down again--we were just girls, Charlotte, just twittering, and we had thought he was a myth, and there was something that day that cleaved me to you and you to me, despite all we pretend not to know about one another. My husbands are like that monster, hovering, and I have lit ten tapers here, the fire blazes, it is all as bright as noon, but in every reflection, every dark space, husbands. I know they are not here. But they are. They hide in the mercury of my mirror, they are not real, but they are, there is no such thing as a ghost, but they are here. And I am afraid--so afraid I cannot sleep--even Marie-Claude asks me if I am not well.

I am deranged, I think. The nervousness I had since poor Godfrey died has never gone away--I have just hidden it well--I write to you because I can no longer read--the text wriggles like worms. I feel feverish.

You are a writer (yes: only I know, and the whole town--you think you have kept this a secret, but everyone knows). I will tell you a story.

Here it goes: I was the princess, she the toad. This is how it starts, always in those fairy stories--I was beautiful, delicate, pretty, sweet--she dark, huge, hulking, defiant, no matter how many switches my father broke on her back. He hated her, hated. Took her out behind the tannery and beat her raw for the slightest things. Since she was little, six five--for a broken mirror, for one fresh word. You should have seen them--my huge, furious father, my sister unmoving as a mule. She was always much larger than I--I was the little bird--my father loved me, everyone loved me. We slept, my sister and I, in the old haunted room in this house, the room haunted by my slave Grandmother Hetty (oh, don't pretend you haven't heard the rumors--yes, they're true, every word--yes I came from slaves. One that your wonderful grandfather brought to town, yes? The good Quaker, the great Marmaduke. Hypocrite. That was one of the things they whispered about me at Godfrey's funeral, yes, that I come from slaves? That my father looked too like the old landlord Marmaduke Temple for the town's comfort? That perhaps our blood is not so dissimilar after all, my little plain friend? Oh, yes, I heard it, I heard it all).

We slept in Grandma Hetty's haunted room. Ginger hurt me badly. She would tie me to the bedpost and pull until just before my arms popped from their sockets. She'd look up at me, calculating, cruel, stick a needle under my nails, push until I screamed.

Whenever my father caught her, he whipped her bloody. Always. My mother never said a word. Didn't see, she was blind. Later, my father took Ginger behind the tannery to punish her, but there was no sign of whipping. At twelve, she was the size of a man, muscled like a man. She was good at work, Ginger, strong, could strip the skin from the fat in a bare second. At fourteen, she would slap me awake and force me from my bed. Down the stairs barefoot, out across the frosted lawn so cold it burnt my feet. Down to the tannery where she made me hold the lantern while the apprentices took their turns with her. One by one, in the stink of death and fat and hair, in that bloody place, one by one. She punished me--my punishment was to watch--her eyes gleaming, teeth bared, nightdress over her waist, her haunches, big, bare, muscled, gleaming in the light from the lantern I held--she'd snarl at me if I looked away. What the boys did to her, she did to me. She made me watch. But if one of them tried to touch me, she'd beat them hard. She made me watch.

Then came the night our father caught us. I, shaking, weeping, trying to look away, she not letting me, the lantern swinging light, one apprentice grunting like a pig behind her, the other two laughing, lolling on the pile of bark, then my father, big, quiet, in the doorway. His one eye gleaming.

"Cinnamon, to the house," he said. I flew, the lantern wild in my hand, the apprentices behind me, fleeing across the meadow. I watched from our bedroom window as my father came out, dragging Ginger by the hair. She'd fall, he'd tug her up by the hair to her feet. Dark blood on her face, on her legs. He slapped her against the side of the house so hard she fell down. He went in. I saw her lying there, in her white nightgown in the dark grass as he went inside. His footsteps on the stairs. I shuddered until he was shut in his room, reading the Bible aloud in his high voice. I went to bed. In the morning, she was gone.

Nobody ever said a word about her. Nobody--not my mother, not my father. It was as if she had never existed. And when she returned, that blizzard, I saw my first ghost--and she is real, here, and I feel her near me, dark and sickening, it is sickening us all, what I did not do to save her, what I couldn't do, what I can't do now. She sickens this town. She is infecting this town with her vice. She is calling my husbands up. I see the town sickening from my window--a pallor, a jaundice on it, men walking with venery on their minds. Sick, sick.

You will be shocked. Good. You will be made ill by this. Not nearly as ill as I. And you still think your Frenchman matters after this tale, do you? Pathetic, you little girl.

No, I won't send you this. It is too mad, even for your kind heart to bear. I can't send this. I will close it up, put it alongside your charming, banal letters. It will infect your letters. It will make them sick. This letter is too mad even for me, a woman you stare at, fascinated by the wildness in me--I know it--I feel it. Oh, Charlotte Temple, with your prissy little face, you wish you were wild as me. You have no secrets, you have no depth. Without your family, without your money, you are nothing, nothing. I could teach you a thing or two.