The Monsters of Templeton (29 page)

My warmest regards, Cinnamon Averell, et cetera, soon to be Peck

Post-Script--I forgot to mention the most important event of the terrible night of the fire--apparently, I am sure you know, that the Temple Manor also burned. The portraits of your grandfather, grandmother, and father are being kept safe for you by the Pomeroys. Unfortunately, all of the furniture that had remained there is gone. It is a terrible feeling, you know, to walk through what remains. The charred beams like the ribs of some dead whale, the mirrors' mercury pooled on the ground. Such history that burnt down that night! I do pity you for your loss.

The Capstan Building, Park Street, Manhattan, New York December the First, 1862

Cinnamon,

No double-talk. No mendacity. You are a dangerous woman, true, though I am also dangerous. I will not return your letters. This bundle is my only protection against you, and perhaps a fire I could summon, even from here, if need be. I am sure you wouldn't want to lose Averell House.

Your gossips are correct. I am returning to Templeton. My nephew will benefit from my family's town. But, no, you will never kiss his cheeks, or wonder at his fine head of red hair. You will never address him. If I hear that he has spoken with you, I will probably lose my temper, and you understand what happens then.

In Templeton, we will be acquaintances, civil and cold. In Templeton, we will not mix, as we are truly not of the same social class, not at all. People always wondered openly why I forced doors open for you. They called you a manipulator and a black widow, after the spider that eats its own husbands. I always laughed. I always told them that I helped you in society because you were such a good person. So kind, I said, and such an excellent friend.

I will not salute you, for this is our last missive. Charlotte Temple

Chapter
19

One Sees by the Light There Is

I LOOKED UP from Cinnamon's and Charlotte's letters to find myself shaking.

After I had read Sarah Franklin Temple's journal, I saw a previous Templeton overlaid on the one I knew; after I read Cinnamon's and Charlotte's letters I saw, at first, only a deep, dark midnight falling over my town. I didn't know what to think. All day, then all night, I read, then reread the letters. They could have been a hoax, I imagined, the fruit of some fevered novelist's mind, a novel abandoned somewhere, half-finished. But the letters themselves smelled of antique rose water and age-crisped lace, and were brittle with the years. The women's script was wildly different and the papers were different, too. Charlotte's writing was elegant but small, controlled, perfectly blotted, her paper thin and feminine. Cinnamon's paper was so thick and good it felt like cloth, and from afar, her script was gorgeous. Up close, however, her writing was a little wild, and there were odd breaks in more troublesome words, as if the writer had paused after four or five letters and checked a dictionary to ascertain her spelling.

"Are these letters real?" I asked the Lump.

Hours later, as the moon had shifted itself to the other side of the lake, I answered myself. "I think they're real," I said. I had remembered a fifth-grade walking tour of the village led by our portly little mayor with his brass cane and his short-shorts, when we heard about how Templeton had once almost burnt to the ground. All of Main Street, the mayor had been proclaiming in his basso profundo voice, gesturing widely with his arms, from the Temple Manor to where Schneider's Bakery is today, all the way up Church Street was a blackened, charred ruin. And yet, children, he'd said, voice trembling with emotion, we rebuilt. We Templetonians always rebuild. On and on he talked while I imagined my hometown a smoldering ruin and longed for a ten-cent fudge pop from the bakery. His mention of Templeton's great fire hadn't surprised me, and I realized then that it was one of the strange, floating bits of knowledge that natives of a small town sometimes know without ever being told.

By the time I looked up, dazed, from the letters, and out the window into the dark and sleeping town, I saw another change. I felt as if I were rising out of my body, then through the roof, and when I looked down, it was on a different Templeton, busy even in the earliest parts of dawn. I could hear the sleeping regiments in the fields out by the river, the night watch's boots on the frozen ground. I could see Main Street still moving with half-drunken men, like hard-shelled insects silvered by moonlight. It was a different Main Street from the one I knew, before the great conflagration that Charlotte had somehow started; the buildings were all different, and one hotel hung plumb out into the middle of Pioneer and Main. A line of men snaked from behind a large building, the Leatherstocking Hotel, and even from above, I could hear their muted talking. Up on the hill, opposite the Presbyterian Church, was a huge building with rows and rows of sleeping boys on the top floor, the dormitory of the Academy. Consumptives sat on the porch at the Otesaga Hotel, to get the early air. Lanterns burned at the backs of the huge mansions in town, servants up already baking the bread for the day. The town was cold, and it must have been winter, but it was still pulsing with life. It smelled of burning wood and melting ice, the thick garlicky stink of many bodies in one space, mingled breath. This was Cinnamon's and Charlotte's Templeton, exciting in that time of war. Had I lived then in this bustling town, I would have said that Templeton would certainly be a bustling, important city 150 years later, not the insular village it is now.

My mother, after her night shift the day before, had silently delivered my dinner to me on a tray when she saw I wasn't coming down. I was distracted, hadn't even seen that I'd eaten an entire wedge of quiche--a food I despise--until she came back to pick up the tray, and chuckled with surprise to find it gone. I heard her go to bed at nine, then the house creaked and moaned with 300 years of rheumatic pains in its joists and beams. I was sorry when I awoke to my modern tourist's village, even though that morning the fog was lit by the sunrise like a lamp under batting.

WHILE MY MOTHER slept her weariness away, I worked in the garden. I still had to digest Cinnamon and Charlotte, and didn't want to move on without talking to Vi first. There was still so much to fathom: that Henry was Charlotte's son and not adopted from one of her sisters, that she was an arsonist; that Cinnamon had murdered her many husbands. I could say with some certainty that the two ladies weren't the sources of my father, but I would only know for sure if Vi told me.

So, I plucked green beans and tomatoes lusty with juices. I pulled weeds from the rows of lettuces and found tender baby squash under the broad leaves. I filled a little container with raspberries and squashed copper-coated Japanese beetles between two gory rocks. When I came up to the house, my mother was up, warbling along in her shower. When I passed through the dining room on my way to wash up and dress, though, I saw a letter in the mouth of the little toy horse on the dining room table, which Vi had put there in a bizarre attempt at levity. The letter was addressed to me.

Willie Upton, Templeton, NY, was all it said.

And it was written in Primus Dwyer's handwriting.

And it was postmarked from Alaska.

This was as far as I got by the time my mother appeared in the doorway, rubbing her hair with a towel. "Whoa," she said, "Willie," because by that time, I was halfway to the floor, woozy, the letter still clutched in my hand.

WHEN I COULD focus again, I was propped up in a dining room chair and my mother was across the table, frowning at me. The envelope was torn and she was skimming the letter.

"Vi?" I said. "That's mine."

She folded the note up again and raised an eyebrow. "Maybe," she said. "But I'm not sure you want to see it."

"Oh," I said in a very small voice. "Uh-oh."

"Should I read it to you?" she said, and I could now see that she was angry. Very, very angry, and it wasn't, for once, at me.

"Okay," I said, but she had already started.

"Wilhelmina," she read, in a staccato voice. "I can't believe what happened. Hope you know how sorry I am. Poor Jan still wants to press charges but she's being calmed. One week, I warrant, and it'll be fine. Going into Fairbanks next week, will try to call. There was a huge development--well, you know what it is! Don't worry--you will be an author. You seem mediagenic--maybe you can go on the Daybreak! show for us, pretty girl like you. Better than fat old professors and gormless PhD blokes. Ha-ha! Oh, Willie, what a muddle we made of things! Hope you don't hate me. I have forgiven you, I know you were only in the throes of what was between us when you tried to hunt down poor Jan. I've got to run (nobody knows I am writing this, of course), but I think of you often--Yours, affectionately, Primus."

I stared at my mother, and she stared right back. The Lump twisted and twisted in me, hard as a cramp. I grabbed the paper from Vi and reread it three times, only feeling its proper sting on the third. And then I stood, ran to the bathroom, and threw up my impromptu lunch of garden vegetables. When I came back, my mother didn't speak. She just held out her soft arms, and I put my head on her shoulder and buried my face in her clean smell. I pressed my face to her neck and my body to her body, and for that long while we stood there together in the mudroom, her cross pushing into the skin of our stomachs, until I moved it aside.

"Assholes like that," she said then, and her voice washed warmly over the knockings of her heart, "are why, no matter what John says, I think it's natural that some women are. Well. You know."

"Lesbians," I said, into her skin.

"Exactly," she said. "Because of insensitive boors like this Primus one you've got here."

"Yeah," I said, and pulled away, feeling tiny and very, very frail. "To be honest, I'm tempted to give up the whole Y chromosome for good."

My mother put her hands on my face and looked up into my eyes. "If you want," she said, in a horrific thug-Italian accent, "I still have some connections in San Francisco. I could arrange a little sumpin-sumpin. Take him out, quietlike."

"Sounds good to me," I said, and we both laughed a little. A motorcoach carrying baseball fans sighed as it passed our house. A mockingbird gave a tentative rill on the windowsill beside us. When she moved, Vi's crucifix swayed and swayed on the bulge of her stomach, like a pendulum counting the seconds.

THAT EVENING, MY mother and I took a long walk around Templeton. The twilight had dimmed into dusk and the windows in all of the mansions began to twinkle. The heat of the day had cooled into a gentle warmth, and the families, sitting on their porches or on the benches of Main Street, all seemed to be murmuring, eating ice cream, watching the sleepy flickers of late lightning bugs in the hills. Those who were only here for the museums had gone home. The town was safe again for the natives, and we had emerged, shyly, like big-eyed ungulates of the fields.

Vi walked beside me, her jowls shivering with each step. I noticed this, and that she had crow's-feet etched deeper beside her eyes than I had ever seen before. She, too, stole small glances at me as we went up and down the streets, as familiar to us as the whorls in our own fingertips. My town had begun to insert itself subtly under my skin again. I could feel it there, moving shards, painfully alive.

"So," I said to keep from thinking, "it was nice to officially meet your beau yesterday."

She seemed peeved at me, and just said, "Great."

"He seemed like a good person."

"He is," she said, and a small smile now alit, mothlike, on her lips. "He is a great person."

"He should be. With the whole ministering thing and all. Did the religion come first, or did you date before you were a convert?"

"I sat in the back of the church for about a year," Vi said. "The whole time just saying to myself, good grief, this is all such nonsense. I thought it was a crock, but I just kept coming back. And then I just fell into it all at once. Belief. Love. Just looked up one day and saw both just sort of shining in his face."

"Love?" I said. I tried not to grimace. "Shining in his face?"

"Yes," she said.

"Well," I said. "That's grand. Just grand."

"Don't make it sound cheesy, Sunshine."

"Oh, I'm not. I'm not," I said. "Now, tell me, Vivienne Upton, why is it that you all wear those crosses everywhere? Makes you all look like a cult."

"These?" Vi said, poking at her crucifix. "Oh. Well, some of us just like them. I mean, the weight of it around our necks is like the weight of being good. It's a reminder. But John first thought of it as a way to make enough money for our sister town in Kenya where we're trying to build a clinic. He calls it a visual reminder, but I think it's sort of a passive-aggressive technique to shame the town into giving. People who aren't part of the flock give so that they don't have to feel guilty every time they see these crosses. People in the congregation give because they're reminded every day. Me?" she said. "It's the weight I like. The reminder."

"Well," I said. "I have to admit that the passive-aggressive thing is pretty ingenious."

"Well," she said. "I hate to brag, but that's John."

We were nearing Averell Cottage, but something in both of us made us slow our steps so we wouldn't have to go in immediately. "Tell me one thing. Do you sleep with him?" I said. "On your sleepovers?"

She looked at me, startled, then stopped walking. We were in the garage by then, and I blushed a little, remembering Felcher in this place, only a few nights earlier. "No," she said. "John doesn't believe in sex before marriage. I'm not so sure about marriage. So, it's a standoff."