The Monsters of Templeton (32 page)

It stood to reason that a boy so young and rich would have had a hard time. He drank, gambled, fell in with a bad crowd. By the time he turned sixteen, he was sent down. He'd exploded a classmate's door with a bucket of gunpowder, some drunken prank, and though all his friends fled, he was so drunk he couldn't. He collapsed at the feet of the dean, giggling. This was his first failure.

He came back to Templeton, then, and his brother helped him find a place in the merchant marines, as he had always dreamt of foreign places, geishas and giraffes and other wondrous things he'd learned of from his readings. He mostly sailed around Lake Erie, though, and left the navy's life when he was twenty-one. That was his second failure. Then he went to Manhattan and, without a university degree but with the help of his father's powerful friends, tried to become an attorney. He was no good at law, had no grasp of it. Third failure.

In Manhattan, he fell in love with a pretty, flighty girl named Sophie De Lancey. She had a very well-connected family and normally wouldn't give him the time of day, as she had plenty of suitors as rich as Jacob, and most were from much more reputable families than the Temples, who, only a generation before, had sprung up from the mud. But something happened, and Sophie agreed to marry him. Nobody knew exactly what caused the rapid change of heart, but the couple had their first daughter about eight months after the wedding, so people drew some conclusions.

They were given land on the Hudson by Sophie's parents, and Jacob tried to make a go at it as a gentleman farmer, but he was horrible at this, too. Hemorrhaging money, as the land didn't give much and Sophie was an expensive wife to have.

Then, in the midst of this, his fourth failure, one night after a long day when some of the cows had to be put down for anthrax, he was reading a book by Susanna Rowson and just up and hucked it across the room. Such tripe! he shouted. I could write better in a fortnight. And Sophie put down her sewing and snapped, Well, then, do it, and he said, By Jove, I shall, and he did. In a fortnight he came back and assembled his family--he only had the first four daughters at that time--and began to read from a sheaf of papers in his hand. They sat, spellbound, as he read every night for a week, and when he was done, Sophie threw her needlework down and ran to her husband and said, Oh, I knew you weren't a failure, I knew it! and he printed the book himself under a nom de plume. It was a great success, though nowadays looks like a pale imitation of the kind of parlor novel so popular in England then. Pale heroines with roses in their cheeks. Stern lords with hearts of gold. Minuets and needlepoint, compromised younger sisters, forgiveness, lovemaking.

Jacob was inspired enough to keep writing, and within a few months he had another manuscript, which he published under his own name. It was patriotic to buy his book, as all the novels consumed in the new country until then were written and published in England, and now there was this American writing as well as the Brits. He was a round success. He began to write and write, with a promiscuity that's surprising when one considers that they had no computers or typewriters, only paper and ink and cut quills, and, later, those newfangled fountain pens.

So the family went off to Europe for ten years, spending all of the money Jacob made from his books, plus whatever was left of Sophie's fortune, and his, too. They lived in luxury among all of Sophie's male admirers, and all those female necessities--the fans, the laces, the ribbon--it all added up. By the time hairy old Richard wrote to say that he was cutting Jacob off the family teat, and that he should come home to Templeton to sort out his finances, the Franklin Temples were impoverished. They had eight daughters by then, all named after flowers, save for the youngest, Charlotte, or Charlie, her father's pet.

HAZEL POMEROY LEANED toward me then, misty blue eyes open wide. "Here's the secret spice," she said. "Here's something you won't learn from anybody else. Take a look at this," and she flipped open a book to a vivid print. "This is a picture they had done of their girls at some painter's in Paris. Just take a look and tell me what you see."

I leaned forward and peered at the print. There were eight pretty girls in a row, all in nineteenth-century dress. I looked and looked in vain for whatever it was Hazel was trying to tell me until, at last, it clicked. There was a wide range of hair colors, from the baby Charlotte's dark reddish curls to the bright fairy blondness of her sisters who were twins. There were varied skin tones, from Charlotte's pale to another's dark olive, and such a range of noses, lips, cheeks, eyes that they could have been an assortment of orphan girls. Only Charlotte had her father's dark eyes; only Charlotte had Marmaduke's--and my--broad chin.

"They don't look like sisters," I said.

Hazel Pomeroy nodded. "Nobody would say it outright. But some think that Sophie didn't pay much attention to her wifely duties. If you know what I mean. Charlie was maybe a fluke. In one of her first letters as a married woman, Sophie De Lancey Temple says to her sister, and I quote, 'How strange, Dorothee, but my new husband, though he sings and is glib and cheerful, seems at the least convenient times to have ice in his veins.' This seems to be code that the man was disappointing her in the boudoir, I think, because in the return letter, Dorothee says that her sister should give her husband a tisane of summer savory and ginseng and mandrake root--all aphrodisiacs, mind you--and use 'the highest of the charms our mother has taught us,' I quote. Here's another secret--their mother was a beautiful French-woman who had mysterious roots. Some whispered in society that she may have been a courtesan before Hiram De Lancey brought her to Manhattan from Paris."

I whistled and said, "Okay. So Sophie's a nymphomaniac. And Jacob is impotent. Christ, Hazel. You couldn't make this up."

Hazel Pomeroy gave her raspy chuckle. "Well," she said. "I have no actual tangible proof, and wouldn't go so far as to publish it until I do, but it seems as if there was only one legitimate Temple in Jacob's whole bouquet. Charlotte. And that," she said, stretching her matchstick arms above her head, "is what I think about your whole idea that Jacob Franklin Temple would have a bastard, as you so nicely put it. If you ask me, he's more like your cold-fish granddaddy than anyone else in the family."

I looked at Hazel and narrowed my eyes. I think I intended to test her when I said, "Well, then, you're saying I'm not directly related to Marmaduke, if you don't count Hetty. Because if Charlotte only adopted her sister's son, and none of her sisters was related to Jacob, then there's no legitimate Marmaduke blood in me."

Hazel blinked and then she grinned. "That's where you're wrong," she crowed. "We have a letter by one Manhattan doctor who claims he assisted at the birth of Charlotte's son. And it was a few months after the death of Charlie's sister, the one whom everybody thought was Henry's mother--obviously Daisy couldn't possibly have had a child from beyond the grave--so it's almost certain that Henry was truly Charlotte's, after all. As you know, if Henry was Charlotte's, and Charlotte was the only one of Jacob's daughters who was actually related to him, Henry would definitely have Marmaduke's blood. Ha! In any case, it has been my research of the entire last decade to try to find more substantive proof that Charlotte had birth out of wedlock. I'm writing a book. It's called Secrets and Slander: The Amazing Story of the Temple Family. You'll be in it," she said, her candid eyes glowing. "And your mother Vivienne's story about her free-love commune. I keep asking her if I can dig around in the attic, but she keeps saying no. I tell her she's hindering American scholarship, but you know your mother. She's a sparkplug."

I could very easily have pulled Cinnamon's and Charlotte's correspondence from my bag then, given it to this ancient lady, in one moment making her career, making her life. But some mean sprite in me kept silent, fearing, perhaps, that she would have heart failure when it was in her hands; or maybe I was just furious that this stranger woman would want to spill my family secrets to the world at large. At the moment I was about to open my mouth and let her have it, I felt a terrible cramping in my gut.

I gasped, and Hazel looked at me, worried. "Are you all right, honey?" she said.

"Fine," I said. "Fine, fine. Thank you."

We sat like this in the dust-thick afternoon sunlight in the little back kitchen of the library. As the pain clutched me, I imagined the sardine-head of the Lump swiveling about in confusion as its world rocked like an earthquake, thinking What the hell is that? Then the cramp relaxed, and when I looked up, Hazel was looking at me, a shrewd expression on her face. "You never," she said, "told me why, exactly, you're looking for an illegitimate ancestor. What are you looking for?"

I just smiled at her and said, as lightly as I could, "Oh, you know. Curiosity."

"Huh," she said.

"Still," I said, "you have no actual proof that Jacob was cold, do you? Just a hunch, right. You have no tangible proof?"

"No," she said, "I don't. But I've read every single journal by him and book about him. I've read every single letter to or from him, honey. I've read everything in the goldarn world, but can't find anything. No, there's no proof. But he seemed as obsessive about his writing as your grandfather was about his history, and George was the coldest man on earth. Wouldn't surprise me if it were a family trait." She made a bitter little face, then gave me her sly smile again.

"Okay," I said. "But say I want to find out if he had an affair. What should I do?"

Hazel Pomeroy sighed very deeply then, and closed her eyes. I felt sheepish for having asked such a rude question of the frail little woman. The sun clicked down over the west hills and the sky darkened to navy. And then she opened her eyes and said, "Only thing left to do. Read his fiction."

"What?" I said.

"Read his fiction. Lord knows, honey, it isn't proof in the normal sense of the word, but you find out obliquely if he's hiding something. Amazing thing, fiction. Tells you more, sometimes, about the writer than the writer can tell you about himself in any memoir."

"All right," I said. "That I can do. How many books did he write?"

And the tuft on Hazel Pomeroy's chin waggled as she said, "Only fifty-five." Then she gave her bleaty cackle as my heart sank, and her laugh filled up the old library and seemed to echo back. Fifty-five books! the echo seemed to say. In ten days! Ahaha! Then she stood and tottered away. She came back pushing the cart a few minutes later. She handed me, one by one, the ten books on it. "Here you go, honey," she said, cheerfully. "Start with these and press on."

"Thanks, Hazel," I said, standing up, the crinkle of my grandfather's manila envelope the very sound of my guilt. "And thanks for the tea."

"Don't mention it, kid," she said. "Keep on the lookout for any letters or such in your house for me, will you?"

"I'll see what I can do," I said. I packed the books away, trying to stifle my dismay. As I did, though, a marvelous thought crackled into my head. "Hazel?" I said. "You mind if I use your phone? Long-distance," I said. "I can pay you back."

"No need. We're state-funded," she said. "And then skedaddle. It's time for me to close up shop."

As Hazel shuffled around in the background, I dialed Clarissa's number, holding my breath. "What?" she said when she answered, sounding half-asleep.

"Clarissa," I said. "You know how you're just kind of sitting around, doing nothing?"

"Doing nothing?" she said. "You're joking, right? Without me, the World wouldn't Turn. The great Guiding Light would flicker out and plunge All My Children into darkness. General Hospital would become remarkably specif--"

"...Yes, yes, hilarious," I said. "Listen. Remember how you used to speed-read books in college?"

Her voice sounded dreamy when she said, "I made it through Pere Goriot in an hour. The Poetics of Space in three."

"Right," I said, hefting my bag, all those heavy words of Jacob Franklin Temple onto my shoulder. "You up for a challenge?"

"Oh, boy," said Clarissa, giving a little hoot. "Always."

By the time I had explained to Clarissa what I wanted her to do, and worked out that I would overnight the books in the morning, Hazel had finished her cleanup and the lights were off in the library. She stood at the door, jingling her keys. "Need a ride?" she said.

"Nah," I said, smiling at her. "Thanks. It's a nice night. I'll walk."

Hazel patted my cheek. "You should smile more," she said. "It suits you," and then she doddered to her yacht of a car and pulled off down the drive with a great rumble of the engine and puff of diesel smoke.

IT WAS LATE enough and dark enough so that I could risk the golf course without being beaned by a hurtling ball, so I walked down the lawn of the Franklin House and picked my way across the shore and up over the smooth green grass of the course. I cut through the country club parking lot and down behind the restaurant, where Hawaiian music was playing and the unmistakable fatty smoke of a roasting pig perfumed the air. Up on the porch, the adults were milling about, laughing, and I went down the hill and through the game of tag that the little kids were playing on the beach, their chubby little bodies hurtling by. Two old men were still battling on the tennis courts, though the ball was a bare green shadow shuttling between them. The golf course was smooth and fine.

I discovered I was talking to the Lump aloud when I heard my own voice. "I am not the kind of person who does existential crises," I said. "But I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to get rid of you."