I looked at the clock; it was late, nearly seven and I hadn’t called the Wenlows in four hours. They were my foster parents, nice enough people, but strict. I’d told them Elmer Hornton had a job for me and rode my bike over from Falmouth to check it out.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “But I still don’t get what you want me to do.”
Another slam. “Damn it, I told you already! When Molly Windsor died, her secret died with her! I want you to find out what it was!”
I lay on my back, hands under my head, staring up at the open-raftered ceiling. My room was over the garage, but I’d chosen it, and no one else wanted it. Too crude, I guess, with its open walls and uncertain insulation. Might find a mouse up here, or a couple of spiders. So none of the other kids — the Wenlows’ other foster kids — shared the room with me. Just the way I liked it.
Downstairs in the kitchen, I could hear them arguing, fighting, jostling over cereal bowls and milk, the television blaring in the corner. (The Wenlows had a TV in practically every room of the house.) Soon most of those kids would be off, taking their arguing-jostling selves to play video games, eat junk food, and mostly waste the rest of the day.
But the older foster kids, including me, were expected to have a job for the summer because it helped keep us “responsible.” So I’d assured Mrs. Wenlow that Mr. Hornton was going to fix me up with something. She’d been glad to hear that, but she needed to know exactly what the job entailed. I had sort of a mixed “history” — some trouble at school, though nothing major — and she wanted to make sure whatever I was doing was legal and safe.
I turned on my side, tuned out the noise below, and thought how I was going to explain this to her.
“Met her in ’38; I was fifteen,” he’d said wistfully, sipping his iced coffee, nibbling on a cookie filled with plum jam. “Pulled a card off the bulletin board in the general store: Help wanted, handyman, good wages. Well, it was still the Depression and good pay might be fifty cents a day. She told me what she wanted done, paid me a dollar a day, and I think, well, I kind of liked her from the start.” He had darted his eyes up at me, expecting a smirk perhaps, but he got nothing from me.
“I digress,” he’d said, almost formally, “How we met isn’t important. What is, is this: Molly passed away and never told me what she promised to before she died. Damned if I don’t kick myself now for not being more... assertive, I guess is the word. We played hundreds of card games in that little house and many times I’d say to myself, ‘Elmer, ask her now!’ ” He paused to take a breath.
“Ask her what?”
“Damn, boy have you got rocks in your ears! Ask her what the secret was!”
“But I still don’t get—” I began, but he hadn’t heard.
He was off in his own reverie...
“Gray eyes, blonde hair, little wisp of a thing, and always a smile. I did her chores, anything she asked, any time she asked.
“I painted that big house, Old Cedar, more times than I care to admit. Painted it white one year, and it stood proudly up on the bluff, like a castle. That was ’47, right after the war ended, and the next year I had to paint it all over again in that dark green. She hated the white.” A soft chuckle. “Told me how to grow purple hydrangeas, but I’ve forgotten, something about aluminum in the soil. Anyhow, she was never much of a talker. Had a job and an apartment in Boston, and came out here every spring around Memorial Day. I’d open up the big house, unroll the rugs, wash the windows, stock the pantry. Dust and vacuum and clean and at the end of the day, she’d meet me by the kitchen door, pay me cash, and say, ‘The lawn needs mowing on Tuesday and garbage pickup is Thursday.’ Very matter-of-fact she was.
“Well, I think she wanted to keep a distance between us. Wasn’t proper, you see, for her being older, to take notice of a younger man. Damn those days.”
“They sound like good days, Mr. H.,” I’d said, and respectfully so.
His blue eyes lifted to me. “In those days a younger man did not pursue an older woman.” He shook his head. “When I retired and left the sign business, she and I got a little closer. I had a schedule of chores which I tended to at the big house, but I’d also stop by to rake or mow, do a bit of yard work at the little house. She’d ask me in, have coffee; we’d play cards. It became a ritual, couple nights a week. It felt right. Felt like it should have been happening all the time, but by then she was in her eighties and it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late for anything more, damn it!” And then rising, fumbling for his handkerchief, he’d muttered, “The devil knows why I’m telling you this.”
Okay, I’d been embarrassed for him. I fumbled around, picked up a magazine, sat down at the end of his new wicker sofa. He went off into the kitchen, started to wash dishes, muttering “no,” when I asked if he needed help.
As for me, I just shut up. Eventually he started again:
“Always small talk. Weather and sports, not much else. I did say to her once, tell me about you, Molly, about your job, and she smiled and changed the subject. Didn’t take long to learn she was never going to take our friendship any further than she already had. She was what in an earlier day was called retiring. Or deferential. I’d see Molly in the check-out line stand aside for people, let them go in front of her, saying, ‘No, you go first, please.’ ” He sighed. “Anyhow, she finally got so she couldn’t live alone. She’s been in a nursing home the last five years.”
So that explained why I’d had no idea who this woman was. Over the course of my friendship with Mr. Hornton, I’d come to know most of his friends, cronies, and acquaintances — his fishing ‘buddies,’ his war ‘buddies.’ I also knew this neighborhood: It used to be mine until my mother had to sell our house. I knew the roads, the people, what they did, where they worked, the names of all their kids. Oh, I was presently living in a foster home, but that was because my mother was “sick” and not able to take care of me right now. My only other living relative was my aunt, and she had six kids, so...
So I hadn’t known Molly Windsor, but I knew the little house by the road. I knew the big house too. I knew how it stood up on the bluff, shaded in giant cedars, and how it was rented out each summer to big families — the kind that invite all their cousins and friends to come and stay.
Old Cedar was an institution at the end of North Manamesset Beach, where the pale sandy beach gave way to marshlands and scrub pine woods. The Victorian-style house, gracious and permanent, stood three stories high, with a gray, clay-tiled roof and two diamond-shaped, stained glass windows on the third floor — one on the south side, the other the north. Facing the bay, the property’s wide sloping lawns extended down to a cement seawall. There was even a private dock with moorage for three boats.
Mr. Hornton had stopped talking, was standing at the counter, staring out the window to the west, the general direction of the coast and the big house, though neither was visible from here. It was getting dark; and I had to leave soon. A low fog was starting to roll in and a sea breeze, humid but cool, was breaking through the windows, lifting the old-fashioned Venetian blinds.
“So you want me find out her secret?”
“I haven’t told you everything yet.” He’d fumbled for his walker; I pushed it his way. “I helped her get the house ready every summer, but she’d never go in!” He gripped the walker, came toward me. “Never went inside that damn house once in all those years!”
I guess I sort of stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.
“One day I said to her, kind of joking, Molly, why won’t you go in your own dam house?” Suddenly a dreary-eyed look. “And she said, ‘Why Elmer, that’s my secret. Everyone has a secret and someday I’ll tell you mine.’ Then she put her hand on mine, squeezed it.” His eyes got wet — honest to God — and shaking his head, then swearing in a particularly vulgar manner, shuffled out of the kitchen into the bathroom.