“What?” I turned around, crowbar in hand, staring at him.
“I can’t stay in here, Herbie, sorry.” And with that Buster disappeared through the opening I’d made in the back of the cedar closet, leaving me in there alone.
Two days later we met — three old men and me — in the little house out on Long Bay Causeway Road, the one with the purple hydrangeas.
Of course, we were all affected, even Buster, who’d been told about the room five decades earlier by Molly herself, when he’d discovered it while doing renovations on the third floor. What the heck was it, he’d demanded to know? He’d refused to just cover it up, not without some explanation. Buster could be, in his own words, a “damned ornery man.” So Molly had come up and into the house that one and only time to answer his questions, to settle his mind.
The only light had been through that stained-glass window, she’d told him, the only way out through one small door, which was always kept locked on the outside. The floors and the door were made of metal plates, to soundproof the room.
“I remember standing there, just dazed by it all,” Buster told us, a stunned Elmer Hornton, a pensive Martin Cross, and me. “A million emotions went through my head and my heart,” Buster went on, “and there was Molly, in the doorway, without a trace of anything on her face.” He looked at Elmer, sitting at Molly’s small kitchen table. “She asked me not to tell anyone, Elmer, and I’m sorry that I...” Buster pulled in his lips and looked like he might cry. “She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.”
“Boxed in.” I whispered. “You told me she’d been boxed in.”
“Slip of the tongue, Herbie,” Buster admitted. “But, yes, for sure she was. Her sister Annie was born with birth defects. She couldn’t walk, could barely move her limbs. The mother didn’t take it well, so she shut Annie up so no one could see her. Shut Molly up too. Molly said her mother was depressed or something and didn’t want anything to do with either child.” Buster was obviously uneasy talking about all this. He shrugged, shook his head.
Martin Cross spoke up: “And the pictures, she’d been painting that side of the house until—”
This was easier to explain: “She wanted to live long enough to see the cedars cover it up, or so she told me,” Buster said. He glanced over at Elmer. “Sorry, old friend, if I’d known how much this bothered you...”
But Mr. Hornton wanted explanations, some way to sort this all out. He turned to Martin: “Damn it, Martin, have you nothing to say?”
Martin raised both hands helplessly. “It was a different time, Elmer. It wasn’t common practice, but it did happen to children with mental or physical disabilities, children who weren’t what their parents expected. They were cared for, of course, fed and clothed and kept clean, usually by servants. But they were hidden away from the rest of the family and society in general. We really shouldn’t judge—”
“No!” Elmer shouted, but his anger wasn’t directed at Martin, or any of us, not even at Buster. “It’s wrong now; it was wrong then! Damn them! She — Molly — shut up with her sister like that! She never learned... she never knew how... she never trusted...”
And it was all there, in just those few words.
A few days later I was at Mr. Hornton’s house, telling him about my new job. I was working at a marina over in North Falmouth, doing odd jobs: painting, cleaning boats, and so on. He was happy to hear it. We had clam-cakes and onion rings out on his porch. Then he told me to come into the house, he had something to show me.
The painting of Old Cedar, which had been over the mantel of the big house, was now over his own mantel. He folded his arms, looked up at it with a strangely peaceful expression on his face.
“Molly wasn’t much of a painter,” he said, “but she was one hell of a woman.”
Then he smiled.
Author’s note: Disappointment rooms really existed.