She is not far away on the day I fall off my bicycle, my knee shredded, bits of the driveway embedded in the wound. She appears from around the corner when she hears me crying. She is wearing her gardening clothes.
She helps me up, looks at my knee, kisses me on the ear, and whispers, “Your dress is magnificent.”
“Your dress is magnificent,” I whisper back to her. I smile a little, the tears still wet on my face. My mother is inventing just for me.
“You may tell your carriage to leave,” she says, and she w heels my bicycle into the garage.
“The ballroom is gigantic!” I say.
“I have never in my life seen a chandelier like this one before,” she gasps, pointing to the sun. “Oh, have you ever in your life seen anything like it?”
“Never,” I say. “Where are we?”
“Vienna, I think.”
“Maybe Spain!” I say.
“Yes, perhaps you’re right. Maybe Madrid.”
“And the orchestra! Oh, my!”
“Listen,” she savs. “The oboe, the Lrench horn! Would vou like to dance?” and she takes my hand and bows before me.
“Oh, yes,” I whisper. “Yes.”
Blood flows down my leg like red satin. She hugs me close.
The musician glides up the stairs to my bedroom in three-four time after everyone is asleep. He is very handsome, of course, and quiet; his music speaks for him. The musician comes to me with gloved hands. “You must be very careful with the hands,” he says.
“Play the fantaisie,” I beg. “Play the fantaisie slowly.”
He nods, smiles slightly, and sits before me. He poises his hands above me and we listen to the silence in the great hall. Then it begins. Our music fills the air. His hands rise and fall over my body; when he touches me, I make an exquisite sound. “Play on,” I whisper. I know how I will disappear in the crescendo. “Play on.”
And it is true: what happens at the climax is beyond all reasonable expectations. The tremendous force that has built up during the long cadence can scarcely be contained.
“Encore,” I whisper. “Oh, encore.”
Sometimes I did think that house was haunted, but it was my mother, that elaborate inventor, who looked squarely into the invisible and then suggested to me in her low, hushed way that there were ghosts there. I do not take credit for the vitality or the range of her imagination; it is she who did all the hard work, Fletcher and I merely assisted. We were her researchers, a role we never questioned. She was the genius and we were the servants to it, the lovers of it. Had it not been for my mother’s need to see the house’s prior residents, we would never have known Emily or Allison or any of the others who passed through our house with harpoons, with cats, with signs.
And so for a few weeks one summer we threw ourselves into the project with a sort of reckless zeal. Recklessness was new to us then, but we were naturals at it, welcoming the chance to hurl ourselves into the depths of our mother’s heart with the fabulous details of the dead that we might accumulate. We did not hesitate, we had waited our whole lives for the chance, and we grew giddy at the thought of pleasing her. The danger, of course, was all too clear, and I shivered a little as Fletcher and I began: it might not work; our best efforts, our purest love might not begin to bridge the distance that separated our lives from hers. But danger has little meaning to those who love as we did. Nothing could stop us. We were captives of her vision. She was such a commanding figure and so rapt in the idea of retrieving the lost that in her presence we had little choice but to follow. She was capable of making the past sound like something we could not do without. We listened, mesmerized by the quality of her voice, the novelty of her ideas. What we could not do without was her.
Tales of the South, the smell of orange peel and roses flooding the room, a drawing done in charcoal that mysteriously changed to watercolors — these things are what I first imagined when I thought of having a house that was haunted. Men aging in their portraits and curtains breathing, hearts beating madly under the floor — it seemed so exciting. “Yes,” my father said in his dreamy way, “a young woman carrying a cage of birds, her dress fluttering though there is no wind.”
“And mandolin music!” I sighed.
“A limping man,” Fletcher said, “with a long yellowed beard and a cane carved in ivory.”
“No,” my mother said, halting all speculation. “We must find the people who actually lived here. They are the ones who return.” She looked around the room with specific hope.
In our short feverish search for the face of the past, we stalked the libraries, pulled apart the town archives, and ransacked the brains of the oldest people in town for clues. We became so caught in our work that we barely looked up. Day turned to night. Children began wearing sweaters in the mornings. School started. Fletcher carried a red leaf on his sleeve.
“Hadley,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Mr. F. L. Hadley, 35 West Maple Street.”
Frederick Lawrence Hadley, easily the oldest man in town, perhaps in the state we thought, recalled nothing anymore.
“You think your life is hard now?” he said to us with raised eyebrows. “Well, it is. But if you hold out to my age, it gets a lot easier. You’ll see.” We nodded though we could not see ever being as old as Mr. Hadley.
“I remember nothing,” he said. “It is one of the privileges of the very old, to worry only about letting the dog out or how long to cook the eggs.” He gave a long sigh. It suggested to me that he was not telling the entire truth. “But try ‘The Relics,’” he said. “They never did learn when to let go.”
It was through “The Relics,” two ancient sisters who had once lived next door to our house, that we learned the unhappy story of Ted and Evonne Osbourne who, from 1920 to roughly 1940, lived in our house, danced in our hallways, threw things from our windows, fought in our kitchen, and drank. “Drunk in the morning, drunk in the afternoon, drunk, of course, at night,” the old women were saying. “Whiskey, Scotch whiskey. Day and night.”
“Anything breakable they broke,” the one who looked older said. The other one nodded. “Glass, furniture, everything, and they threw records out the window, too. Fine china, you name it.” Their voices trembled. “There’s nothing,” they said together, “quite like the sound of fine china breaking.”
It seemed that, when we walked in, these two women were already in the middle of a conversation about the Osbournes. It seemed that they never stopped talking about them, through meals, through tea, through naps.
“They threw books out the window and toys and lamps.”
“They swore like sailors.”
“And there was a child,” one whispered. “It would cry all night. They would hit it.”
“And they forgot to feed it and sometimes they went out and left it all alone.”
The Relics shook their heads mechanically. Long ago the horror had worn off. They could no longer react genuinely to their story, but took vicarious pleasure in other people’s dismay. In us they had a good and partisan audience. We held every nuance of emotion. We hung onto their words, our eyes wide, our brows furrowed.
They were caught up in the bravado of speech, in the storyteller’s art, in the desire to move, to impress, but my brother’s copious notetaking gave a legitimacy, a truth to their words that they were unaccustomed to. They paused and watched his hand slow.
“Well, we never actually saw them hurt the child. We never even saw the child, for that matter. But we heard it crying.”