When it was finished, Frannie separated from Magda and came over. Putting an arm around my shoulder, he said, "How you doin', stranger? You finish your book, or what? We don't see you much these days." His voice was light and playful.
"To tell you the truth, Fran, I kind of got the feeling you'd rather be left alone."
"You've got a point there, but you coulda called and asked how I was doing."
"You're right."
He poked a finger into my chest. "I've been cooking, you know?"
"Really? Oh that's good news, Frannie! I'm so glad to hear that."
"Yeah, well there's more. After you left, Magda started coming over a lot. She's the one got me cooking, cleaning up the house, going out again . . . We talked, you know, did things together. And . . . I don't know. We hit it off really well." He stopped and took a quick deep breath. He had something big to say and needed a lot of air for it. "We're going to get married, Sam."
Before I had a chance to reply, Magda came up. Earlier she had been standing so far away that I hadn't really seen how good she looked. She had lost weight, and her high Slavic cheekbones stood out prominently. She had always been attractive, but now she looked much younger and almost beautiful. For some reason I looked at her hands and saw that her fingernails were painted a sassy Chinese red.
"How are you, Sam?"
"I'm okay. Congratulations! Frannie just told me you're getting married!"
She frowned, then quickly smiled. "Frannie wants to get married. I haven't decided yet. I think he's just grateful to me for pulling him out of his space walk and back into the mother ship. I told you before, he's got a lotta kinks to work out before I agree to sign that contract!"
He pinched her cheek. "You know you love me."
"Loving's not the question – living is. Love builds the house, but then you got to furnish it. Sam, listen, we're all going down to Dick's Cabin for a meal. That was Ma's favorite place so we thought it was a good idea. Will you come? And would you ask Mr. Durant too? She always had a big crush on him."
"Of course. But are you going to get married?"
They looked at each other and a shyness passed between them that was charming. After all they had been through together, they were back to courting. Nothing had been decided. Frannie was eager, Magda honestly hadn't made up her mind. "She didn't say no."
"That's right, I didn't say no. You go ahead now. I've got to say goodbye to the people. Remember, Frannie, you promised to tell him. Now's a good time."
We watched her walk away. "She was so good to me, Sam. Did everything to take care of me. But those kinks she was talking about? I've got to tell you some things. I promised her I would and I've wanted to for a long time anyway. Let's take a ride before we eat. Drive around a little bit."
Durant was very pleased to be invited to the restaurant. When I told him about Jitka's crush on him, his face went blank. Only after a while did he give a small smile. "Funny. I had a crush on her too. Ostrova women have magical powers over Durants."
"Drive up to the Tyndall place."
I looked at McCabe and raised an eyebrow. In all the time I had spent in Crane's View recently, I had avoided going back there. By accident I drove past once but looked away because it brought back bad memories.
Lionel Tyndall had made a fortune in oil in the twenties. He had owned houses all over the country but preferred Crane's View because it was so close to New York. His was one of the largest houses in town, one of those Colonial behemoths you passed out on Livingston Avenue as you were entering the town limits. Oddly, there wasn't much land around his place.
Tyndall died in the early fifties. His large and greedy family went to war with one another over his vast holdings. The legal suits and countersuits continued for years. During that time, the house stood empty. Town kids started breaking in almost immediately after Tyndall's death. What they found became legend.
Lionel Tyndall was a collector: books, magazines, furniture so large it could only have lived in a house of twenty-five rooms. He loved magic and was an amateur magician and ventriloquist. As a boy I'd heard marvelous tales of kids entering rooms full of elaborate decaying theater sets and mysterious objects with names like the Madagascar Mystery and the Heart of God, but I never saw them. These things were gone by the time we began snooping around inside, and the stories only enhanced the sense of danger and mystery attached to the house.
What I remember was the smoky, dusty smell of the place. Light came in through the windows and played across the impossible number of objects still in there. Boxes of children's toys, a desktop covered with playbills from Broadway shows, a velvet chair that had been stabbed full of kitchen utensils – spatulas, carving knives, soup ladles stuck in backward. Who would think of doing something like that?
Kids and bums. Part of the danger of the house was you never knew who would be there when you snuck in through the broken basement door. Vagrants loved the place because there was a roof over their heads, grand furniture to sleep on, a vast array of things to steal.
Once when we were there two miserable, evil-looking men, both wearing porkpie hats, suddenly came around a corner and scared the shit out of us.
"What are you kids doing here?"
"Same thing you are, mister," said dangerous twelve-year-old Frannie McCabe.
The two looked at each other and, as one, disappeared back into the house's shadows. We continued our scouting party. Soon, though, we started hearing strange sounds coming from rooms not far away – high laughter, furniture being struck, fragile things breaking. We figured where it was coming from and sneaked up to the door.
Racing through the dappled, split light of a cavernous room, the two men chased each other, playing a kind of ghostly tag. They were like children, laughing, scrambling, screeching, jumping over furniture, sliding on the wooden floors, tripping over rolled-up rugs.
The bliss was that when anything fell down or smashed, it didn't matter! When kids play tag and something breaks, run for the hills. Heaven turns to hell in one second. Mom's favorite vase in shattered pieces, a table punted across the floor, the silver frame a hundred years old until this minute . . . Game over.
But in Tyndall's living room that afternoon, full of stopped time and long shadows, no one cared about these objects, no matter how valuable they might have been. I'm sure they were valuable – the rugs were Oriental, and one glass that hit the floor shattered into beautiful colors. It didn't matter. The room was tag heaven that day.
That is only one memory of the Tyndall house. There were many others, some equally queer or memorable. We were there often. It was our castle and forbidden land in one. It rarely failed to captivate us.
The summer before I was sent away to private school, a bunch of us went back to the house. We knew we were too old for it by then. Having used it so often for our games and schemes, we'd squeezed out all of its juice long before. But this day, August boredom prevailed and we were desperate for anything different to do.
McCabe had heard that one could make a fortune selling old copper wiring and pipe to a junkyard in Rye. His plan was to check out the Tyndall place, then come back with the right tools and strip it bare. The idea of ripping wire out of old decaying walls in ninety-degree heat didn't excite us, but what else was there to do that day? Part of the reason Frannie was such a good ringleader was his ability to get fired up about things. Projects excited him; he was the one who could imagine money in our pockets after a job was done, whereas the rest of us had to be pulled along behind him like broken toys. Normally we just wanted something to do; he wanted to turn our days upside down.