THE NEW LEAF
Hugh got his resume over to a headhunter's office the week before the housewarming party. He'd been in particularly good spirits, and found the day-to-day work around the house occupied most of his time. But the resume, it had to be done -just get me some job to fill in the time, some little white-collar pigeonhole where I can at least feel like I'm less of a house-husband. As much as he was enjoying working on the house, there were times when he thought if he didn't get out of there he would go bonkers. He began coming up with any excuse just to go down the block, and when he did he felt clumsy -as if he'd been in the damn house so long, in leaving it he was entering an alien landscape, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, but always different. He'd notice people more on these brief excursions to the drugstore or to the hardware store, or more often than not to the liquor store (but just beer, Scout, and only one a day sometimes, so I think I've got it under control)," he'd notice how they were dressed, the anxiety in their faces, their small daily joys, their suppressed rage. That crazy bag lady who had given Rachel such a scare a while back, he saw her in the park and she screamed at him, something unintelligible -even she seemed to be a part of the fabric of daily life. It gave Hugh a sense that somehow just being alive was good. That perhaps this house, this home, would work out, after all.
Whenever the small voice whispered in his head, Hugh Adair, you should be actively pursuing lawyerdom, instead of putting off the inevitable with carpentry and beer. Why the fuck did you go through those damn years of law school, anyway? He always had an answer: I think I went to law school to meet Rachel, I think it was some kind of destiny. I had to go through law school in order to find her. The week before Labor Day, he vowed to Rachel that he would turn over a new leaf.
"And not just the leaf, Scout, the whole dang tree." His spirits seemed so high that Rachel held back from mentioning what she thought (I'm pregnant. Hugh, but maybe I'm not, but it would be okay if I were pregnant, right?) -again she would wait until she saw a doctor. She managed to postpone this in her mind -it was superstitious. But after all, the last time she was pregnant, she'd seen a doctor and then lost the baby. Why fuck it up again?
"So you don't mind about this housewarming party idea."
"Nah. I just wish I had some friends to invite. I assume you'll have your usual, 'This Is Your Life' contingent, Miss Former Pep Squad Leader?"
"Call Bufu up. He may be an asshole, but they're good at parties, too. And you can call up all those other Lambda Chi's. You were good enough friends with them in college."
"Yeah, so I can hear how successful my frat brothers are -no thank you. I wish I knew more losers like me."
“You're not a loser, Mr. Adair, you are my private stud and seasonal sex toy."
When she'd left for work, Hugh made a few calls, the headhunting agency, the city bar association, even Bufu Thompson. "Yeah, a little party, this weekend, just bring a friend or something. Maybe a roll of toilet paper, hey, we can always use toilet paper…" He waded through his small black address book, and realized that most of the people in it were either potential business contacts or Rachel's friends. He decided he'd better not use the phone much, hoping the employment agency would call back -it was times like these he wished he'd gone ahead and gotten call waiting on the phone, as obnoxious as he thought that service was. Bored, he strolled room to room, checking lights, checking the paint jobs he'd done, checking the scurf marks on the floors, checking for upended carpet tacks. He gobbled down a stale Hostess Donut that lay hidden in the breadbox, took out the garbage, checked for mail. Too hot to lounge out on the patio, and he didn't need to get another sunburn this soon -that could wait for Labor Day. He put on a video of Raiders of the Lost Ark, watching the first five minutes and then losing interest since he'd seen the movie about fifty times. Ring you goddamn phone/Get me a job! Get me an interview! He straightened the cushions on the couch, and the photographs he'd taken in law school -mainly of Rachel on campus, or at the beach, or walking through the woods. He remembered where he'd left the Verena Standish book: in the turret room, and as he went into it that nonsensical word HOUNFOUR in streaked red on the cheap yellow paper. Should get someone in here and figure out how to tear down the wall so we can open up that small room there. Maybe just take the old sledge to it -if I could be sure there are no pipes or intricate wiring systems back there.
Then he heard voices, coming from the area where he'd covered over the dumbwaiter.
Penny Dreadful and her dreadful guests. A woman, not Mrs. Deerfield: "Well, I didn't notice anything different about her. She seems common."
"Keep your voice down, dear, and she is quite special." Another woman: "He chose her, after all, hon, he opened her up to him, you saw her face that day. You know."
"As if that means anything, and that was weeks ago. I remember a time when he chose you, too, and see what's come of it. And you weren't terribly special."
"Don't remind me."
"Now don't put those down the sink, I told you -"
“You told me, you told me."
"Yes, well, I think you might listen for once. None of that for me, thank you, no."
"I know I'm impatient but I just wish it would happen sooner. Then we can all rest easier."
"It's that divine justice thing he's got going, he wants her because she's a link to the past. It's that debt. Sometimes we must move slowly to realize the dream of, well, so much more than just a lifetime." She said this last word with obvious disgust.
"No, too many calories for me, right now, got to watch me rigger. Bah, but the flesh is weak, so pass another one over, dear. Now, didn't I just tell you not to put those down there.
I'll be forever cleaning them out…" A loud humming, a blender or some machine, cut off the voices; Hugh was almost disappointed. Hoping he'd hear something again from his downstairs radio show, he plopped down in the window seat, gave a cursory nod to the park -its trees were becoming a drained anemic green as the summer heat continued. He picked up Diaries of an Innocent Age, found the dog-eared page he'd left off on -the part where Verena started to sound a little looney tunes about Draper House.
The good part.
From Diaries of an Innocent Age by Verena Standish: I had not looked into the background of the children's governess as thoroughly as I might have, but she'd come with good recommendations from the Preston-Finches.
So good, in fact, that Walter Preston-Finch called up to tell me that he attributed his son Aaron's admission to Exeter directly to this woman's instruction, and everyone in New York society knew Katherine Preston-Finch (later to become the wife of author-adventurer Francis Earhart) to be the very model of genteel comportment -at the tender age of sixteen -our governess had everything to recommend her to the post. Only after the tragedy did I learn of Miss Fields' affair du coeur with Walter Preston Finch and her subsequent nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. I would not have expected it in such a well-educated woman. I have felt, at times, betrayed by the Preston-Finch family, whose exaltation of this extremely unbalanced young woman contributed greatly to the destruction of my happiness in life. But I really blame myself, and not merely for hiring her without proper investigation of her past, but for casting a cold eye upon my own children, and, I daresay, for letting things within the house itself go unnoticed. Emmie was just four when we moved in, and James two and a haiti Miss Fields was brought in immediately, and I suppose her preoccupation with the tarot cards should have alerted me to a susceptible mind. But I thought it all a lark, then, a gay pastime, similar to my own modest interest in table-rappings. And I was so very involved in being the Washington hostess, the dinners and the parties among the political cognoscenti, trying to help my dear Addison find his way through the diplomatic maze. When I remember those times I ache with regret -how it all means nothing to me now, how it was the folly of the times, how little I truly care. For the eyes and ears of the world when I now think of all I lost in the bargain, But Miss Fields seemed such a serene presence. She was less than beautiful, always an advantage for a woman of no means and great intelligence, for she offended no employer's wife (or so it seemed to me at the time). She did not seem to care a whir for men or their opinions, except inasmuch as they applied to Latin and Greek and the questions of classical philosophy. In dress and manner she was modest, shy and deferential when in the presence of her employers; yet on more than one occasion in those first few years, I can recall her chastising Addison for his attempts to sabotage the children's early education with his outlandish stories. And I thought, at the time, well and good for her, to stand up to my husband's periodic foolishness. There was something very Quakefish about her, a tendency to plainness in speech, dress, and habit. I thought her, those four years she was with us, a sober and stabilizing presence, one that would brook no nonsense, a woman who would build character in my blessed angels. I do not remember her face, except in those last moments, and then it was much changed. But she had an emptiness of expression and a rather remarkable way of reassuring whomever she encountered with that emptiness. These were purely social reassurances -I suppose deference is the better term. One always had the feeling that Miss Fields was more clever than her station, but she had a way of nodding and looking down to the floor that allowed one some superiority. She struck me, upon our first meeting, as someone who had no sense of herself. With the recent popularity of Dr. Freud, we might call this a crisis of personality or identity. But Draper House solved that for her, in an unspeakable way.
She found, in the house, an identity, and perhaps even a husband, a lover -without that base connotation the word conjures in these pornographic times. A companion is perhaps a more suitable word -she found companionship in the house. But the house was, I believe, evil from its foundations to its roof, evil the way a guillotine is inherently evil, the way a hangman's noose is evil, the way a snake is evil.
What remained in Draper House, at any rate, was the irrational residue of evil -left perhaps by the original owner, a woman of murky reputation, or perhaps the evil grew like a fungus, from beneath the house, in the damp-encrusted walls, until finally, the entire structure was in the clutches of something beyond knowing. My religious beliefs are (and have always been) such that I allow there can be no flesh without spirit, however, there may exist spirit without flesh. And the natural law of spirit is to always seek out and invade flesh in order to carry out its benevolent, or in Miss Fields' case, malevolent plan. When I finally was told the whole story of Miss Fields, how she had attempted to take her own life at the Preston-Finch home, suddenly I understood what this woman was looking for. Yes, on the surface, love, in particular a man to love her. How vile Walter Preston Finch seems to me now! How he must have seduced this poor love struck woman and then abandoned her to the fates. And how cruel the fates had been to her!
What must it take to climb a staircase and tie a length of rope to the edge of a balcony and leap off to swing by your neck until dead! And how much more cruel it must have seemed to be rescued, to still live, when all hope for the future was gone.
For, without knowing this story when Miss Fields first came to live with us, I couldn't see it in her modest demeanor. How was I to know the heart that lurked beneath the skin? She came to us without a god, without a faith, with no hope, no sense of the judgment to come, no promise of heaven when the weary toil had ended. And in Draper House she found her god. Her savage god, a god of blood and torture and cannibalism. I do not mean to say a god exists beyond that which we call God; for this would be heresy. But as I have mentioned, there can be spirit, spirit without flesh, spirit seeking flesh, spirit hungry for flesh, hungry to corrupt and destroy flesh. And she found it in the crib, not James' crib, but the crib beneath the house, the entrance to the back servant stairs leading to my dressing table. The hungry spirits touched her there, and through them she understood her mission.
Was she insane? This is what we have been taught to believe. But who teaches us this? Yet more Godless people. We live in a Godless age, and so we look to our empty books and we see yet more emptiness. No answers, just words. We think as a race we possess genius simply because we affirm the unknowable: we say, there is nothing, nothing but ourselves in this world. And when we die, we become part of that nothing. How easy it is to believe in nothing, to believe in empty words, and empty worlds. So what does insanity mean to us? It is just another empty word for something we can't understand, because we believe in nothing.
Miss Fields was not insane.
She was possessed.
Miss Fields murdered my children in cold blood. But even cold blooded murderers have their reasons. And I pray to God, every night I pray to God, that my children were dead before that woman began devouring them. We were gone, Addison and I, on our annual month in New York. It was cool at the Hudson River estate, and I would usually take the children and governess with us.
Although it seems monstrous now that I left them while they were ill, I had, of late, become overwhelmed by other, more pressing matters. Addison and I were having our difficulties. We decided between the two of us to go up to the country without the children, at least for the first week, and try to decide what we would do. Contrary to the popular rumor of the time, divorce was never even considered. I had become a foolish and vain woman, I am afraid to admit, and had begun hearing voices in the house with my coterie of spiritualist advisers. We believed it haunted, although I now think that Draper House went beyond being merely haunted. It was a hunting ground, I think, a place of such hungry evil spirit that all forms of life were its prey. If my friend the Reverend Elijah Calhoun had told me that Hell itself bordered that house, it would not surprise me.
And if you, dear reader, witnessed the scene I beheld in August of that year, you, too, would know the insatiable hunger of that place. We had been gone three weeks with neither a word from my children nor from their governess. I grew worried.
Addison contacted the authorities in Washington, but the delay was too much. My husband and I exchanged words. In the heat of that argument, I left him, and journeyed alone to Washington. Indeed, I discovered that Miss Fields had spoken to the city police. She told them the children were taken to bed with a fever and that she had already sent word to me. In the carriage from the train station, I experienced a presentiment of what was to come: we passed an alley, stopping at a street corner, and I watched helplessly as a pack of hounds ran down a defenseless cat. Their jaws glistened with the feline's blood as they tossed its flesh and yellow fur about. And there was something inside me that warned me from this, something that made me resist entering my own house at first. Draper House.
I rushed upstairs, expecting the worst: that my children were deathly ill, and that Miss Fields was unaware of the danger their lives were in.
But what I beheld was beyond imagining. I will not even write here the vile, unspeakable words she wrote across the walls with their blood, and I dare not remember too clearly my angels' ravaged bodies.
Skinned, and dressed the way a brutal hunter might two felled deer, hanging as if in a meatpacking house. She had tied them up on a crossbar of bamboo, and strung them along the shuttered window in my vanity.
But Miss Fields herself, inspired with the spirit of the house, had even begun disemboweling herself. Later, although Addison tried to keep things from me, I learned that Miss Fields had choked to death on the fingers of her own left hand, which, at the moment they were thrust in the back of her throat, were no longer attached to her body. I dare not commit to paper the shock I felt. But I did not faint, I did not give in to frailty immediately. Instead, my mind took over, shutting itself down like a machine that has become too hot. This is the way in which the medical community has explained it to me. It was not until ten years later that I was able to live in the normal world again, ten years of Foxmeadow, a spa for genteel ladies like myself, women of culture and character who had fallen off the edge of the flat world of sanity.
I would never, of course, return to that house, or even to that city. I could not bear it. Yet the house still will not let me go. I carry it within this weak-vesseled form, and all that is that house is here with me even as I write this.
I have moments of wondering if, at every corner, I will not behold that sight once again.
The telephone was ringing. Not really a ring: these new phones seemed to produce an inhuman trilling that Hugh found painful to hear. Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned bbrrring! Of a phone? Hugh had just begun getting into the book, sinking into the rhythm of the prose. Finally, Verena Standish was getting interesting, if a bit ghoulish. He almost resented this new intrusive noise. But maybe it'll be about a job.
He sprinted to the kitchen and caught the receiver by the fourth ring, juggling it to within an inch of dropping the whole contraption on the linoleum. Hugh cleared his throat, he wanted to sound professional. His voice came out an unnaturally deep baritone. "Hello?" But it was Penny Dreadful from downstairs. "Sorry to bother you, dear, but I'm having a bit of trouble with me garbage disposal and I was wondering what I should -I have a plumber I can call, but I thought I should check with you first…"
Hugh sighed. This was the problem with being a landlord.
"Oh, what's the trouble with it?"
"Ghastly noises, like someone choking on eggshells-it just spits whatever I place down its gullet back up in me face." The cockney affectation in Mrs. Deerfield's voice was a dead giveaway as to her state of being: sauced to the gills. He was about to tell her to go ahead and call the plumber and then stick the bill in his mailbox. But curiosity about the downstairs apartment got the better of him.
"I'll be down in a sec."
Mrs. Deerfield greeted him at the door in a pink silk pajamas-type outfit, smudges of sky-blue eye shadow beneath her brows, fuchsia lipstick smeared across her mouth; all framed by a sort of pink tint to her cotton-candy-white puff of hair-she'd had it curled since he last saw her. She fanned her hands in front of his face, and he caught the strong odor of beer (makes me thirsty. Her fingernails were long and painted green, with what looked like small gold astrological symbols glued to them. She introduced her two lady friends quickly, slurring her syllables together. "Annie, Betty, Hugh. We're all a bit legless at the moment." Mrs. Deerfield giggled mischievously. "I was missing my Ramona, and we held a little séance and she meowed through dear old Annie. The logical thing to do was have a pint or two."
"It was embarrassing, hon," one of the women said. "I just started making these noises and I suddenly wanted to catch a mouse or something. Spirits are like that."
The third woman remained silent; she glanced down at the floor: These must be the weird sisters Rachel had gone on about that first night in the house. "They're really queer, Hugh," she'd said, "and they kind of scared me, and you know how easily I can spook myself without outside help. They say they contact spirits. "Hugh sniffed the heavy air in the apartment.
The only spirits he noticed as he headed back to the kitchen were the empty bottles of John Courage ale sitting on top of a card table. The third woman, the blonde named Betty, was tapping the toe of her right foot rather nervously, and he looked beneath the table, to the area where she cast her glance: the outline of a trapdoor. The crib. "I just read about that." He pointed to the trapdoor. It fit the exact dimensions of the card table above it. What had Verena said about it? It's a quirk of the architect, or something? Now, Hugh, try to sound knowledgeable in front of the weird sisters -and this might not be the right group to tell about the governess who ate kiddos for dinner.
"It's an architectural oddity."
"Dear?" Mrs. Deerfield was over at the sink, turning the garbage disposal on and off rapidly.
"Oh, it's this book I've got about the house -apparently, there's some kind of passage -stairs I guess, though there's not much room for them -underneath there that continues up to the second floor -next to the dumbwaiter. Although it's kind of nutty, isn't it? I mean, why build it like that, when you could just make it like a normal staircase?
But evidently, the guy who planned this house was into weirdness."
"Julian Marlowe was a madman," Mrs. Deerfield stated unequivocally.
"But everything in its place and a place for everything, isn't that right, dear? Perhaps it was a wine cellar of sorts, dear. It’s rather cool there, even in this weather, and it keeps me jams and pickles from boiling. But about the disposal…"
"Oh, right, well, there's a trick to that -anybody got a broom handle?"
"As a matter-a-fact -" Mrs. Deerfield went to get the broom from behind the back door. She handed it to him as he approached the kitchen sink.
“You just poke it around like this, sort of spinning the doohickeys down there." As Hugh spoke, the women laughed, and Hugh, when he had gotten the garbage disposal going, accepted a bottle of dark ale from them. He sipped it slowly. It was ice cold and froze the back of his throat. "I better get back upstairs."
"If you must, but it is nice to have a man around the house -don't you agree, ladies?" They giggled their agreement, although the one called Annie seemed to be laughing at some other joke entirely. Mrs. Deerfield said, "But you both've been avoiding me, and I want you to tell your sweet wife that it was just an accident, after all, I know you didn't mean to kill Ramona, accidents do happen. The world isn't a perfect place."
As Hugh left her apartment, he invited her to the housewarming party, and her friends, also. But there was something going through his mind as he thought about how the cat had died: there are no accidents. He was getting drunk off one damn beer, too, but Lordy it was strong. He almost tripped up the stairs, but there are no accidents, Scout, take a lesson. Not a fucking accident from birth to death. There's a meaning and a reason for everything. Just like my good friend Verena Standish says, that cold blooded murderers have their reasons, too. Like the old Man and my first wife -now that car wreck was no accident, it may have been a drunk driver, but the old Man probably made good and sure they were straddling the white line, I'm willing to put some money where my mouth is, and his mouth felt dry and scratchy. He knew that he would go out somewhere and maybe have another beer or two. Like that cat in the car, sure, it looked like an accident, but nope, it must've been a sign -like that omen Penny Dreadful had when we moved in, the way her cat barfed hairballs -just like I'm a lawyer, it was no accident, it was real life. I had been raised to go to lawyer college, he chuckled, so I did as I was told until the fucking lie got to be too much, which is right now, which is, he looked at his watch, which is 2:30, which is Miller time.
Hugh Adair felt in his pocket for his wallet, and then turned back down the stairs to go out into the sultry day and find himself a bar stool and knock back a couple of brewskies. There was something, something he'd told Rachel that morning, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it, something about a leaf, and as he stepped outside to the sweltering afternoon, the front sidewalk was littered with dead leaves from a gingko tree that did not have long to live itself. Yeah, that’s it, a new leaf. Something about a new leaf But he continued on through the park to the shortcut to Nineteenth Street, trying to forget his unbearable thirst.