De Potter's Grand Tour (28 page)

But what of his son? How will he ever persuade Victor that his desertion was contrived to protect the perfect world he'd worked so hard to create?

He thinks about carrying the boy on his shoulders along the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago fair. He pictures Victor wearing a crown of daisies on his fifth birthday. He remembers one of their voyages to Liverpool when Victor discovered a litter of kittens on board the ship. This boy who once appeared in the stateroom with kittens tucked in all of his pockets—what will he say when his father returns from the dead?

He is lost in thought, past and future blending in confusion, when, to his dismay, the door to the compartment opens and a man about his age enters and takes a seat on the bench opposite. He is not ready for company. He wishes he had pretended to be sleeping, but it is too late for that now.

The man, he assumes, is French, or at least he is fluent in the language, for he has a French newspaper tucked under his arm. He is dressed in a brown suit that is too large for him, and he has weedy, tangled hair that hangs below his ears. He makes a show of loosening his tie and brushing the soft cloth of his beret before setting it beside him. Once he is sufficiently settled, the Frenchman clears his throat, a sure indication that he is going to strike up a conversation with his fellow passenger, who, put on the spot, had better think fast if he's going to concoct a convincing new story to replace the one he can no longer tell.

 

The Ridge

S
HE WAS HOME ALONE
when the stranger knocked on the door. That's the way she began the story when she told it years later. She explained that although she had been a young girl at the time, she was used to staying alone, and she could usually guess who was at the door. She knew the difference between the sound of the mailman's knock and the woodpecker rapping of Mr. Bascomb from the farm across the street. She could judge from Cousin Gertrude's knock whether she was drunk. Her friend Mimi, who lived next to the schoolhouse, preferred to tap with her knuckles on one of the front windows. Mrs. Donnerly, who lived in the cottage across the yard, wouldn't bother to knock at all and just came into the kitchen and started cooking breakfast, while Mr. Donnerly would call upstairs, Halloo, where's our little lady?

The unfamiliar knocking she heard that day definitely meant that a stranger was at the door. She knew she was supposed to be careful with strangers. There were hoboes wandering around the town, and worse. The Donnerlys had instructed her never to open the door if a stranger looked suspicious. But how could she tell if a stranger looked suspicious if she didn't open the door?

It was a warm day, she recalled, muggy and still, with the locusts buzzing at full throttle—the kind of peaceful, ordinary day designed for a girl to spend reading about a family shipwrecked on a deserted island. She didn't want to have to predict the intentions of a stranger, but there he was, knocking on the door. From the upstairs window of the bedroom, she saw a car parked out front, with a driver inside. He had turned the motor off, indicating that he expected to be kept waiting. The stranger, then, had come on business that would take some time. What a bother.

She was only thirteen, and everyone said she was very brave to stay in the big house alone. Rumor had it that the Ridge was haunted. That same morning, little Irene Donnerly, five years her junior, had popped out from behind a door and scared her senseless:
BOO!

Yet as she remembered it, she lived like royalty. Though her father had died when she was eight, and shortly after her father's death her grandmother had died, and then her mother had moved to Queens, she had more money than she knew what to do with. When she and her sister came of age, they would officially inherit the estate. Until then, they were free to stay there when they weren't at boarding school. She could have spent the summer dodging bees and blackflies with her sister at a camp in Maine, or suffocating in her mother's small apartment, but she preferred the comforts of the Ridge, even if it was haunted. The Donnerlys continued to be paid through a trust fund her grandmother had set up. They cooked for her, did her laundry, kept the garden in order and the house clean. She had Mimi nearby when she wanted a friend. And she never ran out of rooms to explore.

There were so many hidden treasures to discover, she remembered wistfully. Up in the attic there was a tent her grandmother said had been used by bedouins in the Sahara. One day she propped up the tent on boxes and laid a feather quilt over the floor and pretended she was lost in the desert. Another day she buttoned herself in a military coat and strapped on one of the heavy swords in a metal scabbard and pretended to shoot a bear with an old wooden pistol.

In her grandmother's bedroom, she liked running her fingers through the straw basket full of foreign coins and examining each medal in the cigar box. Once she put on the scarab necklace set in gold that her grandmother used to say was as old as Methuselah. She remembered finding a pearl brooch and a velvet bag of iris powder, a sandalwood handkerchief box, a set of white vest buttons, and a cameo of her grandfather. Inside a patent-leather hatbox was a silver-fox fur. In a mahogany box was a gold wreath that had crowned the head of a Roman general. Photograph albums and scrapbooks filled a whole shelf of the bookcase. And stacked on top of papers and photographs in the steamer trunk at the foot of Grammy's bed were all her leather diaries plus a cloth one.

She had found it too difficult to read her grandmother's handwriting and closed the diaries back inside the trunk. But other trunks were in other bedrooms, and these were stuffed with crisp linens—embroidered sheets and curtains, bedspreads and tablecloths, cretonne doilies, tea cloths, and pillow scarves. Every wall was covered with paintings. On every floor were Oriental rugs with pretty patterns of whirligigs and curlicues for her to try to copy in a sketchbook.

Sometimes she would set the table for a feast, with the silver-plated soup tureen and the chocolate pot, the champagne glasses, the bread-and-butter plates from Ovington's, the china fruit bowls, the Turkish coffee cups, the cut-glass saltcellars. She would pretend that a king and queen were seated at opposite ends of the table, and she would pour water from the blue glass pitcher shaped like a bird.

But what she liked to do best of all, she said, was to go into the parlor and open the gilt cabinet that contained the treasures collected by her grandfather. Grammy always called him the Professor and said he was distinguished. In the portrait hanging in the dining room he looked like a professor, with his book in his hand and a map of the world behind him. He must certainly have been a distinguished man to have died in such a mysterious way. The official explanation was that he accidentally fell off a boat and drowned, though her daddy believed he'd been pushed into the sea by a thief. His body was never recovered, and no one could say with certainty what had happened to him. Once Cousin Gertrude whispered to her that maybe he hadn't died at all but had instead disguised himself and snuck away so Grammy could collect the money from his life insurance policy.

The contents of the gilt cabinet were all the family had left of his legacy, to be admired through the beveled glass but never touched, never handled, except by Grammy herself—that was her most important rule at the Ridge. Grammy regretted that once an iron statue from the cabinet had been lost, maybe even stolen, and she didn't want anyone opening the door of the gilt cabinet and mixing things up. But then the day came when Grammy wasn't around anymore.

There were buttons and coins, jars and little figurines that were even older than Methuselah, Grammy used to say. Some of the pieces had been purchased by Granddaddy, some he'd dug out of the earth himself. Granddaddy had bought the handsome cabinet to display the collection, and Grammy had kept the key hidden in her bedside drawer. But the girl found the key, and she was free to play with all the treasures as if they were toys.

They were
her
toys, and the Ridge was
her
home. Though she liked to have the big house to herself when her sister was at camp, she wasn't entirely alone. She had the Donnerlys' dog, General Grant, for company. A fat, drooling, curly-haired Airedale, he smelled like dirty laundry and lived only to eat everybody's leftovers and then collapse. He didn't give the impression that he'd ever be roused by an emergency. Still, she was glad to have him around, and she always made sure he was in the room with her when she was alone in the house.

He'd been sprawled like a rag rug beside her bed the day the stranger knocked at the door, but by the time she thought to give him a good shove to rouse him, he was already gone. He had probably squeezed his fat, quaking body beneath the bed in another room and intended to hide there until the danger was past. As usual, he was ashamed to be revealed as a coward.

As she remembered it, she resolved to ignore the knocking and pretend no one was home. But after a minute, the stranger knocked again, more boldly this time, signifying that he was growing impatient. What did he want? If a bill needed to be paid, he could have dropped it in the mail slot. If he had come to sell something, he might as well give up. The girl went to the window, hoping she'd see him returning to his car. But he remained on the porch.

Why didn't he just go away? And why, oh, why, was he turning the front knob and opening the door on his own?

Irene Donnerly, who liked to pretend to be a ghost, had a thing or two to learn. Ghosts were nothing compared to evil men who let themselves into a house without an invitation. Ghosts could be willed away by common sense.

She remembered rising on leaden legs and walking out of the guest room. If nothing else, she said, she had to see the stranger first, before he could surprise her. She had to brace herself against something Irene Donnerly wouldn't have known to imagine, something so awful that down at the bottom of the stairs that sloth of a guard dog General Grant was planted in rigid attention, his fur rising along his spine, a growl coming from deep within his fat body, a rattling growl expressing a murderous ferocity as he confronted the stranger in the hall.

She felt some measure of curiosity as she looked down at the scene, though as she recounted the story so many years later, she couldn't help but worry that she was mixing up the memory of that day with dreams she'd gone on to have.

Did she really call from the top of the stairs, What do you want?

Did the stranger answer, Bonjour, mademoiselle, and then ask, Is this your dog?

He was an old man, she recalled, with gray, wrinkled skin like a newborn mouse and tufts of white hair poking out from beneath his fedora. When she noticed that his bow tie was crooked, she had to clamp her lips closed to keep from laughing aloud.

I said, What do you want?

I am looking for Madame de Potter … your grandmama, I assume.

She's dead.

She…?

She's buried in the cemetery behind St. John's.

And Victor?

She was offended to hear him speak of her father. If he'd known him, he should have known that he had died of pneumonia five years earlier.

He's there, too. Go see for yourself.

From that point, she said, she had no doubt about what happened next. The man raised his cane as if preparing to plant it in a new position and rebalance himself, but the dog took the gesture as a sign that the stranger was preparing to attack. Baring his teeth, General Grant chomped at the air and started barking in a murderous rage.

That's all: an old man came to the Ridge one day looking for Grammy and Dad, and he went away when the Donnerlys' dog started barking. He certainly wouldn't be returning anytime soon. See, look at her, she was perfectly fine!

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she opened the door wider, and the dog rushed out. Mr. Donnerly came hurrying across the side yard from his cottage, still dressed in his pajamas from his afternoon nap. From the safety of the porch, the dog barked furiously as the stranger, whoever he was, climbed into the backseat and the getaway car disappeared down the street.

At first she agreed with Mr. Donnerly's theory that the old man must have belonged to a gang responsible for recent burglaries in the area, and he'd been sent to case the house. But by the next day she would insist that he'd seemed harmless, and she hadn't been scared at all. Many years later, when she was a gray-haired woman with a grown daughter of her own and the two of them had opened the old steamer trunk in her basement to see what it contained, she would tell the whole story and then, at the end, offer another possibility: perhaps the stranger had been her grandfather. Oh, sure, it was hardly likely, she'd say as they looked inside the trunk. Still, she couldn't help but wonder. Wasn't it too bad that the dog had scared him away before she could ask him his name.

 

Acknowledgments

A story titled “De Potter's Grand Tour Around the World” appeared in
Conjunctions,
Volume 56 (Spring 2011). It is not included in the final version of
De Potter's Grand Tour.
A section from this novel appeared in
Conjunctions
, Volume 60 (Spring 2013), under the title “A Collector's Beginning.”