FSF, January-February 2010 (19 page)

As I sped home at dusk, I wondered if I should retrace my grandfather's steps and drive up to the Park-McCullough House along Silk Road—it wasn't so far out of the way. Perhaps I could find the tree he was talking about. But I passed the turnoff and continued, pondering as I did so the differences and connections between this narrative and the previous ones. That Halloween night, I thought, there had been no ghosts in the cornrows, and no cornrows at all, lining the front of the mansion or surrounding the elaborate porte-cochere. But then why had my grandfather chosen that image or motif for his portrait of the house? Though it was obvious he had read the Reverend Parke's sermon, he had no way of knowing how it corresponded or overlapped with various documents from my mother's family—manuscripts he'd never seen, composed by people he'd never met.

But after I had crossed into New York State, I left behind my obsessive thoughts of those dry texts. Instead I imagined my wife waiting for me. And so when I arrived home at my little house beside the river, there she was. She had brought Chinese food from Pittsfield, where she worked as a lawyer for Sabic Plastics.

What was it my grandfather had said? “...A beautiful, shy woman with long black hair, if you care about that sort of thing. She stood in the doorway with a question on her lips..."—when I first read the description I had thought of my wife. Driving home, remembering that first reading, I thought of her again, and wondered how I would answer her question, and whether she would be angry or impatient, as the docent at the Park-McCullough house, I imagined, had had every right to be. But Andromeda was just curious; she often got home late after supper, and in the long September light, everything tended to seem earlier than it was. We made Bombays-and-tonic and went to sit on the deck looking down toward the swamp willows, and ate seaweed salad and chicken with orange sauce out of the white containers with wire handles—very civilized. Andromeda raised her chopsticks, a further interrogation.

And so I told her about the mystery, the ghosts in the corn. As I did so, I remembered the first time I saw her in Professor Rosenheim's class, fresh-faced, eager to engage. Rosenheim had given them an early novel of mine,
A Princess of Roumania
, and it was obvious to me that Andromeda had liked it very much. The class itself was about meta-fiction, which is a way of doubling a story back upon itself, in a fashion similar to my grandfather's description of the double nature of the Park-McCullough mansion with its manifest anomalies. It was possible to see these kinds of patterns in my own work, although I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.

Rosenheim had invited me up from Baltimore to discuss
A Princess of Roumania
, a novel that had become infected almost against my will with references to the past, with descriptions of locations from my own life, and people I had once known or would come to know—all writing, after all, is a mixture of experience and imagination, fantasy and fact. I had accepted his offer because the trip enabled me to revisit the town where I'd grown up, and where part of the novel was set. Already by that time, Baltimore had ceased to feel like home.

And so I spent the weekend visiting as if for the first time the locations where I had set
A Princess of Roumania
. It was strange to see how I had misread my own memory, how little the text recalled the actual places. Lakes had become ponds. Rivers had become streams. Subdued, I met Rosenheim the night before the class, and we sat in a bar called “The Red Herring,” and it was there that he first told me about his student, Andromeda. “You'll see what I mean tomorrow. None of this will be difficult for her. She'll figure out not just what you said, but what you meant to say. If only the rest had half her brains,” he said, peering at me through glasses as thick as hockey pucks.

But then he roused himself, brandishing in his right hand the text of something else I had been working on, a “memoir,” or fragment of science-fiction, which I would finish many years later, and which, ill-advisedly maybe, I had emailed to his class a couple of days before. “How dare you?” he said. “How dare you send this without my permission? Did you think I wouldn't find out about it?

"Did you think I'd be jazzed about this?” he complained, indicating the phrase “whispered drunkenly” in the text. “Did you think I'd want them to think I'm an alcoholic? Though in a way it's the least of my problems: Right now they are reading this,” he whispered drunkenly, conspiratorially, “and they have no idea why. Right here, right here, this is confusing them,” he said, pressing his pudgy thumb onto the manuscript a couple lines later, a fractured and contradictory passage. “Andromeda Yoo is reading this,” he said, his voice hoarse with strain. “You...you'll see what I mean tomorrow."

Now, years later, as we sat with our drinks in Petersburg, she was supremely sensible. “I agree with you. There must be something else besides the sermon, some other manuscript.” She smiled. “You know, this is like what I do all day. I took a Bible history course in college, and I think the thing that made me want to be a lawyer was the discussion of the Q Gospel—you know, how you can deduce the existence of a missing source. It's all meta-fiction, all the time. That's what I learned in college. So that's what we have here. Where's the actual text?"

For the purposes of this memoir, I have narrated it verbatim, as if I carried the document with me, or else had committed it to heart. But that's not so. “It's in my office,” I told her. Some birds were squawking down by the stream.

"What do you think your father means by a ‘sexual indiscretion'? It couldn't have been just sleeping with students. That's what Bennington College was all about, wasn't it? Its founding philosophy. In the 1930s? Didn't you get fired for
not
doing that?"

"I don't think my father knows anything about it. He's just guessing."

This was true, or at least it was true that I thought so. “But it must have been something pretty humiliating,” continued Andromeda. “I mean, thirty years later he couldn't even walk around the town."

"I guess."

"Although maybe the only reason he joined the genealogical society was to go back there, to have an excuse. The way he talks about it, it's not like he had any real interest."

"You're wrong about that,” I said. “He made me memorize a list of all the Parks, although we tended to stop before Gertrude the Bald."

"Hmm—so maybe it's about the jewel. But the problem is, there must be at least one other source for this business about the cornfields, something that doesn't involve anything about the Claibornes. Because there are two sources from that side, aren't there? Doctor Claiborne
and
his son? Was there anything about it in the court-martial?"

"Maybe, but I don't know anything about that yet. I was saving it for later. I haven't told anyone."

She frowned. “Who would you tell?"

"Well, I mean the people who might be reading about this. I've told them about Doctor Claiborne and the Battle of the Crater. But the court-martial, I guess I'm already foreshadowing it a little. Part of it, anyway."

Andromeda looked around. There was no one in the neighbor's yard. Not a living soul, unless you counted the cat jumping in and out of the bee's balm.

"That sounds crazy,” she said indulgently. “Particularly since now you've mentioned it to me."

"Never mind about that,” I interrupted. “We don't want to pay attention to everything at once. One thing after another. Speaking of which, isn't there something else you want to tell me? I mean about this. Now might be a convenient time."

I didn't like to bully her or order her around, especially since it felt so good to talk to her, to let our conversation develop naturally, as if unplanned. All day I had been listening to people's voices inside my head, ghosts long departed, and in some sense I had been telling them what to say.

The sun had gone down, and we watched the bats veer and blunder through the purple sky. The yard was deep and needed mowing. Suddenly it was quite cold.

Petersburg, New York, is a small village in the hollows of the Taconic hills. Quite recently, people like Andromeda and me had started buying up semi-derelict Victorians and redoing them. The town hadn't figured out yet what it thought about that. As a result, we kept to ourselves; we were busy anyway. Andromeda had a gift for interior spaces, and a special talent for making things seem comfortable and organized at the same time. She liked Chinese antiques.

She turned to me and smiled. “Okay, so let's get it over with,” she said, raising her glass. “You know that Bible Studies class I told you about? Well, the second semester was all about heresy. And when you talk about this stuff, I'm so totally reminded of these trials in this one part of northern Italy. It was kind of the same thing—these peasants were being prosecuted for witchcraft. But they were the opposite of witches, that's what they claimed. They talked about a tradition, father to son, mother to daughter, going back generations. On some specific nights their souls would leave their bodies and go out to do battle with the real witches and warlocks, who were out to steal the harvest and, you know, poison the wells, make the women miscarry, spread diseases, the usual. I remember thinking, Jesus, we need more people like this. And they never gave in, they never confessed, even though this was part of the whole witchcraft mania of the sixteenth century. I'm sure they were tortured, but even so, they were just so totally convinced that the entire Inquisition was part of the same diabolic plot to keep them from their work—they'd seen it all before."

Andromeda Yoo was so beautiful at that moment, her golden skin, her black hair down her back. I felt she understood me. “Another interesting thing,” she said, “was that these people were never the model citizens. There was always something dodgy or damaged about them. You could tell it in the way they talked about each other, not so much about themselves. And of course the judges were always pointing out that they were sluts and whores and drunks and sodomites and village idiots. But they had a place in the community. Everyone was on their side. They had to bring people in from neighboring counties just to have a quorum at the executions."

"That's a relief,” I murmured.

She got up from her chair and came to stand behind me, bent down to embrace me—I didn't deserve her! “I'm glad I got that off my chest,” she said, a puzzled expression on her face. “Now, where were we?"

And we proceeded to talk about other things. “What do you think he left next to the tree?” she asked. “I'll bet it was the jewel. The tourmaline the size of a pumpkin or whatever. I'll bet that was what was in the secret box under the floor."

"That's crazy. It never would have fit."

"What do you mean? That's what it was for. Do you really think Esther would have left it in the dead man's mouth? Or in his eye—Kepler's eye, wasn't that it? No, she wanted to see where it was hidden. That was probably how she'd found the compartment at the top of the shaft—looking for the jewel. Maybe she had hired the guy in the first place, or she was his lover—no, scratch that. She was probably a lesbian. That's what her mother probably meant about not living in the real world."

"Really. But then why wouldn't she have stolen it that night? Why leave it in the box?"

"I'm not sure. But that's what your grandfather meant about a tiny crime. He just had it for a few minutes. He'd taken it on impulse, and he had time to think during the drive. How could you dispose of such a thing?"

Andromeda had been adopted from a Korean orphanage and then orphaned again when her American parents died in a fire. And they themselves were also orphans, had met in an orphanage, possessed no family or traditions or history on either side—I don't think I had ever known their names. Maybe they had never even had any names. This was one of the things I found comforting about Andromeda, together with her calmness and common sense. She was so different from me.

Our bedroom, underneath the eaves, was always warmer than the rest of the house. Later, I had already dozed off when I heard her say, “I think it probably has to do with his cousin, Theodora. Didn't she kill herself?"

"Yes, when she was a teenager. It was a terrible thing. He was an only child, and she was his only cousin, too. My father always said it was some kind of romantic disappointment. Maybe a pregnancy."

"You mean a ‘sexual indiscretion.’”

"I suppose so. But not the same one. The dates don't work out."

"Well, what do you know about her? Is there anything in your boxes?"

"I think there's a photograph. A locket."

"Where?"

I had hung up my pants before we lay down, and put my wallet on the dresser with some loose change, a pocket knife, and a number of other small objects. The locket wasn't among them. It's not as if I carried it around. “I don't know,” I said.

But then I felt something in my closed fist. “Wait,” I said, opening my hand, revealing it on my palm. It was round and gold, as big as an old-fashioned watch, and had an ornate “T” engraved on the lid. Inside there were two photographs, a smiling young woman on one side, and an older man in a bowler hat on the other, my grandfather's uncle Charlie, perhaps.

"Turn on the light,” Andromeda said. “I can't see anything."

There was a reading light beside the bed. I switched it on. Andromeda lay naked on her back, one hand scratching her pubic hair. She turned onto her side, raised herself on one elbow, and her breasts reformed. “Look at the depth of the case,” she said. “Maybe there's some kind of secret message inside, under the photograph. There's enough room for a letter folded six or seven times. Look—that's a place where it might lever up,” she said, sliding her fingernail under the circle of gold that held the image. Because of her legal work for Sabic Plastics, she had all kinds of special expertise.

Theodora Park had a pleasant, happy face with a big round nose like a doorknob. I thought to myself she might have made a good clown in the circus, though no doubt that was partly because of her distended lips, the white circles on her cheeks, and the fright wig she was wearing underneath the potted geranium that served her for a hat.