Stories in the Old House, Part Two: the Half-Heiress

Neighbors make neighborhoods, but the Awbury Arboretum isn’t much of a neighborhood, and the people who live there keep mostly to themselves. This isn’t to say that there aren’t occasional rituals that bring families together: barbecues, a jazz festival, and, fittingly enough for this community of old stone buildings and unlit streets, a well-coordinated Halloween with costumes and tours of haunted houses for the kids. Still, families mostly point inward in the suburban fashion, and I never felt any pressure, growing up, to hang around with the other kids who lived around us. I knew our immediate neighbors, the Scattergoods, because their kids went to my high school, but other than that I barely knew the faces, let alone the names, of the five or six families who lived within the walls of the Arboretum.

One summer, when I was in early high school, my mother told me that one of our neighbors to the northwest wanted someone to babysit their daughter for a night. I was young enough that the thirty bucks they were offering seemed like a lot of money, so I said I’d do it. At six o’clock I put my summer reading books into a backpack and walked outside. The week before, lightning had hit one of the large oaks in the backyard, snapping it low on the trunk, and the vast bulk of it was lying in the grass. Its limbs dug into the ground like roots from the force of the impact.

“That Matty girl is hell on wheels, I hear,” my mom told me as I left. She warned me to be sure to enforce strict discipline.

“Don’t worry, Ma,” I told her.

“You’re just too nice a person,” she called after me, as I shut the door.

The old houses of the Arboretum are all clustered around what used to be long dirt roads; the main private drive, Awbury Road, was paved sometime in the twentieth century, but the other road was deemed unworthy of the same treatment, and stretches from the heart of the park to the northwest edge without meeting any driveway or tributary, one unbroken line of dirt.. For those other houses not connected to the main, paved roads, the owners have built their own driveways, unconnected to any interior road, directly to the busy city streets surrounding the park. The net effect of this turning outward is to close these distant houses to the rest of the Arboretum. Surrounded by groves of trees, the only way to reach those far properties is to walk from backyard to backyard, through small pathways cut into the tree line.

So I slipped out of my backyard and onto one of those narrow, wooded paths that cut between houses in the secluded northern section of the Arboretum. The ground beneath me smelled of leaves that had been left to rot undisturbed. I passed a crumbling shed, vines climbing its walls, its windows broken through by the branches of a tree growing inside it. In the twilight the hanging trees made a low tunnel; everything inside it was shaded and dim, and the light at the end looked flimsy, the lazy sun of a summer evening.

Once out of the tunnel, the property of that family to the northwest – I’ve forgotten their names, except for their daughter – opened up. I don’t know how much of it belonged to them and how much of it was the public property of the Arboretum – this was always an issue for the families who lived there – but there was a long stretch of green running up to the house, regardless. There were two weeping willows, one close to me, drifting across the image of the house like a beaded curtain over a girl’s room, the other farther on, past the house itself, shaking in the background.

The house had the ramshackle feeling common to almost all the arboretum homes. Built for rich people of a certain kind, they had been inherited by rich people of another kind entirely: alimony cases, like my mother, tenured professors, people who didn’t mind a little disrepair here and there. Even from a distance I could see that the veranda porch had a couple of obvious loose posts, and as I got closer it was clear that no one had used it for some time; boards had broken on the porch itself and been pulled off, like a piano with missing keys. There was one irregular turret growing from the right side of the third floor, and its windows were broken and boarded. Probably large parts of it were sectioned off and unused.

The parents were already ready to go. The woman, who had carrot-orange hair, cut short with bangs, was sitting on the front steps and jangling her keys against her thigh. She wore sunglasses and a pale pink tank top with her khaki shorts, and her style wasn’t much different from the girls I went to school with; for all I knew, she could have been wearing those sorts of clothes her whole life.

“Oh Sam,” she said, standing, as if she was surprised I’d showed up. “You’re here. Great.”

She held up her car keys and smiled.

“As you can see, we’re sort of rushing, so I left some notes on the fridge. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Matty’s already had her dinner, and she seems like she’s in a quiet mood tonight.”

“Thank the lord,” her husband said, emerging from the doorway. He was shaking his head as he mumbled the words. His brown beard was thick and only half trimmed, and he had the insomniac look: thick, dark circles and heavy lids.

His wife shot him a look that would have taken years to really understand, although the general impression wasn’t positive. I was suddenly glad to be staying in the house and not going with them to dinner. It didn’t seem like it would be a particularly pleasant experience.

“Thank you so much for helping us out like this,” the woman said to me, through gritted teeth.

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

I waved to them as they pulled out of the driveway. It struck me that I didn’t know where they were going, when they would be back, or how to contact them. It was that time of the evening when your eyes see less than you think they do, and they just disappeared down the black length of the driveway.

The girl, Matty, opened the screen door and stepped outside. She had the same orange hair as her mother, and she was wearing a summer dress with big blue flowers all over it. She crossed one skinny leg over the other and waved at me.

“Hi,” she said. “Are my parents gone?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They just left.”

“Okay,” she said. “I was reading. In the living room.”

“I see,” I said.

“You don’t really have to watch out for me,” she told me, and turned on her heel and went back inside.

Following her in, the smell of the house surrounded me, a combination of curry and cardoman from that night’s dinner, a little dust on the old wood, and the same kind of incense my mother sometimes burned to cover up other odors. The ceilings were even higher than in my house, towering over me and the girl. Unlike my parents, who had dealt with the high walls by hanging large, imposing paintings on them, Matty’s parents had left them more or less bare. Even the furniture, a low coffee table and soft, sagging armchairs, clung to the ground as if shrinking away from the empty space. At one end of the living room, completely surrounded by the frame of a non-working fireplace, was a TV that looked like it had been around since the seventies. It was about two feet square, and had dials instead of buttons.

“Do you want to watch TV?” Matty asked me. She was lying on her stomach with a big, leather-bound book opened in front of her. She had caught me looking.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just never seen a TV in a fireplace before.”

“It only gets black and white,” she told me. “It’s not a very good TV.”

“I think I’ll just get a glass of water,” I told her. “What are you reading?”

She held the book up so I could see the words on its spine: The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.

“Wow,” I said.

“It’s pretty good,” she said, shrugging.

I went into the kitchen, shaking my head. The note Matty’s parents had left was taped to the refrigerator. It was really nothing more than a couple of emergency numbers and the name of the restaurant they were going to. No mention of when they would be home.

The kitchen was even stranger than the living room. The cabinets along the walls were so tall they were impractical. When I opened them up to look inside it was clear that nobody stored anything on the top shelves. The island in the middle of the floor looked expensive, large and solid, with drawers and cabinets emerging on every side. A knife was lying on the countertop, bits of basil clumped along its edge, and little green lines following the path of the knife criss-crossed the polished wood. I looked straight out through the bay windows onto the lawn, which seemed a little neglected. So did the windows themselves; the panes were dusty, and the paint job was rough and patchy, as if someone had forgotten to sand and had held the brush with an unsteady grip.

There was a metal kettle on the counter next to the sink. When I was a kid, living in the country, I had known people who used coffee percolators, but it had been years since I had seen one. I tapped my finger against the sides. It was still hot. I took a mug with the Weavers Way logo and poured myself a cup.

I heard the scratch of a needle dropping onto a record, and as I leaned against the island and sipped my coffee the sounds of a string quartet began to wind up quietly in the other room.

Walking back into the living room, I saw Matty leaning over the record player, which sat on a small chest in the far corner. Having dropped the needle, she carefully lowered the plastic cover, stepped back from the turntable, and began to slowly edge the volume up on the stereo. There were four brown speakers, one at each corner, surrounding us. The warm sounds of strings, their melodies intertwining, began to circle the room.

“Do you have any homework?” I asked.

“I already did it,” she told me, her eyes turned back to her book.

I lay back in the armchair and looked up at the high ceiling. There was no overhead light, only the illumination of three tall floor lamps, and the shadows and light swelled and receded as the lamps blended into each other. Outside, the summer night was beginning. I could see the upper windows of my house through the trees, under peaked gables, looking ghostly through the windblown branches.

“You live over on the road, don’t you?” Matty asked me. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when I turned to her she had the book closed and pushed aside and was considering me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I live at 5 Awbury.”

“The big house,” she told me. “I know about it.”

“Oh really?” I asked, teasing her.

“You know, you have ghosts. My parents told me.”

I paused and narrowed my eyebrows. She looked very serious all of a sudden.

“What kind of ghosts?” I asked.

“My parents won’t tell me,” she said. “They just told me that there are ghosts in your house.”

“Well, I’ve never seen one,” I said.

“That’s why I’m not supposed to go on the path at night,” she told me.

“Well, like I said,” I told her, “I’ve never seen one.”

“Maybe that’s because you don’t have the gift,” she told me. “Maybe you’re not sensitive enough.”

“Have you ever seen one?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, looking at the floor. “There aren’t any ghosts here.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Once I saw her face I regretted saying it. It was obviously something she had thought about herself. She set her face against the question, but there was a hint in her eyes, and in the way she tucked her thumbs into her fists, that she had spent some time considering the possibility.

“My parents told me there aren’t,” she said.

“Well, they know better than we do,” I said.

She nodded, but the way I said it, and the way she reacted, made us both realize that we didn’t believe a word of it. I sipped my coffee. With a slight friction, a trembling inside the speaker, the needle lifted off the record.

“The side’s over,” I told her. “Do you want me to flip it?”

“Nah,” she said, getting to her feet. “Do you want to play a game?”

“Sure,” I said. “What kind of game?”

“Flashlight tag,” she told me. “I’ll get the flashlights.”

I heard her banging up the stairs, and then a rustling in some distant closet. She came back with two heavy-duty flashlights, one yellow, one orange.

“You know how to play, don’t you?”

“Refresh my memory,” I told her.

“When you’re it,” she told me, slowly, as if I was a young or stupid person, “you turn on your flashlight. When you hit the other person with your light, they’re it.”

“So the person who’s running, they keep their flashlight off?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Obviously.”

“Okay,” I told her. “I get it.”

We walked out together onto the grass. It was high firefly season, and it seemed like there were hundreds of them, filling the air with a pulsing cloud of light.

“You be it first,” she told. “Close your eyes and count to twenty.”

I did like she asked. There was a light breeze at my neck, but the night was still muggy and close and full of buzzing insects. You could hear cicadas chirring, and the mosquitoes were landing on the backs of my legs.

I reached the end of my count. Circling the crumbling veranda porch, I swung the beam of my flashlight around, trailing it across the grass and onto the layered leaves hanging from the far tree line. Their lawn extended a couple hundred feet in all directions, and I might have lost her entirely if I hadn’t been able to follow the sound of her feet on the grass and her occasional quiet laughter. The grass was a little high, and spotted her and there with clover. With the flashlight sifting through the darkness I felt like a search party, someone investigating the night.

Finally I caught her, trying to glide under the hanging branches of the weeping willow.

“Okay,” she said, a little out of breath. “I’ll count.”

She stood against the trunk of the willow and started her loud countdown. Switching off my flashlight, I circled the house. I was surprised at how much my eyes could adjust, even after watching such a small beam of light. I could see the fence through the trees, and beyond that the suggestion of the Cope House, past the dirt road. I could see the broken boards on the veranda porch. Only the spaces inside the windows of the house, looking up, were too dark to make out.

I heard her intone the last number of her count, and I slipped off again through the grass. I took off my shoes and put them by the front steps, listening to her tramping around the circle of lawn. It was almost too easy to hear where she was going. The beam of her flashlight swept around the far side, and I picked my way around the stone and slipped between two pillars on the porch.

Without a light, and knowing you were being pursued, it was a completely different kind of game. The beam of Matty’s flashlight hanging on leaves and branches in search of me made me feel like a part of the night, like slipping into a hedge and disappearing, melting bodily into the wood and stone of the house and peering out between cracks in the masonry.

“Hey,” she began to call. “Hey!”

Letting out a deep breath, I peeled myself away from the slats of the veranda porch and began to run wildly into the night, towards the tiny pathways that criss-crossed the arboretum. I heard her excited gasp, and then the searchlight swung across, blinding me.

“Got you! Thought you could get away, did you now?”

She had an excellent approximation of an English policeman.  I found myself laughing even though I was out of breath.

“Now you hide,” I told her.

“You took a long time.”

“That’s because I’m so good,” I said, putting my face in my hands, my lips almost touching the cool stone of the house. I counted loudly, feeling the rough walls with the pads of my fingers.

When I finished and turned my beam onto the plain of grass, she was completely gone. I stood very still and trained my ears to the sound of footfalls, or giggling, but the whole place was silent. She was hiding somewhere, I knew, keeping quiet in some sheltered spot. I went from side to side, letting the beam sweep lazily over bushes and trees. When I focused on the sounds of the park, the buzz of insects and the occasional knocking together of the small branches, I found I could hear the tidal sound of cars washing in from the road below us.

I sat down against the trunk of the willow, slowly casting my flashlight around the lawn like I was conducting a sleepy waltz. I knew that I wouldn’t find her unless she wanted me to.   She knew this part of the park and I didn’t. I knew, too, listening to the sound of the cars moving down the road on their way from one part of the waking world to another, that we were both stranded in the orbit of this old, crumbling house, creeping around in the darkness, until someone decided to discover us again.

Finally, her reedy voice came out from the cover of the trees.

“Are you giving up?” she asked me. “Are you worried yet?”

She wasn’t far, but far enough. I sent my little light up against the trees where I thought I heard her voice, but all I could see was the surface layer of leaves, swaying in the wake of a small breeze.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

When my mother decided to move out of her house, during her last days of residency, I liked to ask her nagging questions I had about the history of my old home: what were the older owners like, and how had it ended up the way it was when my mother bought it, half crumbled like many of the other houses in the Arboretum, covered with creeping ivy?

That was how I heard about the old recluse who had died in the upper room, and how I had grown to imagine his death, who had found him and under what circumstances. It was how I learned about the young millionaire who had died of a heart attack while playing polo, who had planned on renovating our house for his illegitimate daughter as a sort of minor inheritance. Instead, the girl’s mother had been forced to sell it to my mother, for one reason or another.

My mother never knew the details of the girl and her mother.

“She seemed like she was lost,” she told me, about the mother. “I don’t think she really knew what she was doing.”

About the daughter she didn’t say much of anything, only shook her head and said it was a shame, a kid being involved in something like that. So it was the daughter I wondered about, owning a house and then losing it.

There were plenty of strange children in the Arboretum when I was growing up. A woman who lived down the street, a quiet woman who was escaping a bad marriage, had a little boy who used to come over and play with my little brother. He had a habit of mimicking dinosaurs while playing with other people, groaning and making his hands into Tyrannosaurus fingers, retreating from the group and turning in circles in some sort of private game. I babysat for him once or twice, too, and heard him talk, obliquely, about his long-gone father. He brooded the whole time I was in his house, barely speaking to me.

There were a couple of kids, brother and sister, the girl around my age and the boy a little younger, who moved into the apartments above the Cope House when I was in eleventh grade. They were Christians of a conservative kind, home-schooled and deathly sober. Sometimes she wore a bonnet, but I don’t know if this was a personal or religious decision. Her skin was so pale it was almost transparent; you could see blue veins in her face. They would come over to my house and drink juice and we would walk around the yard talking, the girl and me, with her little brother trailing behind us.

“My parents are looking for a better place,” she told me. “We’ll be moving soon.”

She would admit to me, sometimes, that the place scared her, that she had a hard time sleeping at night. She told me these things as if they were a sign of personal weakness, and I never brought them up with her after she told me. Eventually she disappeared, too, without warning, so that it was weeks before I asked my mother where she had gone to, while she was in the middle of chopping carrots.

“You mean the Cope House girl?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she told me. “I never really knew their family. Were they Mennonites?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Some people just don’t take to this place,” she told me, matter-of-factly, and went back to her work.

So there were always children passing through, it seemed, dragged by their parents into these crumbling houses, living for a while with the close presence of the past.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was almost midnight before Matty’s parents pulled up into the driveway. Matty was asleep on the couch, the lights were dimmed, and I was reading the Dickinson she had left on the floor. It was comfortable, but the longer the hours got the more the night seemed to press in on the windows, the more I felt anxious, entertaining the irrational feeling that her parents maybe weren’t coming back at all.  I was happy, at first, to see her parents pulling up the drive.

Matty didn’t wake up, but moved a little in her sleep. The car door slammed, and I heard her mother confront her husband with a harsh whisper.

“Can’t you be quiet?” I thought she said. He mumbled in response.

She pushed the screen door open slowly with great care, and looked in on me with a smile.

“The girl’s asleep, is she?”

I nodded. Her mother’s smile was broad but her teeth were gritted, and her eyes were red. Her father stayed outside and smoked a cigarette.

“Well, let me go get some money out of the drawer,” she said, and went past me into the kitchen. I stayed in the entryway and looked out at Matty’s father, who leaned against one of the pillars of the porch and looked out at the woods. It looked like he was waiting for something. His brown hair was going bald on the top, and he slouched as he leaned, his shoulders hunched.

Her mother came back with an envelope.

“I hope she wasn’t too much trouble,” she whispered.

“Not at all,” I told her. “She was great.”

“We worry, sometimes,” she said. “That she doesn’t have enough kids to play with. I know it’s a lot to ask somebody your age to entertain her, but she really appreciates it.”

I nodded.

“This can be a lonely place,” she said.

“I suppose so.”

She nodded and looked at her feet for a second. Then she shook her head and began to dig into the white envelope.

“Can’t have you going without this,” she said, putting the thirty dollars in my hand, plus a five I pretended not to notice. “Thanks again for all your help.”

I thanked her for the money and started out the door. I hadn’t gotten twenty feet across the lawn when her father called after me.

“Not too far away, is it?” he said. There was an unaccountable edge to his voice. “We’re pretty tight knit around here, huh?”

I turned and looked at him. The porch light hit him from on top, highlighting the bags under his eyes. He looked like a much older man than he had earlier in the evening.

I never learned what he meant by the statement, but whatever it was he reconsidered it, and, looking a little embarrassed, gave me a mock-military salute.

“Come around whenever you like,” he said. “We appreciate the company.”

“Sure,” I said, beginning down the path, happy to be gone from that place, going home to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I never went over to Matty’s house again. When that summer finished senior year was a busy time, and like I said, there were never too many chances to meet the neighbors in the park, never too many reasons to walk down the paths to their houses.

One day, while I was away at college, one of Matty’s family’s dogs, an old, senile terrier, wandered into our yard and made the mistake of snarling in a weak way at our one hundred and twenty pound German Shepard, who nearly tore its throat out. The veterinary bills were gigantic, and though my parents paid them, the whole incident soured neighborly relations. Sometime later, before my graduation, Matty’s family moved away.

Despite the whole cast of lost children – the small boy with his dinosaur noises and inexplicable patches of silence, the Mennonite girl with her skin like pale paper, among others I don’t have time to mention now – Matty makes more appearances than anyone when I consider the kids who lived in the park when I was there, who played in its patches of forest and slept under the high ceilings of its houses.  She, more than anyone, seemed to belong there, to have made piece with the place on its own terms.  I think a lot about what she said about being sensitive, or having the gift.  I know that I would never have hidden in the dark woods at night at ten, slinking through the bushes while someone tried to find me with a flashlight.  And I wonder at how she evaded the questions I asked about ghosts, and whether she had seen one.

The strangest thing, too, is that it’s her face that I think of when I imagine the half-heiress who used to occupy my house, who I picture looking out into my backyard as I’ve been looking out at it in these last few weeks of high summer, the fireflies in full fanfare, their trailing lights about to fade as the autumn edges toward us. Maybe it has to do with her insistence that my house was haunted, or still is.

I imagine the mother of the half-heiress as my mother says she was, lost and tired, convalescing in the master bedroom. As she turns under the sheets, almost asleep, the half-heiress is on the first floor, walking from room to room. She runs her hand along the leaves of potted plants. She puts a record on the turntable. She stands on the ends of her toes to drop the needle on the vinyl, and then lowers the plastic covering. Outside night is falling; car engines swell and ebb among the hum of insects. The half-heiress watches the fireflies pulsing above the grass, accustomed to being left alone to watch the park at nightfall. The record starts with a crackle, but before the music begins to swell, filling the high room. the needle lingers on a black band of silence. Stuck in the gap, trapped somehow in a past that people only notice in glimpses, the half-heiress waits for time to catch up with her.