A Ship Made of Paper (39 page)

“Next,” Marie is saying, “we’ll go down to the house’s original cellar, which was part of the famous Underground Railroad, in the years preceding and during the American Civil War.” The strain and the excitement of conducting this tour seem to be exacting their price. Marie’s voice has become a little shrill, and she gestures wildly, as if waving away a swarm of gnats. “We envision this as one of the highlights of the tour.

Right now, you’ll have to use your imagination, but when we have everything set up it will be a sort of diorama of the period, with lifelike figures of slaves.” She turns to face the guests and suddenly loses her a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

footing. Ethan Greenblatt, who is directly behind her, manages to catch her by the jacket—if it weren’t for him Marie would be in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

“She’s not above a lawsuit,” Susan says to Kate. Then, to Daniel:

“Don’t mention anything to Marie about our stopping this ridiculous project of hers. I’ll tell her myself, it seems only fair.”

Marie is rattled by her near fall, but she continues with the tour, bringing the guests down to the ground floor, turning left in the entrance hall and leading them all through the conservatory, the dining room, the main kitchen, and then the summer kitchen, where the door to the cellar can be found.

Iris and Hampton walk through the entrance hall, followed by Ruby and Nelson.When Ruby sees Kate and Daniel, she calls out to them with her customary exuberance. “You’re missing it, you guys. Come on, we’re going down to see where the slaves hid.” She holds her hand out.

“Let’s take a look,” Daniel says to Kate, taking Ruby’s hand.

Ferguson has seen to it that the cellar is well lit for today’s party—

there are standing and clip-on lamps every few feet—but he has not been able to dispel the dank gloominess of the place.With its packed dirt floor and thick, fabriclike cobwebs, it seems more like a cave than a part of someone’s house. It smells of rain and mold. Strips of pink fiberglass insulation hang from the ceiling. Generations of broken wooden chairs line the walls, awaiting repair. In fact, the entire place is a terminal ward for stricken furniture, some of it too valuable to dispose of, some saved for no apparent reason. Old leather chairs ooze cotton, dozens of old oak chairs stand along the wall with their cane seats torn, unraveled, or missing altogether. There is a small Queen Anne sofa upon which someone seems to have poured white paint.There’s a rolltop desk missing all of its drawers, and with one of its legs replaced by an unpainted two-by-four.

There are skis, tennis racquets, a croquet set, sleeping bags, a punching bag covered in dust hanging from a beam.There seem to be literally hundreds of paint cans, some without their tops appear to be empty, others seem brand-new.There are at least twenty large cartons of china, a dozen

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rolled-up rugs secured with twine and stood up on their ends, drooping and leaning into each other like a family of drunks. In a corner, someone has abandoned an old, elaborate model train set, its tracks ravaged, its cars toppled, its miniature landscape of trees, cows, and water towers scattered—it looks like the transportation system of a country that has lost a long, ruinous war.

At the north end of the old cellar is a cast-iron coal-burning furnace, unused for decades. Some twenty feet to the side of the furnace, the dirt and stone wall is paneled over with wide wooden planks, newly painted white. Marie stumbles for a moment on her way to the wall, and then when she reaches it she rests her hand on it. “Is everybody watching?” she calls out.

She spreads her small hand out as far as her fingers will reach, and then, applying pressure, slides a false panel in the wall over a few inches.

Then she grabs hold of the edge of the opened panel and drags it further to the side, revealing a vast, dark emptiness.

“This is where the runaway slaves were kept,” she calls out. “Sometimes there’d be just one or two of them, sometimes as many as ten.

Then, when the coast was clear, they’d get herded out and sent on their way—to Canada, mostly. Where they’d be free. The great thing about this space is that the temperature is always sixty degrees, winter and summer, as is true with many of the rooms in Eight Chimneys.”

Marie goes on for a while longer, telling everyone about Wendell Richmond, who was the master of the house from 1820 to 1882, and about the escaped slave who gave birth to a child in this cellar, and about the artifacts of that time that have recently been recovered—the little tin earrings, the diary filled with sketches of trees, fields, and other fleeing slaves, the un-explained human teeth. Then, finally, she steps into the old cloister and feels in the air for the lamp that has been set up—she has never looked more like a blind girl than at this moment, groping for the switch with almost spastic waves, like a kid pretending to have lost her sight.

The light comes on, revealing two mannequins that Ferguson got from the Fashion Bug at the Windsor Mall. One of them is dressed in a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

overalls and a straw hat, the other in an old gingham dress, and both of them have been freshly painted brown. Ten by ten, the guests walk into the secreted room, have a look, and presumably imagine themselves hiding and hungry in such a place. It smells of mud that has been there forever, and the paint that only yesterday was sprayed on the mannequins’

faces. When Daniel crowds in to look around for himself, Kate, refusing to be a part of the tour’s grand finale, has already left, and when he feels the tip of a finger against his backbone, Daniel’s heart quickens: he knows it is Iris’s touch. He takes a deep breath and feels it again. It is just one finger, a circumspect gesture, a child’s, a prisoner’s, but the force of her fingertip stirs his blood. Then it is time for them all to turn around and let the next wave of guests come in to look at what is, after all, just a storage room in the cellar of an old house.When Daniel faces the other direction, he is behind Iris and Hampton, Nelson and Ruby. He could return the secret little touch, but he doesn’t dare. He doesn’t trust his hand; it is not inconceivable that once he touches her he will not be able to stop.

Upstairs in the ballroom, the party has become more animated. The guests, released now from the dutiful march through the house and its claustrophobic conclusion in the cellar’s secret room, and further released from the slightly hectoring quality of Marie’s voice, are gossiping and joking with each other in increasingly excited voices. Daniel is looking to see where Kate is now and finally sees her across the room, standing with Derek, whose face is very close to hers and who is speaking to her with what appears to be great seriousness. Daniel sees Iris, too; she’s talking with Ethan Greenblatt. Then he sees Susan with Marie. Susan is holding Marie by the upper arm and seems to be scolding her. Marie tries to yank her arm away but Susan’s grip is too strong. She continues to speak to Marie, with a rather cruel, powerful smile on her face, and suddenly Marie breaks free.

Marie leaves the ballroom and heads straight out of the house, without so much as a jacket or a sweater. Seeing this gives Daniel a small jolt of concern, but before he can give it much more thought, Daniel is set upon by Upton Douglas, who swings his way over on his crutches,

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accompanied by a willowy middle-aged woman with an elegantly unhappy face, a widow from Buffalo, to whom Douglas has been showing houses in the area. Upton wants Daniel to talk to her about how grand it is to live in Leyden, its beauty, and convenience, its friendly atmosphere and myriad cultural events, and Daniel is trapped in this seemingly endless conversation.

Finally, he feels a tug at his back pocket. It’s Ruby.

“Can I have Ginkie?” she asks.

It takes him a moment to understand she wants her doll, and another moment to realize he no longer has it in hand. And then he remembers: when he felt Iris’s finger on his spine, his hands instinctively opened and the doll slipped from his grasp.

“Oh, you know what, Ruby?” he says, scooping her up. “I think I accidentally left her downstairs.”

“Where?”

“Just wait here. Find Mommy, and I’ll find Ginkie.”

He sets Ruby down and waits there for a moment while she hurries off to find Kate.When she has disappeared into the crowd, Daniel walks out of the ballroom and makes his way through the dining room, the kitchen, and the summer kitchen, where he finds Ferguson and Derek huddled together in intense conversation. Ferguson’s shoes are covered with fresh, wet dirt; there is a muddy patch on his right knee.

“Daniel,” Ferguson says, “Marie’s gone missing.”

“Have you seen her?” Derek asks.

“I saw her leave,” Daniel says. “Maybe half an hour ago.” He has his hand on the door leading down to the cellar. He can barely even form this thought in his own mind, but the fact is that he hasn’t seen Iris for a while and he cannot help but wonder if she is still somehow in the cellar.

“Well, you know what
I
think,” Derek says to Ferguson. “She’s blind.

I don’t care how well she knows the property, things are torn up out there and where there used to be paths there’s nothing but fallen trees.

And those boys from the juvey home are still at large and for all we know they could be out there right now.”

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“My God,” says Daniel. “You and Kate are really focused on those kids.”

“You would be, too, if it happened to you,” Derek says sharply.

“What do you think I should do?” Ferguson asks.

“You want me to call it in?”

Ferguson sighs, looks away, and Derek presses him.

“I appreciate your wanting to be discreet . . .”

Ferguson sighs. “Call it in,” he says.

“I’ll be right back,” Daniel says, opening the cellar door.

“Where are you going?” Ferguson asks.

“My kid left her doll down there,” Daniel says. He waits for a moment and then quickly heads down the stairs, holding on to the banister, his legs trembling.

A few lights have been left burning and he easily makes his way past the Richmond family’s cast-off possessions.The sliding door to the secret room is still half open, and by the time he pulls it all the way to the side his heart is pounding violently.

“Hello,” Iris says. She has been sitting on a small, rough-hewn bench and she rises as Daniel walks in. She is holding Ruby’s doll. She and Daniel stand there facing each other for a moment, and then she hands the doll to him. “Here.”

“Thank you,” he says. The two painted mannequins seem to be staring at him. He looks at Ruby’s doll for a moment and then lets it drop from his hands. He puts his arms around Iris.

“I was waiting for you,” she whispers.

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Daniel and Iris rearrange their clothes. They are reeling. Their legs are weak. Desire summoned but unresolved leaves them nervous yet vague, like people awakened while dreaming.

“Wait here,” Iris whispers, her lips an inch from his mouth. She turns to leave but he catches her, stops her, just to show that he can. She slips away from him and hurries out of the cellar, he hears the heels of her shoes clacking against the wooden stairs,
bang bang,
it’s like being buried alive and listening to the hammer driving the nails into the coffin.

He waits, and when he finally comes back upstairs, he is still trembling, but no one pays attention to his arrival, no one asks where he’s been, or what the matter is.They are gathered in front of Ferguson, who is addressing them all.

“All right, then,” he’s saying, “here’s what we’re going to do. First, I want to thank you all for your help. My family appreciates it and I appreciate it, and I think if we go out there, and just do this in an orderly way, we’ll find Marie before she hurts herself. The police have been informed, but there’s not a hell of a lot they can do right now. I don’t know what we’re paying our taxes for, but it’s not for helicopters. So it’ll be up to us.”

Nine men and five women volunteer to form a search party to find poor Marie. Everything capable and charismatic in Ferguson is on display a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

as he addresses the volunteers. His voice is powerful, confident; he has even produced a topographical map of his holdings, and he stands before it now and taps at it with his blunt, oil-stained forefinger.

“This is where we are right now. The house is right in the center of the property, plus or minus three degrees. We can radiate out from the house, and since we’ll have seven teams, each team can cover roughly a forty-five-degree slice of the pie.”

Susan has come up close beside him. Her expression is at once pro-prietary and serene, like a cat about to stretch out next to something it has killed. She is holding a large wicker basket with both hands; it is filled with what appear to be thick, red cigars, with pictures of medieval lions printed on them.

Gathered in the entrance hall, beneath the stained and sagging grandeur of the painted ceiling, the volunteers choose their partners.

Daniel doesn’t care whom he is paired with, as long as it’s not Hampton, but luck would have it otherwise. Hampton may not like Daniel but at least he knows him, however uneasily, and without actually saying anything he stands next to Daniel, as if their searching for Marie together is a foregone conclusion.

“We need a way of signaling when we find her,” Susan is saying. “I’ve got Roman candles and everyone should take one. If you find her, light the fuse, and the rest of the search party will know.”

“Where did you get those?” asks Ferguson.

“Remember when we had that Burmese purification ceremony two Septembers ago?” Susan says, dropping the basket onto the floor. She cannot help reflecting upon how Ferguson had mocked the ritual, as he mocked all rituals, or anything new—except the ritual of infidelity and the novelty of a new young body. “Help yourselves,” she says. She figures that everyone here knows that Ferguson is screwing Marie, and probably they assume that Marie has fled the house because Susan finally told that little whore what she thinks of her—and they are essentially correct in that assumption, though “finally” might not be the right word, since Marie has known of Susan’s enmity all along, and why she picked today