The Death of Perry Many Paws (3 page)

Cam’s mother, Claudia, inherited the house when her father died. Her brother Alden Jr., a Princeton graduate, had died at Pearl Harbor. Her brother Franklin, the imaginative and creative one, had also shown a great deal of promise. He had started getting “strange” during his mid-teens and eventually drifted into a hermit-like existence, never marrying and preferring to live in the old gardener’s cottage on the Behrends property. So Alden Sr. had left the house to Claudia along with money in trust for Franklin, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life. Perhaps by leaving the house to his only daughter, Alden Sr. felt he was making amends to his three sisters who were ignored in his father’s will. My guess is that wherever they were, they agreed it was way too little, much too late.

I remember the first time I saw The Castle, as it was affectionately or derisively called, depending on your viewpoint. I had just graduated from college with a degree in English and had answered an ad for a summer job.

Wanted for the summer: College graduate with good organizational skills, a sense of direction, no allergies and a love of books needed to catalog extensive family library. Ability to tell a first-edition Charles Dickens from a Harlequin Romance preferred
.

They also offered room and board and a weekly salary that worked out to a dollar over minimum wage for a forty-hour week, more money than I had ever made in my life. I immediately sent a letter and resume to C. Mack, address The Castle in Birdsey Falls. I was hired, sight unseen.

The day I arrived, a petite, well-dressed woman answered the door and introduced herself as Claudia Behrends Mack. I assumed she was
the C. Mack of the ad and therefore would have a good sense of humor. I soon discovered that she wasn’t and she didn’t.

“You must be the girl we hired from the advertisement.”

I nodded my head and introduced myself as she looked me up and down, neither approving nor disapproving, just
looking
. Eventually she opened the front door all the way and I entered.

“I don’t usually answer the door myself but it’s Beatrix’s day off. When Beatrix isn’t here my son answers the door but he appears to have gone off also.” She looked around the two-story foyer as if this son of hers might suddenly appear. I stared at the chandelier that hovered like a giant blimp over my head and moved a few feet to the left.

“You may leave your luggage in the foyer and I’ll show you around after you tidy up.”

I hoped that ‘tidy up’ was a euphemism for going to the bathroom because I really was about as tidy as I could get. I could tell I was already a huge disappointment to her and wondered what it was she was expecting. I was everything outlined in the ad, including having no allergies and a good sense of direction. “I had no problem finding the house,” I said, to drive this point home.

Claudia proceeded to show me the first floor of the house. She informed me who all her relatives were, taking time with each portrait, staring at it like she had never seen it before, touching the faces affectionately and cocking her head and smiling.

“This is my father, Alden Behrends, Sr.” She touched the frame of a stern-looking man who appeared to be a cross between a basset hound and a rabbit. “Wasn’t he handsome?”

“Oh, definitely,” I said, crossing my toes, my fingers and my eyes.

“And this is a family painting of my parents and my two brothers and me. I’m the one sitting on my mother’s lap in the lacy dress.” She lightly caressed the child in the dress. “This is me.” Was she one of those rare people with such a dry sense of humor that you had to pay
close attention to know they were being funny? “The boys standing on each side of the chairs are my brothers.” I glanced at her again. No, she was totally serious. Now I wasn’t sure if she was simpleminded or if she thought I was.

“The two adults are your parents,” I said.

“Of course,” she answered, unimpressed.

After that we saw a painting of Claudia and her two brothers as adults. She was still the one in the dress. There were three paintings of Roger Behrends with each of his three wives. Roger was a dapper-looking fellow with a twinkle in his eye that didn’t fade from one decade or wife to another. I mentioned to Claudia that I thought Roger was a very handsome and interesting looking man and she stared at me like I had said I ate cat litter for the fiber. She obviously had some as yet undiscovered affliction that made her unable to distinguish a handsome man from a homely one. Therefore I was rather intrigued to meet her son when she described him as “not as good looking as my father.” I couldn’t imagine that anyone could be less good looking than a man who resembled the offspring of a rabbit and a basset hound.

I had settled in my room, which was large, light-filled and lovely. A sense of curiosity and obligation sent me to the library to begin poking around and making a plan for getting all the books in order. Claudia hadn’t bothered to show me the library but had pointed it out in passing so I knew where it was. She had gone to her room for her pre-dinner nap and I was left on my own. The library door was still closed so I tentatively knocked and, hearing no response, pushed open the door.

I could only stand in the doorway and stare. The structural beauty of the room was totally overshadowed by disarray and clutter. Books were piled like columns all over the floor, some tilting so precariously that the landing of a fly could send them tumbling. Since the floor was already littered with books, no one would notice if another couple
dozen were added to the mess. Half the bookshelves were empty and spiders had built complex condominiums in all the open spaces. The sunlight forcing its way through the windows illuminated the clouds of dust that filled the air and attached to every surface in the room. As I stared, mesmerized by the floating particles, I thought I could distinguish actual human shapes floating around the room, landing on the books and then launching themselves back into the air to swirl up to the ceiling two stories over my head. I looked at the landing that ran around the second floor of the library and thought I saw ethereal beings lined up peering over the railing at me. Suddenly the leather chair next to the fireplace seemed to be occupied by a pipe-smoking rabbit-faced man who stared at me with disinterest. The dust continued to swirl and the rabbit-faced man reshaped and floated up to join the others at the railing. I wanted to scream. I needed to sneeze.

“My father was not a tidy man,” a voice boomed behind me, causing me to both scream and sneeze at the same time. I turned around so abruptly that I lost my footing and had to grab onto the door frame to keep from falling. Standing there with his hands in his pockets and grinning was one of the most interesting men I had ever seen. He was well over six feet tall and built like a swimmer, broad across the shoulders but lean everywhere else. His hair was a flaming red that Lucille Ball would have envied, and he wore it long. It gently curled and waved around his head like a red halo. His face was so covered with freckles that it looked like he had just returned from a beach holiday and had applied sunscreen haphazardly with a squirt gun. His eyes were an emerald green and, oddly enough, surrounded by thick black lashes that any woman would die for. His smile was warm and lit up his whole face. He wasn’t much older than me but the crinkles around his eyes indicated that he smiled a lot and found life to be amusing. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Cam Mack. You must be Tamsen Darby. Welcome.”

I got my balance and shook his hand, smiling at his infectious grin. He gestured toward the library. “You can see why we need help.”

I nodded. “What happened in here?”

“Nothing. This is the way it always is. This is how my father liked to work. He died six months ago and we just closed the door. I finally convinced my mother that we needed to do something in here to protect the books and see if there are any papers or other things we should be taking care of. My mother doesn’t do manual labor and I didn’t want to do it by myself.” His attention wandered off me and to the disastrous library.

“I’m sorry about your father. I can see why it would be difficult for you to do this alone.”

He tore his eyes away from the room and returned them to me. “I try to get home most weekends but I’m in grad school in Boston and some weekends I just can’t make it. It’ll be good for my mom to have someone else living in the house with her in addition to getting this room sorted out. I’m glad you’re here.”

I suddenly felt, for the first time, that I was glad to be there.

The summer turned out to be life changing. I rarely saw Claudia and sincerely doubted that she felt any comfort by having my presence in her house. Her older brother, Franklin, who lived in a small gardener’s cottage on the property, came over several times a week and did the heavy lifting and cleaning for me. Although probably not much more than sixty, he seemed twenty years older. He shuffled when he walked and seemed like a man burdened with aching joints. Yet he was able to move the furniture around easily and climb up on the ladder to wash and clean without any problem. One day I came in and he was on the top of a ladder cleaning the chandelier and looked like a young man, totally engaged in what he was doing, almost enjoying himself. When he saw me, he darted back into his shell and aged twenty years. We rarely spoke. I was grateful for his help so respected his privacy.
While he was busy cleaning, I was able to do the more challenging work of cataloging the books.

There was one day, early in the summer, when we had a one-sided conversation. It was the first time he came over to help me. Claudia had brought him in, introduced him and left. We had stared at each other for several seconds and then he had made a growl-like sound and banged his hand on the desk, causing dust to fly all over the room and papers and books to tumble to the floor.

“Room should never be allowed to look like this,” he muttered under his breath as he picked up the books and laid them gently back on the desk. “My father would be disgusted by what that man did to this room. This is what happens when you let someone other than a Behrends run the house. Never understood what Claudia saw in that Mack guy. Married beneath her. Claudia deserved better. Glad he’s gone.”

I later asked Cam about his strange uncle and he had shook his head and smiled. “He’s always been an odd one. I know he disliked my father and felt my mom had married beneath her but I think Franklin felt that anyone who wasn’t a Behrends would have been beneath my mother. I know both she and Franklin tried to convince my father to change his name from Mack to Behrends so the name wouldn’t die out. My father indulged my mom in many ways but he held firm on retaining his name.”

My favorite days were the ones when Cam was there and we would work side by side, chatting. I learned that he had a sister, Cassandra, who was six years older. He seemed to be comfortable with the fact that he was an accident. He stated matter-of-factly that his mother had lost interest in the whole mothering thing by the time he was born and, once he had outgrown his nanny, had spent most of his childhood with his dad or the family housekeeper, Mrs. Knapp. I found out that “going to grad school in Boston” really meant attending Harvard for
his MBA. In high school, he had balked at attending a private boarding school like Cassandra and had been happy in the local high school, where he was editor of the newspaper, played baseball and had been voted most likely to be a politician. For someone brought up in a locally wealthy and prominent family, he seemed more like Huck Finn than privileged rich kid. He said it was because when he was born, his mother had taken one look at him, pronounced him very un-Behrends-like, and resumed directing all her attention to his sister. This seemed to suit him fine. By the end of the summer I realized that being as un-Behrends-like as possible was the better path in life.

As the library got whipped into shape, Cam and I spent more and more time away from the house taking walks, having picnics, going to the movies and eventually going to Boston for the weekend for some privacy. It was the best summer of my life and when Cam proposed in August I said yes, never more sure of anything in my life. I knew I would have Claudia and Franklin and Cassandra to contend with, but it was worth it to spend the rest of my life with this funny, adventurous, kind and gentle man. In the middle of a glorious cherry-paneled room with towers of beautiful books, lacey cobwebs and ethereal dust, I had found my soul mate.

t was several days after our WOACA meeting and Cam remained frustrated in his attempts to talk to Abbey. The first time he called she was in the library and couldn’t talk. The next time she was out to dinner with friends and could only talk a minute. Then she was on the subway and didn’t have good reception. She promised that she would be able to talk to us tonight.