The Towers of Love (4 page)

This in itself, for Hugh's grandfather, had been a severe enough blow. But there was an even worse one to come. To compensate him for his business, the Massachusetts company had offered to purchase his plant for something in the vicinity of three-quarters of a million dollars. This, Pryor claimed, was not even half the plant's worth. There was a lengthy court battle and, in the end, the court-ordered price for his company was even less than he had first been offered—under half a million. “Just Compensation!” Hugh's grandfather had stormed in a long, fuming advertisement that he had inserted in the local paper at the time. “It is Nothing But Unjust Compensation!” The advertisement, which Ogden Pryor had considered his last, definitive statement on the matter, had hung for a long time in his study, fading and yellowing in a picture frame. Hugh's grandfather had reread this polemic so many times that, in the end, he had been able to quote most of its three thousand words by heart. But it was doubtful, of course, that anyone else had ever bothered to read it.

Looking backward, it was easy to suspect that the town had hated Hugh's aristocratic grandfather. (Tall-hatted, with his walking stick, his cuffs secured with gold links, his shoes immaculately spatted, he had been fond of striding through the town on the way to his plant, looking neither to the right nor left, nor acknowledging the humbler people who stepped aside, murmuring deferential greetings, doffing their caps as he passed.) Indeed, the town may have hated all the Pryors, and it was likely that the town had privately rejoiced at Ogden Pryor's defeat and humiliation. But it didn't matter, because Hugh's grandfather now hated the town and all who lived in it, and his gesture of hatred was to announce that he would move away from Baldwin and never return to it, and that he would take his proud house, the handsomest house in Baldwin, with him. He had come south, to Connecticut, selected this hilltop site above the river backed by acres of wood, in an area of southern Litchfield County where the rolling, wooded hills were dotted with large estates such as the one, nearby, which the Everetts—who were originally from New York—had built in the early twenties. Of course, no one but outsiders called these houses “estates.” They were called houses.

Then, with his new land, Hugh's grandfather had begun the long and curious process of tearing down the house in Massachusetts and shipping it, stone by stone, lintel by lintel, European room by European room, to Connecticut, and reassembling it there. It had taken him three years to complete the job, and the number of flatcars that were used varied according to whom you asked. Some said twenty-three flatcars had carried the load. Others said one hundred and twenty-three. (Once, Hugh's mother had proposed as an epitaph for him, “Lie lightly upon him, O Earth, though he laid many a heavy load on thee.”) And it had cost him, to complete the task, all of the half-million which the new power company had paid him and, as the family ruefully admitted, “probably a great deal more.” The family had tried to talk him out of it, tried to persuade and argue with him that the feat was impractical, but he could not be swayed.

Ogden Pryor had been a man who had lived by ancient and crusty maxims. “If at first you don't succeed,” Hugh had found, inscribed in the familiar large, strong hand in the flyleaf of one of his grandfather's books, “try, try again!” His grandfather had tried it again, in Connecticut. He had dammed the Rampanaug River. At night its rushing waterfall still lulled you to sleep and pounded in your dreams. He had built another dynamo, begun to generate his own electricity again. His new plant was even bigger than the last, and enough current poured from it to light most of the county. But when you looked back on it, his decision to try it all again seemed like the sheerest folly. It seemed inconceivable to Hugh that his grandfather had not bothered to find out (but he had not, and did not find out until his power plant was finished and operating) that a state ordinance forbade any private power lines to cross any state-maintained road; that the only lines which were permitted to cross were those of the Connecticut Light and Power Company. Ogden Pryor had never been able to budge this law, though he had battled with the state legislature until the day he died, and his correspondence on the matter filled an entire filing cabinet. Why hadn't he looked into such things ahead of time? No one had ever known but Ogden Pryor. Perhaps, as Hugh suspected, his grandfather's mind was already beginning to crumble. Hugh was never sure. But at any rate, the vast wells of power that the new plant was capable of producing were never used for anything more than to light Ogden Pryor's rebuilt house.

People often asked why, when he had built the house again, he had built it as a castle, with crenellated roofs, flying buttresses against the west wall, with those two fat square towers rising above it surmounted by serrated battlements. Inside, the new house was identical with the old. Outside, it was built with the same stones. In Massachusetts, the only thing that remained of the first house was the set of Italian marble columns. Why had he left them there? No one really knew, but they were still there, and Hugh had seen them once when he had gone to Baldwin to visit his Pryor cousins. They rose weirdly above the undergrowth that had taken over the landscape like four druidic shapes, cracking in the weather but now totally wrapped with wild vines. The reason Hugh's mother always gave for the columns that had been left behind and for the new house's castle style was this: “Poor Papa,” she said, “misfigured a little bit on the amount of land it was going to take to hold the house when he built it again here on the hill. When he had it about half-way built, poor soul, he realised that he was going to have two whole rooms left over, with no place to put them. So he decided to put them on top of the house, as towers. Well, when he'd done that, he decided that the house should have traditional castle trimmings to make it look right from the outside. So he added the battlements and the buttresses and all the rest. Naturally, Carrara marble columns didn't go with a castle, so he left them behind in Baldwin.”

But the real reason, Hugh had often thought, was probably both simpler and subtler. In his defeat, wasn't it likely that this embittered man had built his warlike residence as a gesture of his hatred and defiance—not only against his former home in Massachusetts, but against everyone? Didn't the towers speak equally to his former townsfolk, who, he felt, had betrayed him, and to the whole world which had also betrayed him? Wasn't it significant that the two top rooms that the towers held, rooms that were approached by separate staircases at opposite sides of the house, had never been finished on the inside? They were bare, hollow, and meaningless rooms that held nothing but dust and that, as far as the house was concerned, were suited for nothing. The two rooms were closed off now; no one ever used them. Hugh's mother, who had said that every castle should rightly have a ghost, had invented a ghost for this one. “Old Chief Rampanaug,” she called him, and she insisted that his restless shade prowled the battlements at midnight. But, Hugh thought, if there ever was a ghost in the castle it would be his grandfather's ghost. And this ghost would not prowl, but would stand in one of the tower rooms, challenging the countryside to come and get him.

Hugh had a very indistinct memory of his grandfather, who had died when Hugh was only five, and he knew him mostly from the portraits which hung in the house, and from the photographs of him in the family snapshot albums. He had heard, though, that Grandfather Pryor had become quite eccentric in his later years. After his wife died, he never tolerated visitors. Though the house was listed in the
Connecticut Guide
, and there were those who suspected that he himself had had it put there, his major pastime had become charging out of the house with a shotgun to frighten away the sightseers. He had let the inside of the house succumb to disrepair and dirt. Every morning, in good weather, he went down to the plant and checked its operation, reaching it by crossing the dam's narrow lip above the waterfall, the rushing water funnelling around his bare ankles as he went. And, one morning, he had fallen from the dam and been drowned in the boil of water below, a bizarre end to a bizarre career. His two daughters had inherited the house jointly, and Hugh's mother, who had married Allen Carey when she was barely seventeen, had announced that she would like to live there. Her sister Reba, who had never married, maintained a room in the house, but only came for visits.

Hugh was thinking about the house now as he walked up the long flight of white stone steps towards it. He had said good-bye to Edrita at the corner of the drive, after coming out of the woods. And now, seeing the house ahead of him with lights glowing behind several windows—it was already growing dark—he was thinking again that it was an ugly structure, and that he had never really liked it. It was only because his mother, with her fondness for the whimsical, had liked it that he had ever tolerated it and thought of it as home. His mother had always thought the castle was “amusing.” There had been a time when “amusing” had been his mother's favourite word, and she still used it from time to time. It was she who had named the place Rampanaug Towers, and had had the words emblazoned, in florid pink, on her stationery. “We live in the most amusing castle,” she sometimes said to total strangers. “Come see it some time. It's thoroughly haunted, of course. It will amuse you.” But the castle was neither amusing nor very pretty. It was merely big. And it had, from an architectural standpoint, a number of strange things about it. There were the windows, for example. A traditional castle, one might suppose, would have narrow slitlike windows. But his grandfather had been fond of sunlight, and so the windows were all enormous—great, cavernous squares that marched up the towers' sides and gave the building a vacant, half-expectant expression. Then—another odd thing—there were two front doors. They stood at the front of the house, side by side. One, which was slightly smaller than the other, was supposed to be a tradesmen's entrance, and the other, larger door was intended for guests. But the effect was so confusing that no one—neither tradespeople nor guests—ever knew which door was for whom, and the family used the two doors interchangeably. The smaller door led into a room that had once been called the service room, and that had contained the laundry in the old days. But his mother, when she had moved in, had done the house over completely and this room was now called the front room, a sort of reception room that she had furnished with tall, stiff-backed, gold-painted chairs. The larger door led into the main hall, where the great oak staircase was, where other doors opened out into the rest of the ground-floor rooms.

Crossing the terrace, Hugh tried first the smaller and then the larger of these two doors and found both of them locked. He rang the bell, and waited for Palpal-Latoc, the Filipino houseman, whom his mother had nicknamed Pappy, to come and open it for him. Pappy came and opened the door and, bowing, stood back to let him in.

“Hi, Pappy,” Hugh said, and took off his old field jacket. Pappy took the jacket, bowing again, and disappeared with it.

The living-room was dark and, at the door, he stopped and fiddled with the panel of light switches until, in the vast, high-ceilinged room, a few lamps came on.

The oddities about the house continued inside it. There had been, of course, a lavish use of electricity. Everything could, in some way or another, be turned on and off with a switch. The fireplaces throughout the house were electric, and the portraits on the walls, which had been recessed in the panelling, could all be bathed in light from hidden niches near their frames. Over the living-room fireplace, there was a magic-lantern-like photograph of the Wellesley College pond set into a circular aperture which had been cut in the stone mantel. This photograph also could be lighted from behind—a view, he understood, of which his Grandmother Pryor had always been very fond. And in the high panelled ceiling had been placed literally hundreds of small electric globes. These were operated from a separate switch panel, and could be regulated so that the ceiling would emit everything from a soft, other-worldly glow to a light, as Hugh often put it, “bright enough to light a night baseball game.” But the ceiling lights were hardly ever turned on any more because the bulbs, high and remote, were difficult to change when they burned out. The room now was empty and quiet, except for the distant and endless rumble of the waterfall above the river.

The room had been redecorated since the last time he had been up for a visit and, when he had first seen it yesterday, he had not been sure that he really liked it. “Your mother's got herself in the hands of a new decorator,” his father had written him. “Everything's got to be black and white marble, it seems. Costing me a pretty penny!” The black and white marble had been placed, in bold squares, on the floor of the front hall and in the living-room. All rugs had been removed. The new decorator had also predicted a return of Victorian decor, and had urged Alexandra Carey to “get in heavy with Victorian before everybody else does.” The large living-room had been filled with massive, truculent pieces of Victorian furniture—high armoires, chests, stiff little love seats and marble-top tables. The decorator had discovered, in an attic somewhere, a number of Rogers Groups, and their little figures, in bronze, played checkers and sang Christmas carols and otherwise entertained themselves on table-tops and chest-tops around the room, appropriately lighted. It had been the decorator's idea, too, to cover the upper walls, above the panelling, with what looked like gold plush but actually was, as his mother explained to him, “not plush at all, but a silk-flocked-velours wallpaper that looks like plush and really costs much more than plush,” and the decorator had suggested that the doorways be draped with heavy velvet portières, which hung on gold rings from gold rods.

The decorator's name, she had told him, was Titi, and he was French. “Titi has the most marvellous idea,” she had said. “You must meet him. You'll be terribly amused by him. I'm dying to have him go through the whole house. Of course Titi's an absolute fairy, but I do think fairies make the best ones, don't you? The best decorators, I mean. Titi has a little friend named Waldo. Goodness, but I sometimes think your father is the most
obtuse
man. Do you know what he asked me, darling? He asked me if I was falling in
love
with Titi! Can you
imagine
? Wouldn't you think your father would be able to tell, being a man? Heavens! I caught Titi and Waldo holding hands the other day in the library. I think they'd just been about to kiss. Waldo's always pinching Titi's little bottom whenever he thinks I'm not looking.”