Bittersweet (39 page)

As we walked toward the Dining Hall, Galway took my hand. We were going to end this, once and for all.

We mounted the steps quietly, but it was obvious, as soon as we swung open the doors, that every Winslow I’d ever met—Ev, Athol and Emily, Banning and Annie, the Kitterings, even CeCe—was gathered there, dressed in black and seated in makeshift rows as though to create a congregation. The crowd was facing the closed, gated kitchen, in front of which Birch stood, hands folded, head bowed. He lifted his eyes at the sound of us. And then they all did, the great herd of the great family, the young and the old, each and every one, lifting their blond heads and casting their blue eyes upon us.

Birch gestured to a seat that had been saved for Galway in the front row. Galway squeezed my hand—I thought it was a temporary good-bye—but he held his ground, and the doors came to rest behind us. Panic settled on me; were we about to be indicted of something?
Why else would they all be here, waiting for us? I nearly dropped Galway’s hand, longing for the virtual anonymity I’d enjoyed in my early days at Winloch. I felt the impulse to apologize, then run.

The Winslows turned back to Birch, but his eyes stayed upon us. A faint smile grew at the corners of his lips. I couldn’t bear to look at him, but to look away would be to show my fear.

“I trust you received the message I left in Boston,” Birch’s voice boomed across the space.

Galway didn’t skip a beat. “Yes, Father. We came as soon as we could.”

Birch dismissed us in a glance. Then he spoke to the gathered group. “As I was saying, she was a strange woman, but her oddities didn’t detract from her unique vision of the world. She was funny. She was stubborn—” At this, there were some chuckles from the family, and a dissolve, from a woman on the left, into a sob.

It dawned on me that someone had died. That this was a memorial service.

“Linden was my sister,” Birch solemnly intoned, confirming my fears, “and death won’t change that. I’m glad the end was quick—” His voice cracked as he fought back crocodile tears.

So Indo had finally died. A stunned, numb sadness settled in my chest. As Birch pretended to struggle, letting his shoulders quiver enough to gain sympathy, but not so much that he was rendered speechless, I realized how perfectly in control he was. He was playing the convincing part of the devastated mourner, and nearly everyone believed him.

He had won. She had lost. I believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was partly my fault that she had given up, and that he held all the power now; I had been unable to find the proof she wanted, needed, to expose him. That I had failed her only meant he was now free of her. I’d even lost Kitty’s journal; worse, someone else—probably Birch—had it in his clutches. And now Indo was
dead and her horrible brother was standing before a roomful of his followers, smugly eulogizing her, tasting victory, and there was nothing I could do about it. Fury mounted inside me, at my own incompetence, at the cancer that had eaten Indo up, at the horrible man before me, tricking everyone with his false grief.

“My sister was a materialist,” he continued, his supposed sorrow ebbing, his hands gesturing animatedly, as though he were running a PowerPoint presentation. “She loved beautiful things. Not expensive things, not necessarily, not diamonds, not lavish vacations or caviar, but little boxes she collected from her travels. Fabric from the souk. Photographs taken on a backpacking trip to Machu Picchu …” Birch went on, but something he’d said caught, like a fishhook, at the corner of my mind.

Indo—a materialist. That was certainly true; her small red cottage was packed to the gills with collections and whimsy, an abundant stockpile of too-muchness. She loved her things. And then, I thought of it—the Van Gogh. In her bedroom, on the last day we’d spoken, she’d cried out for it: “my painting.” But when I had tried to use the Van Gogh as an incentive to tease out more information, she had started to laugh maniacally, insisting it was too late for her. I’d thought her mad. But maybe there was something more concrete at play. Maybe she had started laughing—and wanted the painting in the first place—because it, in itself, was important.

I had to get to it. Perhaps it could tell me what Indo had not.

Birch droned on. The congregation grieved. But I knew that to truly memorialize Indo wouldn’t be to sit in a closed room listening to someone she hated speaking in platitudes about her. To honor her would be to carry on her cause.

Knowing it would cause a disruption, but not caring anymore, I pulled my hand from Galway’s and backed out of the double doors behind us. I would run as fast as I could.

I
sprinted down the stairs, up the road and over the hill, into the long meadow. Past Clover and the other cottages, and toward Trillium. I dashed to the screened-in porch. No one seemed to be inside. I placed my hand on the screen door and yawned it open, heart pounding, bracing for a gun, or a bear, or a vampire, but then I was just standing on Birch and Tilde’s porch. The summer room’s doors stood open, and the Van Gogh waited for me like a piece of ripe fruit ready to be plucked. I walked toward it.

“Lovely, isn’t it,” came a reedy, small voice the instant I stepped in line with the painting. I wheeled around. There, in the chair where Athol had caught me the night of the wedding, sat Gammy Pippa. She was as small as a girl, wrinkled, knobbed. She listed to one side. The scent of talcum powder wafted off of her.

“Good gracious, dear,” she replied, “you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shook my head stiffly.

“I couldn’t stand all those hypocrites talking about Linden as though she was some kind of saint,” she remarked, blinking up at the masterpiece. I watched her eyes dance over the lines of the painting, before they searched the world beyond me, out on the porch. “The light comes off the water just as it did when I was a girl.”

She was only an old woman. Strange, nosy, but aged enough that I could speak to her of sentimental things, admire the room, flatter her family, and she wouldn’t know I had come to see the truth, once and for all.

She examined me carefully, looking me up and down. After a moment she asked, “Who are you?”

Even better. “I’m Mabel,” I said, extending my hand. Her small palm gripped mine. Her knuckles were knobby. “We met the night of the wedding. Mabel Dagmar. Genevra’s roommate.”

“I know your name, Mabel,” she said, irritation creeping into her voice. “But who are you?” She was hot to the touch, her pulse throbbing through her veins, as though her whole hand was a living creature with its own tiny heart.

“Who are you?” she asked again, this time, her words ringing with playful demand. She pulled at my hand with surprising strength. “Who are you?”

I felt the same strange sensation as when she had touched my face in the tent—of transparency, light-headedness. Of her looking deep inside me and seeing what I wanted to keep hidden.

“My grandnephew Jackson,” she began, her words spilling forth buoyantly, “came to see me the day before he died. He’d asked everyone to tell him the truth and no one would. ‘Who am I?’ he cried over my kitchen table. ‘Who am I?’ So I asked him, just once, what he thought the truth would do for him—why he wanted it so badly. He told me he believed it would set him free.”

The old woman’s eyes sparkled triumphantly. “So I told him,” she said, her jaw tightening. “I told him exactly who his parents were. I told him the truth—the truth everyone else was too afraid to tell him. ‘There,’ I said, once it was out in the open”—she chuckled to herself, as though this were an anecdote that brought her great joy—“ ‘now you know, your father is your uncle, does that set you free?’ ”

My mouth had gone dry.

“Depending on what you believe about the afterlife,” she prattled on, “I suppose you could say that the truth did set him free, out into the great expanse—”

“How can you say that?” I said, tearing my hand from her clutches. “It was because of what you told him that he killed himself.”

“Wouldn’t you have done the same?” she asked slyly, looking straight into my eyes. And I realized: she knows. Somehow, she knows what I told John. She knows I am partly responsible for his death.

“Don’t feel ashamed, girl,” she said, answering my thoughts. “The truth is a noble grail to seek. But if you’re after it, you must imagine, first, what it will mean to get it. The truth is neither good nor bad. It is above evil. Above morality. It doesn’t offer anything besides itself.” She nodded resolutely. “I’m proud I told Jackson the truth. I’m glad he died knowing who he was.”

“The product of brother-sister rape?” I balked.

The old woman shut her eyes, as though exasperated at my histrionics. “My dear, it would be best for you to decide now whether you are strong enough to know the truth, especially if you’re going to be a part of this family …”

My heart pounded. I wanted Galway, didn’t I? Didn’t being with him make me a Winslow? “I don’t know,” I said vaguely, unable to tear myself away from her even as she horrified me. “I don’t know what I want.”

“Well, you better make up your mind,” she said impatiently, looking back out toward the porch. “They’re going to wonder where you ran off to.”

I swallowed. “I want to know about the painting.”

“The truth?”

I nodded.

“Go on,” she said, her gnarled hand pointing up at the Van Gogh.
I looked back to the masterpiece—trees, sky, and meadow. It was beautiful. But it held no answers beyond itself. “Go on,” she said, pointing in agitation, irritation creeping back in her thin voice, “take it down.”

It was a priceless work of art. I laughed. One sharp, incredulous laugh. “I can’t.”

She struggled to her feet then, hoisting herself up with the help of the armchair. I looked back to the painting. It was three feet long and at least two feet high. The frame was gilded and heavy—I imagined I would just barely be able to lift the work off the wall, and wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it back into place. But I feared it would crush her. “This is silly,” I said.

“You want to know the truth, I’ll show you.” She was still struggling to stand. She’d barely make it to the painting, let alone lift it.

“Sit,” I insisted, stepping before her. She narrowed her eyes and obeyed.

The story the Van Gogh told changed up close. Instead of long, fluid lines that made a picture, it was globs of paint. Midnight blue, magenta, and gold rippled with skill and effort.

I lifted my hands to perch along the edges of the frame and lifted. It was heavy, but not as heavy as I’d thought. I tottered backwards, unsure of how it was attached to the wall. It unhooked easily. Pippa pointed to its back.

I balanced it down onto the floor. Turned it so I could see its reverse. Even then, I was doubtful I would find anything worthwhile.

But I was wrong. For there, on the back of the Van Gogh, was an official-looking stamp, the words in German, surrounding a swastika.

B
ack in summer’s first days, in mid-June, I had found myself strolling, alone, past the Dining Hall. I was in search of Ev. We had passed the inspection, Winloch was filling with residents, and I didn’t yet know that she was sleeping with her brother. All I knew was that she’d promised me a swim and, while I was getting ready, had wandered off, this on the day that my catalog bathing suit had finally arrived. I was incredulous. Irritated. Greedy for her attention.

In sight of the Dining Hall steps, I spotted Indo just as she spotted me. The older woman was perched on the wooden boards like an awkward bird, angled toward the sun, dressed in a purple sweater and wide orange pants. She lifted a hand and shielded her eyes and called to me in stentorian tones.

“ ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree …’ ”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Then followed her gaze to my crisp new copy of
Paradise Lost;
I’d reluctantly resolved to head back down to the Bittersweet cove for a bookish afternoon if Ev was nowhere to be found.

“Such a wee scholar you are, Mabel Dagmar,” the older woman intoned in a Scottish accent as I detoured toward her across the emerald lawn. I didn’t know whether she was teasing or flattering me.
“You do realize, my girl, that most nincompoops have no idea what the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree actually was. Most people believe the apple merely represented Knowledge. But we know better. It was the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nothing less than the curse of consciousness. Of moral responsibility. Of always, ever after, having to choose between what is right and what is wrong.”

This was long before I truly knew the Winslows; before I discovered the worm at their center. I had only just begun the search for Indo’s proof, but I knew nothing of Kitty and her journal, or a swastika on the back of a Van Gogh.

Indo guffawed as an early summer breeze skittered over us. “Knowledge! Knowledge.” She shook her head. “As far as I’m concerned, there is such a thing as knowing too much for your own good. Don’t you agree, Mabel?”

I can’t know for sure how I would have responded, but I sometimes wonder if it could have been the truth. That early in the summer, it might have been a relief to unburden myself, to confide that, yes, I already knew too much, entirely too soon. To confess I had come to Winloch to forget. That I believed her family, beautiful and rich, would deliver me from the bitter knowledge of my own making.

But instead I heard Ev calling my name.

I turned to see my friend emerging from behind the tennis courts, Abby nipping at her heels. “I’ve got to run,” I said, watching Ev’s hair halo in the sun.

Indo’s eyes followed mine. “Beware Lucifer’s rhetoric. He’ll seduce you with charisma.” She smiled. Tapped my book.

I glanced down at it. “I haven’t really started reading yet.”

“Well then,” she said crisply, “perhaps you’ll know what I mean by the end of the summer. How darkness infects those among us who can’t resist a juicy tale.” Her eyes lit up impishly: “Beware. You look like such a girl.”