Farthest House (11 page)

He leaned forward, meeting her gaze at eye level. “You don’t suppose that big hairy thing I saw running around here got into your room?”

Willow knew only one big hairy thing. Her mind cried
No, no, it’s a trick.
She didn’t want to remember Friar, and she knew not to believe in good things: Papa promising they’d go for ice cream and never taking her, promising trips to the library, promising new socks and panties. Broken promises made her feel slapped inside. She shook her head, she shouldn’t believe because Friar was Jonah’s dog now. She’d been in the kitchen after Mémé’s will was read, her arms wrapped around Friar’s neck while Papa carried their bags to the car and stood outside the front door and yelled at her to “Come on.”

Mable stopped stirring whatever was in her bowl. “Don’t you worry about Friar,” she said, “he loves Jonah, and I have a feeling he’ll do Jonah some good.”

Then Papa called again, louder this time, and Willow stood at the kitchen window and watched Friar and Mable cross the yard and Jonah’s door open and Friar’s tail begin to wag for the first time in three days.

Now, these months later, she searched Papa’s face, wanting real assurances. With his sallow skin and cheeks sinking in like palms, he’d turned into an old man. She rocked on her toes and grabbed his forearm. “I wish, I wish,” she said, wishing that she never wished.

He put a hand over hers. “Go on, take a look.”

She couldn’t move. Never knowing would be better than disappointment.

He squeezed her hand. “I know,” he said. “You go on now and have a look.”

She ran down the hall, hurrying so fast hope couldn’t catch her. Her hand shook as she turned the knob and swung open the door. Friar lunged at her, both forepaws hitting her chest as they went over together, spilling into the hall in a tangle of Willow’s thin arms and legs and Friar’s heavy fur and wet tongue.

Only after they rolled on the floor did Willow notice the large black easel from Mémé’s attic and the other things: blank canvases, brushes, and tubes of paint. Mother Moses lay on the bed.

She ran back, Friar at her heels, and into Papa’s arms.

He held her. “I figured some things belonged to you.”

He had wine and cigarettes and newspapers. She had permission to paint and Mother Moses and Friar. She’d study herself into the fifth grade, and while she did—going to school every day—Friar would take care of Papa.

Only much later, did she notice the box of books in the corner. On her knees, she unpacked them, showing each to Friar: a book on cave art, one on mythology, a book of French painters,
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
, a few of my watercolor journals, and the book she’d loved of Frida Kahlo’s work. She opened the book to a painting of monkeys draped around Kahlo’s neck and turned pages to see masks that cried real tears, two Fridas hooked together by a long vein, a painting with bones in Frida’s head. The book also had a photograph of Frida in bed, her back in traction, and a brace of white sheeting keeping even her head immobile. The picture proved Frida had a real mustache and eyebrows like two black wooly caterpillars butting heads. Neither Frida’s back nor her face were fixed. Not one bit fixed. Her eyes, looking straight at the camera, said it too:
Not one bit fixed.
Willow had already known people with stupid backs could paint, and now she wondered if people with stupid backs had to paint no matter what.

The book was license. She had permission to paint, like Frida, telling whatever stories came to her, no matter all the Sister Dominic Ageneses in the world.

She considered how only Mémé knew her favorite books. Mémé must have been at Farthest House to tell Papa which ones to take.

That night, with Mother Moses over them, she and Friar slept in her bed.

14

Growing up, I hadn’t been entirely without support. I had Mme. Francoise, who saw not just with the eyes in her head but also with the eyes in her heart. She didn’t turn from the pain she saw in me, not like the rest of the maids and cooks who averted their eyes when I was near. But what could they have done? To question out loud what they suspected would have meant immediate dismissal. They were women lucky to have employment. Coming forth wouldn’t have changed The Beast’s routines or his beliefs. They’d have simply been replaced with others more willing to look away in exchange for bread to place in their children’s hands.

Mme. Francoise was tiny and bent and seldom spoke. I don’t know how many years she sat on her little stool in the stone kitchen before she approached me. I had walked by her a hundred times, and seen nothing, maybe a shadow, or a fixture as meaningless to my child’s mind as a stick broom. Then she came. I was outside, hiding between bushes. Crying, with my bloomers torn off, I rubbed and scratched between my legs. Such itching and burning I’d never known.

She took me inside, sat me in a bucket of warm water, cloudy with herbs. I recognized some of the things she boiled before adding them: lavender, chamomile, walnut, anise, and Damask rose. There in the kitchen, no clothing beneath, and the skirt of my dress blossoming over the pail sides, as though I simply sat on a little stool, I soaked. I don’t remember how often she needed to save me in this way, but I remember the instant relief of sinking into her remedy, antibiotic and restorative and being content to sit there long after the water was cold. At the time, I didn’t know enough to associate the infections with The Beast, though she must have.

I’m convinced that she was allowed to stay at the villa in part because she went nearly unnoticed. She was half phantom, hunched alone in her corner, an old wool scarf tied around her head, a gnome or ancient fairy. Under certain slants of light, I could catch a tincture of the fiery red hair she once had. When she wasn’t walking the hills harvesting wild things, she worked soundlessly at her table with her herbs and flowers, chopping, pressing, and grinding for her creams and powders. Sitting in her concoctions, I watched the staff approach her with their colds, flu, and female troubles. They would stroll to her stool, waiting until she looked up. She studied them, at times there was whispering, and after a few minutes, she shook powders or crushed leaves onto tiny squares of paper, and with her chloroform-stained fingers and nails, she folded the paper and gave instructions. “Boil a cloth along with this. Wrap it tight around the wound,” or “Make a warm tea, strained well. Drink it three days. No more.”

I loved the scents rising from her table and her peaceful silence. While the others chatted and cackled amongst themselves, her quiet was louder. There was the afternoon, too, after my having been with The Beast, the sky black and slicing with lightning, when I feared running across the fields and climbing into my cave. Mme. Francoise saw my sorrow, and her eyes told me she knew about the morning I had. Her concern doctored me, the acknowledgment of my sorrow, and I sat down next to her eager to be taught. Later that afternoon, when The Beast was ready for his tea, when it sat on his tray ready to be delivered, she opened my palm, put a pinch of something in it, and with her eyes motioned to the tea cup. Then, she screeched at a rat that dropped out of the air, and as the maids screamed and grabbed brooms, I hurried and opened my hand over the waiting cup. The powder vanished, like a white leaf sucked down a drain. For three days, the house was in an uproar, The Beast fuming with unstoppable diarrhea.

My desire to learn everything she knew increased. I picked flowers for her, learned the weeds around there and their properties. At least for a short time. Was it my mother who pulled me from the kitchen and the company of women “beneath” me? With so many secrets needing kept, was she afraid of Mme. Francoise and her crone sight?

I’d already spent enough time in the kitchen to learn something of dyes. I began making tints and painting the local weeds and flowers. My mother and The Beast found the pastime acceptable. Wanting me complacent, they were happy to supply me with books of botanical prints done by other artists. While I painted, they knew where I was, who I wasn’t talking to, and I didn’t return from the mountain after hours away with torn undergarments. Painting, I became a young Mme. Francoise, quiet, unseen, learning everything I could.

Living with Thomas in Peu de Nid, I continued painting. He gifted me with a magnifying glass, a wonderful aid, and studying the tiny fibers and gradations of colors, I learned more about herbs and apothecary, even as I searched for my reflection, painting what I could of my soul. I worked studiously, as Luessy did after me in the medium of words, and Willow did in the years after having my easel brought to her. She, too, was a young Mme. Francoise, alone in her room, working, learning, searching for a handhold on her wobbling world. Julian was happy to see her there—surviving despite him.

How often, as her paintbrush lifted color from her palette to a canvas, did she feel my presence in the room and my attachment to the easel? Thomas built it, hid the gift until he finished and presented it to me on our first anniversary. Did he not realize it was too heavy and required my calling him every time I wanted it moved? Or did he want to be called from his curry brush or his photographic plates to move the piece of furniture when I needed help?

Often, over the next few years, as Willow turned the pages of my old journals, her fingers brailing the fading colors and shapes of orchids, roses, and datura, she must have believed the works held some largess simply for having survived the decades and for having a connection to Farthest House.

Through the remainder of grade school and her first year of high school, structure sustained her: school, homework, housework, reading, and when she could, coaxing Papa to throw the football in the backyard because he needed the exercise. And painting. At school, her friendships were casual and with girls as unpopular as herself. They sat together at lunch, but she avoided getting too chummy. She had no desire for a
best
friend who might want to visit, have sleep-overs, and who’d see Papa sitting at the table with yellowing newspapers and green wine bottles. She owed Papa all his secrets and kept confidences only with Friar.

Age and puberty finally changed that. Not her love of painting, but its ability to be enough.

The last day of her freshman year, she walked out of Our Lady of Supplication High School hearing the cars pulling from the parking lot and vibrating with music by the Beatles. Some headed for the nearest golden arches, others to the mall to buy summer shorts, halter-tops, and swimsuits. She had no money for the first, or the second, and no desire to try on revealing clothes.

“Chicken,” the girl at her side said.

Willow, a head taller, tried to shrink her height, slumping ever so slightly. “I’m not chicken, I just don’t want to go shopping.”

“Chicken.”

With everyone off and excited about the summer, the thought of going home to her static life filled Willow with dread. She headed for the library, her only free resource. She didn’t put her new books in her satchel. She held them against her chest like a shield, proclaiming to any kids who saw her that she didn’t mind being alone, and she preferred books over friends.
Brainy-ack
stung less than
loser
or
loner
. She carried the books that way up the porch steps and across, not a shield against Papa, but against the gloom holding them both captive.

As she opened the front door, Friar bounded to her with his tail wagging. She bent, dropped her books and wrapped her arms around his neck. “How’s my best friend?” She tilted her face up so his tongue scoured her chin and not her lips.

Julian sat at the table unshaven and holding a cigarette that was hardly more than a stained brown filter between his thumb and index finger. Spread out before him was his customary newspaper and two wine bottles, sitting like sentries. He snuffed the cigarette out in his ashtray already heaped with matchsticks and cigarette butts. “All done?”

Foreboding tracked a thin line of heat up Willow’s spine. The ashtray looked like the site where a tiny house had burned down. She hated things she could almost see and had to push away before she did. She put her books on the table. “Yup. Freshman year is over.”

He refolded the newspaper. The still-growing paper towers hugged the back wall of the main room in shoulder-high drifts and added staleness to the already foul air. He called them his
records
and Willow made herself believe him. Mémé had kept stacks of books and papers piled everywhere, and they’d all been important to her. If Papa read and kept up on recent crimes and who’d been sentenced, then when the time came, he could go right back to his job as if he’d never left. On that day, Red would have a hundred pending cases only Papa could solve.

Julian lifted one green wine bottle, tipped it, and set it down. Empty. He squinted at the other. Empty.

He no longer hid his drained bottles. Willow found them not just on the table, but crawling from beneath the sofa, sitting beside the toilet, teetering atop the television, and even on the back step where they cupped bits of shine in slants of light: street, sun and moon.

She opened the refrigerator—no milk, no soda, no orange juice. She closed the door and saw Papa using a stained finger and pushing her top library book back an inch, then the second and the third, reading the spines and forming a tiny stairs as he did.

“
Mad Apple?”
His voice more startled than questioning. He picked the Luessy Starmore Mystery from the stack and flung it in the direction of the overflowing trashcan. “You got your report card?”

She went for the book splayed open on the dusty floor. “Why’d you do that?”

His gaze drifted over the wine bottles on the table, but what he saw was a past she was too young to understand. He hoped she never had to, and certainly not at…fifteen. God Dammit, he missed her birthday, remembering only the anniversary of Jeannie’s death. “You got a report card?”

She brushed crumbs and long strands of Friar’s hair from the novel pages. Papa could get the card himself if he cared so much. “It’s in my backpack.”

He took his time, unzipping her bag, reading the grades again and again, and finally, nearly to himself, “We’re showing ‘em, aren’t we?”

Willow’s heart gripped. She shrugged. She didn’t study because she believed they were
showing
anyone or even to make him proud. She liked pleasing him, though the responsibility of having to do so always threatened to sit her down. She studied because she’d never be pushed behind again, because paying rapt attention to instructors kept her mind from roaming around the room, wondering what others did the night before or seeing someone whispering about her. Even waving an empty sweater cuff. She studied because receiving high marks made her back matter less.

Julian and I could see that as she grew, (she’d be tall like him) the gnarl on her back didn’t keep up. Year by year the bone was smaller in proportion to her increasing height. Her mind kept hold of an old picture though, and she thought of herself as
disfigured,
like her soul.

“Those grades call for a celebration,” Julian said, “and hey, happy birthday.”

His raw need made her ache and search for some distraction. “How come you never read Mémé’s books?”

“I’ve read them.”

“Really? Did you hate
Mad Apple
so much you think it belongs in the trash?”

His smile faded. “That’s enough.”

She stood beside him at the table. “You always do that,” she said. “You quit talking.”

“I said, ‘That’s enough.’”

“You can’t just clam up like I’m not here.”

He slapped open his newspaper.

By seven o’clock, the sun still two hours from setting, Julian had left the house, returned with more wine, and celebrated so much he lay draped across his bed, snoring. Standing at the door of his room, Willow stared at the figure on the bed.
Not Papa. Not the man she still remembered him being.

She thought about calling Tory. Maybe there was something Tory could do or undo. Maybe Tory would come, bringing her sewing basket and doll parts and sit at the kitchen table. Maybe the two could talk and fix things. But Papa didn’t want his sister there any more than he wanted
Mad Apple
in the house.