Hotel Paradise (21 page)

Up ahead, Ulub had stopped in front of an oak tree and was running his hand across its trunk. He motioned us over and I saw that carved into the bark was a rough heart. Beneath the heart were hewn the letters AL.

AL. It made me smile. For this was before Ulub started being called by his license-plate letters, and I remembered Dr. McComb had said his name was Alonzo. It made me smile to think of Ulub being an Al. I wondered, too, if the heart was just for him; there was no arrow through it, but I supposed Ulub’s heart had often been pierced.

Except for the birds’ twitters and the soft plopping of occasional pine cones, it was all deathly quiet. It was really like walking through something dead, a dead landscape.

Something slithered across my instep. Prepared for a milk snake, I squinted my eyes nearly shut and looked down. But it was only a lizard, a very small one, now nestled in its camouflage of leaves.

My tongue moved in my mouth, searching for the flavorless wad of gum, before I remembered spitting it out back there among the vines. Yet my tongue still moved. A strange emptiness came over me, and I wondered what would happen to a person whose thoughts trailed away, whose mind emptied out. Who had nothing in his mouth, or in his stomach or in his mind, a sieve through which everything had leaked out, just as on the ground the light-confetti had leaked through the branches overhead. I remembered those gangster movies where the one with the machine gun would tell later how he made a sieve out of so-and-so, blood spewing everywhere. I looked down at the light-droplets fallen through the webs of branches and imagined light leaking out of me like silver blood spewed across the leaves. What I longed for was another helping of mashed potatoes. I knew I was not actually hungry, for it had been only an hour since I had eaten, and yet it felt like hunger. Hunger or this huge emptiness. I felt fainthearted. It was a better word than “cowardly.” Can your heart swoon or sleep? Run away? Hide? The lizard dashed away and woke me from this fantasy, and I saw the others had gone on, and were stopping long enough to get Ulub away from another tree—another heart, I supposed.

We went a little distance, no longer filing along, for what there was of a path was either covered by leaves and twigs or was not even there, and maybe never had been, and what we’d taken for a path was just an old rut in the ground. So we were separate and divided, as if we each had our separate thing we were looking for, but all moving in the same direction. I was closest to the lake, about twenty or thirty feet from its edge. I could catch only glimpses, through the thickness of the brush and the hanging branches and the trailing bend of a willow. Light was turning to nickel, and that made it harder to see the water. I was taking some heart from the silence around me. It could not be penetrated by kitchen sounds or by the rattle of a martini pitcher or by Vera’s waspish commands.

I squinted to see what I could of the lake, fast disappearing in the disappearing light. And I thought of my father. This was my father’s lake, for he came here often, to the boathouse and the spring. To fish for fish that I guess he always tossed back. I do not remember much about my father. I do not think about him much. Other people have come to this lake and gone away, fewer and fewer over the years, almost no one now. But my father seems to hover here still. Finally
we came to the edge of a clearing, and then the clearing itself, and then there was the house. To me it was like coming upon a familiar dream-place, one I’d seen again and again in my dreams. Here it was now, in person, in the flesh.

Slowly we approached it. Mr. Root stopped so that he could light his oil lamp, for it was close to eight o’clock now, that period of lavender light that signals approaching darkness. It was the time when drivers will switch on their lights, even though you can still see clearly. But drivers like Lola Davidow become uncertain in this light. It is always a relief to me when adults are uncertain, for most of the time they claim they’re so right. So Mr. Root grew a little uncertain and lit up his oil lamp. It looked friendly, the small flame spurting in its glass cage.

We paused around back to look at the small porch where a screen door listed, the top dropped away from its hinge. This was the rear door to the kitchen, which we could tell was quite large, for it was still the same room around the next corner, where we stood looking in through a long window with old, watery glass.

Then we rounded another corner and looked in through the same sort of window to what appeared to be a living room or front parlor. Its most prominent furnishing was a grand piano. Against the walls were bluish blobs of old overstuffed chairs and a sofa. There were round tables covered with dark cloths. Ulub now went into an act, waving his arms and trying to talk, his excitement making talk all the harder. He was pointing to the piano and then running back around the side of the house and pointing to the kitchen. We tried to quiet him down a little, and I decided we should go into the house and let Ulub show us what he meant. This is what we did.

Nothing seemed to be locked up, including the back door to the kitchen, and I wondered how the house had kept itself together all of this time and free of squatters. For there were no signs that people had attempted to take it over, nothing except for stubs of candles stuck on little plates. Bread-and-butter plates, my wide experience with them told me. Yet, even they could have been left behind by the Devereau sisters, along with their furniture. I wondered if they had taken flight suddenly. Probably not, though, for no one had ever mentioned their leaving in that way. No one knew where they had gone, either, or if they had gone together.

Mr. Root brought out his matches and lit the two candles on the kitchen table, for it was growing dark and of course there was no
electricity. The table was a lot like Miss Flagler’s, white porcelain, only this one was chipped in a lot of places and dark patches showed through. The four chairs were painted wood. Ulub, still in his pleasurable excitement, gestured for us to follow him into the parlor.

Atop the shawl covering the closed lid of the piano sat three more candles, and Mr. Root went to work again with his matches. He didn’t waste them, lighting only one and picking up the other two candles to hold their wicks against this lighted one. They were still stuck to their dishes, rooted there in candle-wax drips. The room was eerily illuminated now, and the clumps of chairs and sofa sprang into greater relief. There was a big fireplace with a marble mantel, in front of which sat two dark horsehair armchairs with little lace antimacassars, stiffened with age. Several round tables of varying sizes—one behind the sofa, a larger one more or less in the room’s center, two smaller ones beside chairs—were all cloth-covered but absent of photos or knickknacks. Had they held such things, the room would have looked much like Dr. McComb’s sitting room, I was surprised to see. Except that his seemed warmer and more friendly. Well, of course it would be; his had been lived in for all of the forty years or so that this one had been vacant. I could not make out the colors of the wallpaper very well, but the pattern was of vines and weary-looking flowers, petunias maybe. One portrait hung against the wall by a sideboard. It was the only picture in the room and I went to inspect it. The Devereau sisters when they were children, that’s who the three girls in it must have been. Four girls, really, for in the center and below their chin level was another little girl, the youngest in the portrait. The three sisters ranged around her were unmistakably sisters, for they all had the same squarish faces, long brown hair, plaited or loose, and straight-lipped, solemn expressions of people about to be baptized. But the fourth was blond and had a round face and an almost merry look. Pale blond.

I had to shake myself out of thinking it might be the Girl. Time seemed to be melting, running off like a stream or a river, for, of course, she could not even have been born at the time this picture was taken. I figured that the Devereau sisters were probably in their early teens here, but could have been younger, for children always looked pinched and solemn and old in pictures back then. My mother certainly did. If what Aurora Paradise said was true, this blond girl must have been Rose.

Ulub’s arm wavings and guttural words were distracting me, and I turned to see him sitting on the piano stool, punching a finger on the keys and saying something like “Ee wah may-en,” and then he’d punch some more keys.

Ulub kept saying this—“Ee wah may-en”—and Mr. Root had his face screwed up in a terrible act of concentration. Finally, he snapped his fingers: “She was playing!” And when Ulub nodded his head vigorously, Mr. Root slapped his thigh.

“Mary-Evelyn was sitting here playing the piano when you looked through the window?” I nodded to the window nearest the piano, where it was still light enough to see the place where we had been standing out there, looking in. Ulub nodded again, yes, yes. Then he rose and beckoned us to follow him back into the kitchen, where he sat down at the table and pretended to pick up a fork or a spoon and raise it to his mouth. Back and forth from ghost plate went the ghost fork. He also wore a rather dumb expression, which he meant to mean this was not his face but another’s. One of the Devereaus, of course. And then he moved to another chair and changed his expression, and then to the third chair. Ulub was taking all of the parts. In silence we watched him making his rounds of the table until he got the bright idea of having
us
play the Devereau roles.

“Hit own, hit own.”

It was clear enough he meant for us to “sit down,” so we pulled out the white-painted chairs, but hadn’t actually sat before Ulub was pulling at each of us, at our arms, plucking at sleeves and rearranging us. We all wondered about this—I know I did—why Ulub thought one or the other of us was more one or the other of
them;
but we let him have his way. Me he sat at the table’s head, and I wondered which tormentor he had me down as, and whether she was worse or better than the other two. Ubub and Mr. Root sat solemnly, their hands folded before them, awaiting further developments. Ulub smiled a rare smile and continued, clapping his two hands against his chest and pointing into the parlor. “Ah on in air.” Here he made little waves with his hands, patting the air before him. He was going to play the piano, I guessed correctly. Ubub applauded me. It was like charades.

Ulub pointed to each of us. “U cuh nin nen ah caw”—and here he gave a short yell.

No one knew immediately what he meant, so it was up to Mr.
Root and his concentrated efforts. He made Ulub repeat the phrase twice. Both of them looked equally pained until finally Mr. Root, slapping his thigh again, said, “You going to call to us. We got to wait here until you call us in, right?”

Ulub beamed and nodded and left.

“Hell,” said Mr. Root, “he ain’t hard to understand. Don’t see the problem, myself.”

In another moment, an awful raucous noise filled the air as Ulub pounded on the keyboard. Ubub (I could see) was about to rise and protest when a silence as full as the sounds had been came over the room. This was followed by muffled movements and then a cry or call which we took to be his signal. We rose and went through the door to see Ulub, not at the piano, but on the other side of the wall, standing there as if glued to the wall directly beside the kitchen door. I was first in the room, and he pulled himself away and ran back to the piano, where he started crashing around on the keys again. I doubted Mary-Evelyn had played that way.

He beckoned us over and, by means of more gestures and grunts, got us to stand in a semicircle around the piano and stare at him. When Mr. Root started to say something, Ulub furiously put his finger to his mouth. We were apparently not to speak; we were to look at the shamed Ulub—or Mary-Evelyn, sitting there with bent head and laced fingers staring at her shoes, or the floor.

I remembered what the Woods had said about the Devereau aunts not talking to Mary-Evelyn. What she must have been doing was merely listening outside the kitchen door, listening to conversation just to hear others speak. I remembered too my mother’s saying what a “silent little girl” she was, carrying glass plates of tiny canapes around at parties, never saying anything. She had run back to the piano when she’d been discovered.

Ulub was saying something to Mr. Root that sounded like “autumn, summer.”

“Aw noo un-ner.”

Mr. Root looked really perplexed, and Ulub repeated it two or three more times, all the while pointing at the piano keys and rippling his fingers up and down the air above them.

“All through dinner!” said Mr. Root, brightening. “All through dinner! That’s it, ain’t it?”

Now everyone nodded as if all of our fears had been confirmed. I said, “Mary-Evelyn was to play for them all through dinner, and if the music stopped, they’d go check on her.”

Almost ferociously, Ulub nodded.

I bowed my head. I found it truly hard to believe—not Ulub’s story, but that such a thing could happen.

I wondered if it had been a ritual thing, Mary-Evelyn playing the piano while they ate their dinner; if it was her penance that she must entertain them (though I doubted they took much by the way of “entertainment” from it) all through dinner.

Ulub spoke again: “Ee ride.”

Ubub and I looked at each other, and Mr. Root listed forward a little, as if this could help him in his deciphering.

Ulub said again, “Ee ride, ee
ride.”
Seeing then that no one was getting it, he screwed up his face and started to shake with dry sobs.

Mr. Root exclaimed, “She cried! That’s it, ain’t it, Ulub?”

Having made us understand, Ulub stopped heaving and nodded.

I said, “And her aunts, they just stood around and watched her?”

Again he nodded. Ulub looked truly unhappy.

No one said anything then. I guessed, looking around at our faces, no one wanted to. Gathered around the piano this way with our heads slightly bent, and looking down at our shoes, it was like a prayer meeting.

I could think of no yes-or-no question to ask and finally resorted to: “Then what happened?”