The Bone Key (25 page)

T
HE
G
REEN
G
LASS
P
APERWEIGHT

When he died, Eleazar Siddons named me as one of the executors of his will. This responsibility was both unlooked-for and unwanted; he had been my guardian from the time I was twelve, and I had hated him as much as he had hated me.

My co-executor was Mr. Siddons’ godson, a blank-faced, decent man named Henry Levington-Price. After the funeral, when that fat basilisk, the widow, had been carried off to the house of her spinster cousins, Mr. Levington-Price and I met the lawyer, Mr. Eversleigh, at the Siddonses’ house.

Mr. Eversleigh was the son of the Eversleigh who had been the lawyer of both Mr. Siddons and my father. I had chosen when I reached my majority to place my affairs in the hands of another firm, so I had never met the younger Mr. Eversleigh, but I recognized him instantly. He was an eerily accurate replica of his father, even down to the narrow, gold-rimmed spectacles and the three-strand comb-over. I told myself vehemently that it was silly to be afraid that I would walk back into my childhood and followed Mr. Eversleigh and Mr. Levington-Price into the study.

The room looked exactly as it had looked when I had left the Siddons house for good at the age of eighteen, as if the intervening years had never happened, as if my escape had been nothing but a dream. It still seemed to me that at any moment the door might open and Mr. Siddons come in, his mouth as vicious as a snapping turtle’s, the cane he favored switching back and forth at his side. I reminded myself that I had just seen him buried and set myself to listen to the lawyer.

The will was a simple document. The bulk of the estate went to Mrs. Siddons, with small bequests to Mr. Siddons’ two goddaughters, a larger bequest to Henry Levington-Price, and “ ‘to Kyle Murchison Booth, by whom I did my duty during his minority—’ ”

Mr. Eversleigh broke off with a cough and gave me an uncomfortable look over the tops of his glasses.

“Go on,” I said. “I . . . I know how Mr. Siddons felt about me.”

“ ‘I bequeath his choice of one object from my house, its value not to exceed fifty dollars, and the choice to be approved by my wife, Hermione Eldred Siddons, and my godson, Henry Levington-Price—so that he may remember me.’ ”

There was a short, appalled silence.

“It would have been less insulting to leave you nothing at all,” said Mr. Levington-Price.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “That, er, that was the point.”

I knew the incident to which Mr. Siddons had been referring. When I was fourteen, I had come back from my prep school for the summer to discover that the Siddonses had sold my parents’ house. It had been the last time I had sought a confrontation with Mr. Siddons, and in my memory I could hear my own voice, shrill with indignation, “You didn’t even leave me anything to remember them by!” and see the vicious, self-righteous thinning of Mr. Siddons’ lips. The caning he had given me had left me unable to sit down for a week. I supposed I was pleased, in a vindictive way which horrified me, that the memory had rankled him so badly.

The lawyer said, “That’s it for the substance of the will,” and read off the closing legal formulas.

It took perhaps two hours for Mr. Levington-Price and me to finish our obligations. When we were done, and Mr. Levington-Price had generously arranged with Mr. Eversleigh that if anything else came up, I should not be bothered with it, they both looked at me uneasily, and Mr. Levington-Price said, “Do you want to choose your bequest now, Mr. Booth? I’m glad to wait, I’m sure.”

I was about to say, No, thank you, I want nothing from this house, when I remembered that several of my parents’ belongings had mysteriously ended up in the Siddonses’ possession. I said, “ . . . Thank you. You’re very, er, kind.”

“It’s no trouble,” Mr. Levington-Price said. He grimaced and added, “I’m not looking forward to facing Mrs. Siddons.” Politely, Mr. Eversleigh pretended not to hear.

We began a slow, methodical parapeteisis through the house. I felt like the foulest kind of vulture, peering at the Siddonses’ furnishings, wondering how much they were worth and if they had belonged in my parents’ house before. I was and am sure that invoking such a feeling, a beslimed sense of moral uncleanliness, was precisely the reason that Mr. Siddons put that clause in his will. He had never forgiven me for suggesting that he partook of the sin of avarice.

I was disturbed to discover how few things I could identify positively as having belonged to my parents. Everything in the house was familiar, but I had lived there for six years—and had done my best since then to forget the house, my guardians, even my parents, whose deaths had felt so powerfully like betrayal. And those few things—the vanity with the beveled mirror, the original John Singleton Copley, the set of Sèvres china—were all worth far more than fifty dollars.

I came to the front parlor in this state of gloom, Mr. Levington-Price and Mr. Eversleigh lingering tactfully at the door, and began to investigate the drawers of the Chippendale secretary—which, since Mrs. Siddons did no writing, served only for ornament. One drawer stuck. I tugged at it; it shot open and stuck again with what seemed like almost sentient malice, hurling the single item within to the very front of the drawer. I recoiled so hard that I nearly fell over backwards, catching myself at the last moment on my right hand and twisting my ankle painfully.

“Mr. Booth?” said Mr. Levington-Price.

“I’m all right,” I said, a purely reflexive lie.

Inside the drawer, the green glass paperweight stared at me balefully.

I had found the green glass paperweight very shortly after I had come to live with the Siddonses. They took no pleasure in my company, and, although they had not exactly encouraged me to spend most of my time in the disused rooms on the third floor, they had certainly placed no hindrance in the way of my doing so.

A week or so after my thirteenth birthday, in a shabby, miserable sitting room whose windows looked out on nothing but brick walls, I opened the drawer of a three-legged end table and found the green glass paperweight inside. It was of a size to fit comfortably in the palm of my hand—at thirteen I was already gangly and awkward, and my hands were as big as some adults’—its texture smooth and ridged at the same time and infinitely pleasing. It was heavy for its size, as if it were stone rather than glass. In color it was a pale green; it would be wrong to call it “milky,” because that suggests opacity, and the green glass paperweight was luminously translucent. I used to stare into it for hours, imagining that if I just looked hard enough, I would find it to be truly transparent. But it was never quite—except for once, and that might have been a dream.

I had already learned that the Siddonses classified as “stealing” touching anything that did not belong to me, so I put the paperweight back in its drawer before I left the room. But I remembered how it had felt in my hand, and I crept back up to that third-floor sitting room several times in the next two weeks, to sit in the dust, cradling the paperweight in my hands, staring into it and pretending that it was a magician’s crystal ball. After a caning from Mr. Siddons—he seemed to believe that I was clumsy on purpose, and if I was just punished enough, I would stop being intransigent and stop breaking things—I decided that I did not care if they punished me for stealing. I took the paperweight to my bedroom, and that night I lay in bed, its hard, cold smoothness cupped in my palms, and imagined that if I looked into it, I would see Mr. Siddons being eaten by Apollyon. The fantasy made me feel better; it was the first time I had been punished by the Siddonses that I had not cried myself to sleep.

I was sent to Brockstone School that spring term; I had not attended in the fall because of my father’s slow dying, and the Siddonses did not want to wait until the next school year began. The schoolwork was no difficulty; even coming in half a year behind, I was well ahead of my classmates. But I made no friends, being too shy to venture an approach to anyone and everyone else having found their particular friends months ago. The boys began to say that I was peculiar and stand-offish, and I was an easy target for bullies. When I was sent back to the Siddons house for the summer, I wrapped my hands around the green glass paperweight and imagined my tormentors being burned in the fiery furnace that did not touch Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Mostly, though, I used the paperweight as a means of catharsis for my hatred of the Siddonses. Every time Mr. Siddons caned me, every time Mrs. Siddons said to one of the ladies who visited her that I was “backwards” or “disturbed,” I would go up to my room and lock the door—although I was not supposed to—and sit on the bed with my back against the wall, the paperweight cradled in my hands. I stared into the paperweight’s cool depths and thought about Mrs. Siddons being eaten by dogs, like Jezebel, or the earth opening beneath Mr. Siddons’ feet and swallowing him whole.

I came to imagine myself as putting my anger in the paperweight, along with all the horrible things I thought and did not say. I had never been a voluble child, but it was in my early teens that I began to stammer and pause—or even stop dead in the middle of what I was saying—to be unable to get through a sentence before the person to whom I spoke impatiently finished it for me. Everything I said in the Siddonses’ hearing was offensive; I could not express an opinion, state a fact, or ask someone to pass the butter without Mrs. Siddons remarking that in her day children were brought up to be nicely spoken and she couldn’t imagine what my poor mother (with the word “crazy” never spoken but always implied) had been thinking. Or if Charybdis was sleeping, Scylla would bark that there was no need to mumble, and weren’t they teaching me how to behave like a gentleman at that damned expensive school? And if I said nothing, one or the other of them would fix me with a petrifying stare and demand to know what I was thinking. They did not trust my silence.

All this I poured into the green glass paperweight. And gradually, as time dragged on and my life did not change, it came to seem to me that the paperweight was responding. It never warmed, no matter how long I held it, but I began to see—or to imagine that I saw—flashes of light deep within it, and it began, contradictorily, to seem to admit less light into its depths, as if it were clouding up from within.

I should have been scared. Twenty-one years later, I
was
scared, staring at that thing in the drawer and remembering the dream that—perhaps—had not been a dream. But I had been barely adolescent, friendless, grieving still, trapped under the authority of people who hated me. I continued my orgies of hatred, pouring anger and venom and vengeance into the paperweight, and the paperweight continued to suck those things out of me. By August of the year I was fourteen, I cannot remember ever being angry except when the paperweight was in my hands. Without it, I became passive, meek, infinitely apologetic; holding it, I raged and seethed and hated, as if I were a cup running over with poison. If Mr. Siddons’ sin was avarice, then mine was surely wrath.

And then, in the last week of August, the last week before I had to return to Brockstone School, I had the dream.

But it was not a dream. I had told myself, day after day until I finally forgot about it, that it was a dream, but now, crouching awkwardly on my heels in the Siddonses’ front parlor, I knew it had not been a dream. And I had known it was not a dream at the time. I had been wide awake.

It had been late. I had heard the Siddonses come upstairs, separately, first her heavy and ominous tread, then his light, swift stride, like the tapping of an insect against a window pane. When I was sure they were both asleep, I sat up in bed again, found the paperweight in the dark by feel, and surrendered myself to my fury.

After a time, I became perfectly sure that the paperweight was glowing. I bent over it, closer, and the clouds within it parted, and I saw, clear as daylight, trapped within the paperweight’s green shell, the image of myself: a skinny, gawky boy with untidy brown hair, his ankles and wrists protruding from his pajamas, sitting cross-legged on his bed in the dark, hunched over something in his hands which glowed green.

As I watched, the boy got out of bed, still clutching the paperweight in his left hand. He crept silently to the door, out into the hall, down the long, cold stairs. He moved smoothly despite the darkness; at the bottom of the stairs, he glanced over his shoulder, and I saw that his eyes glowed the same green as the paperweight. He went to Mr. Siddons’ study, slipped a key out from under the blotter, and unlocked the bottom desk drawer. He took Mr. Siddons’ loaded pistol out of the drawer and started back toward the door.

My hands spasmed, and I dropped the paperweight. The light died out of it instantly. My hands were cold, and my heartbeat was too fast, too painful. After a long moment, I fumbled my handkerchief off the bedside table and picked up the paperweight. It sat inert, a lump of glass. Without giving myself time to think about it—for if I had thought about it, I would surely have panicked and brought down disaster upon my head—I got out of bed, slipped out of my bedroom, and snuck back up to the third floor sitting room where I had found it. I put it back in the three-legged end table, still wrapped in my handkerchief, and crept back downstairs to bed. Two days later I returned to Brockstone School and began the process of convincing myself it had all been a dream. By the Christmas holidays, I had succeeded in forgetting about the paperweight entirely, and I had not thought about it again from that day to this.

“This,” I said, and I barely recognized my own voice. “I take this as my bequest.”

Mr. Levington-Price came with me to speak to Mrs. Siddons, since her approval, too, had to be secured. He saw how troubled I was, but he was compassionate and did not ask me to explain myself.

Mrs. Siddons was sitting in her cousins’ front parlor, knitting. I could feel myself becoming mesmerized by her knitting needles, just as I had as a child. It took a real effort to drag my gaze away from them, and I made no effort to look her in the face.