The Glass House People (26 page)

"Can we bring up your painting and show everyone?" asked Beth softly. "I think they should see the original. Of course, I couldn't work in as much detail in glass as you could with a brush. Your painting shows so much more."

"All right," said Aunt Iris. "Bring it up." Her voice was suddenly firm. "I want to see it."

Beth slipped inside. She returned a few minutes later carrying Aunt Iris's canvas. "Wait a minute, everyone," she announced. "If you think
my
stuff is good, take a look at this." She propped the painting on the table next to her window. "Aunt Iris was my inspiration!"

"Wow!" exclaimed Tom.

"I see now where you get your talent, Beth," said Hannah. She leaned forward to read the banner flying from the castle turret. "'Notfilc'—oh,
Iris!
I remember now!"

"What does that mean, Mom?" asked Tom, pressing forward to see.

Hannah shook her head. Grandmother and Grandad leaned over as well, and Aunt Iris reached out her hand as if to shield the painted banner from their eyes. "You made it for Christmas, didn't you, Iris?" murmured Grandmother. "I remember how Clifton loved it."

Beth stood back as her family crowded around the table to lean over her window and Aunt Iris's canvas. They moved back and forth, gesturing, marveling aloud at the details, comparing the version of paint on canvas with the leaded glass. Beth was not surprised when she heard the crack.

The sound wasn't loud, but everyone leaped back from the table almost in one motion and stared down in horror. A single sliver of purple glass lay at their feet.

"Meteor shower," said Tom into the momentary silence.

Grandmother had two bright red spots on her cheeks. Hannah pressed her hands to her mouth. Aunt Iris began crying again. Then the wicker rocking chair creaked as Grandad sat down, and everyone started exclaiming at once:

"That's a real shame—"

"Oh, Elisabeth! I'm so sorry!"

"Hey, I bet I was the one who bumped it—"

"Beth, honey, please forgive me—"

"I'm so clumsy sometimes—"

Beth picked up the shard of glass carefully and placed it on the tabletop. She took a deep breath, then smiled at them. "It's not ruined," she said. "Probably the seam wasn't tight enough. I can fix it. Don't worry, it wasn't anybody's fault."

"Maybe so, maybe so," muttered Grandad.

"But your beautiful work," wept Aunt Iris.

"It'll be all right," Beth said. "Accidents happen."

Grandad rocked steadily, nodding his approval.

***

The next day Beth received her first letter from Ray. She held it in two hands and carried it outside to the swing in the backyard as if it might leap away from her and disappear. She slit the flap hastily and pulled out the single sheet of notepaper. The left-hand edge was ragged where he'd torn it from a notebook. His writing was a dark scrawl across the page:

Dear Beth,

Jane decided to close the shop for a few weeks between evening class sessions and head for the mountains. I went along and we camped in the redwoods. Those giants are really something! I was inspired to do a new window once we got back.

I'll be teaching a Wednesday night class called "Nature into Glass." Jane will be teaching a new workshop called "Glass Portraiture." We hope you'll take one—or both—of these new classes. You're just about the best new artist I know—but you'll need to keep your hand in.

Glad to hear you've been hard at work on a new project, Babe. Give us a call when you get back and let us see the masterpiece! We hope you'll be home soon—it sounds like you've been
having a tough summer, you poor kid! Hey—take some advice from Uncle Ray: Don't let the goons get to you! They're not worth it.

Love,
Ray

Beth dropped the letter onto the grass and watched it flutter across the yard into the rosebushes. After all these weeks of waiting, this was all? A single sheet of paper? A note that filled barely half the page?

She kicked the swing up high, leaning backward to pump herself into the sky. A camping trip—with Jane? Jane Simmons was the owner of Glassworks and even older than Ray himself. She must be in her thirties. Beth closed her eyes against the thought of them together—traveling in the same car, setting up tents (or one tent?), cooking together outside, going on long hikes, talking about the beauty around them, planning new classes. She felt dizzy.

She couldn't have said how much time had passed when Aunt Iris found her sitting on the motionless swing. Her aunt walked slowly across the backyard. "Hello, Beth. I thought maybe your dog needs a walk." Aunt Iris hesitated, taking in Beth's shuttered face. "Would you come with me? Maybe we can stop off at the candy store and say hello. I'd like to taste those homemade doughnuts I've heard so much about."

For a long moment Beth stared at her aunt as if she didn't recognize her. How could it be Aunt Iris, of all people, reaching out to her? Maybe it was her imagination, but Aunt Iris already seemed to have gained a little weight. Her cheekbones weren't so sharp anymore. Neither was her voice.

Beth had to pull herself in from some dark place before she could speak. "Okay," she said finally, and was surprised that her voice sounded normal. She called for Romps, who was lying in the shade of the hedge. "Good idea," she continued in that same normal voice. "I could use a doughnut, too." As they left the yard together, a welcome breeze sifted through the trees and stirred the grass. Beth forced herself not to look back even once to see whether the letter from Ray had blown away.

When they returned from their walk, she went straight down to the basement to repair her window. The jagged shard of broken glass brought to the surface her anguish. She kept her hands steady while she cut and soldered the lengths of lead, though tears came to her eyes and dropped onto the glass.

Even repaired, the crack in the astronaut's lifeline would always be there, easy to see if you looked closely. She thought of Clifton Becker, how his death shattered so many lives in this house. Even if it were possible to repair those breaks, as Grandad tried, the cracks would still be there and would show if you looked closely. She stood back to look at the whole panel. Its soft gleam seemed to deny any cracks at all.

Maybe she should give the window to Aunt Iris as a symbol that cracks
could
be repaired, and the whole picture
could
still be beautiful and bright?
It would be a nice gesture
, she thought, but knew she wouldn't do it. She wasn't sure she even believed it. She wanted to ship her window home and show Ray and Violet. Well, Violet, anyway. The glass panel would look lovely hanging in the big living-room window of the apartment. Whenever she looked at it she would remember this summer, this house. And somehow that wouldn't be so bad anymore.

Working offered her solace. She found herself mourning the break that had severed the little astronaut's lifeline—it seemed exactly the way Ray's letter had severed her own. All summer she'd had him in her head, and in her head he had been waiting for her. The letters she imagined he would write had sustained her through the days and nights of tension and unhappiness. She survived the summer because she imagined his strength holding her together. His love had been a lifeline stretching across the three thousand miles of America. And yet all the time, he had been camping with Jane Simmons!

Beth stayed down in the basement until dinnertime. She cleaned and polished and buffed her window, but still the cracks remained visible.

Tom carried out his threat to teach Aunt Iris something about computers the next morning. The two of them sat out on the sunporch for more than two hours while Tom showed off his expertise and encouraged her to try out the different functions. When Beth came up to call them for lunch, she saw their heads bent together over the portable computer.

"Start with something simple," Tom was urging. "Just type a simple letter or something."

Aunt Iris bit her lip. "I haven't written to anyone in years."

"Just type anything. Here, look." He leaned over her and tapped the keys:

NEW WORK BY IRIS SAVAGE
COMING SOON TO AN ART MUSEUM
NEAR YOU!!

"Silly boy," she said.

"It's not silly! Look how easy it is to change it around," he said, and he pushed another few buttons:

COMING SOON TO AN ART MUSEUM
NEAR YOU!!
NEW WORK BY IRIS SAVAGE

"Very clever," she said. "But you're still a silly boy."

When Beth broke in to remind them that lunch was waiting, Aunt Iris was shaking her head in reluctant admiration of modern technology and of Tom's mastery of it. "Clifton would have loved to write his novel on one of those things," she told Beth.

They headed for the stairs. As Aunt Iris reached for the railing and started down, Tom grabbed Beth's arm. "We'll be down in a sec, Aunt Iris," he said and pulled his sister back to the sunporch.

"What is it?"

His face was a puzzle. She recognized the look; he wore it when he was up against something modern technology couldn't solve. "I found this when I was plugging in the surge protector," he said, lifting a pile of computer magazines from the desk and withdrawing a single sheet from underneath them. He thrust the thin page of yellowed typing paper at her. "It was stuck behind the desk against the wall and I don't know what to do with it."

Even before Beth read the words typed on it, she felt the butterfly wings start flapping in her stomach.

"It's a title page," whispered Tom. "And you get only one guess which book it's from."

Beth didn't need any guesses at all.

The Beasts of Notfilc
by
Clifton Becker
**
Dedicated to my darling! I will love you forever.
**

Tom wanted her advice. Should they throw it away? Or put it back where it had been for twenty years? Should they give it to their mother?

Beth handed it back "Toss it," she said tersely. "We've had enough trouble from old Clifton Becker already. If Mom reads that dedication, she'll start mourning him all over again."

But just as Tom was about to ball the page up, she reached for it again. "No, wait! I guess we should give it to her...." She wasn't happy about this decision, but the paper wasn't really theirs to throw away, after all.

They went downstairs. Grandmother and Grandad were sitting in the dining room while Aunt Iris dished up homemade chicken rice soup. Hannah was at the kitchen sink filling glasses of ice with water.

Beth touched her mother's elbow. "Mom?" She motioned with her head toward the pantry. Eyebrows raised, Hannah allowed herself to be led out of the kitchen. She leaned against the washing machine.

"Is something wrong?"

Tom cleared his throat, then explained how he had moved the desk on the sunporch to plug in the computer before giving Aunt Iris her lesson this morning.

Beth held out the page, brittle and yellow from twenty years of waiting. Hannah looked from Beth's face to Tom's and back again, then wiped her hands on her shorts before taking the paper. She read it in a second and her eyes filled with tears. Too late, Beth decided the best thing would have been to put it back where Tom found it.

"Thank you," Hannah said, and gave them a trembling smile. She walked back through the kitchen into the dining room.

Beth and Tom followed her and sat in their chairs. Hannah stood by hers a moment, reading over the words Clifton Becker had typed so long ago up on that sunporch.

Then she sat down and passed the page across the table to Aunt Iris. "The kids found this," she said quietly. "I believe it's yours."

September arrived with cool winds to blow away the long summer's heat. The leaves on the trees around the house on Spring Street changed to brilliant orange. The elm tree in the backyard turned red. The roses in the side yard dropped their petals onto the grass.

Clifton's grave was in a grove of oak trees. When the wind blew, bright leaves flew down onto the still-fresh mound of earth and rustled against the granite stone.

The day set for the wedding came and went. Iris noticed that her hands sometimes went numb in the middle of the day. Shaking them to get the blood moving again seemed too much trouble She had no enthusiasm for anything now that her heart, like Clifton's heart, was dead. The only difference was that his had stopped beating entirely and hers still pumped blood through a living body. A small difference, really. She discovered with a kind of relief that she simply couldn't eat anything anymore. Food didn't smell good now that she was alone, so why bother with it? She stayed in her room, felt the shutters of her soul coming down. Locking. Late one night in the middle of the month, when her parents and sister were asleep, she limped through the house in a kind of fog, carrying all her art supplies and canvases to the basement and dumping them in a corner. She couldn't imagine she would ever paint again.

A week or so later Hanny Lynn stood on the porch steps in the early morning light, breathing deeply. She welcomed the change to autumn and drew the cold air into her lungs as if it could fill her with new life. She knew she couldn't live here anymore under such clouds of anger and accusation. She would be leaving soon, moving on even as the seasons moved on. She was making changes. She was making plans. When to go, how best to go on from here.

The summer was nearly over. There was a crispness in the air now that chased away much of the humidity. The family in the house on Spring Street found it easier to sleep at night.

When Monica and Bernard came over for a farewell dinner, Hannah invited them to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. And she promised Grandad and Grandmother they'd all be back at the house on Spring Street for Christmas. After the heat of the summer, Beth had a hard time imagining Spring Street with snow on the ground. Tom and Monica took Romps on lots of walks, possibly to talk about their own future plans.