First, I went into a shop and bought a decent-size travel bag. A girl my age who arrived anywhere without a stitch of clothing or any possessions would surely attract more attention, I thought, recalling that it already
had, so I then went into a department store and bought socks, undergarments, some pants and shirts, and a few simple dresses. I even bought myself a cap. After I had those things and some basic toiletries, I felt more confident about traveling alone.
I discovered that Quincy was connected to the regional subway system and was the fourth stop. At the station in the city, I found a magazine advertising hotels and apartments. One in particular caught my attention because it looked so historic and yet unpretentious. It was the Winston Rooming House. I went to a pay phone and called to see if I could make a reservation. The woman who answered sounded old, maybe as old as Thaddeus Bogosian. Mrs. Winston seemed very suspicious. I was tempted to ask her if I was the first person ever to inquire about available space.
“Where did you get my number?” she asked with a tone of suspicion.
“You have an advertisement in the
Daily Tripper,
” I said.
“I do? Well, it was probably something my nephew, Ken, did without telling me. He thinks I need looking after, but I’ve been running this rooming house for close to thirty-five years, thank you. I always believed the right sort of people would find their way here without me doing a song and dance about how nice and clean my place is.” She paused as though she wasn’t going to say any more, but before I could speak, she asked, “How long do you plan on staying?”
“I’m thinking about looking for a job in Quincy,” I said. “At least a few weeks, if not longer.”
“Um. You sound very young. I should warn you that this is a very quiet place. I have some long-term regulars who demand it as much as I do.”
“That’s exactly what I’m looking for, Mrs. Winston, a very quiet place.”
“Um,” she said skeptically. She still hadn’t told me whether she had space available. “Well, you stop in, and we’ll see what we see,” she said, clearly sounding like someone who wouldn’t take just anyone into her rooming house.
“Okay.” I nearly laughed at her obvious New England independence, but then I thought that she and her place might be exactly what I needed in order to keep a low profile. Besides, from what I could see, there were quite a few other possibilities if that one didn’t work out. I headed for the subway train to Quincy. When I arrived, I looked for a taxi to take me to the Winston Rooming House. The driver not only knew it well, but he also knew Mrs. Winston, who was apparently quite a local character.
“Her family line here goes back to the mid-eighteenth century,” he said, “and she’ll let you know it every chance she gets. There are lots of people around here who are that way. They aren’t unpleasant or anything, but they’ll let you know they have a special claim on Quincy, a claim even on the air you breathe. Where you from?”
“Out west,” I said. The less anyone knew about me, even a taxi driver I might never see again, the better it was, I thought.
“Yeah, well, wherever that is, it’s different here,” he
said. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror but then stopped talking, as if he was used to people who didn’t care to talk about themselves with strangers. I could see in his face that he was full of questions for a young girl like me arriving in Quincy and heading for a rooming house, but I turned my attention to the city.
There was a calmness in the way people moved about. The late-spring sunshine seemed already to be a great contrast with the darkness I had traveled through to get here. Everything had a lazy, laid-back atmosphere. We had been living in Los Angeles long enough for me to feel at home there, but it was so much larger and so much more populated that even though I was still in a city with close to a hundred thousand people, I felt as if I had stepped into a small town. It was just large enough for me to disappear safely but small enough for me to feel I was in a friendlier, warmer community. Maybe it was all wishful thinking, but I needed wishful thinking right then. I had lived most of my life believing I was an orphan. My father had plucked me out of anonymity and given me a name, and although I didn’t have a real mother living with us, I had Mrs. Fennel looking after me the way a mother might, and I had sisters. I had a family. Now I was all alone again. This time, I was truly an orphan, but this time, my chances of finding a family and acquiring a name were next to nil.
The taxi wound its way through busy city streets before turning off and following a more circuitous route to a very quiet side street with about a dozen houses. Some were relatively modern, but interspersed
were much older structures. He stopped before a large, rectangular, two-story wooden building with rows of windows, chimneys at both ends, and a grand-looking portal centered in the façade. Of all of the houses on the street, it appeared to have the most land, with a richly green lawn cut in a perfect rectangle. The driveway was gravel, and except for some potted flowers in the front, the property looked quite simple and unpretentious. Just off the street, a very small wooden sign in script read “Winston House, 1748.”
The taxi driver got out to open my door and get my bag out of the trunk. “You’re not exactly right on top of all the action here,” he said, looking down the very quiet street. No one was outside of any house. Nothing was moving. It looked more like a three-dimensional painting.
“Thank you,” I said, and paid him the fare without any other comment. He looked at the front of the Winston House, shrugged, and got back into his taxi. I stood watching him drive off and then rolled my bag along the slate walkway toward the front entrance.
There was an old-fashioned door ringer that you had to turn. I did so and waited. No one came to the door, so I did it again. Twenty or thirty seconds later, the door was tugged open, and a tall, thin woman with charcoal-gray hair in a chignon stood glaring out at me as if I were an unwanted vacuum-cleaner salesperson or something. She held a dish towel and was drying her hands. There was a small sign next to the door that read, “No solicitors permitted.”
“Yes?” she said.
“My name is Lorelei Patio. I called earlier about a room.”
“Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door.
I thought that was quite rude. For a few moments, I debated turning around and walking off to find another rooming house or hotel. The taxi driver was right about the neighborhood, however. I saw nothing remotely resembling a place to stay. It was a good three or four blocks back to the busier street.
The door opened again, and this time, a much shorter woman in a gray dress with a white lace collar looked out at me. Her dark brown hair, which looked at least shoulder-length, had been gathered into a soft knot at the top of her head. Some strands had been pulled from under her hair band and curled over her forehead.
She raked over me with her soft hazel eyes, sizing me up and then nodding. “Just as I thought. You’re pretty young. I hope you’re eighteen at least, otherwise you’re wasting your time and mine,” she said. Her voice was firm but not nasty.
“I am,” I said. “Are you Mrs. Winston?”
“Well, who else do you think I’d be?” she asked, and followed that with a one-syllable laugh. She turned, and the woman who had first greeted me stepped up beside her. “What do you think, Mrs. McGruder?” Mrs. Winston asked her.
“A risk at minimum, Mrs. Winston. She has the face of an angel, however.” She drew closer and looked at me harder. “I see no trouble in her eyes now, but these eyes have seen trouble,” she continued.
“Exactly my thoughts,” Mrs. Winston said. “Well, come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll see about you.”
Once again, I didn’t know whether to be amused or angry. I wasn’t at the Winston House to be interviewed for a job. I was there as a paying customer. They both stepped aside to make way for my entrance. I picked up my suitcase, hesitated, and then entered the house. Mrs. McGruder stepped forward quickly to close the door behind me.
I was pleasantly surprised by the brightness and the color scheme of the entrance hall. The walls had apple-green and white paper, divided into broad panels with white molding. The wainscoting was stained dark green. On the floor was a green-and-white-checked rug with a plain border, and against the wall were a settee and two chairs with white woodwork and green upholstery. The white console opposite was beneath a mirror. A green-and-white-lattice plant stand held purple and pale yellow irises. Ahead of us was a white stairway with box trees in green tubs at the foot of it. The air was perfumed with the scent of fresh spring flowers.
“This way,” Mrs. Winston said.
I followed them to the right to enter what I thought was a small, rather cluttered sitting room. Every available space was taken up with antiques—clocks, statuary, sepia photographs in old frames, music boxes, and, of course, leather-bound books with yellowing pages. The furniture looked as if it had been there from the first day anyone had moved into the house.
There were large, comfortable-looking mahogany
chairs, a sofa, and two footstools grouped around the fireplace. To the right of that was a table with a lamp, some books and magazines neatly stacked, and two more chairs nearby. Across the way was a tall secretary with a straight chair. The woodwork, walls, and fireplace were a soft gray. The rug was a plain velvet, and the curtains were in a chintz pattern with green foliage. Despite how crowded the room was, it did look cheerful and cozy.
Mrs. Winston indicated the sofa for me, so I lowered my suitcase and sat. She took one of the chairs facing me, but Mrs. McGruder stood off to the side near the entrance.
“This rooming house has been in my family for over two hundred years. It didn’t begin as a rooming house, of course. Families were a lot larger back then, but over the years, as our family thinned out, some moving away, we began to take in boarders. I’ve been doing it from the day I was married to Knox Winston. We raised our two children in this house while we had three boarders. They became members of our family. I’m telling you this so you will understand why it is so important to us to know all about the people who want to stay here for however long that might be.
“Now, I will say, you are the youngest person ever to wish to do so. Naturally, then, we would want to know a little more than usual about you. If this is offensive to you, please be assured that you won’t be hurting our feelings by leaving right now.”
She didn’t look at Mrs. McGruder. I did and saw her staring at me so intently that I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated. In some ways, she reminded me of
Mrs. Fennel, who had the eyes of someone who could look through your very soul.
I shifted my legs and nodded. “What do you want to know about me?”
“Well, for starters, why are you in Quincy?”
“I wanted to start my own life, and I wanted to start as far away from my father and his current wife as I could,” I began.
My story seemed to unfold as I told it, emerging from real events as much as from things I invented. My older sister Ava, when she was training me to take over her position in our family, had told me that we have a unique ability to fabricate on the spot. “We do it so well,” she had said, “that we come to believe what we invent.” She’d laughed. “Sometimes it’s impossible to distinguish what really happened from what we claim happened. It’s in our nature to be deceptive, because deception is protection. Whether you want to be a good liar or not, Lorelei,” she’d said, “you are.”
“My goodness, why do you want to be as far away as possible from your father?” Mrs. Winston asked, this time looking at Mrs. McGruder, who narrowed her eyes and nodded softly, as if she had always known what I was about to say or, more accurately, create.
“Where are you from?” Mrs. McGruder asked before I could respond.
“Southern California, Los Angeles,” I said.
She nodded at Mrs. Winston. “Thought so,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’m an only child,” I said. “I was very close with my mother. We were more like sisters.”
Mrs. McGruder liked that. She walked over to sit beside Mrs. Winston.
“In fact, I knew she was very sick before my father knew,” I continued. “During a routine physical exam, the doctor discovered that she had bone cancer. My father was never one to tolerate sickness and weakness, either in my mother or in myself. Whenever I was ill, he practically ran out of the house and always left everything for my mother to do, so you can imagine what he was like when she told him the bad news.”
“And they wonder if women are stronger than men,” Mrs. McGruder said.
Mrs. Winston nodded, pressing her lips together. “I should know,” she said. “I had to take care of my paternal grandmother, didn’t I? My husband found every excuse to avoid seeing her when she was in the hospital, too.”
“Don’t I remember. The burden you had,” Mrs. McGruder said, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. “Any other Christian soul would have collapsed under the weight.”
I could see I had begun to swim in the stream of their sympathy. I sighed and pressed my fingers against my eyes as if to stem the leaking tears.
“I was the one who took my mother to every doctor’s visit,” I continued. “My father was on one of his so-called business trips when I had to take her to the hospital that final time. He never said good-bye. I tried to do it for him, but my mother knew I was only trying. You can’t hide the truth from someone on death’s door. Lies and hypocrisy are turned away.”
“Poor dear,” Mrs. Winston said, nodding. She looked at Mrs. McGruder. “Some of us have no choice about when we have to grow up and put away childish things.”
“Amen to that,” Mrs. McGruder said, and clicked her tongue again.
I took a deep breath and looked away. I was actually forcing back real tears by now. Ava would have been proud of me if she were sitting there, I thought, but I was thankful she was not and hoped she never would be again.
“My mother died a few months ago,” I said without looking at them first. Then I turned slowly, dramatically. “Later, I discovered that my father had already been seeing this woman while my mother was dying in the hospital. It was like having death stab me in the heart a second time.”