Locked Rooms (28 page)

The road continued to flirt with the sea, coming near and ducking away again, before we turned definitively towards the hills and the engine noise deepened with the climb. My body knew the twists and turns, the scattered farms and cattle lots rang a familiar note in my heart, but the hollow space at the core of me grew: I should not have come; Holmes was right, it was a mistake; it would be bad if I were to find something of my family still inhabiting the Lodge; it would be worse if I did not. I wanted to seize my savaged hair in both hands and scream aloud, just to relieve the building pressure, but I knew that if I screamed, it would be impossible to stop.

So I sat and quivered, staring in hope and apprehension, responding to Donny’s questions with silence or a brief gesture—a flick of the finger to say, “Go right, here” or a nod to say we were on the correct road. I was conscious that Flo was watching me out of the corner of her eye, wary as a horse about to startle, but at some time in the previous couple of miles I had also become aware that Flo was riding in the place my mother had sat, and my mother had usually done something—very soon now, she used to . . . what?

We cleared a corner and the hillside of trees dropped away, and I threw off my rug and shouted, “Wait! Stop!”

Donny slammed on the brakes, causing Flo to choke on her chewing gum and the heavy motor to skid to the edge of the loose gravel roadway, but he managed to stop the machine before its front tyres entered the drop-off. I swallowed hard to push my heart back out of my throat—I emphatically didn’t like being a passenger—and then scrambled over the side of the car to the ground. Donny turned off the engine. Silence took over, broken only by the crunch of their shoes on the gravel as they joined me, the
ping
of cooling metal, and the call of some rude-voiced bird.

Mother used to call out for Father to stop, so she could see the view.

The trees were lush, dark redwoods interspersed with brash young maples, the native oak, and some leathery-leafed tree with peeling red bark. At precisely this point on the road, as if stage curtains had been parted by a pair of huge hands, the forest drew back, revealing a sparkle of blue water.

But something was missing. I stepped to the side, then further, until the very tip of a dock came into view behind the trees. I wondered if the dock had been truncated, by decay or purpose, or if it was simply that the trees had grown up and obscured its length. Studying the vista, I decided the latter was the more likely explanation: The end of the dock appeared to be as square as ever, and the slice of lake revealed by the parted boughs seemed narrower than it should be. I nodded, satisfied, and climbed back into the motor.

Flo and Donny glanced at each other, and I realised belatedly that some kind of explanation might be in order, considering that I’d nearly sent us off the road with my sudden shout. Their hearts were probably still racing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d forgotten until we reached this point that we always stopped to take a look at the lake. If I’d noticed what a state the road was in, I’d have suggested it more gently.”

“No problem,” Donny said. “My baby’s got good brakes.”

He was, I believed, speaking of the motorcar.

We drove on, slowing as we went through the village that was not as tiny as it had been. The general store had sprouted a petrol pump in front, which would mean that the residents no longer had to remember to stop in Serra Beach or Redwood City to fill up their tanks, and the café next door to the store had nearly doubled in size—it now might seat as many as twelve people at one time. The post office looked just the same, and the minuscule library, but I could never have imagined a day when I would see that brief stretch of village lane with more motorcars than horses.

“Half a mile or so, and the road will divide,” I said to Donny. “Keep right and circle the lake. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The lake was small, and in five minutes, I was saying, “We can pick up the keys from that house with the white picket fence. Flo, would you mind awfully going in and asking for them? If I go I’ll get involved in offers of coffee and she’ll stir up some biscuits and it’ll be dark before we get away. Just tell her I’m feeling rather tired, and I’ll call by tomorrow. Oh, and make sure she knows we brought a picnic for tonight, and that we don’t need her assistance to make up beds.” Mrs Gordimer’s garrulous streak was a steady-flowing stream whose levee required constant shoring, lest the flood of words wash over the cabin’s lovely quietude. She more than made up for her husband, whose speaking voice I had heard perhaps a dozen times over the years.

“Sure,” Flo said, and hopped out to trot up the spotless stones of the front path between brutally pruned standard roses, all an identical peach-pink, that hadn’t changed in as long as I remembered. Nor had the face that appeared at the door before Flo could touch the bell, the face that frowned mistrustingly at her explanations before peering past her at the motor. I leant forward, trying to look even more wan than I felt, and waved a feeble hand. Before the caretaker could come and deluge me with sympathy and questions, Flo laid a gentle hand on her, no doubt reiterating her lie about the state of my nerves.

In a moment, she had retreated; a minute later, and Flo was coming back down the walk with the keys swinging from her finger-tips. Mrs Gordimer came out onto her porch—whiter of hair and more stooped, but I’d have sworn wearing the same exact gingham dress she’d worn when I was a child. I waved at her again, and silently urged Donny to get the motor under way. He heard me, and did.

The track down to the Lodge had been maintained to the extent of having the ruts smoothed and the branches trimmed away, but Donny had to creep the last few hundred yards, chary of ripping out some vital piece of the underpinnings. Finally, the trees opened up, and we were there, at the living centre of my childhood.

Chapter Eighteen

N
ot much to look at, actually. Certainly nothing grand enough to
impress our Pacific Heights neighbours: an original one-storey house made of stripped logs with a newer two-storey addition to one side, cedar shingles going slightly mossy on the roof. However, standing and looking at the way it sat on the earth, one became convinced that here was a house whose doors would shut true, whose windows would not rattle in a breeze, whose porch floor would not attack a child’s running feet with splinters.

Father had called it the Lodge, and although Mother had complained that the name made it sound like the gate-house to a manor, the name had prevailed. In this basic summer house on the lake, we had been Family. When we were in San Francisco, my father had worked long days, appearing in our lives briefly in the evenings, generally granting us one whiskey-and-soda’s worth of time in the parlour or library before he wished us a good-night and sat down to dine with Mother. Week-ends were better, but often he and Mother were taken away by social obligations—either that, or Levi and I were dragged along for social obligations thinly disguised as family events, such as one memorable picnic at the beach that ended with me bloodying the nose of the snobbish son of the bank’s vice-president, who had dared to make a remark about my little brother’s Jewish features. Family museum trips were better, but too highly organised to be much fun.

Here, however, Father had been himself. Which was only proper, since he had built the Lodge with his own hands.

The original building had comprised four spacious rooms: an all-purpose sitting room at the front, a grand fireplace and dark-panelled walls, and beside it a smaller room that had served as my father’s bed-room in his bachelor days, converted into a billiards and smoking room after my mother came. Behind these rooms were the kitchen, with the table at which we often took breakfast, and the dining room, opening onto a broad stone terrace that nestled between the back of the original Lodge and one side of the two-storey sleeping addition. The newer wing, five bedrooms and two baths, had been added (along with electric lights and hot-water heaters) when he had brought civilisation, in the form of Mother, back from England.

Father had lived in a tent among the trees for the better part of two years during the construction of the Lodge, which coincidentally amounted to the time it took his parents to withdraw their demands that he return to Boston and assume his responsibilities there. He had chosen the trees, helped to cut and haul them, milled the boards, and stacked them to dry. He had learnt a score of trades in the course of the building, become a brick-layer and a glazier, a carpenter and a plumber. He’d rebuilt the fireplace chimney three times before he was satisfied that its draw was clean, and spent a solid month experimenting with the decorative wood-work on the porch railing.

Despite the later additions, this house was his from foundation stones to roof-tree; every time he walked in, he looked around and made in the back of his throat a small sound of profound relaxation. It was, it now occurred to me, the precise equivalent of my mother’s touching of the mezuzah as she entered the Pacific Heights house.

“Do you want me to open the door?” asked Flo at my shoulder.

“No,” I said sharply, then softened it to, “Thanks, but I was just remembering how lovely it was to come here, and get away from the city.”

“Really?” she asked dubiously. I laughed, suddenly seeing the rustic building through the eyes of Miss Florence Greenfield, and she hastened to add, “I mean, I’m sure it’s a very nice house, and I know a lot of people have summer places or hunting lodges or things, especially with Prohibition and all, but it’s just, well, I’m not really a briars-and-brambles kind of a girl.”

“Not to worry, Flo—the plumbing works, there are no bears here, and I’m sure we’ll find it clean and tidy. It’s only for a couple of days, and if it’s too dreary you two can always go back early.”

But as I stepped forward with the key, it occurred to me that Flo was the one responsible for the transformation of the Greenfield house, and that to a woman with Deco sensibilities, the rusticity of the Lodge might prove a challenge.

The key moved easily in the lock; I stepped across the threshold: no trace of mustiness in the air. The house was cool, certainly, but as we moved into the rooms I was relieved to find it as tidy and dust-free as it had ever been—clearly the interdiction against trespass in the Pacific Heights house had not extended here. There were even a couple of fairly recent
Saturday Evening Post
s laid on the table between the sofas, just as Mrs Gordimer had used to provide for us. I told myself that Norbert would have informed her that I was coming to California, and therefore a visit of the Lodge’s owner to the lake was possible—it was better than thinking that the poor woman had replaced these offerings and removed them, unused, every time she’d cleaned over the past decade.

Flo’s cautiously polite noises had turned to honest appreciation as soon as she had seen the interior, and now, as she worked her way towards the back, her voice took on a note of enthusiasm and even—once she saw the view—wonder.

“Oh, Mary, this is perfectly swell! It’s like something from a fairy-tale book, the flowers and the lawn and the lake—and look, there’s even a boat, just sitting and waiting.”

I moved, reluctantly, to join her at the expanse of windows that formed the back wall of the original cabin, and saw that, indeed, the little sail-boat lay ready. One glance at its trim paint told me that it had also been recently placed there—no doubt by the stout Mr Gordimer, grumbling and snapping at one or another of his youthful assistants as they wheeled the vessel out of the boat-house and down to the dock. He’d always knelt, laboriously, to pass a clean cloth over the boat’s prow before nodding to himself, then climbed to his knees, turned his back on the gleaming object, and marched up the dock and the lawn with the weight of the world on his shoulders, muttering glum but inaudible invective to himself all the way—most of his conversations were conducted with himself.

I’d once caught my mother smiling at his retreating back; when she’d noticed me watching her, she had winked, as if we shared a secret.

I pulled my eyes from the waiting boat and made myself look at the wide stretch of green that spilled down to the water’s edge: my mother’s realm. Father had built the house, but Mother had formed the garden, and my dread for this spot was greater than any other. She had spent hours here every day we were in residence, pruning and weeding, planting the flowers and shrubs she had brought from the city, putting into effect the changes she had worked out with the help of Micah—who, as far as I knew, had never set foot here. It was all her, from the tiny pink rose she had placed in the shelter of the apple tree to the dancing fuchsias she had placed in shady corners and the wild-flower seeds she had scattered in the lawn, every inch of it her vision and her labour. I was afraid that seeing the garden without her in it would act like a knife in my heart.

But I had reckoned without the effects of time: What I saw was not her garden. Oh, the bones were there, the trees and shrubs she had planted, the shape of delineation between cultivated and wild, but the flesh had changed beyond anything she had known. The lilac, once a trim and obedient resident of the far corner, now appeared to be making serious inroads on the native growth. Another shrub—a peony, I thought—was halfway to being classified as a tree; the tiny pink rose had all but overcome the apple in a riot of colour; and the English flowers she had nurtured around the perimeter had long ago broken for freedom in the lawn. The grass, which Mother had always preferred shaggy as compared to the tight trim of English lawn-grass, was nearly a meadow; although it had been mown in the past couple of weeks, pink daisies and yellow dandelions gave it the appearance of a tapestry.

It was startling at first, then reassuringly foreign. And as I began to relax out of my apprehension, two thoughts came to me: that it was indeed magical, as Flo had said; and that it was precisely what my mother had been working towards. I was grateful that Mrs Gordimer had not inflicted her tightly pruned system here.

My ruminations were interrupted by a voice previously unheard here—Donny’s, coming from the next room.

“I don’t know about you girls, but I could sure use a drink after that drive.”

“Oh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “A nice long drink, sitting on the lawn, watching the sun go down, that would be heaven. There probably isn’t any ice,” she added sadly.

“There probably isn’t any booze,” Donny commented, his voice saying that this was clearly a more serious problem. “I knew we should’ve brought along something stronger than fizz. All I’ve got’s my flask—I don’t suppose we could unearth the local boot-legger at six o’clock on a Sunday afternoon?”

“There should be both,” I said, and followed his voice into the kitchen.

If the Gordimers had laid out the magazines and the sail-boat in anticipation of an unannounced visit, they might well have put milk in the ice-box, tea in the cupboard, and bread in the bin. I pulled open various doors and found them occupied as I had expected, so I took the ice-pick from its customary drawer, wiped off its rust on the clean dish-towel that hung below the sink, and handed it to Donny.

“Chip off some bits from the block in the ice-box. Flo, you’ll find glasses in the second cupboard there. And unless the mice have figured out how to use a cork-screw . . .” I laid my hand on the tea caddy that sat on the set of narrow shelves along one wall, and tugged. Then I tugged harder, hanging my weight against it. Flo and Donny both stared, no doubt wondering both why the caddy had been glued down, and why I so wanted it off. Slowly, the apparent canister gave way, tipping forward: Its tin sides concealed, not tea, but a lever for unlocking a sliding door. With a grinding protest of gears long unoiled, the caddy folded itself face-downward on its shelf. I stuck my fingers against the edge of the shelf, pulled hard, and the entire wall of shelves trundled slowly to the left and vanished behind the cupboards.

I turned to grin at my amazed companions, both of them crowding to see beyond my shoulders. “My father had an oddly elaborate sense of humour,” I explained. “He used to offer my mother a glass of tea, and this is what he meant.”

“And that in the days before the Volstead Act!” Flo said.

“Even more appropriate now,” I agreed. I started to move forward into the dim hidden closet to peruse the bottles, then stopped dead at a tinkle of glass skittering across the floor. “Don’t come in, there’s glass on the floor. Some of the beer bottles probably exploded in a hot spell. However, apart from that, there appears to be pretty much whatever you like,” I said to Donny. “Gin?”

“Any vermouth? I could make us a shaker of martinis.”

I’d never had a martini, but I obediently handed out the bottles. While he and Flo searched the cupboards for a shaker of some kind, ending up with a decidedly rustic Mason jar, I found a broom and swept up the shattered bottles—two of them. I also gingerly took the remaining three out to the dust-bin, although they were probably no hazard in the cool of that day. When I returned, I was checking over the other contents of the hidden closet when an arm snaked past me holding a cold, clear glass.

“Cheers,” said Flo. I took the glass, lifted it in response, and took a swallow. After that, I stood where I was for a while until my eyes had stopped watering. Flo studied the shelves with her own clear eyes. “What a nifty little room, Mary. Like a safe-room.”

“More or less. My father figured that there would be long stretches where the house was empty and didn’t want to leave things out in the open to tempt passers-by. Not that there’s anything particularly valuable here, but there’s the candelabras, and a nice set of old silver in that chest, and two or three of the cameras he used to fiddle with.”

“Ooh, and a phonograph! Does it work?”

“I should think so, although the music will be old.”

“How sweet, we can lace up our whalebone corsets and tap our toes decorously to the old songs. Donny, be a sport and wrestle that old Victrola out onto the lawn, would you?” She followed him, clutching a stack of recordings in one hand and her drink in the other; I ran a last eye over the shelves, made a mental note to find some oil for the mechanism, and wrestled the door shut, tipping the tea canister back upright to lock it.

We drank rather a lot that evening, between the martinis, the wine Flo had brought for our picnic dinner, and a bottle of very old brandy from the hidden store-room. We drank and we laughed and we listened to the music of another generation, Flo and I taking turns dancing with Donny on the uneven stones of the terrace. When it was dark, we placed candles in the three tarnished candelabras and ate our picnic on the lawn. The night was so still that the candle flames scarcely moved, and the occasional moth drawn by the light was soon extinguished. Afterwards, we returned to the terrace, where Flo and Donny danced in and out of the light. They found a tango, a dance that had been new and racy during my family’s last two summers here, and set about it with great seriousness that soon gave way to laughter. I realised that I was rather drunk and very tired, and that before too long I would become maudlin; to top it off, we hadn’t made up the beds.