The Loves of Leopold Singer (50 page)

Sara thought of Dr. Devilliers at Laurelwood and his practical religion. But that life was gone. She would not see Carleson Peak again. “I would prefer not,” she said.

-oOo-

Marta sat in the wet grass between Leopold and Obadiah. The late morning drizzle put a chill in her bones, and though she knew The Grim One would arrive soon for his weekly visit, she’d stay at the graves a while yet. How had the world changed so radically?

Eleanor and Jonnie married quite soon after the funeral. The day before the wedding, there was a family meeting. Harry as eldest son spoke first. “I'll move to town and run The Post. I’ve let the Adams place.”

“The Adams place?” Eleanor had said. “Then Sara’s parents will not be returning.”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It’s all too mysterious. An advertisement came in to let the house. The managing editor showed it to me as a matter of curiosity before having the type set.”

“So you grabbed it peremptorily.” Jonnie laughed.

“Of course.” Harry looked at Marta. “I plan to be even more involved with the paper than Father was, and I’d be no use on The Farm. It makes sense to keep a house in town.”

“Of course, Harry.” She didn’t care what anyone did now.

Samuel said, “With such a fine house, it won’t be long before some young lady decides she must keep it for you.”

“I'm ready to meet such a one,” Harry said. “But I won’t be without a housekeeper. Josef and his bride will stay with me until their house is built. The place is large enough to shelter all of us and more.”

“Poor Sara,” Eleanor said. “Now she won’t have a home to come to—if she does come back.”

“That’s the mystery,” Harry said. “The place doesn’t belong to Franklin Adams after all. The advertisement was posted from Kingston, Jamaica. The property belongs to a Mr. J. C. Beaumonde.”

“Must be a relative who put up the money to build,” said Samuel.

“Or someone who owed Aristaeus Sande a very large favor,” said Harry.

“Lucky Mr. Beaumonde was smart enough to keep it out of Franklin Adams’s name.”

“That’s unseemly talk from a minister,” Jonnie said.

“A man can work for heaven and think of earth too,” Samuel laughed. “Speaking of which: Jonnie, I’ll be at Harvard at least another year. And really, I have as much talent for farming as my brother.”

“Yes,” said Harry. “So we, Samuel and I, were hoping that you and Eleanor would live here and run The Farm. Surely Father wished that, Jonnie. He was grooming you for it.”

“No pun intended,” Samuel slipped in.

Jonnie and Eleanor grinned, and Jonnie said, “We hoped others would see this solution.”

Marta alone had not laughed, but neither did she frown. So Jonnie officially assumed the responsibilities he had already taken on in actuality, and Eleanor could expect to permanently relieve Marta of her housekeeping obligations. In her early grief, Marta had been grateful. Now she just felt useless, aimless, and lonely.

Then last night she heard sounds in Eleanor’s childhood bedroom. When she went to investigate, her daughter was putting a quilt over a compromised Miss Sara Adams. “Mother!” Eleanor had hissed, waving her from the room.

Sara Adams’ unexpected appearance only made Marta feel worse. It seemed the order she had worked so long and hard to maintain was coming undone all around her. Coming out of her room this morning, she had met Eleanor coming up the stairs. “Is there no husband?”

“No.”

The curt response had sent her to the kitchen to find something to chop or pound. Cook set her to the bread dough, and soon the imperative of muscle memory took hold.

Leopold’s will was clear. The Farm belonged to Samuel and Harry. They had every right to move Jonnie in and make Eleanor the mistress of the house. She would accept her new role as dowager. So was she old now. She remembered the wet pressure of Leopold’s kiss behind her ear. How she ached to feel his touch, if only once more.

She had to get out of the house. Out to the grass between the headstones, in the presence of those who knew all.

She always felt better in the little graveyard. Across from Leopold and Obadiah, the Zehetners had added to their numbers in the world of shades. Gisela was there, and beside her an empty space waited for Jonathan. Willie was to his mother’s left, then George who died from an infected cut, and Thomas, taken by scarlet fever. Old Carl’s marker, at his request, had his wife’s name carved upon it. One day they would all be here, secure from the world.

“I miss your voice, Leopold,” she said. “Do the angels sit at your feet, just to hear the sound of it? Someday I’ll be here with you forever. And will it be so wrong that Obadiah lies between us? For he always did. There was always that one secret I kept from you. You must be his friend there in heaven. He would have no other.”

She thought of the letter Eleanor had received from Sara Adams just last week, posted months before that, with the news of Sir Carey’s murder. She had asked Eleanor to repeat the name of the deceased person after hearing Sara’s description of a kind and well-loved man.

“Sara writes:

Sir Carey died a devout Christian, beloved by all. Hundreds attended his funeral, and there was a great wailing from all the common folk of the Peak.”

Marta had snorted at that. No, she would not believe eternal heaven was any portion of that man’s reward. George Grim’s horse plodded up the long driveway, and she snorted again. “I swear, Leopold, sometimes I find myself in sympathy with Jonathan and Willie. If God loves the likes of Sir Carey and George Grim, then I cannot love God.”

Though the graveyard was behind the house, she could hear the preacher’s groans as he strained up the stairs to the front door. She sighed.

“Dear, what do you think? So many times I pushed you to church. Now one thing or another keeps me home Sundays. It is my good luck, Jonnie is as much a heathen as his father. He tells Eleanor to let me grieve in my own way. I heard him say to her that religion is just superstition. I like to think our son-in-law makes good sense.”

But she had a new secret. She had begun to pray to the Virgin, like a Catholic. She fancied her old brooch as something of a rosary, fingering the snake’s fine scales in the place of beads. These days she remembered the bronze pieta with fond nostalgia. “God’s grace, I am giving myself a pity party today!”

Inside The Farm, Grim drank coffee and waited. He was as patriotic as the next man, but to his last day he would prefer tea. At least in this house, the coffee was laid on with cream and cane sugar and interesting spices. Josef Zehetner kept both families stocked with precious things.

Since the horror of the storm, he visited Mrs. Singer every Tuesday. He doubted he brought her much comfort. The day of the storm constantly replayed in his mind. Why had he been led out on that limb only to fail? Why had the river taken Leopold Singer?

His study of scripture now focused on the Lord’s mysterious ways. His sermons had changed. No longer did he lay down God’s gauntlet before an intimidated flock. Over the last year, he had explored the nature of the Lord’s never-ending love. It had been so long since he mentioned Christ’s chariot, the young people no longer joked about it. Mrs. Singer continued with Lightfeather and the Unitarians, but that did not deter him. He would not abandon her.

He shifted the bundle in his lap to the table so he could rest his coffee on his knee. He had brought the brass teakettle he’d made for Hattie years ago. That morning he’d found it set aside, dull and uncared for, in a corner. The latest Mrs. Grim never used that kettle. She seemed even to resent it.

I and the kettle are the same
, he’d thought,
unloved, dishonored, losing our luster
. He polished it to its original brilliance, thought to give it to Mrs. Singer, and felt a little less sad. When the time came, she could pass it on to her fine daughter. Lyman had no taste for artful things, and Martin was lost to him.

He heard her then, heavy on the staircase treads. But it wasn’t Mrs. Singer. “Good Lord!” He flew across the room.

-oOo-

Only one, Sara thought. Only one misstep, and either she or it—or the both of them—would be gone. In any case, she would be free. Halfway down the stairs, the solution had come to her. So simple, really. She lifted her skirt a little, stuck her foot out just a bit too far, and began to fall. Easy. Until something large and determined blocked the way.

-oOo-

Reverend Grim caught the girl in the midst of her fall and alarmed the household. He sat with her through the afternoon into the night, held her hand and wiped her forehead, paced outside her door, and offered quiet prayers to the Almighty. He left his vigil once, very late, when night had gone but morning had not quite arrived.

Marta sat in an overstuffed chair by the fire. She was beautiful as ever, the firelight dancing in her emerald eyes. Her daughter Eleanor slept on a sofa some distance away.

“Mrs. Singer, for a long while now, I have wanted to give you this.” He set the bundled teakettle in Marta’s lap. The cloth it was wrapped in fell away, and it gleamed in the firelight.

“How lovely.” Marta’s expression was enough. He was satisfied. “But I cannot accept this, Reverend Grim.”

“It’s merely a gift!” He stood apart from her, hands dangling, powerless. “Only a gift.” He fell to his knees and clutched at her skirt. “My name is George.” The kettle clattered to the floor. “Could you not say it once? Just once.”

Marta pushed him away. “Reverend Grim, remember yourself.”

Sara’s wail invaded and added to George’s pain, and Marta turned away to look at the fire. George rose silently and returned to the stairs. The sofa was empty. Hadn’t Eleanor Singer been sleeping there?

In the room she shared with Jonnie, Eleanor stifled her sobs. She hadn’t been asleep. The sight of the teakettle glittering in the firelight, so lovely, had evoked a searing pain in her heart. She’d slipped away and gone upstairs.

She opened her wardrobe, searching. She had seen what she wanted quite recently, but now she couldn’t remember where. She wasn’t afraid of waking Jonnie. He was always exhausted at the end of the day. He’d slept through Sara’s loud labor so far. That was it. They were lying on the trunk below the window in her old room.

She crept in unseen behind Grim’s back. It was extremely odd that Sara refused all help but Grim’s in her distress. She wouldn’t even let them call a midwife.

“Stretch forth thy hand, dear girl.” Grim’s voice was tender and sweet. “That’s all God wants, one small act of faith, like reaching for a piece of bread, and He will give you such nourishment, you will never again hunger.”

Sara saw her. “Get out!” she screamed, her eyes wild. “Get out, get out!”

Eleanor snatched up her old boots and ran. She found privacy downstairs on the side porch in a wicker sofa. She rocked back and forth, cradling the treasures, her cheek against the leather. “Papa, I miss you so much.”

Hours later the sun was well up, the babe delivered, and the new mother out of danger. Reverend Grim was declared a hero, but he seemed distracted and sad and unwilling to hear any praise. “I must go now,” he barely whispered and staggered out to his wagon.

Marta and Eleanor stood in the doorway and watched him urge his horse down the drive where Leopold’s daffodils danced in the morning sun. Midway between the house and the main road, the wagon stopped. There was a noise like a pop, and Grim slumped over.

-oOo-

The large attendance at his funeral would have stupefied George Grim. Bleak though his vision often was, it was no bleaker than that of the majority of his contemporaries. He had been a teacher, a healer, community leader, and a sincere and powerful preacher, in the end one who explored God’s mysteries more than the Lord’s mandates.

The few who knew the true circumstances of his death told the same story: They supposed some wild creature, likely a snake, had frightened his horse so that he had fallen from his cart. It was a bizarre freak that his pistol accidentally discharged to such tragic effect.

More than one eulogy was given, and all mentioned his heroism during the time of the near flood. Lyman displayed saintly bereavement, and Martin was truly distraught. Grim III made an outstanding widow. As she packed to leave the parsonage, she fleetingly wondered what had become of Harriet’s teakettle—not that she wanted the horrid thing near her.

-oOo-