Wonder Show (4 page)

A true entrepreneur, Mister had convinced the child welfare authorities that teaching his wards a trade and enabling them to work outdoors would ultimately benefit the girls and aid their “transformation into more productive members of society.” This was how sewing mail-order uniforms and harvesting apples in Mister’s family orchards had become mandatory for each and every resident of the McGreavey Home for Wayward Girls. Every resident, that is, except for the girls who were appointed to the household staff. And as hard as Caroline tried to sound disinterested, Portia knew exactly how much she hated sewing and picking apples.

“Portia!” Caroline whispered. “Language!”

Portia rolled her eyes. “Whatever way I say it, you know I’m right. We’d be free of this”—she waved her hands like a magician—“and we’d have a nice big roof over our heads again.”

Caroline had lived in a large house before. Her family had money and the things that went with money, like feather beds and housekeepers and a deathly fear of scandal, which is why Caroline had been stashed away at The Home when rumors had begun circulating about her and the gardener’s son. “Only temporary,” Caroline’s mother said in all her letters. But it had been almost two years already, and Caroline was beginning to lose hope.

“And,” Portia added, “won’t your mother be impressed when she hears you’ve moved from the orchard to the house?”

Portia would later wonder whether she had been playing fair when she said that. There was nothing Caroline wanted more than for her mother to send one last letter calling her home. She prayed for it every night, the cement floor of the bunkhouse pressing her knees until they were numb, and sometimes in the mornings as well. She said her prayers in a near-silent whisper, but once in a while Portia would catch a phrase.

“I’ll never see Daniel again,” Caroline promised. “I’ll do everything my mother says. Please, please, let me go home.”

In the end, of course, Caroline’s mother did send one last letter. But that was not for several months. And by then the tiny pocket of hope that Caroline carried with her had drained itself empty as a broken hourglass.

And the girls would all remember the version of Bluebeard that Portia had told them as they sewed the hems of relentless numbers of pant legs, the story starring Mister and his mysterious house, and they would shiver like dry leaves.

Portia

I may not have been easy to care for, but I was surely not a wayward girl. I knew exactly where I wanted to be, and it wasn’t sleeping in a cabin at the bottom of Mister’s hill, picking apples from his gnarled trees, sewing uniforms until my fingers went numb, pretending to be grateful because he fed me and put a leaking roof over my head.

Of course, I’d been nothing but a thorn in his side since I’d arrived (a fact that gave me particular pleasure, I confess). I was good at thinking of games for the little girls to play with sticks and apples, which chafed Mister to no end because to him apples equaled money. I told ghost stories and tall tales in the sewing room, and most girls couldn’t listen and sew at the same time. And girls not working equaled nothing for Mister’s bank account.

I wasn’t afraid of him because I thought I had nothing to lose.

I finally talked Caroline into moving up to Mister’s, and I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but working up there made me miss the bunkhouse. Maybe I’d gotten too used to the sound of a dozen other girls sleeping around me. Or maybe the house had absorbed something of Mister’s wicked little soul. He inhabited the place as if it had always been his, as though he would live forever within its steady walls. Like he hadn’t crouched in the shadows waiting for his mother to die so he could spring on the carcass of her life and feast on what was left.

Perhaps that sounds a bit dramatic. I have been accused of worse things than embellishing the truth. I am even guilty of some of them.

Whatever my sins, I am no liar. Not anymore. And I tell you true: there was something festering in the heart of that house.

Caroline at Night

They didn’t have to share a room. Mister’s house had empty spaces to spare. But it had been so long since either of them had slept alone that, without even really discussing it, Portia and Caroline packed their things, carried them up the hill, and moved together into the room at the back corner of the house. It was the only room without a view of the orchard, except for Mister’s room, which was at the other end of the upstairs hallway and obviously not an option.

They did not want to look out over their recent past and feel guilty for having escaped it—to think of the other girls sleeping in the frigid, drafty bunkhouses and crying silently for the homes they remembered a little less every day. And spring was slow in coming this year. When they opened the windows in the morning, the thin air still had a cold lining, like snow inside a blanket.

It was only at night that they felt so entirely, insurmountably bleak. Moving into the house did not, as it turned out, spare Portia or Caroline from the nightly misery of time to think. And it was quite some time before Portia was able to begin her search for the legendary files. Mister had a stringent schedule—each day of the week brought its own list of chores—and there was little time for exploration. Plus, he had brought a third girl up from the bunkhouses. Delilah was brash and nosy, talking constantly while Portia tried in vain to tune her out.

“Where’d you come from? Where’s your family? Mine’s from Decatur, but they headed west a while back. Yours go too? Tell you they’d come back soon? Yep, that’s what they told me.”

Portia had the distinct feeling that Mister had recruited Delilah to drive her mad.

Whatever comforts Portia and Caroline had expected to find, this house was not their home any more than the orchard or the bunkhouse or the workrooms. So they found ways to distract each other, to calm their minds until sleep managed to overtake them.

Most nights, it went like this:

PORTIA:
What are you afraid of?

CAROLINE:
Everything.

PORTIA:
No, really.

CAROLINE:
Really.

PORTIA
: How can you be afraid of
everything?

CAROLINE
: In this house, I am.

PORTIA
: Are you afraid of me?

CAROLINE:
You’re not a thing.

PORTIA:
What about the rest of the world? What are you afraid of out there?

CAROLINE
: Sometimes I think there is no rest of the world. I think this might be all there is.

PORTIA
: You know that’s not true.

CAROLINE
: I can’t remember what my mother’s voice sounds like. I can’t remember how many trees there are in my front yard. Maybe I imagined my whole life before I got here. Maybe it wasn’t real.

PORTIA
: You’re not crazy.

CAROLINE
: Promise?

PORTIA
: Yes. I promise. Now, pick just one thing to be afraid of. Just one. And the rest can’t hurt you.

CAROLINE
: One thing?

PORTIA
: Yes. One.

CAROLINE
: Being alone in the dark.

PORTIA
: You’re not.

CAROLINE
: Not yet.

Bluebeard Takes a Bride

Time, as they say, passed. Portia had hoped to spend a few weeks at most in Mister’s house—she had envisioned herself moving in and barely unpacking before she seized her magic file and ran off to find Max. Or at least took a few steps in the right direction. But the regimented schedule of housework, cooking, and daily chores, the numbing regularity of life in Mister’s house, made time disappear. It was as if some unseen force stole Portia’s days and weeks whenever her back was turned. She was washing the kitchen windows one day and was shocked to see alabaster blossoms populating the orchard trees, and her bicycle rides into Brewster Falls no longer required a coat.

The trips to town had been sanctioned by Mister only a few weeks earlier, after much pleading by Portia to Caroline. Portia could not abide asking Mister for such a thing directly, but he had become more and more fond of Caroline in their months of working together and allowed her nearly anything she requested.

Caroline was, of course, repelled by Mister’s attention. But Portia reminded her almost daily of the praise that was sure to come from Caroline’s family when they found time to respond to her letters. Caroline wrote to her mother at least twice a week, detailing her duties as Mister’s assistant in his many intellectual pursuits. In truth, neither Caroline nor Portia was quite sure what Mister hoped to accomplish by documenting his lineage, as it was quite clear that no one in Brewster Falls wanted any association with the McGreavey name. Nor could they tell what kind of readership Mister might find for his various “doctrines,” which were opinionated and difficult to follow, and bore titles like “The Arrogance of Flight” (in which the actor Howard Hughes was compared to Lucifer). Portia wondered what a man who had apparently never left his house could possibly have to say about Hughes’s record-breaking flight around the world, but she listened with great fascination to Caroline’s account of Mister’s fierce expression and ever-reddening countenance as he dictated long sentences that made no sense to her whatsoever. Many of Mister’s opinions seemed to come, Caroline said, from some inner well of religious conviction. Which, too, seemed strange, since Mister never went to church, excepting the Sundays when Father Sipperly came out from town and held services in the decrepit chapel that the departed Mrs. McGreavey had built in the northeast corner of the orchard. And he allowed Father Sipperly’s visits only in order to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

One man, unmarried, living alone with so many girls. Mister was aware of how it looked.

“I am aware of how it looks,” he said to Portia one evening as he watched her making meat loaf for dinner. He was very particular about his food and often “supervised” her cooking. “Perhaps it is time I took a wife.”

He said it as if he were talking about acquiring a new mule. Portia was glad her back was turned to him so he could not see her grimace.

“It is only a question of who would be most . . . suitable,” he went on. “Not too young, not too headstrong.”

This clearly put Portia out of the running, a fact that she celebrated by garnishing the meat loaf with extra parsley. But what Mister said next nearly made her drop the platter altogether.

“I believe I shall speak to Caroline about this. She has become rather . . . dear to me.” He spoke absently, trying out the words as he might experiment with some foreign dialect he did not understand. It was as if he had forgotten Portia was there, and she dared not move, dared not remind him. “Yes,” he murmured. “I shall speak to her first thing after dinner.”

Which gave Portia (in her estimation) just enough time to mash the potatoes, set the table, and convince Caroline to run away.

Except that Caroline didn’t want to run away.

And she wasn’t surprised to hear that Mister was planning, in his odd way, to propose.

“You said it yourself,” Caroline said, “that moving up to the house would show my mother how I’ve changed. That she’d know for certain that I wasn’t in love with Daniel anymore. Just think how well my getting engaged will show her the same thing.”

“But,” Portia spluttered, “it’s
Mister.
You can’t be serious. You can’t possibly think—”

“All I know is that I haven’t heard from my mother in months. Months, Portia. I have to do something to make her see that I’ve grown up.”

“But you haven’t grown up! Not if you think marrying that man is going to help you get home. You’ll be trapped here forever. He’ll never let you leave.”

Caroline waved her hand like she was swatting at an errant bee. “I won’t actually have to marry him, silly. Mother would never let me go through with the wedding—she only needs to hear that I’m engaged, and then she’ll come get me and take me back to Stony Landing.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Mother’s had my future planned since I was born. She knows exactly who I will marry and when, and that used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. And I will tell her that as soon as she arrives.” Caroline turned, humming softly to herself, and gazed dreamily out the window. “Mister can think whatever he wants. But once Mother comes to get me, he won’t stop her from taking me. And then I’ll be home again.”

Portia thought Caroline had selected the worst possible moment to develop a sense of conviction. She had never met Caroline’s mother, but she knew a thing or two about what happened when someone went far away, how after a time you couldn’t see their face anymore when you closed your eyes or hear exactly how they laughed at a joke, how they seemed less like a real person whom you loved and more like a character in a story. And once that happened, it was easy, too easy, to let them float away like milkweed.

Caroline was holding on to her mother. But her mother didn’t seem to be doing the same.

Last Letter

Dear Caroline,

Your father and I were quite surprised to receive your news. We never expected that you would find a husband there, but we are as happy as can be, and have told just about everyone we know. We are only disappointed we will not get the chance to witness your marriage firsthand.

We would love to attend, naturally, but as you know summer is a very busy time for us. Perhaps your father and I will come for a visit in the fall. Anyway, I am sure Mr. McGreavey wants to keep you close—you will be a wife now, darling, and your life will be there with your husband. We will, of course, always be your family. But now you must start a family of your own.