The Hellfire Club (40 page)

Because the finger was still aimed at her throat, Nora shook her head.

“No. And it wasn’t a picture of those two idiots who never read a book in their lives, Effie and Grace, not on your life. She never felt any closer to those three than she did to strangers on the street. At first, I couldn’t understand Katherine going off and leaving our picture behind, but when I noticed she had left her silk robe and a bunch of books, too, I saw what she was doing. She knew I’d be coming to get everything for her. She left those things behind for me, because she knew I’d take care of them for her. And I bet you can guess why.”

Again Nora gave the answer Helen Day waited to hear. “Because you understood her better than the others.”

“Of course I did. She never made any sense to them her whole life long. It was like Jeffrey with the Deodatos. I love them, and they’re wonderful people, but they never could figure out some of the things Jeffrey did. People like Jeffrey and my sister always color outside the lines, isn’t that right, Jeffrey?”

“If you say so, Mom,” Jeffrey said. “But you’ve colored outside the lines a few times yourself.”

“That’s what I’m saying! A couple of times in my life people said I was crazy.
Charles
told me I was crazy. Going with Lincoln Chancel! Giving up my son, and not even to him, but to people he thought were inferior! You must be as crazy as Katherine was, he said. Well, I said, in that case I’m not doing too badly. You can bet he changed his tune when Jeffrey got his scholarship to Harvard and did so well there. When people don’t have a prayer of understanding you, the first thing they do is call you crazy. Grace and Effie
still
think I’m crazy, but I’m doing a lot better than they are. They thought Katherine was crazy, too. She embarrassed them, just like I did when I went to work for the Chancels.”

She folded her arms over her chest in a clatter of coins and beads and gave Nora a flat black glare. “My sisters actually thought Katherine ran away with that drawing, changed her name, and lived off the money she got for it. Know what they told me? They said Katherine never had a bad heart in the first place. Dr. Montross made a mistake when she was a little girl, and she’s had special treatment ever since. Stole that drawing and took off, changed her name, now she’s laughing at us all. They said Charles changed his name, didn’t he? Didn’t you? they said. Wasn’t Mr. Day you married, was it? I said I never changed my name, man I worked for did that, and when he spoke, you
listened.
All I did was get used to it, and it was only my married name anyway. All that writing, they said, that was crazy, too, but it wasn’t, was it, Jeffrey?”

“Not at all,” Jeffrey said.

“She was invited to Shorelands. Nobody says those other people were crazy. And Dr. Montross wasn’t a fraud. Katherine had rheumatic fever when she was two, and her heart could have given out at any time. We all knew that. She
died.
Grace and Effie said, You never found her, did you, and neither did all those policemen, but they didn’t see what it was like. You could have sent twenty men into those woods for a month, and they wouldn’t find everything.”

“If she wanted to get out, why go through the woods instead of taking some easier way?”

“Didn’t want to go past Main House,” said Helen Day. “Katherine didn’t want anyone to see her. And you know, maybe she did get to the road. Maybe she even got a ride and a room for the night, or took the train somewhere, but her heart stopped and she died. Because she never got in touch with me about her things. I waited two weeks, but neither Katherine nor anyone else called me, and I
knew.
”

“But your brother and your two older sisters didn’t agree? They thought she might still be alive?”

“Charles didn’t. He was sure Katherine had died, just like me. Dr. Montross told our parents that it would be a miracle if Katherine lived to be thirty, and she was twenty-nine that year.”

“And Grace and Effie?”

“They knew it, too, but they changed their minds when that book came out, almost saying in black and white that Katherine took that picture from the dining room. Katherine couldn’t do anything right, as far as they were concerned. They never had a good word to say for her until they started going through her papers before throwing them out—papers I gave them for safekeeping—and saw some scribbles on a few pieces of paper that reminded them of a movie they didn’t even like! They still thought she was crazy, but they didn’t mind the idea of making some money off of her. Old fools. Katherine didn’t write that book, Hugo Driver did. If you want to know what my sister was writing, look in that folder.”

74

WITH A RUSH
of expectant excitement, Nora opened the spring binder. Jeffrey stood up to get a better look.

UNWRITTEN WORDS
by Katherine Mannheim 15 Patchin Place, #3 New York, New York (copy 2)

She turned over the title page to find a poem titled “Dialogue of the Latter Days,” heavily edited in green ink. Her heart sank.
This
was what Katherine Mannheim had been writing? The poem continued on to the second page. She flipped ahead and saw that it took up twenty-three pages. “Second Dialogue,” also heavily edited, ran for twenty-six pages. Two more “dialogues” of thirty to forty pages apiece filled out the book.

“It’s one long poem, or so I’ve decided, divided up into those dialogues. She had two copies, and made changes to both of them. She must have taken the first copy to Shorelands to spend the month revising it there, and I think she was planning to type up a third and final copy with all the revisions when she got back.”

She had been “unwriting” the
Unwritten Words
through a lengthy, painstaking series of revisions. “This was on her desk?”

“In her apartment, right next to her typewriter, along with a big folder full of earlier versions. The one she took to Shorelands was lost along with everything else she put into her suitcase.”

“You never showed it to me,” Jeffrey said.

“You weren’t here all that often, and I wasn’t done looking at it. I always had trouble understanding the things Katherine wrote, and this was harder than anything else, especially with all those scribbles. After a couple of years, I began to find my way. I saw—I think I saw—that she was writing about her death. About living with her death, the way she did for so long. If you had asked me, I would have said that she never thought about it because she didn’t seem to. Katherine wasn’t a brooding sort of person at all, but of course she thought about it all the time. That’s why she wrote the way she did, and why she lived the way she did. What I think is, my sister Katherine was a saint. A real-life saint.”

Startled, Nora looked up from the book. “A saint?”

Helen Day smiled and glanced down at the photograph. “Katherine was the most sensitive, most intelligent, most dedicated person I’ve ever known, and deep down inside herself the
purest.
What most people call religion didn’t affect her at all, even though we were raised Catholic. You’ll find more spiritual people outside churches than in them. Katherine couldn’t be bothered with the unimportant things most people spend their whole lives worrying about. She knew how to have a good time, she sometimes shocked ordinary-thinking people, but she had
focus.
When I take on new girls here, I look to see if they have at least a little bit of what Katherine had, and if they do, welcome aboard. You do, you have some of it.”

“Well, a lot of ordinary-thinking people might think I’m a little bit crazy,” Nora said, thinking of her gleeful demons.

“Don’t you believe it. You’ve been
hurt.
I can see that. No wonder, considering what happened to you. Here you are, chasing around Massachusetts instead of going back home, if you still have a home to go back to.” She looked over at her son. “Alden Chancel might not think you’re the right wife for his son, but you’re hardly crazy. In fact, what
I
think, you’re one of those people who take in more than most of us.”

“You’re giving me too much credit,” Nora said.

“You’re a person who wants to know what’s true. When I look back, it seems to me that most of what I learned when I was little was all wrong. Lies were stuffed down our throats day and night. Lies about men and women, about the proper way to live, about our own feelings, and I don’t believe too much has changed. It’s still important to find out what’s really true, and if you didn’t think that was important, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

Yes,
Nora thought,
I do think that it’s important to find out what is really true.

Helen Day checked her watch. “I have to make sure everything’s all right before I put in an appearance at the Asia Society. I hope you’ll think about everything I said.”

“Thank you for talking to me.”

All three stood up. “You’ll be at the Northampton Hotel?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said.

Helen Day had not taken her eyes off Nora. “If you’re still up around ten, would you give me a call? I want to talk about something with you, but I have to think it over first.”

“Something to do with your sister?”

The old woman slowly shook her head. “While I’m thinking about my question, you should think about your husband. You’re stronger than Davey, and he needs your help.”

“What’s this ‘question’ of yours?” Jeffrey asked.

She turned to him and took his hand. “Jeffrey, you’ll come here tomorrow, won’t you? We’ll have time for a real conversation. If you turn up around eight, you can help with the driving, too. We have to pick up a lot of fresh vegetables.”

“You want me to drive one of the vans while Maya and Sophie sit in the back and make fun of me.”

“You enjoy it. Come over tomorrow.”

“Should I bring Nora?”

Helen Day had been moving them slowly toward the front door, and at this question she met Nora’s eyes with a look as significant as a touch. “That’s up to her.” She let them out into the warm night.

75

“YOU LIKED HER,
didn’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t like her?” Nora asked. “She’s extraordinary.”

Jeffrey was driving them down Main Street, where restaurant windows glowed and gatherings of three and four drifted in and out of pools of light cast by the streetlamps.

“I know, but she drives a lot of people up the wall. She makes up her mind about you as soon as she meets you, and if she takes to you, you’re invited in. If not, you get the big freeze. I was almost certain she’d warm to you right away, but . . .” He glanced at her. “I guess you see why I couldn’t say much about her beforehand.”

“I suppose I do,” she said.

“What would you like to do?”

“Go to bed,” she said. “After that, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life chopping celery for your mother. I’d have to change my name, but that’s all right, everybody else already has. After a couple of years maybe I’d get to be as perceptive as your mother thinks I am.”

Jeffrey gave her one of his sidelong looks. “I thought you seemed unhappy back there. Disappointed, I guess.”

“Well, you’re already perceptive enough for both of us. Yes. I guess I was expecting too much. I thought that even if everything was falling apart around me, at least I could help prove that your aunt was the real writer of
Night Journey.
Instead, all I managed to find out was that Hugo Driver was a nasty little creep who stole things. But if he didn’t steal
Night Journey
, then everything we thought we knew was all wrong. What did your aunts see in those pages, anyhow? What excited them so much?”

“Phrases. Descriptions of landscapes, fields and fog and mountains. Most of them were sort of like Driver, but not close enough to justify calling a lawyer. There was something about death and childhood—how a child could see death as a journey.”

“That makes a lot of sense for Katherine Mannheim, but it hardly proves anything about the book.”

“Two other phrases got them excited, mainly. One was about a black wolf.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“The other was ‘the Cup Bearer.’ They did get excited about that.” The front of the hotel floated past them. A guitarist played bossa nova music on the terrace.

“I don’t get it. That’s what Davey used to call your mother.”

“You saw that picture of the two of them as little girls, where my mother is holding a cup. After that, Katherine started calling her the Cup Bearer.” He rolled the MG down into the lot. His smile flashed. “I forgot, you never read
Night Journey.
”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Book Eight of
Night Journey
is called ‘The Cup Bearer.’ That’s what really got Grace and Effie going, that and the wolf.” He pulled into an empty spot and switched off the engine.

“But Davey was calling your mother the Cup Bearer before he could even read. How did he ever hear about it?”

“He must have seen the photograph in her room,” Jeffrey said. “He went there looking for her sometimes, when Alden and Daisy left him alone. If he’d asked her about it, she would have told him about the nickname. That would have been another reason why the book meant so much to him later on. It reminded him of my mother.”

Now she knew why Davey had been irritated with her when she had asked him about the origin of the nickname. Jeffrey was waiting patiently for her to finish asking questions so that they could leave the car. “Is the Cup Bearer in the book anything like your mother?”

“Well, let’s see.” He propped his chin in his hand. “She makes this foul-smelling brew. She had no children of her own, but she raised someone else’s child. On the whole, she’s pretty fearsome. I’d have to say she’s a lot like my mother.”

“Hugo Driver never saw that picture. Where did he get the phrase from?”

“You got me.”

In the warm evening air they moved toward the concrete steps, washed shining white by the lights, leading to the hotel’s back door. Half his face in shadow, the Eton cap tilted over his forehead, Jeffrey more than ever resembled a jewel thief from twenties novels. “Maybe this is none of my business,” he said. “But if she leans on you to call Davey, think hard before you do it. And if you do decide to call him, don’t tell him where you are.”

He turned away and led her up the gleaming steps.