The House on Seventh Street (3 page)

FOLLOWING LUNCH
AT
an air-conditioned cafe, Winna and Emily drove home in the air-conditioned car. Winna dragged two old fans out of the cellar and set them up in the parlor where they found a drawer full of old black-and-white snapshots. Winna quickly sorted through them, stopping to look at a very old picture of the house.

“Look, the trees were just planted. The house was painted a dark color back then—with white trim.”

Emily looked over her mother's shoulder. “It looks kind of spooky.”

“The story I heard was that my grandfather Edwin built the house when he was looking for a wife. He found just the girl—her father was a state senator and a big deal lawyer. Off and on, he was elected district attorney here in town. Your great-great-grandfather's name was Andrew D. Smythe—are you going to remember all this?” Winna jabbed her daughter with her elbow and chuckled.

“He was Juliana's father,” Emily said, getting it straight. “But don't count on me remembering his name.”

“In those days, the Grummans owned the only department store in town. In the beginning, it was a dry goods store founded by your great-great-grandfather Grumman—back when Main Street was about a block long and still had tumbleweeds blowing in from the desert.”

“I remember the store, Mom. You took me there when I was little.” Emily handed her mother a snapshot. “Here's a recent picture of Poppa. Do you want to keep it?”

Winna glanced at it, and took it in hand.

“He's wearing his favorite tweed sports coat, a white shirt, and that bolo tie—his uniform. I think he wore that every day. Last time I saw him he looked a little dusty and unkempt. I remember the days when he dressed stylishly in a suit with a vest and tie. He was so handsome. I wanted to marry him when I was four.”

Emily laughed and reached for the picture. “He looks almost frail here.”

“You know, he was born to wealth. Through his work, he added to the family wealth, but he never lived like a wealthy man. He seemed not to care when people joked and accused him of being frugal.”

“That's a symptom left over from the Depression,” Emily said.

Winna smiled. “He used to say, ‘you can only spend a dollar once.'”

The parlor phone rang. Winna stepped over a rolled-up rug, sidestepped several packing boxes, and, catching her breath, reached for the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Winna?”

She knew the light ethereal voice. “Chloe,” she said, flashing a grimace at Emily. “I thought you weren't speaking to me ‘ever again'—at least not in this life.”

“I called to apologize. I don't know what forces influenced me last week. Actually, I do now. Juno did my chart yesterday.”

“Ah, I see. The planets in juxtaposition to the moon as it crossed over your roof made you paranoid—and rude.”

“Look, Winna, I called to apologize,” Chloe said. “You are my sister and Daddy's in his grave. We have problems to solve.”

“I have problems to solve, you mean. I'm the one who flew out here in May and had to arrange the funeral and the reception without any help from you.” Winna couldn't resist the jab. “You didn't even bother to attend, Chloe.”

“Are you going to bring up the funeral every time we talk?”

“I'm the one who's been in this house working her butt off in the boiling heat, sorting the mess left by two generations of pack rats.”

“I've been disinherited, Winna. You know Daddy hates me.”

“Daddy's gone. He isn't here to hate you. He gave absolutely no one a hard time at the funeral. But everyone in town noticed that one of Henry Grumman's two children was missing.”

“How do you know he wasn't there? I'm sure he was. I feel him everywhere I go.”

Winna rolled her eyes at Emily and shook her head in disbelief.

“Actually, I called to tell you about a conversation we had the day Juno updated my chart.”

“Chloe, I can never understand your conversations with Juno.”

“No, the conversation I had with Daddy.”

Winna didn't even bother to let sarcasm creep into her voice, “Oh?”

“He came to me in a vision. I saw him on that mountain where he died—beautiful—I don't have words to describe it—maybe I can paint it. He looked transformed, the light of the universe shone through him, altering his aura—you know that muddy brown his aura always showed.”

“Chloe, I've never seen an aura.”

“That's because you are spiritually stunted and your mind is closed,” she said. “Anyway, in the vision Daddy was bathed in a clear white-gold light. He spoke such loving words to me that the pain at the back of my left shoulder instantly melted. You know, the pain that dogs me if I don't get my weekly massage. He's at peace, at last,” she said, her voice coming dramatically over the line. “Do you want to know what he said?”

Winna said “sure” as she shrugged
not really
.

“He forgave me!”

“Forgave you?”

“He said he was sorry he cut me out of the will.”

“How wonderful—how convenient.” Winna began to pace.

“Don't be sarcastic, Winna! It's impossible to communicate with you. You have such a tiny little closed-up mind. You're always judging me. You don't know what it's like having someone sit in judgment of you all your life.”

“Chloe, we've had this conversation about judging each other,” she said as she spun on her heels. “What do you want from me? Dad wrote you out of his will for his own reasons. I'm discussing Dad's estate right now with Reed. I'm not exactly a money-grubbing monster, you know. But there are problems—I have concerns and you haven't been around for me to discuss them with you.”

“Daddy said he'd try to contact you—to let you know that he's changed his mind. How can he reach you?
You
, of all people, won't be open to receive him.”

Winna could hear her fifty-seven-year-old sister sobbing. For years she had watched her sister slip further and further into a world Winna did not understand—a world full of sadistic and benevolent planets, talkative spirits, and mind readers.

Winna knew that no one would guess they were related, let alone sisters. Compared to Chloe—who was strikingly beautiful, tall, and willowy—Winna could see that she was pretty enough—short and curvy, her light-brown hair streaked with silver. Chloe hid her gray away at the beauty parlor. Winna, an Anglo-Catholic, actually went to church. Her sister found that baffling and had said so. Chloe was a metaphysical seeker with a budding interest in shamanism. The last of the Grummans, they blended like oil and water.

“I'm listening,” Winna said, “I know the dead don't hold grudges. Dad was tough. He hurt us both.” Chloe's pitiable little gasps and sobs accused her over the line. “There's something I want from you.”

In a voice rank with self-pity, Chloe said, “What?”

“Why don't you come over and help me go through this house? Maybe that will help both of us feel better.”

“I—I—that would be hard right now. I'll have to see.”

“It's important, Chloe. There are things here that I want you to have and we need to talk.”

“I don't know, Winna. Juno warned me—and Todd is just settling in.”

“Todd is a part of your new life. Wouldn't you like to settle history before you face the future?”

“I don't know. I'll ask Juno what she thinks. I'll stop by on the weekend. Gotta go.”

Click.

“Goodbye, Chloe.”

Winna put the phone down and looked around as if to remind herself where she was. She stood beneath the arched ceiling in the parlor of her family's old house. Beyond the windows the view held the pillared side porch, and under the old trees the dead shade garden, punctuated by two tall cast-iron urns, sitting among the weeds. When Winna was a child Gramma Juliana had kept the urns filled with dragon wing begonias and trailing ivy. Now they sprouted thirsty weeds.

Winna thought back to after Juliana's death, when the house stood empty for a number of years. Then not long before his second marriage failed, her father had taken up residence there with Ruth. It had been a terrible marriage. Ruth was demanding and ran up bills without consulting Henry—Chloe had told her that much. Finally, Ruth deserted him and moved to Phoenix, leaving him high and dry, expecting a big check in the mail every month. She lived with him less than a year and got nothing in the divorce. Winna wondered if she was dead.

How can it be that Dad has left no mark—no impression that he had ever lived in these rooms? Except for Ruth's contributions—the avocado wall-to-wall carpet in the kitchen and the carpets covering the tiled floors in the bathrooms—nothing of his remained. Winna had found pill bottles in the bathroom cabinet, his clothes in the master bedroom upstairs, a stack of newspapers and some unpaid bills on the kitchen table, but everything else had belonged to her grandparents. Her father had just moved in with his wife. Why? Any normal person would have had a yard sale and gotten rid of the junk, auctioned the treasures they didn't want, ripped off the wallpaper and painted, hung their own pictures, and brought in some comfortable modern furniture.

The parlor, now cluttered with packing boxes, had once been a sumptuous room. Winna had spent her first days in the house shooting pictures in the moody old rooms, the light wonderfully eerie as it fell through lace and stained glass over the deep long windows. The old mahogany sofa upholstered in faded coral brocade was still richly draped with paisley throws and silk pillows. A dancer twirled atop a high twisted green marble pedestal near paintings hung in elaborate gold frames—dark oils of classical landscapes and tall ships on stormy seas. Even the empty jardinières where ferns and begonias once grew were fascinating to her camera's lens.

The place seemed timeless to Winna, the house and the desert valley. She knew that her father had lived in the house and the town in the past more than the present. Like the visible strata in the cliff face where an ancient ocean had lapped against its shores, the place seemed to hold past, present, and future together as one timeless whole.

Winna burst into tears. The Grumman house was a treasure trove and all hers, yet she felt sadly alone, abandoned.

Emily came to her and gave her a hug. “Poor Mom. I don't know how you put up with her.”

“It isn't Chloe,” she cried, “it's—it's everything.”

“Dad?” Emily's brown eyes searched Winna's face.

Through tangled emotions, Winna tried to make sense of her sadness. For the past three years, she had lived alone after her husband of thirty-five years had left her—left her with the wrinkles around her eyes, her ten extra pounds, her silvery hair.
I'm old, yesterday's news,
she had believed at the time. As far as she could tell, Walt was old too. But that did not seem to matter to his new young wife. She was a lawyer—so was Walt. How sweet, she had thought bitterly at the time, they have something in common.

Winna collapsed on the sofa. “I don't know. I guess so. I really haven't gotten over it—what happened with your father. I've been obsessed with the hurt. I've spent the last three years trying to convince myself that my career was enough, that my exhibits in Boston and New York are fulfilling, that having important clients means I'm loved, that being an even bigger success would make me happy. When Dad died, and the will was read, I knew I had to come here to settle everything. I felt relieved to leave New Castle for a while—to get away from all the work. I thought I'd feel better here, but I'm just hotter.”

The sound of Isabelle's waking echoed down the hall as Emily sat down beside her mother. “You will feel better here, Mom. You and Dad were together a long time.” Emily took her mother's hand. “I want you to move here—to be near me.”

Since Emily had been in diapers, she had known how to comfort. “No, honey, I can't leave my life, my work, or my friends any more than you could leave yours. You mustn't think I could ever live in Grand Junction again.

“Oh, Lord.” Winna wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of one hand. “Let's go stare at the baby.”

1910

JULIANA GRACE
SMYTHE
was in love. He was her first love, but she knew she would never love anyone else. She and Adolph Whitaker—she called him Dolph—had gone to school together since the first grade, but it wasn't until she was fifteen that she fell in love with him.

It began at the high school on a spring day, just warm enough to go outside for lunch. After her classics class, Juliana set out to meet her best friend, Daisy, on the side lawn. Reflecting on a passage of Cicero they had studied—“It is from nature that the sentiment of loving and the affection that springs from kindly feeling are born”
—
she
reached their usual meeting place. To better ask Daisy about it, Juliana wanted to put Cicero's wisdom into her own words. True friendship is everlasting because it is human nature to love and nature cannot be changed
.
With all her heart she believed that. She planned to ask her best friend if she agreed. In the fall term, they had studied Virgil and Juliana was most thankful that they had moved on.

Daisy wasn't there. Juliana sat down with her lunch pail and her copy of
Laelius de Amicitia
to wait under a young elm whose buds were just about to burst. She anxiously looked for her friend, then diverted her eyes across the sunny lawn up the face of the two-story stone building to the octagonal bell tower. How exciting it would be if she could climb to the top and see the view—maybe she could get permission to ring the bell one morning. She lowered her eyes to the lawn again and searched the sidewalk now lined with students finding places to sit on the stone benches and the lawn. Daisy was not among them.

Just then, Adolph Whitaker walked by with his lunch pail. He smiled warmly and said, “Waiting for Daisy?”

She could feel her face light up just as it always did when a boy spoke to her. “Hello, Dolph. Have you seen her?”

“I usually see her first thing—on my way to class—but not this morning. Maybe she's home sick.”

“Oh bother,” Juliana said, scanning the lawn once again. She hated eating alone but was not going to get up and search for one of her other friends. “Well, it's not as if they give us all day to eat our lunch,” she said, opening her lunch pail.

“An hour never seems long enough,” he said. “If you'd like company, I'll spend that hour with you, fair Juliana.”

Juliana smiled and patted the grass. “You always sound like a poem.”

“A poet should, should he not?” He sat down cross-legged and opened his lunch pail. Dolph was slight, only a few inches taller than Juliana. His dark curly hair parted in the middle with rows of waves heavily oiled into place. His fair skin set off the large blue-green eyes as they studied Juliana.

“I should like to read one of your poems, Dolph,” she said, unwrapping her sandwich. As she took a bite, a little dab of mayonnaise remained at the corner of her mouth and she licked it off. “Do you write stories too?” She held her hand up, hiding the fact that her mouth was full.

His face assumed an air of mystery. “At the moment my pen is doing a turn on a new account of the affair between the lovers of Camelot.”

“Guinevere and Lancelot in modern dress? I'd like to do a modern version of
Pygmalion and Galatea
. Only I'd make him a surgeon and her a mermaid.”

Dolph laughed. “You wicked little thing. It sounds like you've read
Frankenstein
.”

“Yes, and I adored it—never cried so hard in my life.”

He glanced at the book lying upside down in the folds of her skirt. “What's that you're reading now?”

“Cicero. I just worship him. Virgil's
Aeneid
—we read that last term—was interesting to be sure, but it took every ounce of my strength to get an A in that class.”

“I read both last year and had the opposite impression. It must be the difference in our sex.” He left his eyes on her face too long and she looked away.

“You are the smallest girl in your class. I'd guess you are also the youngest?”

“Yes. Fifth grade was too easy and they moved me to sixth,” she said.

“Juliana—such a bright little creature. If I were to describe you in a poem, I'd say your skin is white as cream and your eyes a dark amber honey.

Juliana felt herself blush. “That sounds like a compliment—cream and honey?”

Dolph was two years older, a top student, and he had just complimented her.

He laughed. “Cicero said, ‘A friend is, as it were, a second self.'”

She grinned, rolled her eyes, and matched his quote with another: “Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.”

He was up to the challenge. “I like this one: ‘Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.' Ah ha, pass the salt, Juliana.”

So went their first real conversation. When the bell rang, Dolph reached for her hand. “Now we must part, fair Juliana, but methinks I've found a kindred spirit.”

Adolph Graham Whitaker would become a great writer, Juliana was sure of it. She liked the idea of marrying a writer. He was the last thing she thought of that night before she fell asleep. He is just my sort of person. I think he is handsome. His eyes—do they smolder? No, they pierce. No, I think they devour. His mouth? The lips are full and there is a little twist to his smile, as if there is something on his mind that he is not willing to reveal. I like that. He's mysterious? No, girls should be mysterious. Boys are mystifying. I think he is just my sort. Soon Dolph called on her at home. Her mother would allow them to sit alone in the parlor for an hour, on nice days outside on the porch. They had lunch together every day at school. Juliana asked Daisy to please understand her sudden abandonment—she was in love.

“Someday, when you are in love, you will know exactly how I feel, Daisy. Then you will forgive me.”

The time came when she had to face the certainty that Dolph would take his full scholarship and go off to a fine school in the East. He would leave her behind in Grand Junction, in her mind a perfectly backward cow town where her father was district attorney. He dealt with all kinds of unseemly things: Indian troubles, squabbles about water rights, murders. He talked about his work every night at the dinner table. Juliana found his conversation to be either fascinatingly sordid or endlessly boring.

Grand Junction had grown out of the desert. The hard sunbaked soil, the color of ash, nurtured little but tumbleweeds and sage on the dry plain where once Utes had hunted. In 1881, the government drove the Indians away to reservations in southern Colorado and Utah. The US cavalry escorted a long line of Ute braves on horseback—women and children on foot—out of the west end of the valley. They were barely out of sight as scores of white men on horses hastened in from the southeast to stake out the choicest land for farms. Wagons full of land-seeking families rode into the valley eager to claim acreage for a ranch or a house site in town. Two rivers, the Gunnison from the mountains to the southeast and the Colorado from the northeast, coursed into the valley. The newcomers diverted river water into ditches and later canals, turning Grand Junction into a farming paradise. Water was all that light colored soil had needed to nurture orchards and fields.

Indians from the reservation still came into town, spreading their blankets on Main Street's sidewalks, selling beadwork, pottery, jewelry, and blankets. The Indian school took Ute children from the reservation and boarded them outside of town, dressing the girls in white dresses and the boys in pants, jackets, and shirts. Hoping they would assimilate, they taught them a trade, English, and Christianity.

Orchards and fields surrounded that rough-edged civilization with its nineteenth-century Main Street bordered by blocks of small bungalows and modest frame houses. On or near Main Street stately buildings rose above the valley floor: the Mesa County Courthouse, the towered bank building, the railroad station. The residents were proud of Seventh Street, one of the few choice streets where the well-to-do were building handsome houses, and ashamed of the southernmost street near the railroad tracks where nice women never walked. Everywhere—in vacant lots, along roadsides, or on the outskirts of town—swaths of alkali and the tumbleweeds reminded the residents that this was a dry, inhospitable land.

Two things Juliana would never forget happened in the spring of 1910. Her parents took her to see the one and only Grand Junction performance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Colonel William Cody, she had learned, got the name Buffalo Bill for having killed thousands of buffalo over a period of eighteen months—more than anybody else. Juliana had already dismissed that particular achievement of his as dubious. But when she saw him under his cowboy hat, wearing buckskins and riding a palomino, she could not help her feelings of awe. Even though he was an old man by the time she saw him, never in her life, or in the life she hoped to have, would there be a more striking figure. The Rough Riders of the World reenacted the Great Train Robbery and the Battle of Summit Springs. She thrilled at the sight of the mounted warriors of the world in martial array: Russian Cossacks, German cuirassiers, Bedouin Arabs, South American gauchos, English lancers, and Irish dragoons fresh from four years of European triumph. Her only disappointment? Annie Oakley was not in the show.

The second thing she would never forget came the following Saturday. Juliana was certain she would never again have such a remarkable, eventful week. She and Dolph had run off alone, away from the Peach Blossom Festival. Hand in hand they had sneaked down a narrow lane, through someone's vegetable garden. Breathless, excited by their daring, they dodged into a small orchard unseen. Dolph kissed her and pulled her down in the tall grass. The sky was azure, the grass green and fresh. She lay there under pink blossoms letting him kiss her all he wanted. She knew she shouldn't, but he tasted delicious and her heart beat with delight at his touch. Neither spoke, but they looked deeply into one another's eyes. His hand grazed her breast, then he lifted her skirt. Before she came to her senses, she let his warm hand move gently up the inside of her thigh. She let out a little embarrassed cry and sat up, smoothing her skirt, afraid to look Dolph in the eye.

“It's all right, Juliana,” he said. “I'm sorry, but I'm overcome with love for you.”

She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “I don't want to talk about it now,” she said. “You mustn't tell.”

“No, I would never—” he said, kissing her again.

She did not want to talk about what he had done or what she had felt, but she would think about it again and again, until she could think of nothing else.

They were not away from the festival for long and no one had missed them, but Juliana and Dolph had traveled a million miles together. As far as Juliana knew, no other girl had ever done things like that or felt the way he had made her feel. She was almost right about that. Girls from good families did not have such adventures. She knew that. Juliana had always been precocious.

That summer Dolph worked at the grocery store where he would filch a pint of strawberries for Mrs. Smythe or a chocolate for Juliana. He would sneak them outside behind the store to his bicycle and hide them in the basket under the jacket his mother made him carry. After work, he took the treats to the Smythes.

Juliana expected him as she waited in the gazebo. Through the lattice and the vines she saw him ride up on his bicycle, lean it against the fence, and walk up the front steps. Almost like a game of hide and seek, she wanted him to find her in that leafy bower. Now Dolph was out of view. She wanted to run to him, but knew enough about romance to not appear over-eager. Right now, she guessed, he was ringing the doorbell and her mother was answering. Mrs. Smythe would welcome him with a smile, and when she saw what he brought—a jar of jam, maybe, or oranges shipped all the way from California—she would thank him.

How he could afford to buy these lovely things, Juliana did not know. He couldn't and the fact that he did proved how very much he loved her and wanted her mother's approval.

Dolph came down the front steps and hurried to the garden path toward the gazebo. She knew her mother had told him where she was. He carried something in his hand—something for her.

Juliana spent that late afternoon side by side with Dolph on the gazebo's wooden bench. He had presented her with a chocolate and she could tell that he delighted in watching her slowly nibble it away.

“Would you like a bite?” she teased.

“No, it's just for you. Tomorrow I will bring you a lollipop so I can watch you devour it with that dear little tongue.”

Juliana was quite aware that her mother kept watch on them from the kitchen window. Sometimes she could see her standing there or at the window of an upstairs bedroom. She could, in fact, appear at any one of the windows on that side of the house. Juliana knew that her mother could not spend all day on alert and, when the coast was clear, she would grab Dolph by the hand and take him next door, behind Mr. Osgood's tool shed where they found a secluded spot perfect for a kiss and a long embrace.

Mrs. Smythe stood at the dining room window. From there she usually saw her daughter with her beau studiously huddled together reading a book or a manuscript. Sometimes they scribbled in their notebooks. She wondered what on earth they had to talk about. Their conversations never seemed to end. Today the gazebo was empty and she hurried out to the porch to see if they had decided to favor the porch swing. They weren't there.

I must tell that child again that if she wants to be free to entertain her beau at home, she is required to stay in sight.

Mrs. Smythe hurriedly crossed the porch, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked across the street to see if Mrs. Partridge was in her garden. Thankful that she was not—ashamed to have her neighbors see her so humbly attired—she untied her apron and dropped it on the porch swing before she put a foot on the front steps. Taking the path to the other side of the house where the cutting garden grew, she found them there, walking among the flowers like two innocent children full of summer wonder. She marveled at how her daughter was growing up, so small and lovely in her afternoon dress with the puffed sleeves. The upswept hair and chignon made her look grown-up, but a pale blue ribbon tied in her strawberry blonde hair reminded that she was still a child. Mrs. Smythe had not won the argument about whether or not Juliana was old enough to wear a chignon.