The Memento (46 page)

They did not see, but they could hear it singing. Jenny furrowed her brow and listened closely to the words, and then she started singing almost perfectly along with it, “…  
with one star awake, as the swan in the evening moves over the lake
.”

“I’ve been hearing that song since I turned twelve,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s at the bottom of the stairs singing. Can’t you see it?”

They both shook their heads, but they kept their ears cocked. There was not a doubt in my mind that it was Pomeline.

As it disappeared, I put my hands to my eyes. It was time for me to face Pomeline. Art was shaking his head. He wanted me to stay in the house. But when he realized I would not stay, he said he wasn’t going to let me go alone. He took a lantern from the kitchen and we went out outside.

I remember standing on the stepping stone mosaic made with the broken teacups. Art turned the lights on in Evermore. The door was closed, and that seemed to reassure him. He was still hoping it was stress that was breaking us—and that if it was closed nothing could have gone inside. Art opened the door. We walked along the path holding hands and we could both hear the loud tinkling of the glass wind bells. We heard the humming surround us, and Art kept shaking his head as though that might send the music off on the breeze. The night air was toasty but still I shivered, and my scar tingled. There were no lights near the pond but the bright moon reflected on the water. Art whispered that maybe it was just one of them wood creatures we had believed in when we were children. That was easiest to believe, I suppose, that a childhood story had come to life.

I left Art there on the path with his lantern and went down to the pond’s edge. Bats ricocheted all about. In the moonlight I saw petals scattered on the water and I knelt down there on the bank. The humming all around me became song blending with the bells:

That song I had heard so long ago in the Tea House, and in the Annex, the ballad Pomeline had been playing early that summer in the music room.

Cold, vile-smelling breath blew on my neck and the scar on my face blazed as I sensed her lean forward over my shoulder.

“Pomeline,” I said, “we’re sorry for what happened. We were only children. You must go away. You can’t stay here any more. You should never have let Dr. Baker touch you. That could only ever have led you to heartache, don’t you see?” The breath was in my ear, relentless, unsettling. I heard Art calling to me as though he was far off in the brambles.

It came ever closer, and there was its image in the moonlit pond.

There were gleaming ponds in its eyes, glassy pools with moons and white swans, and I saw then it was not Pomeline back from the dead to haunt us. A disfigured version of Jenny was reflected there, singing her lifeless tune. The swans came squawking out for me at that moment, as if on cue, and I stood up and turned to find nothing but Art back on the path, coming toward me, his voice clear and loud, the lantern swinging in his hand. We looked behind us and the mansion was completely illuminated, every room in the house. We ran back, screaming Jenny’s name.

Jenny was in her room reading when we came rushing in, the same as before, as though she was expecting us for an appointment. I sat at the edge of her bed with Art. I did not know how to tell her it was not Pomeline who was haunting us, but Jenny herself, that she was that little white thing that had showed itself to me throughout the years. She was so unsettled in herself for all of her days that her spirit started rising early. I had told Art all this as we came in the house. And all the while I had been thinking of the man in the shade of the sugar maples at the Tea House the last two weeks before Grampie died. Grampie said in his letter it was the memento stirring in me, and I understood that now, the ghost of a ghost. Grampie had begun to rise, and, perhaps because I was a Mosher too, I had sensed him even as such a young girl.

I looked at the photographs Jenny had there on her bed. She’d taken them out of an album bound in black velvet. “This is what my mother has been looking for,” Jenny said. She laughed grimly. “Granny must have taken them and tucked them away so no one could ever find them. That’s why they were afraid of her. Now my mother knows I have them.” Splayed out were unholy
black-and-white photos of Dr. Baker and Estelle, much younger, naked and doing things in positions I had never imagined.

Art carefully pulled out Pomeline’s journal. It had weathered poorly in the swan house, warped and mildewed from moisture. He tried to read it aloud but couldn’t get words out. Art handed it to me. He and Jenny listened while I read. It wasn’t no journal entry I was reading, but words to a song, lyrics, about a girl who found out that her love was a ruin, and poisonous, the girl whose baby was ill got. Her lover had spurned her, he had turned from her, had been with her mother, although he was her father, and the man who dangled, choked and tangled, was,
la la la
, not of her blood.

It was poetic, a ballad she might sing at the piano wearing a pretty summer dress as the piano keys tinkled the melody, but nothing could make sentimental the fact that Dr. Baker was her father, and the father of the baby that died with her when she crashed down in the surging waters and was bashed into them red rock cliffs. Jenny explained to us, as we sat there in utter shock, that Estelle never told Dr. Baker, and he was too wrapped up in himself to even think Pomeline wasn’t Charlie’s child. Estelle didn’t let Pomeline know, at least not until the damage was done.

I thought of the Pomeline of that summer, the bright Pomeline who wilted before our eyes, with her drawn, tired face and tender stomach, the Pomeline with no one to turn to but three children who held her over the pounding waves and tossed her away into the sky.

There was a gust then at the window and the white lace curtains blew in and pulled out. Jenny gazed at the two of us with her big, pleading eyes. She did not know until it was too late that some things you can never take back. And we were only children. We renewed our pact in that dishevelled and cluttered room never to say a word about what happened so long ago. Pomeline was now a part of memory and the island and the moody water forever circling it. We linked our hands together and as we took our vows
Jenny whispered,
Peace on earth and mercy mild
. She took her hands away from us and clasped them to her heart.

We did not discuss that night. Raymond Delquist came over each day in the week that followed to meet with Jenny. She was getting weaker and was not expected to live beyond the autumn. On good days she could walk around, and on bad days she would lie in bed or sit in a chair. She was quiet in a way she had never been previous.

I still saw the thing in white. I could hear it singing in the night, and I could see it flitting through the garden in the twilight, and peering in the windows. But there was no longer fear, for I understood that some spirits who knew they would be passing would show themselves to me. Their stories would find their way into my bones and my fingers, and into my needle and onto the muslin. Quaint and final, once I put the last stitch down and encased it in a frame. This was the memento as it stirred and came to me.

They took Grampie’s house, piece by piece. They rebuilt it in the art gallery in the city, the Tea House, even with his sign. They had a bench right outside the house, like it was on the lawn instead of in a gallery room. I went there once, watching people coming in and out, as though we’d never lived there, those Moshers who saw the dead. They took my embroideries too, and they called it
grotesque art
.

The one of Jenny and her mother and Dr. Baker by the pond in Evermore is in the exhibit. No one but Art knew it was stitched before they found them there. I sat on that bench and looked at it on the white wall beside our little house now in this big stone art gallery in the city. While the ghosts of ghosts found their way into my needle, in all my years holding the memento it was only ever Grampie and Jenny who I saw beyond my pictorials. Perhaps
Grampie’s war horrors and Jenny’s childhood malady and agony conjured up some part of them seeking witness to their lives and suffering … and to their end. I thought of the day of my mother’s funeral, when we come back to Petal’s End after she was put in the ground. I stood by Art on that late-August afternoon when the sun was already far around in the sky. I wore a black dress from the closet at Petal’s End and I wore black everyday thereafter, to remind me we have to fear but what we let hide in the shadows. We threw dirt on Ma’s coffin and we laid down flowers by her tombstone beside John Lee and my grandparents. We left Ronnie there, alone, as he wanted to be. Jenny paid for the tombstone but she did not want to come to the graveyard.

Down the dirt road we drove back to Petal’s End. For a moment I thought I could hear Ma saying not to call her fucking Mrs. Mosher, and Jenny reciting her peculiar chants, and I glimpsed that white thing in the white dress with the hands clasped, standing by the side of the road as we turned into Petal’s End. Lifting her head, and eyes full of the pond, swans and ripples. Art said later I spoke out as though in a pulpit, proclaiming,
There ain’t nothing mild about mercy … when you call for Holy Mother Mercy she don’t always come alone. In the shadow of her skirts comes Sweet Sister Vengeance
.

When we come through the wildwood, back from the funeral, there were petals from the house to Evermore, the path laid out, and Dr. Baker’s car was parked there in the driveway, the keys still in the ignition, as though the car was waiting to be moved back by the carriage house. We ran across that trail of petals, crushing them into the grass and gravel. The door to Evermore was locked from the inside. Art got a ladder so we could go over the top and then down from a tree. We followed the petals to the pond.

Jenny was in a lawn chair, her eyes open behind her glasses. There was a teacup broken at her feet, a pot of tea on the table beside her, the swans at her side. In her fingers was a long-stemmed
rose. And face down in the pond, like you had been in the brook, Melissa, were Dr. Baker and Estelle, their legs caught in metal bear traps that had been thrown in the water some time before.

Later it was reported that the swans had beat Estelle and Dr. Baker in the head, hit them hard with their massive bony wings, beating them as they protected their cygnets. Estelle and Dr. Baker had stopped in their tracks from the shock of seeing Jenny sweating profusely, her face mottled and red. And in that moment the swans had attacked them and they had fallen into the pond and stumbled into the traps below the surface. There they drowned as Jenny sat before them in her lawn chair and sipped her mortal petal tea, every wicked blossom she could find, the foxglove and monkshood, brewed and steeped in silver, and sipped from a delicate china cup. She wore all the horror of her life and death. Her wind bells hung silent in the weeping willow tree.

After Art called the police, there was sirens and vehicles and a commotion that hadn’t afflicted the estate since the final garden party twelve years earlier. Of course we knew the truth, for it was in my embroidery.

Art took me away to my room where I slept deeply, for a long time. Petal’s End went to the Nature Conservancy, with us to live there as long as we wanted, Art and me, and our children, the sweet ones with their own now, who will come and find me here, for Art has been gone some years. In the picture you see how he fell in the flowers along the stone wall of Evermore, the hoe still in his hand.