There Was an Old Woman (4 page)

Chapter Six

Before Evie left the upstairs bedroom, she took down from the wall the framed Georgia O'Keeffe poster—a white camellia blooming out of a field of pale blue and turquoise—that she and Ginger had picked up at an after-Christmas sale at the Met. She found some duct tape in the kitchen and used it to secure the picture over the broken window. At least that would keep squirrels and wet weather out until she could get the window properly replaced.

Downstairs, she put away the broom and gloves. Her parents' bedroom and bath were the only rooms left to assess.

She felt her way through the dark downstairs hallway to the tiny room tucked under the stairs, opened the door, and peered in. The familiar room, barely big enough for her parents' double bed and two bureaus, smelled like a rank subway tunnel. Wrinkled clothing covered the bed. Evie recognized the pink terry-cloth robe she and Ginger had given their mother for a Mother's Day years ago. More ashtrays on the bureaus overflowed with cigarette butts. Evie raised the window shades and tried to open the windows, but they wouldn't budge.

Her mother's bottle of Jean Naté sat on the bureau, as always. Evie unscrewed the top and poured a little into her hands. The scent reminded her of fresh laundry and lemon meringue pie. It was what her mother smelled like after a shower. And sometimes, her father had smelled of it, too.

Evie closed the bottle and put it back.

When she shifted the clothing on the bed, she realized that the bedding beneath was damp and smelled sour. She stripped the sheets. The mattress was wet, too.

Working quickly and trying not to gag, she balled the sheets up with the dirty clothes, hauled the bundle out through the front door, and dumped it by the side of the house. As she stood there, hands on her hips, taking great gulps of fresh air and girding herself for hauling out the mattress, a red sports car rolled up and pulled into the driveway across the street. That house was spruced up and freshly painted in shades of tan, maroon, and a deep green, the bushes in front sculpted into perfect spheres—all that tidiness a tacit rebuke to her mother's house. A man Evie didn't recognize got out and looked across the street. He gave her a puzzled look and raised his hand.

Evie turned away and went inside. She didn't know him and had no desire to explain the mess her mother had made. By the time she'd wrestled the mattress off her mother's bed, set it on end, and shoved it out the front door, the man had disappeared. She pushed, pulled, and dragged the mattress up the side of the house where she propped it under the bathroom window, leaning the nasty side, soiled and pitted with cigarette burns, against the house.

That's when she heard a steady
drip, drip, drip
coming from beneath the house. Under the bathroom. She stooped and looked through a hole in the wood lattice paneling that covered the gap between the house and ground. She couldn't see anything, but she could certainly smell it. Raw sewage.

Frustration welled up inside her. What next? Evie reached out and yanked on a nearby oak sapling that had already grown a foot tall. But it was too deeply rooted to budge, and all Evie had to show for her effort were fingers scraped raw. The rot in the house was deep rooted, too, nurtured by decades of unhappiness, fertilized with denial.

Evie heard a tentative throat clearing. She pivoted away from the house and the sapling, a little embarrassed to have been caught taking her frustrations out on a weed. Standing on neatly mowed grass beyond her mother's scraggly yard was a diminutive elderly woman, leaning on a cane. She had on a pink cardigan and a collared blouse with a double strand of fat white pearls around her neck.

Evie brushed away tears she hadn't even realized she'd shed. “Mrs. Yetner?” Amazing. The old woman was not only still alive but remarkably little changed aside from the cane and the back that was stooped rather than ramrod straight. Evie and Ginger had considered Mrs. Yetner ancient even when they were growing up.

“Ginger?” the woman said. She pulled a tissue from the wrist of her sweater sleeve and dabbed at her nose as she pinned Evie under her sharp, speculative gaze, magnified through thick glasses. “No, of course not. You're the other one, aren't you?”

Chapter Seven

“Right, I'm the other one.” The girl stood and collected herself.

She seemed to Mina to be so . . . vexed wasn't quite the right word. More like at wit's end. Well, who wouldn't be, given the ungodly mess her mother's house had turned into? And so fast.

When Mina first spotted the girl—or woman, as they liked to be called these days, though the reasoning escaped her—maneuvering a mattress up against the side of Sandra Ferrante's house, she assumed it had to be Ginger. But the minute the girl looked up, Mina realized this was the younger sister. The taller, ganglier one. Not the one who sold Girl Scout cookies but the one who kicked around a soccer ball and skinned her knees.

“I'm Evie,” the girl told her.

Eve. Now there was a name that didn't go out of fashion. Not like Harriet. Or Freda. Mina had always been the only Mina anyone had heard of, except for every once in a while when vampires came back into fashion and people remembered the Mina who, despite Count Dracula's attentions, had been saved and gotten married, as if that were preferable to an eternity of pure passion, forever and ever with no “death do us part.” Mina wondered where she'd put her copy of that book. She wouldn't mind reading it again.

“I had an older sister, too,” Mina said, and wondered why on God's green earth she'd offered that up.

“I didn't know that.”

Well, of course she didn't. Annabelle had moved in with Mina a few years after the girls next door went off to college. Then—for what? Six years? No, eight—Mina and Annabelle been widowed sisters living in the house in which they'd grown up. And even with Annabelle gradually fading, like those early colored photographs in the album that lost their vividness even though they were rarely exposed to light, life was quite lovely really. So much simpler and less fractious without men around to make a mess and have opinions.

Annabelle had been growing increasingly forgetful, even difficult at times, when the doctors confirmed their worst fear. Dementia. Progressive and unstoppable. Mina had been so determined to take care of her at home. All that changed a few years later when Mina was woken up in the middle of the night by a knock at the door. The nice young fellow who'd taken over running the store was standing on the step with his arm hooked in Annabelle's, like he was escorting her home from a dance. Only instead of a prom gown, Annabelle was wearing her thin nightgown with a white lace collar. She was also barefoot, her toes blue with cold.

Finn said he found Annabelle shivering on the store's front steps. It was a miracle she hadn't gotten lost, or worse.

The next day, Mina had started looking into nursing homes. She found one that was just a twenty-minute drive away. Annabelle lasted there for two years more, finally succumbing to pneumonia. Mina was so grateful she'd been there when Annabelle passed, holding her hand.

“Did you call my sister?” the girl asked, bringing Mina back to the present.

“Yes. Your mother asked me to. She said to call Ginger and tell her . . . tell her . . .” Mina frowned. She had repeated the words Sandra Ferrante asked her to convey, over and over to herself. Written them down, even, on the same slip of paper where the EMT wrote Ginger's phone number.

But when she made the call, Ginger hadn't been there. She'd called again and still no one answered. Mina usually refused to talk to machines—it made her feel ridiculous and unseemly—but she'd swallowed her distaste and left a message, telling Ginger that her mother had been taken off in an ambulance. She took so long explaining what happened that before she could repeat Sandra Ferrante's message the phone gave a long, insulting bleat. Even Mina knew what that meant. Time had run out.

Now she had no idea where she'd put that little piece of paper, and just as she'd known they would, Sandra's words had slipped from her grasp.

“Well, I'm sure your mother will tell you herself, won't she? God bless her. How is she doing?”

“I'm going over to the hospital later today.” The girl gave her a twisted, shaky smile. “I'm so sorry. Must be difficult living next door to all this.” She gave a helpless wave toward her mother's house.

“I try not to notice,” Mina said. The Ferrantes' had never been
House Beautiful,
but lately it had become especially run-down. Though Mina often lost track of time, it seemed to her that it hadn't been in nearly this appalling of a state even two or three months ago. No wonder the girl was chagrined.

To make her feel better, Mina added, “Fortunately, if I take off my glasses, everything looks lovely. When you can't see dirt, it makes cleaning so much simpler. Just like when you can't see your own wrinkles.”

The girl gave her a thin smile. In return, Mina offered a sympathetic cluck and added, “It must be overwhelming coming home to this.”

“Completely. Honestly, I don't know where to begin. I've been here all morning, and I've barely made a dent. I never thought it would be this bad.”

The poor thing in her tight jeans and leather boots did seem spectacularly out of her element, like a prairie chicken washed up on Coney Island. Clearly she was overmatched to the task at hand. Well, who wouldn't be?

“I know you're not asking for advice,” Mina said, “but that's never stopped me from offering it. Take one thing at a time.” She poked her cane into the tall weeds that began just past her property line, pushing aside a tangle of knotweed and a burgeoning tree of heaven, then waded over to the girl. Reaching up and putting her hand on the girl's shoulder, she said, “You know, anything looks less daunting after a sit-down and a nice cup of tea.”

Chapter Eight

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
Evie had been tempted to ask as she let herself be shepherded into Mrs. Yetner's house. She and Ginger had always called Mrs. Yetner the white witch because of her white-white hair and skin the color of parchment. She still wore the same cat's-eye glasses she had when Evie was younger, satiny-white plastic frames with a sprinkle of rhinestones at the corners. Now that vintage look had come back in style.

Mrs. Yetner had been a severe presence who sucked in her cheeks and stared down her nose at any neighborhood kid who dared to mouth off to her. But she'd also been kind, in an unobtrusive way, except when Evie trampled her hydrangea and Shasta daisies en route to rescuing a soccer ball.

But for all the years Mrs. Yetner had been their neighbor, Evie had never actually been inside her house. Now Evie looked around in awe at the spotless kitchen with its black-and-white checkerboard tiled floor, two-basin porcelain-over-cast-iron sink standing on legs, and pair of pale-green metal base cabinets with a matching rolltop bread box sitting on a white enamel countertop. Spatulas and spoons hung from hooks on the wall, all with wooden handles painted that same green. The utensils had the patina of old tools, used for so long that they bore the imprint of their owner's hand. Evie felt as if she'd stepped into a 1920s time warp. These days people replaced their belongings long before any of them acquired the dignity of age.

One of the few newish items in the room was a recycle bin, shoved against the wall and filled to the brim with neatly folded newspapers, cat food cans, and glass. Even Mrs. Yetner's garbage was clean, Evie thought, recalling the abysmal mess at her mother's house.

Mrs. Yetner left her cane resting in a corner and picked up a kettle. Bright, mirror polished with a pair of brass cylinders over the spout, like mini organ pipes, it at least was not old. She tipped back the cylinders and filled the kettle with water, then set it on the front burner of a green-enamel stove. The stove's white-and-chrome dials were spotless, as were the porthole windows in the oven's two doors.

A fluffy white cat brushed against Evie's leg as Mrs. Yetner struck a match and lit a burner. There was no
tick-tick-ticking
like a modern gas stove, just a
whoosh
as the flame caught. Evie lifted the cat and buried her face in its warm back. The cat draped itself, languid and boneless in her arms, and purred like a wheezy truck engine.

“Ivory doesn't take to most folks,” Mrs. Yetner said. “Cats know their people.”

“I never knew I was a cat person,” Evie said, setting the cat down. “How can I help?”

Mrs. Yetner pointed to a wooden corner cabinet with glass doors. “There's tea and china in there.” Her arm trembled and she glared at it, balling her hand into a fist and lowering it to her side. Evie noticed that she was wearing two wristwatches on her arm, and her fingers were gnarled like tree roots. “And there's milk in the icebox.”

Evie opened the cabinet. The shelves were lined with green-and-white shelf paper patterned like gingham, the edges cut with pinking shears. No pantry moth would dare take up residence in there.

Tea bags were in a mason jar on the bottom shelf. Evie unhinged the clamped lid and fished out two. From the shelf above, she took down a pair of delicate teacups and matching saucers, decorated with pink roses and blue forget-me-nots. So
not
dishwasher-safe. But then, as she realized when she looked around, there was no dishwasher.

She set the cups and saucers carefully on the table and placed a tea bag in each cup. Inside the refrigerator, on a shelf lined with plastic wrap over paper towels, she found the milk and set it on the table, too.

The teakettle went off, a strident three-tone cadence. Mrs. Yetner pulled it off the burner. She poured hot water in the cups and settled in a chair at the table.

“This kitchen is amazing,” Evie said. “That wonderful old stove. The floor. Do you know how special it is to find a period kitchen so intact? In fact, this whole house . . .” Evie's gaze traveled past the kitchen's arched doorway, through to the narrow dining room, and on to the living room with windows looking out over the water. The footprint and floor plan of the house were identical to her mother's, and yet it felt utterly different with its mahogany paneling and thick cove moldings that belonged more in a manor house than in what had started out as a beach cottage.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Yetner said. “Have a look around. The tea needs to steep, anyway.”

Evie got up and walked through, pausing to touch one of the fluted columns mounted on a half wall separating the dining room from the living room. A memory flickered. Before the fire, her parents' house had had columns separating the rooms, too, only theirs had been plainer, not topped with these Doric scrolls—volutes, to use the technical term.

Mrs. Yetner followed as Evie walked to the fireplace in the living room and ran her hand across the cool, voluptuously carved marble mantel. “This is so lovely,” she said. Her parents' fireplace surround was plain brick that someone, in a misguided effort at redecorating, had painted fire-engine red.

“My father salvaged that from a mansion in Manhattan,” Mrs. Yetner said. “But it's far too grand for this house, don't you think?”

“Your father was a builder?” Evie asked.

“He was. And a businessman. And an attorney. That's him,” Mrs. Yetner said, indicating a framed sepia family portrait on the mantel. “Thomas Higgs.”

“Higgs?” Evie asked. “As in Higgs Point?”

Mrs. Yetner smiled and nodded.

Evie examined the photograph. A man in a suit and tie was seated before the same marble mantel, his slim, severe wife standing behind him. Two children, little girls maybe six and eight, stood rigid and unsmiling beside him. Only the baby sitting in the father's lap, wearing a long white dress and holding an old-fashioned carpenter's plane, seemed at all happy to be there.

“That's me.” Mrs. Yetner pointed to the smaller of the two girls. “And that's my sister, Annabelle. The little one in my father's lap, that's my brother.”

Alongside other pictures on the mantel were an oyster shell and the dark, leathery, helmetlike shell of a horseshoe crab. Propped up at the other end was a small white plate with a decal of the Coney Island Parachute Jump. Beside it was a metal paperweight of the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair.

But the keepsake that caught Evie's eye was a metal miniature of the Empire State Building. Evie picked it up. From its silhouette, Evie realized it had to be old. Its top was stubby, the way the building had looked in the 1930s before its owners abandoned the fantasy that gigantic, cigar-shaped dirigibles could come nose to nose with its mooring mast and disembark passengers onto a gangplank more than a thousand feet in the air.

“You must have gotten this a very long time ago,” Evie said.

Mrs. Yetner blinked, and for a few seconds she seemed at a loss for words. She picked up another framed photograph from the mantel. “This is me and Annabelle again. A little bit older.”

Evie looked closely. Two young girls stood barefoot on a beach. Their long skirts and the scarves on their heads were being whipped around by the wind. Each had her arm around the other's waist.

“Which beach is this?” Evie asked.

“Right down the street, if you can believe it. There used to be a beach there. Saltwater meets freshwater. It was lovely for swimming.”

Mrs. Yetner put the photograph back. Evie was still holding the little replica of the Empire State Building. Cast out of pot metal, what must once have been crisp details now blurred and melted, almost like candle wax. When she looked up, Mrs. Yetner was staring at it, too.

“I used to work there,” Mrs. Yetner said.

“Really?”

“I bought that the day I interviewed for the job. Kept it because I thought it brought me good luck.” There was something in Mrs. Yetner's expression that Evie couldn't read.

“When was that?”

“Oh, my, who remembers?” She gave a vague wave. “End of the war.”

“I ask because I work at the Historical Society, and we're mounting an exhibit about some of New York's great fires. And one of them was when a World War II bomber crashed into the building. That was back when the building looked like this.” Evie held out the souvenir. She went on, trying not to sound too excited. “So of course I'm wondering if it's at all possible that you were working there when . . .”

She was interrupted by the doorbell. Mrs. Yetner turned sharply, her eyes wide. There was a sharp
rat-tat-tat,
then a man's voice. “Aunt Mina?”

Mrs. Yetner turned back to Evie. She plucked the little statue from Evie's palm and dropped it into her own pocket. “Would you mind getting that?” she said, adjusting her pearls and smoothing her sweater. “Sounds like my nephew has arrived.”