Treasure Box (9 page)

But Grandmother's eyes remained closed, her face slack with sleep.

At her right hand, Uncle Paul leaned forward with a grin. "Going to introduce me again, darling? I can change my name if you'd like."

"No need, Uncle Paul," said Madeleine. "Shall I ring for breakfast?"

"Please," said Uncle Stephen. "Some of us need to take nourishment at regular intervals."

"It's your bell, dear," said Aunt Athena.

Madeleine reached out and rang a small bell that sat beside her place at the table. It occurred to Quentin that hers was the place where Uncle Paul had been sitting. So he really had been an interloper there.

As soon as the bell rang, the same quiet servant from the day before opened the door from the butler's pantry, and two footmen came in with steaming plates, one of biscuits and one of scrambled eggs and bacon. Both began serving with Madeleine, and worked their way down the two sides of the table, crossing behind Grandmother and working up the other way. But no food was put on Grandmother's plate.

The collection of people around the table was odd, Quentin supposed, and there were certainly family tensions, but he couldn't help noticing that it was Madeleine who seemed to rule here, not Grandmother. It wasn't an idea he liked much, that Madeleine herself was the main source of family tension. And it wasn't fair, either. He had no idea of what had actually gone before. All the hostility might well have been earned. What did he know of these people? Uncle Paul, with his smarmy smile and ingratiating manner, was only fifteen years older than Madeleine but looked her age. For all Quentin knew, Paul might have molested Madeleine when she was a girl, or tried to; he might richly deserve Madeleine's goading. Not that Quentin took such speculation seriously, but after all, Madeleine
had
recoiled from his first attempt at any kind of serious physical intimacy with her. Wasn't it possible that Paul—or someone—had done something which made even a husband's caress at first repellent to her?

No, no, it wasn't right to start assigning unspeakable crimes to strangers. If Madeleine hadn't accused them, why should he?

The eggs were hot, the bacon cooked perfectly. The biscuits were steaming, freshly sliced, the butter still melting inside them. Whatever other failings this house might have, the cuisine had the simple perfection that approached the platonic ideal. Not scrambled eggs, but
the
scrambled eggs that all other scrambled eggs were imitating. The bacon of bacon, the biscuit of biscuits.

"Delicious," said Quentin to Madeleine.

She smiled, then leaned close to him and whispered, "Tin, in the upper classes one doesn't compliment the food. It's assumed that the food will always be perfect, and it isn't to be discussed."

He started to laugh, but caught himself when he realized she wasn't joking. All he could do was look at her oddly for a moment and then dig in to eat more. This was the food she was used to; he cringed to think of where he had taken her, what he had cooked for her. He had never wanted to live rich, but when they built a house, it would have to have a kitchen where a first-class chef would be glad to cook; and the chef would have to have a budget that would allow the acquisition of such ingredients. He could do no less for Madeleine, even if she said she didn't need such things.

The footmen came back for a second pass, this time with fruit—slices of pear so ripe they dissolved sweetly in his mouth almost without chewing; chunks of fresh pineapple with not a trace of acid sting to them; raspberries so plump and tart that the flavor seemed to dart through his whole face the moment he bit down on one. He closed his eyes to enjoy the perfect flavor without distraction.

"He's asleep!" crowed Simon. "Put him right out!"

Quentin opened his eyes, startled.

Simon looked crestfallen. "Oh, shame! No nap after all! Poor boy! Newlyweds get no sleep at all, do they!"

Madeleine put her hand on Quentin's knee under the table, to still his response. "Now, Simon," she said loudly, presumably to pierce Simon's deafness. "Mr. Fears is still a young man. He doesn't think of a nap as recreation yet."

"Not recreation!" cried Simon. "A feat! The great Olympic monathlon! To sleep, perchance not to dream! To obliviate one's dire sins in the wine of night!"

Grandmother was looking at Quentin again. And this time her eyes didn't close when he glanced at Madeleine and touched her sleeve.

"Grandmother," said Madeleine. "I hope he meets with your approval. He's everything I need, don't you think?"

Grandmother said nothing, but her eyes continued to drill into Quentin's soul, or so it seemed. He wanted to beg her pardon. He wanted to leave the room.

"With him beside me, I can open the box, don't you think?"

Grandmother's eyes slowly closed.

"Grandmother is annoyed with me," said Madeleine.

"Box?" asked Quentin.

"My inheritance. My grandfather left it for me. But by the terms of his will, I was forbidden to open it until my husband stood beside me."

The words cut him to the heart. She had never spoken of this before, never a hint that she stood to gain financially as soon as she brought a husband home.

"Oh, relax, Tin," she said. "I don't actually care about the inheritance. Not like I did when I was a girl. It bothered me
then
, of course, to see that box every day and know I couldn't open it. I grew out of that. I would have been happy never to come back here, never to open it. But since I
am
here, and
do
have a husband...."

"I knew you weren't marrying me for my money," said Quentin. "It never occurred to me you might be marrying me for
yours
."

He said it with a smile and a laugh. But it was only barely a jest.

"It isn't money, I'm quite sure of that. Or if it is," said Madeleine, "it isn't much because the box isn't all that large." She laughed and patted his hand. "Quentin, you're taking all this too seriously. I called it my treasure box when I was little. I even made maps of the house to where it was buried, though of course it isn't buried at all, it just sits there in the open."

"That seems a cruel temptation to a child. You might just have opened it."

"If I open it prematurely, I can't keep what's inside," said Madeleine. "I think Grandmother always hoped I
would
open it, and lose it. That dear old temptress." Madeleine's laugh was light and not unkind-sounding. Yet it
was
unkind, Quentin thought. She can be unkind without even noticing it. Do I know my wife at all?

Madeleine leaned over and rested her head on his arm. "Quentin, I don't like who I become when I'm here. And you don't like me either. You would never have loved me if you had met me here. But when I go back outside with you, I'll be myself again, you'll see. My true self, my best self. Not this awful... whatever you think I am."

"I think you're my dear wife," said Quentin. "But going outside sounds like a good idea. You were going to show me the river."

"You had enough breakfast?"

"Full as a tick," said Quentin.

"Grandmother, do excuse us to take a walk along the bluff."

Grandmother's eyes followed Quentin as he rose to his feet and pulled back Madeleine's chair so she could also rise. But she said nothing.

Simon's voice piped up loudly. "Everyone here who is actually real, please raise your hand!"

Madeleine murmured to Quentin, "When they get to a certain age, I think they should be locked up somewhere."

Quentin laughed and shook his head. "Why, when he's already locked up in a dream?"

"Oh, you put that so beautifully." She squeezed his arm. "I
love
you."

The library had only the windows to link it with the outdoors. They had to cross the entry hall and go into the official dining room in order to reach a door leading out onto the back portico. It was a broad expanse of flagstones with five wide steps leading down to the snow-covered lawn. The lawn itself, interrupted only by an occasional tree that was invariably surrounded by a circular bench, flowed on to the bluff overlooking the river. The river itself was, of course, below the level of the bluff, but in the clear, weary light of a winter afternoon, they could see the dark shadows of trees against stark and shining snow on the bluffs on the opposite side of the river. Miles and miles away, it seemed, though it could hardly be that far.

"It's a little bleak," he said.

"Imagine it with leaves," said Madeleine. "Imagine it filled with life. Imagine it when the country was still young and you might hear the tootle of a steamboat on the river below, and the sound of children laughing as they ran along the bluff."

As she spoke, the pictures she conjured in his mind delighted him, and he smiled. "All right," he said. "I'm willing to admit that winter has its own beauty, too."

"This house wasn't always filled with strange old people, you know," said Madeleine. "It was once alive and bright."

"When you were a little girl here?"

"I was a solitary child when I lived here," said Madeleine. "And Paul—he was no company for me."

Quentin wondered again whether Paul might have molested her, or tried to.

"But Mother told me what it was like when she was young. She and Paul were little here, and even though that was well after the age of the steamboats, of course, they knew the stories—Aunt Athena told them—and they'd play steamboat captain down by the river or up in their attic playroom."

"The idylls of childhood."

"Whatever that means. Exactly."

"But Aunt Athena can't be old enough to remember steamboats, either."

"Oh, of course not. Just a conduit for old stories. Family memories. She has to use her head for
something
. Keeping the old tales alive isn't a bad occupation for it."

"Mad, you're so
nasty
about them."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm always so frightened when I come here, I'm not at my best."

"What are you afraid of?"

She didn't answer and she didn't answer, and then they were at the bluff and the river scene unfolded below them. Even with patches of ice along the edges of the river, it was formidably wide. Quentin remembered paintings by the Hudson River School and tried to apply those magnificent pastorals and landscapes to the scene before him. It wasn't hard. Before the river was a highway, it was a habitat, and now that the traffic was gone, perhaps that old life was coming back. Some old docks still touched the icy river edge, but at other places the verge of the river had been given back to the woods. How many squirrels were living off stored nuts in those trees in the lee of the bluffs? How many coons and rabbits, field mice and weasels lived without the sight of man for months on end?

Her hand stole around his waist and she leaned into him. "Oh, Quentin, I do love this place, I
do
love it. This is what brings me back, even though I hate who I become when I'm here."

"So let's open the treasure box and go. I can buy you another place on the river with a view just like this. Or better."

"There
is
no place just like this."

"You don't want me to look for another Victorian mansion?"

"Pre-Victorian, dear," said Madeleine. "Victorian is so... nouveau."

They laughed.

They walked on the path along the edge of the bluff. In a few places the drop-off was rather steep, and the path did skirt rather close. He couldn't help remembering Uncle Paul's jocular warning: Maddy's a pusher. And he was walking on the side by the river. But she wasn't pushing, she was holding him, and he loved the feel of the way their bodies moved, not quite together, but rubbing against each other, hip to hip, his arm across her shoulders, her arm around his waist. The breeze was a little chilly, but the sun was warm.

They reached the end of the family property and turned back to the house. They took a different path this time, and it led around a small stonewalled graveyard with an arched entrance. "Isn't it kind of morbid, keeping the family dead here on the property?" asked Quentin.

"It depends on how you regard the dead," said Madeleine. "They were part of us in life. Shouldn't they be part of us in death?"

"Will
you
be buried here someday?" he asked.

"
I
intend never to die," she said.

"Statistically, almost every woman who marries is signing on for widowhood at some time in her life."

"Do
you
want to be buried here?" she asked teasingly.

"Not unless I'm really dead," he said. "No fair burying me while I'm still snoring."

"You admit you snore?"

"Everybody snores," said Quentin. "But they only hear the other guy's snoring."

"And sleep through their own," said Madeleine. "Isn't that the way it goes."

"Does my snoring annoy you?"

"I think it's sweet," she said. "And when it keeps me awake, I pinch your nose and then you think you woke up to go to the bathroom and while you're in there trying in vain to aim somewhere near the toilet, I fall asleep very very quickly."

"What an efficient system. By the way, I may miss sometimes, but I've never yet peed on my feet."

"Or if you did, it didn't wake you," she said.

"You're as gross as a kid," said Quentin.

"It's one of the things you love best about me, though."

"Maybe," said Quentin. "But you have to promise to act shocked when our children talk gross. It's no fun if your parents can match you, ick for ick."

"I promise to be shocked."

They were back at the house. The dining room was empty. So was the library, and the table had been de-leafed and turned the other way, so it didn't take up the whole space between the vast walls of books. It wasn't as warm and inviting as the library in the grande dame's house had been. Instead of ladders, there was a balcony around three sides of the room, with a narrow spiral staircase leading to it. It all looked cold and uncomfortable, like a high canyon that you could only scale by taking your life in your hands climbing up a rickety narrow ladder. He went to the shelves to examine the titles, but Madeleine caught his arm almost at once. "Quentin, there's
nothing
readable there."