The Book of Speculation

13 JULY 18TH

“How long does approval take?”

On the other end Kath Canning sips tea. “Several months to a year. It needs to go through land use and zoning committees. You know the town.”

She doesn’t have to say it. “Slow.”

“For the work you’re talking about you need an environmental impact study.”

“More money.” I shift the phone to the other ear.

“I have to be honest with you. The historical society can help with landmarking, but we don’t have the money you need. It’s just me, Betty, and Les these days, and we’re all volunteer. Your best bet is a loan.”

“Thanks, Kath. I appreciate your time.”

“Best of luck. The Timothy Wabash house was lovely.”

Yes, it was. I hang up, more screwed than I was ten minutes ago.

Enola walks into the living room, rubbing some kind of goo into her hair that makes it stand up in chunks. We’re going to the McAvoys’ for dinner. I suggested a restaurant, but Alice said Frank wouldn’t hear of it. She broke the news last night at the Oaks, while grumbling into her gin.

“Dad went on about how Enola’s hardly ever here and it’s ridiculous that no one’s cooked you a decent meal. Did he bother to ask my mother? No, he just assigns her cooking.”

“Enola’s boyfriend’s with her.” I grimaced down a gulp of rye. Definitely the drink of the recently fired.

Alice sighed. “Sure, fine. What’s another person? Maybe he’ll distract my dad.”

“From what?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Mom said seven-thirty. Is that okay?”

I twisted the end of her braid around my finger, and gave it a tug. “Seven-thirty is fine.”

As we said good night she said, “It’s weird to not have you at work.” It was almost an afterthought.

Frank is going to ask about Pelewski and the house. And find out his jobless neighbor is dating his daughter and needs a quarter million dollars.

Enola and I wait while Doyle shaves. She picks stuffing from the sofa, tossing it onto one of my shirts. She’s been away so long that every change seems enormous, from her hair to her thinness, the trances, and the man who followed her here. When I came in last night she was dealing cards while Doyle snored on her bed. No, they’re not a Marseille deck or a Waite deck. They’re different, but familiar. I tried to get her attention, but she was engrossed.

“Enola, are you okay?”

A piece of foam flicks from the couch. “Yep. Are you?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“No, but you will anyway.”

“Your cards look very old. My book — Churchwarry doesn’t know much about it because it was part of a big lot, but it reminds me of your cards, they’ve got the same kind of wear. I was wondering where you got them.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to tell you about the book,” she mutters. “The cards were Mom’s.”

The cards Mom was dealing when Dad begged her to stop. “I didn’t know Dad gave them to you.”

“He didn’t. Frank did.” She continues methodically divesting the couch of stuffing.

“Why would he have them?”

“You’d have to ask him. He gave them to me before I left.” By left she means left me.

“When can I expect you to start stinking up the house?”

“What?”

“You burn sage to clean tarot cards, don’t you?”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s called smudging and you don’t have to do it every time.”

“But you do have to do it.”

“These aren’t work cards, they’re my private deck. Cards kind of gather energy from people and build history. You talk to the cards and they talk to you. These I don’t clear because we’re talking.”

A conversation with Mom’s cards is disturbing.

“What do you talk about?”

“You,” she says with a shark-toothed grin.

Doyle exits the bathroom, clean-shaven. Though it does little to improve his appearance, it reveals the shadow of what might have been a nice-looking young Midwestern man beneath the layers of ink.

“Hey, we ready?” Doyle asks. He looks back and forth as if sensing something off.

“Sure.” Enola flings herself at him, dropping a loud kiss right over his ear.

“You told them you’re bringing me, right?” Doyle asks. “You gave a little warning.”

“About what? The McAvoys are nice,” she says.

He looks at me, concern pulling the tentacles on his jaw downward. “People can be weird about the tattoos.”

I think of everything Frank will hear tonight. “I’m sure you won’t be a problem.”

I follow them down the pebble driveway, across the street, to the McAvoy house. White-shingled, a picket fence and freshly painted porch, a plaque proclaiming it the homestead of Samuel L. Wabash, established 1763. In the yard is a swing set Dad helped build for Alice.

“Looks like my mom’s place,” Doyle says, sticking the tip of his tongue from the corner of his mouth.

The blinds snap down on one of the front windows. Frank’s wife keeps a pair of binoculars on the windowsill, watching all the comings and goings. Leah probably told Frank the instant the gutter broke on my house.

Enola waits for us on the porch. For a moment there’s terror in her eyes, then as Doyle approaches the look dissolves.

“Hey,” I say to her.

“What?” she replies, the what that ends a conversation.

The door opens and Enola hugs Frank.

“Too long, Enola. It’s been far too long,” he says.

I wave to Leah, who hangs back in the living room. She smiles and politely says hello. She’s never been quite as warm as Frank.

Frank’s eyes land on Doyle. He blinks a few times before greeting him, gawking. To his credit, Doyle appears to not mind. The Electric Boy sticks out a hand to shake.

“Doyle Bartlett.”

I never even asked his last name. I assumed that Doyle was his last name.

“Frank McAvoy. Pleasure to meet you.” The handshake lasts too long. I clear my throat and Frank drops his hand. “No sense in standing around on the porch. Leah’s almost got dinner ready,” he says, scratching his sunburned nose, “and Alice is here.”

“Great.”

“Good to have all you kids under one roof,” he says, and pats my shoulder. I follow him inside. It’s like my house; couch against the far right living room wall, a kitchen off the back, the hall to the left that leads to the bedrooms — three of them — only Frank’s house has gone right. The walls are pale yellow, free of cracks, and sprinkled with pictures of Alice. By the door is a photo from our high school graduation. Alice is in the back row, the tallest of the girls. She’s in the kitchen, delaying the inevitable awkwardness, the amount of which even she doesn’t fully understand. She waves at me, then spots Doyle. She mouths with library-perfect silent diction, What is that?

Dinner is formal. Leah’s taken out the good china, which only makes the meal more uncomfortable. Enola picks at the lace tablecloth. The fancy silver is out, and we’re drinking tap water from the crystal, which is out of place in Doyle’s green and black hands.

Alice radiates nervousness, or maybe it’s me. Leah sat us together and our knees touch. When I say hello, her lips tighten, but under the table she weaves our fingers. Hi. I remember the Alice of the graduation photo and how she used to giggle at the smallest things; that is not this person, and she isn’t the smiling woman from the library, either. Here she’s a daughter. She steals quick looks at Doyle and he catches her at it. She blushes and it’s beautiful.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Leah, but unlike Frank she looks the same, still wearing her hair in a long red ponytail. She might dye it. Maybe she’s softened, gotten a line or two, but she’s still Leah and openly gaping at the tattooed man sitting across from her.

“It hurt to get them done,” Doyle says. “They go everywhere. It’s the worst when the needle is over bone, but after a while you kind of fade out and it’s not so bad.”

“Oh,” Leah says, her mouth going round. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

“It’s cool,” he says. “You can’t help it.”

“Why so many?” she asks.

“It’s sort of like a hobby, but kind of like addiction?” he says, voice tipping up as he cocks his head. “You think you’re gonna get just one, but then one starts looking really good with another and before you know it you want every piece of you drawn on. I wish I had more space. Some people don’t like their skin, you know?” He pops a piece of broccoli into his mouth, using his fingers. “I picked mine.”

“I got stuck with mine,” Leah replies. “Horrible. I burn to a crisp if I’m in the sun for five minutes.”

“Guys like freckles,” he says. “True story.”

A slow smile crosses Leah’s face. “I know.” Soon she’s laughing, in pleasant conversation with a tattooed Electric Boy. Enola chimes in now and again. Alice stays quiet but keeps brushing my hand. She hasn’t brought us up. That should feel good; it doesn’t.

“Did Pelewski come by?” Frank asks around a forkful of pot roast. “He said he would.”

Enola’s eyes flick in my direction. I set my silverware down. “Yes. He gave things a good once-over.”

Alice looks at me.

“Contractor friend of mine,” Frank says to Alice. To me, “He’s a good guy. Did the roof last year. What did he tell you?”

There is no easy way to say it. Pulling the Band-Aid slowly is just as bad as tearing it off. “A hundred and fifty thousand. To start. Probably closer to two hundred fifty for everything.”

Alice stiffens. There’s a blue flower on the wallpaper just to the left of Frank’s ear. I look at its petals. Talk to them.

“What?”

I repeat the figure. Leah and Doyle’s conversation stops.

“That’s not a repair; that’s a goddamned mortgage,” he says.

“I know.”

“You don’t have it.”

“I called the historical society.” Now is where I’m supposed to ask, but I can’t. Not with Alice next to me. Her hand pulls away.

Frank drinks some water, chews a few more bites, and looks down at his plate. “Well, we can’t just let it fall in.” He puts his palms flat on the table, as if the decision is made. “I’ll float you some money, enough to get started. Give me a day or two to get things in order.”

From Leah comes a quiet, “Frank.”

“Dad.” I’ve never heard Alice hiss before.

“It’s not right to just let it go. Paulina and Dan loved that house.”

He wants to save the house for my parents, dead people. I should refuse, but I’m in no position. “I’ll pay you back.”

Alice pushes her chair out, smashing the leg into my foot. My knee hits the table and the gravy boat spills.

“I’ll go make the coffee,” she says, and disappears into the kitchen. Enola and Leah look at their napkins.

“I’ll see if she needs help,” I say.

I walk to the kitchen as Doyle tells Frank, “That’s a huge thing, man. Huge. You’re a real good guy.”

Alice grinds coffee by the sink with a large hand grinder, a relic of a machine. Her fist moves in hard circles. The counter light flickers over the gentle curve of her arm as she cranks the handle. If it’s possible to grind coffee sadly, this is what she’s doing. Her shoulders slope and her movements have a weight that makes everything deliberate and painful. Her yellow blouse is stained with dampness under her arms and the hair at her nape curls with sweat. I know she tastes like sweet salt. I have an old memory of her in her green field hockey skirt, freckles peeking over shin guards and knee socks. I have a fresh memory of her in her bed, feet twisted in pink sheets, dimples at the base of her spine.

“Hey, are we okay?”

“You didn’t tell me about the contractor. You didn’t tell me anything. You talked to my dad, but not me.” She continues grinding. “Were you planning on asking him for money?”

“No,” but then I know I’m lying. “Not unless I had to.”

“They don’t have much. And I don’t want you taking it.”

“I know.”

“I can’t make him not offer, just like I can’t stop him from doing any other stupid thing he wants to, but I can ask you not to take it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.” Alice measures out spoonfuls of coarse black grounds and heaps them into her mother’s percolator.

“I didn’t think he would offer.” The counter is cold when I put my hands against it and lean next to her. I promise to pay it back, but know the words are empty when the amount dwarfs everything. If Frank pays, if he helps at all, he’ll own me.

She says, “That isn’t the point.”

“You’ve seen the house. I don’t have anything.” With each word she feels further away.

“You know,” she says, “you could leave here. Find a job somewhere else. Colleges have rare book rooms, D.C. has archives all over, museums.” Her voice softens. “I could help.”

“I’ve been looking,” I say. “There’s a manuscript curator position in Savannah. It’s an interesting place, a specialty library with museum and historical society ties and everything. They’ve got a canoe trip diary from 1654 that describes the entire coast almost untouched. It’s far, but—”

“Georgia,” she says, establishing the miles in two syllables.

I can’t ask if she would go, though I can see her bent over a book, curled up in the rumpled sheets in an apartment — ours. I can imagine waking up, her back pressed to me, without fear of a collapsing ceiling.

In the dining room Enola swears. A quick look shows her mopping up water. Too thin. Pale. Jumpy.

“It’s my parents’ house.”

I can see Alice’s spine stiffen. “I could say things, you know. I could say things so he wouldn’t give you anything. I could tell him that you fucked me and nearly got me fired. He wouldn’t give you a cent.” She tamps down the grounds with a small weight. It makes a soft thudding sound. Threatening.

“You could.”

“I won’t,” she says. She fills the percolator and plugs it in, and then she’s beside me, her back to the window. “Because I’ve known you my whole life, and there are things you don’t do to people you’ve known your whole life. Keep that in mind.” The sides of our hands touch, the little fingers lining up in a row. “If you take his money, it’s because I let you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. I really am sorry.”

“I’m not hurt,” she says. “And I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

Her presence is like a heartbeat. I feel her skin on mine, electrons and molecules glance each other until pieces of her become me. I wish I could do dinner at La Mer again and not have picked up Enola’s call. I wish I hadn’t taken the books, that we’d never left her apartment, that I’d said something years ago. “You sat behind me in French class,” I say. “Whenever I try to remember French I can hear you conjugating verbs. I hear you all the time.” Her accent had been good. Madame Fournier used to make her recite in front of the class. “Je suis. Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes.”

“Stop,” she says, shaking her head. “I like you, Simon, but I’d rather not look at you right now.”

I pull my hand back from the counter. “Sorry. I just—”

“You’re taking advantage of my father. He’s never gotten over your parents. You have no idea of the years of stories I’ve listened to about Paulie and Dan, Dan and Paulie. You think about how they haunt your life; it never occurred to you that they haunt mine.”

For the first time since we began talking, Alice looks at me. She’s calm, matter of fact. “So when you take his money — because you will — just know that you’re taking it from an old man who’s fixated on his dead friends. You’re asking a lot from me.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You do. You can leave.” She takes a deep breath. “I think maybe you should leave. Maybe I should. I thought — forget it.”

The bubbling of the percolator fills the silence. I stare at the column of her neck; she holds herself so straight that she makes me feel warped.

“I’d like you to leave me alone now.” She says it sweetly and that makes it worse.

I slink back to the dining room, where Enola is telling Leah about the animal tents at the Florida State Fair and Doyle, thankfully, is using his fork. Alice returns with the coffee as though nothing happened and the rest of the meal is unremarkable, except for my shame. Dinner is over when Leah sighs and clears the coffee cups. Alice rises to help and Doyle and Enola scoot for the door.

“Simon, stay,” Frank says before I can leave. “Have a beer with me.”

“No, no. I need to get back.” I say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” yet I wind up on the porch, holding a beer. Our shadows are framed by the silhouettes of horseshoe crabs drying on the railing.

“I don’t feel right about taking your money, Frank.”

“What else are you going to do? Can’t let the place fall in.” He takes a pull from his bottle. “You can pay it off like a loan.”

I don’t want to talk about money anymore. “Enola said you gave her my mom’s tarot cards.”

“Did I?” He scratches his head.

“Right before she left. You gave them to her.”

“Ah, I remember. They weren’t the sort of thing you’d expressed interest in. Enola came by, said she was traveling like your mom did.” He drinks. I do the same. “It felt like giving them back to your mother.”

“Why didn’t my dad have them?”

“Paulina and I were close, I was just as much her friend as his. I knew her one day longer than your dad. I’m the reason they met.” He taps his foot, tap, tap, tap, twitching out the story. “It was the hottest damned summer and nobody was taking boats out because the sun would bake you until your skin split. Her show was in town, I forget the name of it.”

“Carnival Lareille.”

“Lareille, that’s right. Don’t get old — you hit my age and you’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” He drains his beer and looks across the street to where lights pulse in the front room of my house. Doyle at play. “I figured I’d have a drink, cool off on some of the rides, maybe meet a girl. I saw a line outside this tent where you could get your fortune told. I thought what the hell, and there she was. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Your mom, she was striking.”

I’ve heard my father’s side, how Frank had taken him to the show the next night, how that night Mom had been a mermaid in a glass tank, holding her breath for impossible lengths of time, how he loved her at first sight.

“What did she tell you?”

“That I’d find a good woman and that my life would settle, even though you long to drift like a boat, she said. She was good.” He stands up, stretches his back, and sets his empty bottle on the porch railing. “Your mom gave me the cards before,” he gestures to the water. “I guess it was her way of saying goodbye. Wish I’d known.”

She’d told me goodbye and I hadn’t known either. “Was she acting strange at all?”

Frank coughs. “Strange was relative with your mother. If she’d seemed different to me or your dad we would have tied her down to stop her.” He looks at my beer and grunts, “Drink up. I’ll show you the shop and we’ll talk about you paying me back. I’d straight up give you money, but the wife would murder me if Alice didn’t skin me first. Something going on with you two? She looked ready to kill you all night.”

“Not that I know of.” Not anymore. He steers me behind the house to the large barn that serves as his workshop.

I’ve looked at the workshop but have never been inside; it was off-limits growing up. The walls are lined with tools, vises, lathes, saws, and things I can’t begin to know the purpose of. At the end of the barn are two drafting tables. Frank leans against one. In the heart of the room a boat’s skeleton waits for its skin.

“Sloop?” I ask, shrugging at the frame.

“Too small for a sloop. A dory, or will be.” He makes a note on a drawing. “You’ll learn. You can work the money off with me, do some of the first part of the finishing, the first sealing coats, nothing detailed. If you do get a job you can work weekends.”

Alice must have told him I was let go. I told her nothing about the house or the money — I broke more rules than she did — but still, it was my failing to disclose.

Behind the drafting table, just past his head, is the most extraordinary thing: a huge dark purple curtain that hangs the full length of the wall. By all appearances it’s velvet. Something about it reminds me of sketches from the book. Curtains drawn over a cage, drapes on the inside of a wagon. “Where’d you get that?”

“What?”

“That’s a theatrical curtain.” At the bottom there’s a chain to weigh it down and seal out light. “Seems out of place in a workshop.” I look around the barn and see a series of small portraits in oval frames hanging in the open wall spaces. Relatives? There’s something vaguely Slavic about them, the moustaches on the men, the curved shape of a young woman’s brow.

“It keeps the glare off the drawings in the afternoon and shuts out drafts in the winter. Was in a box of stuff that belonged to my dad. The pictures were in there too.”

“Family heirlooms, then.”

He shrugs. “Guess so.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“Nope. I never really went in for heirloom stuff. Things are things, you know? I just like them. They make the place look a little nicer, keep it warm.”

There’s a knock on the barn door, Leah with more beer. I refuse but a bottle winds up in my hand. Leah leans in to kiss her husband’s cheek and brush sawdust from his shoulder, gestures made soft by habit. Out one of the windows I can see the Sound all the way to the harbor. The lights from the ferry amble toward Middle Ground Light and eventually Connecticut. People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.

When my bottle thumps on the drafting table it startles the both of us. A wide sweat mark swipes across the drawing, blurring the ink. I look back up at the curtains. They couldn’t be the same ones, of course. But they’re striking, individual, but very familiar. My eyes come to rest on the oval-shaped painting of a bearded man. His gaze is unsettling. I should check in the book for him, just in case. If only to prove that I’m imagining things.

“The paintings, are they relatives?”

“Might be. Don’t really know. Like I said, they were in a box with the curtains and some of my dad’s things. They were probably my grandfather’s. I think I remember seeing them at his place when I was a kid. He kind of liked to accumulate things.”

The bearded man stares back at me, demanding I look at him, look for him. I’m sure I’ve seen that face staring out at me from a page. “Frank, I’m sorry. I need to go.”

Enola and Doyle are lying on their backs in the sea grass by the bluff, looking at the stars. Enola has one hand behind her head, and the other tucked away in her pocket. The cards again. They don’t notice when I walk past.

* * *

The book is on my desk, closed as I’d left it. I start at the beginning, methodically searching for sketches, here a drawing of a tiny horse, one of what looks to be a llama, and there, the frame of a skeleton — the very beginning of a tarot card. A note about shoes and boots, costuming, a wig — and there they are, the curtains — draped over what looks like an animal cage with a young boy sitting inside. Not ten pages after, sketches of a wagon interior, hung with small oval paintings. And after, yes, there is the painting of the bearded man — Peabody’s rendition. I’ve seen the actual thing; it’s more eastern, the book’s sketch vaguely anglicized. An interpretation.

Churchwarry picks up and asks me to wait while he gets rid of someone on the other line. “Dante fanatic. Insufferable man. Thinks he’s my only customer,” he says. “Did you get Binding Charms?”

“Yes,” I say, and thank him. “That isn’t why I called, though. I just had the oddest experience. My next-door neighbor, who I’ve known my entire life, has things I’ve seen sketches of in the book.”

“You sound terrible.”

“I’m a little shaken, I just…” The words don’t come.

“What things?” Churchwarry asks. I imagine him pacing the shop. I can hear him prop the door open so that his wife can call down if she needs him. He walks toward what I imagine is the back of the shop, where the shelves are fuller, heavy like the reference shelves at Grainger, and muffle the sound of our conversation.

“Theatrical curtains, portraits.” I hear his chair pull back. Books being moved.

“One curtain looks very much like another, no?”

“They’re the same curtains, Martin, I know it. And the portraits — faces don’t change.”

He pauses for a moment. “Did he say how he got them?”

“He said they were his father’s, possibly his grandfather’s. Who did you say you got the book from? Whose estate?”

“John Vermillion, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t put much stock in the name, though. As I recall from the rest of the auction, he was a consummate hoarder. There was no rhyme or reason to the lots. Quality books were butted up against ruined paperbacks. Pulp. A total nightmare. We were all bidding on pure speculation.”

“I just — I found out that my mother gave away her things, like she meant to kill herself. I saw the curtains and the paintings he had — my neighbor. My mother, she gave things to him, to the neighbor, to Frank.” It could be so simple. Suicide might run through my family with a genetic marker as clear as blue eyes. Simple and horrifying. Enola, on the lawn with her Electric Boy, carrying in her a thing I am powerless to stop.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and there is kindness in it. “I feel like I may have stirred a pot I shouldn’t have.”

My mouth fills with a coppery taste where I’ve bitten into my cheek, the sort of little wound that will swell for days. “It’s too much. To know he had her things, and then to see those paintings and curtains from the book. They’re the exact portraits. I need—” It takes a few tries before the right words surface. “I need to know who he is. He’s someone.”

“We’re all someone,” Churchwarry says. He means to calm me, but instead I feel a cold black fear.

“You should know that we die—they die — on July 24th. My mother, my grandmother, Cecile Duvel, Bess Visser. All of them, every single woman, drowned. Six days.”

“Six days?”

“My sister, Martin. My sister.”

A small gasp.

“Exactly.”

“Is there anything I can do?” There is something different about his voice now. If I could put a name to it I’d say it has the ring of tenderness.

“You like research?” He makes no complaint when I ask him to find out everything he can about my neighbor’s family. “Franklin McAvoy, his father, grandfather. I need to know why he’s got these things.” I give him names to look for — Peabody, Koenig, Ryzhkova or Ryzhkov (damned patronymics). There’s a larger picture at work, something that ties Frank to the book, to my mother, to whatever it is that’s killing us.

The next hours are spent under yellow lamplight. The portrait in particular bothers me. From the sketches it looks as though it hung inside Madame Ryzhkova’s wagon. A small column of figures nearby details expenditures — silks, herbs, salt. A fortune-teller’s tools. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Churchwarry starts tracing Frank’s family and I start with Ryzhkova, our research will intersect. I turn on the computer and do a cursory search for Ryzhkova. The name pings back thousands of results. Shit. Of course it would be the Smith of Russian names. Too much information is just as bad as none at all. Dates should trim things down, 1700s, late. Region as well. Most coming into the colonies would likely have come in through New York City or Massachusetts, Boston particularly. Philadelphia might be a stretch. Though she might hate me at the moment, Alice is still quietly helping me. I log into the National Archives, punch her university ID, and begin searching for ship passenger manifests.

When I collapse under the screen’s glow, I dream of walking along the bottom of the Great South Bay, or maybe it’s Jessop’s Neck, where the water is bathtub warm and the beach is lined with yellow jingle shells. The sand blooms with long leaves of seaweed that becomes hair, red and thick like Alice’s. A horseshoe crab crawls on my foot, then to my leg, clinging. It’s followed by more until I cannot see the water through the deluge of crabs. I wake, gasping.

Enola turned my computer off. In the quiet I hear her shuffling cards.