There was something else as well: Holmes was eyeing me with that awful air of expectancy he did so well, as if he had placed an examination question and was waiting for me to follow my preliminary response with the complete answer. He believed there was more in the situation than I perceived; were I to ask what it was, he would make me work for the answer.
That was more than I could face at the moment. Instead, I stood up briskly.
“I want to go look at the house. Norbert gave me the keys. Would you like to join me?”
“Shall we take lunch first?”
“I’m not really hungry. You go ahead, if you like, and join me later.”
“No, I shall go with you,” Holmes said. We assembled our possessions, and at the door he paused to ask, “Do you have the keys?”
“Of course,” I said. “They’re in my . . . No, they’re not. What have I done with them? Oh, yes, here they are.”
I had left the brown envelope on the foot of my bed, I saw, and went back to pick it up. As I turned back to the door, I thought about the walk before me and the condition of the house—and, no doubt, its facilities—at the end of it. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Holmes,” I said, and stepped into the marble-and-gilt room. When I had finished, I dried my hands, patted my hair (unnecessarily—the bob minded neither wind nor neglect) and strode to the door.
“The keys?” Holmes reminded me.
“They’re—Damn it, where have I put them now?” I spotted the manila rectangle, half hidden between the mirror and a vase of flowers, and picked it up curiously: The wretched thing eluded me so persistently, it might have been possessed. With a spasm of irritation, I ripped it open and tipped its contents into Holmes’ outstretched palm. His long fingers closed around the simple silver ring with half a dozen keys that ranged from a delicate, inch-long silver one to an iron object nearly the length of my hand. I tossed the scraps of paper in the direction of the trash basket, and marched out into the corridor.
Twice on the way I took a wrong turn; both times I looked around to find Holmes standing and watching me from up the street. The first time he had a frown on his face, the second a look of concern; when we finally reached the house itself he stopped before the wide gate, studying the keys in his hand.
“Russell, perhaps it would be best for me to enter first.”
“Open the gate, Holmes.”
He raised his eyes to my face for a moment, then slid the big iron key inside the padlock’s hole and twisted. The metal works had clearly been maintained—oiled, perhaps, on the gardener’s yearly visits—and the key turned smoothly.
I stepped onto the sunken cobblestones of the drive, my nerves insisting that I was approaching the lair of some creature with teeth and claws. I could feel eyes upon me, and not simply those of the guardian neighbour across the street. Yet there was no movement at any of the windows, no evidence of traffic apart from the footprints and crushed vegetation Holmes and I had left the day before. With Holmes at my back I walked towards the front door—and nearly leapt into his arms with a shriek when the branches above us exploded with sudden motion: three panicked doves, fleeing this invasion of their safe sanctuary.
I forced a laugh past my constricted throat, and gestured for Holmes to precede me to the door.
The solid dark wood was dull with neglect, the varnish lifted in narrow yellow sheets where the years of rain had blown past the protective overhang of the portico. Thick moss grew between the paving tiles; an entire fern grotto had established itself in the cracks where stonework met door frame. I heard the sound of the tumblers moving in the lock, a sound that seemed to shift my innards within me. Holmes turned the knob without result, then leant his shoulder against the time-swollen wood, taking a sudden step across the threshold as the door gave way.
The dark house lay open to us. I looked over Holmes’ shoulder down the hallway, seeing little but a cavern; steeling myself, I took a step inside. As I did so, the corner of my eye registered an oddly familiar rough place in the frame of the door, about shoulder height. I stopped, one foot on either side of the threshold, and drew back to examine it.
A narrow indentation had been pressed into the surface, some four inches in height and perhaps half an inch wide. Screw-holes near the top and the bottom, and a gouge a third of the way down from the top where someone had prised the object out of the varnish that held it fast. A mezuzah, I thought, and suddenly she was there.
My mother—long rustling skirt and the graceful brim of a hat high above me—pushing open the glossy front door with one hand while her other came up to brush the intricate carved surface of the bronze object. A blessing on the house, laid at the entrance, mounted there by command and as recognition that a home is a place apart. My Jewish mother, touching it lovingly every time she entered. And not only my mother: My fingertips remembered the feel of the carving, cool arabesques protecting the tightly curled text of the blessing within.
My hand reached out of its own volition and smoothed the wood, indented, drilled, splintered, puzzling.
“What have you found?” Holmes asked.
“There used to be a mezuzah on this door. My mother’s father gave it to her, the year I was born. It was his first overture after the offence of her marriage, her first indication that she might be forgiven for marrying a Gentile. And as it turned out, his last, since he died a few months later. It meant a great deal to her. And it’s gone.”
“Perhaps Norbert senior took it down, for safekeeping?”
“I shouldn’t think it would occur to a Gentile to remove it.”
“And your mother herself wouldn’t have taken it down?”
“Not unless she didn’t plan to return. And they died on a week-end trip to the Lodge—our summer house down the Peninsula. We intended to be back in a few days.”
“A friend, then, who removed it, knowing what it meant to her?”
“Perhaps.” I fingered the wounded frame again, wondering. I knew none of her friends. I had a vague idea that one or two women might have visited me in hospital after the accident, but I had been injured and orphaned, and in no condition to receive their comfort. Their letters that reached me in England went into the fire unanswered, and had eventually stopped.
Oddly, although the missing object should by rights have increased my apprehension, in fact the brief vision of my mother moving through the door-way served to reassure me, as if her hand had smoothed the back of my head in passing. When I turned again to the house, it was no longer the lair of a dangerous beast, merely empty rooms where once a family had lived.
The interior looked like something out of Great Expectations, an interrupted life overlaid with a decade of dust. The gilt-framed looking-glass in the entrance hall bore a coat of grey-brown fuzz, the glass itself gone speckled and dim. I stood in the door-way to the first room, my mother’s morning room, and saw that the furniture had been draped with cloths before the house was locked up, all the windows and curtains tightly shut. The air was heavy with the odours of dust and baked horse-hair, unaired cloth goods, and mildew, along with a faint trace of something burnt.
Holmes crossed to the nearest windows and stretched his hand to the curtains.
“Careful,” I warned, and his tug softened into a slow pull, so that the dust merely held in the air instead of exploding back into the room.
A drift of trembling black ashes in the fireplace was the sole indication of the house’s abrupt closure. Everything else lay tidy: flower vases emptied, ash-trays cleaned, no stray coffee-cups, no abandoned books. This had been my mother’s favourite room, I remembered, and unlike the formal back parlour had actually been used for something other than the entertainment of guests. She had arranged the delicate French desk (one of the Louis—XIV? XV?) so that it looked out of the window onto what had been a wisteria-framed view of the bird-bath, and was now a solid green curtain. She’d loved the view, loved the garden, even keeping yearly journals of its progress—yes, there they were, pretty albums bound in silk
that she’d pored over, writing the names of shrubs planted and sketching their flowers, recording its successes and failures in her precise script so unlike my own scrawl. I turned away sharply out of the room; as Holmes followed me, he gently shut the door, cutting off the watery sunlight and plunging the hall-way back into gloom.
The entire house was a stage set with dust-coloured shrouds. The long dining-room table was little more than a floor-length cloth punctuated by the regular bumps of its chairs, its long tarpaulined surface set with three blackened candle-sticks. The music room was home to a piano-shaped mound and a small forest of chairs; the pantry, its door giving way reluctantly to a third key on the ring, lay waiting, the house’s silver, crystal, and china neatly arrayed in their drawers and on their shelves.
In the dim library, Holmes gave a grunt of disapproval at the smell of must. This had been my father’s study, where he had kept accounts and written letters, typing with remarkable facility on the enormous Underwood type-writer, its mechanism so heavy my child’s fingers could barely propel the keys to the ribbon. The Underwood, like the desk and the two chairs in front of the pristine fireplace, was draped; the carpets here had been rolled up against the wall, and emanated a faint trace of moth-balls.
The stillness in the house was proving oppressive. I cleared my throat to remark, “How many acres of dust-covers do you suppose they used?”
Holmes merely shook his head at the disused and mouldering volumes, and went on.
As we worked through the rooms, various objects and shapes seemed to reach out and touch my memory, each time restoring a small portion of it to life: The looking-glass near the door, for example, had been a wedding present that my mother hated and my father loved, source of much affectionate discord. And the fitted carpet in the back parlour—something had happened to it, some catastrophe I was responsible for: something spilt? An upturned coffee tray, perhaps, and the horrified shrieks of visiting women—no, I had it now: Their horror was not, as my guilty young mind had immediately thought, because of any damage to the carpet, but at the hot coffee splashing across my young skin, miraculously not scalding me.
My eye was caught by a peculiar object on the top of a high credenza: an exotic painted caricature of a cat, carved so that its mouth gaped wide in a toothy O. But shouldn’t there be a flash of yellow, right where that stick in the middle . . . ? Ah, yes: Father’s joke. He’d found the cat in Chinatown and fixed a perch across its open mouth, then arranged it on the precise spot where my mother’s canary, which was given the occasional freedom of the room, liked to sit and sing. How Levi and I had giggled, every time the bird opened its mouth in the cat’s maw.
As I worked my way through the rooms, there was no entirety of recall, merely discrete items that sparked specific memories. I felt as if some prince was working his way through the sleeping events of my childhood, kissing each one back to life. Or tapping them like a clown with a trick flower that flashed miraculously into full bloom.
Not that I’d ever much cared for clowns, nor had I been one for fairy tales: The passivity of that sleeping princess had annoyed me even when I was small.
Only when we reached the very back of the ground floor and Holmes pushed open a swinging door did I discover a place that felt completely familiar, wall to wall: the kitchen. No cloth shrouds here, just white tile, black stove, shelved pots, a row of spoons and implements. The wooden table where I’d sat down with plate, glass, and home-work. The ice-box (unchanged from my infancy) from which I’d taken my milk, tugging at its heavy door. The pantry, startlingly equipped with food-stuffs: biscuits and coffee in their tins, flour in its bin, preserves in jars that had gone green beneath their wax seals.
Ghosts are most often glimpsed at the corners of one’s vision, heard at the far reaches of the audible, tasted in lingering scents at the back of one’s palate. So now the house began to people itself at the furthest edges of my senses: A wide-bottomed cook, her back to me, laid down the wooden spoon she was using to stir a pot and bustled away through a door. It happened in one short instant at the very corner of the mind’s eye, and she was gone when I turned my head, but she lived in my mind. Then at the base of the door I noticed a trace of long-dried soil, and with that, through the window in the upper half of the door, a much-abused, sweat-dark hat the colour of earth seemed to pass: the gardener.
His name had been . . . Michael? No, Micah. I’d loved him, I knew that without question, although I remembered next to nothing about him. He had rescued a bird for me one time; the neighbour’s cat had pounced and feathers flew and I—small then, perhaps four, sitting on the back steps (Were there back steps on the other side of that windowed door? I crossed to the window: yes, two of them, leading down to what had once been a neat gravel path-way)—I had screamed in full-throated protest at the sight, bringing Micah around the corner with one hand clamping down his hat and the other holding a rake, his stumpy legs so close to running that the very sight of him silenced me. The cat shot away into the shrubbery; Micah gathered the bird, gentled it, placed it in my sheltering hands where it lay for a time, stunned but not injured. Its heart thrummed nonstop, astounding the palms of my hands, until suddenly it jerked into life and launched itself into the air, flitting into the branches of the apple tree, then away.
I looked down at those hands, two decades older. Curious, the means by which memories were stored. The door-frame mezuzah, the bird, both lay in the skin of my hands. Why was the mind said to have an eye and not a hand, or a tongue? Perhaps touch, taste, odour, sound were linked to the heart rather than the intellect. Certainly both of these tactile memories I had retrieved carried with them profound and specific emotional charges, the one of homecoming, the other of competent authority, both of them immensely reassuring.
I raised my eyes to the grubby window, and in that instant it was as if the kitchen door flew open and the sun spilt into the room. I knew, beyond a doubt, what I wished to do: I would clean the house, restore it, remove the decay to which my neglect had condemned it; and I would find the people who had been here, friends and workers, and talk to them all, weaving myself back into the tapestry of community. For too long, I had turned my back on my past. Holmes was right: I had brought us here for a reason.
Feeling as if I had cast off a heavy and constricting garment, I spun on my heel to go in search of Holmes, to tell him what I had decided, and nearly fell over him. He was stooped to look into a small mirror placed awkwardly on the wall.
“Holmes, I—” I began, and then I took in his attitude, that sharpening of attention that put one in mind of a dog on scent. “What is it?”
“Does this not seem to you an odd location for a looking-glass?”
“For a man your height, certainly. But even in America, few cooks are over six feet tall.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, waving away my explanation. “I mean the placement itself.”
Once my attention was drawn to it, I could see what he meant. It was a round glass set in an octagonal frame, somehow Chinese looking, but a looking-glass used by servants to check their appearance before entering the house would surely be located near the swinging door, not above the long bench used for pots and dishes on their way to the scullery. I took his place before it, bending my knees to bring my eyes to a more normal level.
“It’s also too small to see one’s entire face in it,” I noted in surprise.
“Queer,” he agreed, opening and shutting the cabinets to survey their contents.
“Could it be intended as a means of keeping one eye on the back door while working at the bench?” I speculated, but unless it had shifted over the years, its only view was the cook-stove, and there was no sign of a prop fallen from one side. While I was craning this way and that, taken up by the minor puzzle, Holmes continued on his circuit of the room.
“Did your family have a resident pet?” he asked, back again near the swinging door.
He was squatting before a roughly glazed porcelain vase or bowl that sat on th
e floor at the base of the wall. Six inches at its widest and five inches high, it was primitive in craftsmanship but oddly graceful—and precariously placed, considering the traffic there would have been in and out of the door.
“I don’t believe we did. We had a canary, but cats made my brother sneeze, and my mother disliked dogs.”
I could see why he asked, for when I picked it up to examine it, beneath the dust the mineral deposit left by a pint or so of evaporating water was unmistakable. Still, it was an odd utensil for the purpose, its sides narrowing at the top to an opening that would prove awkward for feline muzzles. Too, surely it would have been better placed in the corner between the sink and the back door, or even inside the scullery. I put it back where I had found it and cast my eyes around the kitchen for anything else out of place. All I could see was a long-dead pot of some unidentifiable herb withered on a window-sill—no doubt an oversight on the part of Norbert’s cleaners, not a deliberate peculiarity.
“Was your cook Chinese?” Holmes asked.
“I shouldn’t have thought so,” I told him. As with most Western cities, the Chinese community in San Francisco was closely hemmed by judicial ordinance and societal expectations. They were allowed to run laundries, make deliveries, and perform menial labour, but a Chinese cook in a private home would have been unusual.
“You don’t remember,” he said, not a question.
“I am sorry, Holmes,” I snapped. “I’m not being deliberately unco-operative, you know.”
But even as I said it, his question had woken a node of memory; the ghost stirred again, that ample-bodied figure moving from stove to scullery. A cook: But now that I thought about it, the woman had been wearing loose trousers, and soft shoes. And a tunic, but colourful, not a thing a menial worker would have worn for hard labour.
“Mah,” I breathed in wonder. “Her name was Mah. And Micah was her brother.”
“Who is Micah?”
“Our gardener. He rescued a bird from the neighbour’s cat one time. He wore a sweaty soft hat, and he used to bow when he gave my mother a bouquet from the flower bed. And . . . and he used to make me laugh with the way he talked. He called me ‘missy.’”