“Her family line here goes back to the mid-eighteenth century,” he said, “and she’ll let you know it every chance she gets. There are lots of people around here who are that way. They aren’t unpleasant or anything, but they’ll let you know they have a special claim on Quincy, a claim even on the air you breathe. Where you from?”
“Out west,” I said. The less anyone knew about me, even a taxi driver I might never see again, the better it was, I thought.
“Yeah, well, wherever that is, it’s different here,” he said. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror but then stopped talking, as if he was used to people who didn’t care to talk about themselves with strangers. I could see in his face that he was full of questions for a young girl like me arriving in Quincy and heading for a rooming house, but I turned my attention to the city.
There was a calmness in the way people moved about. The late-spring sunshine seemed already to be a great contrast with the darkness I had traveled through to get here. Everything had a lazy, laid-back atmosphere. We had been living in Los Angeles long enough for me to feel at home there, but it was so much larger and so much more populated that even though I was still in a city with close to a hundred thousand people, I felt as if I had stepped into a small town. It was just large enough for me to disappear safely but small enough for me to feel I was in a friendlier, warmer community. Maybe it was all wishful thinking, but I needed wishful thinking right then. I had lived most of my life believing I was an orphan. My father had plucked me out of anonymity and given me a name, and although I didn’t have a real mother living with us, I had Mrs. Fennel looking after me the way a mother might, and I had sisters. I had a family. Now I was all alone again. This time, I was truly an orphan, but this time, my chances of finding a family and acquiring a name were next to nil.
The taxi wound its way through busy city streets before turning off and following a more circuitous route to a very quiet side street with about a dozen houses. Some were relatively modern, but interspersed were much older structures. He stopped before a large, rectangular, two-story wooden building with rows of windows, chimneys at both ends, and a grand-looking portal centered in the façade. Of all of the houses on the street, it appeared to have the most land, with a richly green lawn cut in a perfect rectangle. The driveway was gravel, and except for some potted flowers in the front, the property looked quite simple and unpretentious. Just off the street, a very small wooden sign in script read “Winston House, 1748.”
The taxi driver got out to open my door and get my bag out of the trunk. “You’re not exactly right on top of all the action here,” he said, looking down the very quiet street. No one was outside of any house. Nothing was moving. It looked more like a three-dimensional painting.
“Thank you,” I said, and paid him the fare without any other comment. He looked at the front of the Winston House, shrugged, and got back into his taxi. I stood watching him drive off and then rolled my bag along the slate walkway toward the front entrance.
There was an old-fashioned door ringer that you had to turn. I did so and waited. No one came to the door, so I did it again. Twenty or thirty seconds later, the door was tugged open, and a tall, thin woman with charcoal-gray hair in a chignon stood glaring out at me as if I were an unwanted vacuum-cleaner salesperson or something. She held a dish towel and was drying her hands. There was a small sign next to the door that read, “No solicitors permitted.”
“Yes?” she said.
“My name is Lorelei Patio. I called earlier about a room.”
“Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door.
I thought that was quite rude. For a few moments, I debated turning around and walking off to find another rooming house or hotel. The taxi driver was right about the neighborhood, however. I saw nothing remotely resembling a place to stay. It was a good three or four blocks back to the busier street.
The door opened again, and this time, a much shorter woman in a gray dress with a white lace collar looked out at me. Her dark brown hair, which looked at least shoulder-length, had been gathered into a soft knot at the top of her head. Some strands had been pulled from under her hair band and curled over her forehead.
She raked over me with her soft hazel eyes, sizing me up and then nodding. “Just as I thought. You’re pretty young. I hope you’re eighteen at least, otherwise you’re wasting your time and mine,” she said. Her voice was firm but not nasty.
“I am,” I said. “Are you Mrs. Winston?”
“Well, who else do you think I’d be?” she asked, and followed that with a one-syllable laugh. She turned, and the woman who had first greeted me stepped up beside her. “What do you think, Mrs. McGruder?” Mrs. Winston asked her.
“A risk at minimum, Mrs. Winston. She has the face of an angel, however.” She drew closer and looked at me harder. “I see no trouble in her eyes now, but these eyes have seen trouble,” she continued.
“Exactly my thoughts,” Mrs. Winston said. “Well, come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll see about you.”
Once again, I didn’t know whether to be amused or angry. I wasn’t at the Winston House to be interviewed for a job. I was there as a paying customer. They both stepped aside to make way for my entrance. I picked up my suitcase, hesitated, and then entered the house. Mrs. McGruder stepped forward quickly to close the door behind me.
I was pleasantly surprised by the brightness and the color scheme of the entrance hall. The walls had apple-green and white paper, divided into broad panels with white molding. The wainscoting was stained dark green. On the floor was a green-and-white-checked rug with a plain border, and against the wall were a settee and two chairs with white woodwork and green upholstery. The white console opposite was beneath a mirror. A green-and-white-lattice plant stand held purple and pale yellow irises. Ahead of us was a white stairway with box trees in green tubs at the foot of it. The air was perfumed with the scent of fresh spring flowers.
“This way,” Mrs. Winston said.
I followed them to the right to enter what I thought was a small, rather cluttered sitting room. Every available space was taken up with antiques—clocks, statuary, sepia photographs in old frames, music boxes, and, of course, leather-bound books with yellowing pages. The furniture looked as if it had been there from the first day anyone had moved into the house.
There were large, comfortable-looking mahogany chairs, a sofa, and two footstools grouped around the fireplace. To the right of that was a table with a lamp, some books and magazines neatly stacked, and two more chairs nearby. Across the way was a tall secretary with a straight chair. The woodwork, walls, and fireplace were a soft gray. The rug was a plain velvet, and the curtains were in a chintz pattern with green foliage. Despite how crowded the room was, it did look cheerful and cozy.
Mrs. Winston indicated the sofa for me, so I lowered my suitcase and sat. She took one of the chairs facing me, but Mrs. McGruder stood off to the side near the entrance.
“This rooming house has been in my family for over two hundred years. It didn’t begin as a rooming house, of course. Families were a lot larger back then, but over the years, as our family thinned out, some moving away, we began to take in boarders. I’ve been doing it from the day I was married to Knox Winston. We raised our two children in this house while we had three boarders. They became members of our family. I’m telling you this so you will understand why it is so important to us to know all about the people who want to stay here for however long that might be.
“Now, I will say, you are the youngest person ever to wish to do so. Naturally, then, we would want to know a little more than usual about you. If this is offensive to you, please be assured that you won’t be hurting our feelings by leaving right now.”
She didn’t look at Mrs. McGruder. I did and saw her staring at me so intently that I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated. In some ways, she reminded me of Mrs. Fennel, who had the eyes of someone who could look through your very soul.
I shifted my legs and nodded. “What do you want to know about me?”
“Well, for starters, why are you in Quincy?”
“I wanted to start my own life, and I wanted to start as far away from my father and his current wife as I could,” I began.
My story seemed to unfold as I told it, emerging from real events as much as from things I invented. My older sister Ava, when she was training me to take over her position in our family, had told me that we have a unique ability to fabricate on the spot. “We do it so well,” she had said, “that we come to believe what we invent.” She’d laughed. “Sometimes it’s impossible to distinguish what really happened from what we claim happened. It’s in our nature to be deceptive, because deception is protection. Whether you want to be a good liar or not, Lorelei,” she’d said, “you are.”
“My goodness, why do you want to be as far away as possible from your father?” Mrs. Winston asked, this time looking at Mrs. McGruder, who narrowed her eyes and nodded softly, as if she had always known what I was about to say or, more accurately, create.
“Where are you from?” Mrs. McGruder asked before I could respond.
“Southern California, Los Angeles,” I said.
She nodded at Mrs. Winston. “Thought so,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’m an only child,” I said. “I was very close with my mother. We were more like sisters.”
Mrs. McGruder liked that. She walked over to sit beside Mrs. Winston.
“In fact, I knew she was very sick before my father knew,” I continued. “During a routine physical exam, the doctor discovered that she had bone cancer. My father was never one to tolerate sickness and weakness, either in my mother or in myself. Whenever I was ill, he practically ran out of the house and always left everything for my mother to do, so you can imagine what he was like when she told him the bad news.”
“And they wonder if women are stronger than men,” Mrs. McGruder said.
Mrs. Winston nodded, pressing her lips together. “I should know,” she said. “I had to take care of my paternal grandmother, didn’t I? My husband found every excuse to avoid seeing her when she was in the hospital, too.”
“Don’t I remember. The burden you had,” Mrs. McGruder said, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. “Any other Christian soul would have collapsed under the weight.”
I could see I had begun to swim in the stream of their sympathy. I sighed and pressed my fingers against my eyes as if to stem the leaking tears.
“I was the one who took my mother to every doctor’s visit,” I continued. “My father was on one of his so-called business trips when I had to take her to the hospital that final time. He never said good-bye. I tried to do it for him, but my mother knew I was only trying. You can’t hide the truth from someone on death’s door. Lies and hypocrisy are turned away.”
“Poor dear,” Mrs. Winston said, nodding. She looked at Mrs. McGruder. “Some of us have no choice about when we have to grow up and put away childish things.”
“Amen to that,” Mrs. McGruder said, and clicked her tongue again.
I took a deep breath and looked away. I was actually forcing back real tears by now. Ava would have been proud of me if she were sitting there, I thought, but I was thankful she was not and hoped she never would be again.
“My mother died a few months ago,” I said without looking at them first. Then I turned slowly, dramatically. “Later, I discovered that my father had already been seeing this woman while my mother was dying in the hospital. It was like having death stab me in the heart a second time.”
Mrs. Winston pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“Mother of God,” Mrs. McGruder said, and she looked up as if she could see an angel hovering on the ceiling.
“I knew it, but I said nothing to him—or to my mother, of course. Two weeks after my mother’s passing, my father brought his new girlfriend home. We hadn’t even put up the tombstone yet.”
“Oh, the hardness cementing the hearts of self-centered men,” Mrs. Winston said.
“They didn’t marry. They had the decency to wait some time before they were going to do that, but she behaved as though they were married. It wasn’t long before she was telling me what to do, and he was siding with her all the time. Finally, he gave me an ultimatum. Accept Veronica as my surrogate mother until they were married—that’s her name; he calls her Ronnie for short—or leave.”
“Your father said that? He gave his own flesh and blood such an ultimatum?” Mrs. McGruder asked.
Mrs. Winston grunted. “I don’t know why that would surprise you, Mrs. McGruder. You and I have lived long enough to see it all.”
“But not to abide it.”
I nodded. “He gave me that ultimatum, so one night, I packed only enough to get away quickly. I had a little of my own money, and I thought I would get new things as I went along. As you can imagine, it was important to travel lightly and get as far away as I could as fast as I could. I don’t intend ever to go back there except to visit my mother’s grave from time to time. I know he won’t.”
“You poor child. Don’t you have any relatives you could have gone to?” Mrs. McGruder asked.
“Both of my parents were only children, and both sets of grandparents are gone,” I said. “I guess you can see how important my mother was to me and I to her. As I said, we were more like sisters.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Winston said. The two women were both silent a moment, and then Mrs. Winston looked up at me again. “What brought you to Quincy?”
Time to mix in some truth, I thought. It’s the recipe that always works.
“To be honest, I read about it on the flight from California to Boston and decided it was a good place to get a new start. I’ve always loved being close to the ocean, but even more, I love being close to history.”
“No question about it. You’ll be close to that here,” Mrs. McGruder said.
“Why didn’t you go to college?” Mrs. Winston asked, still holding on to some of her skepticism and suspicions. It was too much a part of her nature to let them go easily.
“I fully intended to do so, but my father told me we didn’t have the funds and I should first get a job and make some money. We had the funds. I knew it, but what could I do? He made promises that I knew he would never keep. He said he would match anything I made, but once his Ronnie came to live with us, I saw the writing on the wall. There would be little or no money put away for me, no matter what I did. She was always asking him for expensive things.
“But I haven’t given up on going to college someday,” I said quickly.
“Did you inquire about any job prospects here?” Mrs. McGruder asked.
“Not yet, but I’m good on a computer, and I have very good organizational skills. No matter what, I want very much to try to live here for a while,” I said. “This looks like just the sort of place that’s the opposite of where I was in California. I have the feeling that people are real here. I’m the sort who likes to make new friends. My mother was like that, too. She taught me that if you are honest and sincere with people, they will be the same with you. My father taught me the opposite,” I added, grimacing, “but I’ve tossed those lessons overboard.”
Now they looked as if they were the ones holding back tears.
“We have room for only six guests,” Mrs. Winston said after a deep sigh. “Currently, we have three. You’ll be our fourth. There are strict rules,” she added with a tone of admonition.
“I’m not afraid of rules,” I said.
“We’ll see. We’ll show you your room. You’ll be sharing a bathroom with Mrs. Addison. She was recently divorced, and she is waiting for her new house to be renovated.”
“And for her divorce settlement, which could go on for quite a while. The courts here are like the courts in a Dickens novel,” Mrs. McGruder added. “Have you had any lunch?”
“Lunch?” I smiled.
“What’s so funny?” Mrs. Winston asked.
“I w
as so involved in my travel, I forgot to eat breakfast, too,” I said.
“I’m not surprised. Young people today don’t know right from left most of the time,” Mrs. McGruder said.
Mrs. Winston nodded in agreement. “Well, then, first things first,” she said, rising. “You just make yourself at home here for a few minutes while we look into some lunch. I’m a little hungry now myself.”
The two of them left me. I gazed around the room, which just reeked of history, of family, of heritage. I had no reason to feel at home and no expectations of finding friendship at all.
But somehow I felt as if I had.
Was it merely a wish, a need so great it would paper over reality and leave me even more vulnerable than I was before I had begun my journey?
The world was bright there, cozy and warm.
Don’t fool yourself so quickly, Lorelei, I told myself. The winds of darkness you left behind are surely blowing vigorously in every direction at this very moment, searching for you, waiting to swallow you up and take you back to the fate you were destined to have.
Remember Ava’s prophetic words.
“You can’t escape from yourself.”
3
I continued to elaborate on my story at lunch, building on half-truths. I held the two women in rapt attention, especially when I described the fictional Veronica, making her sound jealous of my capturing even a few seconds of my father’s attention. I even suggested that she tried to make me out to be a thief by claiming that she couldn’t find certain pieces of her jewelry and somehow was always missing money. Jealousy among myself and my sisters was always in the air at home. All of us competed for my father’s attention, so it wasn’t difficult coming up with this scenario and describing it with passion in my voice.
“Whenever Veronica brought any of this up, she fixed her attention on me in front of my father so that there would be no doubt whom she was accusing. She must have descended from Judas,” I added, and their eyes widened. “It was like living with an assassin,” I said. “Gradually, my father’s once loving eyes turned into cold gray stones when he looked my way, and all because of her. Once my father loved me like a father should love a daughter,” I added, thinking of my real father. “He loved to spend time with me, lay whatever wisdom he could upon me to guide me, but after she came on the scene, I felt like a stranger in my own home. It got so I was spending hours and hours locked up in my room, finding every way I could to avoid them. I would fall asleep with my mother’s picture embraced in my arms and pressed to my heart.”