The Callender Papers

  “Is that evil?” I asked. “Like this is?”

  He shook his head, confused. “How are we going to figure it out?” he asked.

  I was glad to return to a practical question and glad to have someone to confide in. “I’m looking through the papers. I’m looking for something there, I don’t know what. It would be around our age now, the child, if it lived.”

  He agreed. We were both, I think, thinking of what it would be like to be dead. Not even to have lived as much as we had. Or, at least, I was thinking of it.

  Mac stood up, as if he couldn’t sit thinking any longer. “Would you like to meet my family?” he asked, holding out a hand to pull me up. I declined his help. “I was to ask you to dinner, you and Mr. Thiel,” he added. “All the rest are girls, younger than you.”

  “I’ll ask Mr. Thiel,” I said.

  “I brought my Latin,” he said. So we sat beneath the trees, with the sound of the falls behind us, and reviewed Latin. I enjoyed working with the precise language, after thinking so much of dark and inexplicable things.

  When we returned to the house, Mr. Thiel had returned and waited for us in the library. “You’ve had an invitation,” he said to me and gave me a letter. It had been opened, I noticed; but then I saw that it was in fact addressed to him.

  “So have you,” I retorted, which surprised him. I left Mac to repeat his invitation and read the note. It was quite formal and requested the pleasure of my company for Sunday luncheon at the Callenders’. It was a woman’s hand, flowing and rounded, the capitals ornate. The note had been written by Mrs. Callender. It was oddly apologetic: she excused the invitation by saying that her children did so lack companionship. Mr. Callender, his wife said, had been pleased by my cleverness and education and hoped Mr. Thiel would allow me to spend an afternoon with his children.

  When I had finished reading, I looked at Mr. Thiel and he looked at me. Neither of us spoke for a minute.

  “You probably want to meet the McWilliams family,” he said. He was glaring at me as he said it, but I was in no mood to be cowed. Mr. Thiel added, “It is perhaps time that I begin to go out a little more.”

  A surprised noise burst from Mac, which he tried to turn into a cough. It was a laugh, I think. “Mother will be most pleased,” he said. “She will fix a time with you.” I’d never heard him speak so formally.

  “What do you think?” Mr. Thiel asked Mac as he walked him to the door. “She hasn’t been here more than three weeks and already there have been more invitations come into the house than in the last ten years. It all goes to show.”

  When he returned, however, he was not so pleasant. “So. Do you want to go there?”

  I knew he did not mean the McWilliamses’. “I would like to,” I said, which was an understatement: I had determined to. “Unless you forbid me.”

  “I don’t have that right,” he said.

  “I am in your charge,” I reminded him. He could forbid me to go, and I would obey him. But I wanted to meet Mr. Callender’s family, those graceful figures I had seen on the lawn that first day, the children of whom the father had spoken so frankly. Indeed, I wanted to see Mr. Callender again.

  “Then I will accept for you, since the invitation was addressed to me. At least now Mrs. Bywall can have Sunday with her own family.”

  This was his way of reminding me, of trying to make me change my mind, but I ignored him. In fact, I went directly into the kitchen where Mrs. Bywall was beating a pot of mashed potatoes over the stove. Some of her hair had escaped. Wisps fell onto her flushed face. There was a roast in the oven and the kitchen doors were open to cool the room off.

  “Mr. Thiel asked me to tell you that you might like to spend Sunday with your family,” I said.

  “I might indeed,” she wiped her face with the apron. “But what about you?”

  “I have been invited to dine at the Callenders’,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and closed her lips. “I did not know you had met them.”

  “I met Mr. Callender in the village that day I went down,” I told her.

  “Have you something proper to wear?” she asked me, but her mind was elsewhere, I think. “They were more fancy down the hill, always so. You need a proper dress for the occasion.” This idea seemed to upset her more than the notion of my going.

  “Aunt Constance gave me a very pretty dress before I came here,” I said. Mrs. Bywall insisted on seeing the dress, and although it seemed to me she barely looked at it, she pronounced that it would do wonderfully well.

  I hoped it would do wonderfully well. I hoped I would do wonderfully well there too.

  Chapter 9

  I dressed myself carefully for the visit to the Callenders’. Something about that first scene I had spied over, where they were array on the lawn, made me try to appear at my best. I could never, I knew, look elegant. But I was careful to be perfectly neat. I surveyed myself in the mirror before I went downstairs and was satisfied with the results. I had tied back my dark braids with a pink ribbon, and my image looked back at me filled with excitement. If I did not know myelf, I thought, I would want to meet this lively person.

  Mr. Thiel and Mrs. Bywall both awaited me at the foot of the staircase. “Don’t you look nice,” Mrs. Bywall said, as if she had to say something. Mr. Thiel said nothing, just stood impatiently. He insisted on driving me over in the carriage, but—even though this time I sat beside him—we had no conversation. I assumed he was angry, angry that I was going, and angry that I was eager to go. I did not attempt to speak with him. After all, why should he expect me to share his disaffections?

  As we approached the Callender house, a woman came out onto the front porch, alone, to greet us. She must have been watching for us. Mr. Thiel reined in the horse and sat silent.

  “Good morning, Mr. Thiel,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear the words.

  “Mrs. Callender.” He inclined his head, without looking at her.

  She offered me her hand and helped me down. “You are Jean Wainwright. How do you do? We are so glad you could come. Mr. Callender is detained inside, but he will be out shortly.” Then she spoke to Mr. Thiel again. “He asked me to say that we will see Miss Wainwright home,” she said.

  Even at this Mr. Thiel did not look at her. He nodded and drove off.

  Mrs. Callender must once have been pretty. Her blonde hair curled into ringlets that framed her oval face. She was slender and her carriage was straight. She should have been a lovely woman; her features were formed for smiles and cheerful conversations. Instead, she looked half-awake, as if she were speaking and moving mechanically and had not the strength to do more. Her blue eyes were faded, as if many baths in salt-water tears had bleached the color out of them. She pouted. Her hands fluttered helplessly. We stood awkwardly watching the carriage drive off. I began to wonder if my presence was unwelcome. “I hope it is not a great inconvenience to have me,” I said. Mrs. Callender had taken a breath to answer when she was kept from speaking.

  “On the contrary, it’s a pleasure,” her husband said, stepping out from the shadowed doorway just as Mr. Thiel’s carriage disappeared from sight. As if he deliberately avoided meeting Mr. Thiel, I thought. He might have read my mind. “Forgive me for lurking in the background.” He laughed. “We have an old quarrel, your employer and I, and we meet as little as possible. That is to say, we do not meet at all. It is odd what families will come to, isn’t it? Isn’t it, my dear?” He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders, smiling at me. She looked at him with a kind of dumb adoration in her eyes. There was something rabbity in her face and movements, I thought.

  “His wife was my sister,” Mr. Callender said to me.

  “I know.”

  “And you know about the quarrel too, I suppose.” He studied my face, his own face—for once—quiet, serious. His eyes held mine. “I’ll tell you, Miss Wainwright, it’s hard on a man to do what is right and then be judged so harshly for it. But in this world, you have to make choi
ces and stand by them, regardless of what people say. And people will say just about anything, won’t they?” His eyes lit with humor, and his mobile face became lively again.

  I felt sympathy for him. It seemed somehow wrong that this irrepressible, good-humored gentleman should be in any way troubled in spirit.

  “I’m so glad you could come,” he said. His dark blue eyes shone with some kind of inner excitement. “There’s so much to do, so much to talk about. First, you must meet the children, come along. Everyone is in the parlor, waiting. We’ll make a royal progress. Priscilla?” He held out one arm for his wife and the other for me, and so we entered the house.

  The parlor windows looked out over the front lawn. The room was furnished with spindly-legged tables and chairs and a large, black horsehair sofa. Over the carved wooden mantelpiece hung an oil painting of a young girl beside a younger boy. Lace doilies topped the tables. Two glass-fronted cupboards were filled with china pieces, demitasse cups, statuettes of shepherdesses and little dogs, vases and plates. All of these shone with cleanliness. A spinet piano stood in one corner, sheets of music piled on it.

  The three Callender children stood in a row before the fireplace. Like their parents, they were dressed in white, the boys in white linen suits, the girl in a white dress. The older boy resembled his father, only somewhat dimmer, as if his features and coloring had been faded by the translation from father to son. The others resembled their mother, except in their darker hair, more brown than yellow. The girl wore her hair like her mother’s, in long curls; her hands she clasped in front of her.

  “My daughter, Victoria,” Mr. Callender said. The girl’s eyes stared into mine with no expression. Her mouth turned up in a mannerly smile.

  “How do you do?” I said, wondering if I should offer to shake hands, or perhaps make a small curtsey, since she was two or three years older than I.

  She inclined her head, slightly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said, her stiffness belying her words.

  “And Joseph.” Mr. Callender indicated his older son. This young man lounged back against the mantel and surveyed me. “If he can manage to pass the exams, he will go into Harvard next year, or Yale. If not . . .”

  “There is always the army,” Joseph drawled. “Or the merchant marine. One would prefer those, don’t you know.” He smiled lazily at me as he spoke, ignoring the quick disapproving frown on his father’s face. He didn’t look as if he would prefer an active life, but I knew better than to judge from appearances alone.

  “How do you do,” I said.

  “You’ll disappoint Miss Wainwright,” Mr. Callender told him. “She has her mind set on an education.”

  “Chacun á son gôut,” Joseph remarked.

  “And Benjamin.” He stepped forward and shook my hand clumsily. Then he stood back into line, watching his father.

  It was an uncomfortable moment. At a word from Mr. Callender, we all sat down, around the room. Mr. Callender looked from one to the other of us. “Aren’t first meetings awful,” he remarked, but he looked as if he was enjoying himself.

  “Father has told us so much about you,” Joseph said to me.

  “You’re quite superior, we’ve been told,” Victoria added. She sat with the perfectly straight back of a young lady, her skirts smooth over her legs; she looked at her older brother, not at me, as she spoke.

  “My husband tells us you live in Boston,” Mrs. Callender said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t you find Marlborough dull?” Victoria asked. Just as I opened my mouth to answer she went on. “I do. If I lived in Boston I wouldn’t care to spend a summer here. But then, I’m not a superior person.”

  “She’s employed,” Benjamin told her. He had his feet on the rungs of his chair and he shifted restlessly in his seat. “Rooting about among Grandfather’s papers. Finding out all of our secrets.” He at least looked at me, a rather sidelong glance that seemd to me not friendly. I thought I understood then what might have caused the hostlity of these young Callenders that had puzzled me.

  “I haven’t found out any secrets,” I reassured them. “Just dinner menus and lists of linens, a few notes accepting or declining invitations. Although there is the correspondence between your grandfather and his father.”

  “Isn’t that an odd occupation for a young lady, Father?” Victoria asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind any occupation,” Benjamin remarked.

  “It’s not exactly fine stitching or watercoloring.” Joseph agreed with Victoria.

  I answered Benjamin, since Mr. Callender seemed content to sit back and listen. “I agree with you. I have been employed, one way or another, almost as long as I can remember. My aunt, with whom I live, has a school, and there is always something useful to do.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Benjamin told me impatiently.

  “Benjamin,” his father warned him.

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  “Then what did you mean?” I asked. He reminded me, with his truculence, of some of the younger girls at the school, trying to pick a quarrel so that they would have attention.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Benjamin,” Joseph drawled at me, “thinks he is the reincarnation of our great-grandfather.”

  “More than you at least,” Benjamin answered quickly. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting that.”

  “Why do you hope that?” I asked, because I had not liked the sound of the elder Enoch Callender in his letters, and I wondered if he was more admirable than he had seemed.

  “He got what he wanted,” the boy said. “Nobody stood in his way for long. He always got what he wanted.”

  “What is it that you want?” I asked him. He had spoken so intensely that I was curious to know what could move him so.

  “Money,” he answered promptly. “Money and more money.”

  “Everybody knows that, you donkey,” Victoria said.

  “The question is how,” Joseph said. “What great-grandfather was good at was knowing how to make it. When he was your age, he was already a rising young man.”

  “I can’t help that,” Benjamin said. “At least I’m not sitting back and waiting to marry it.”

  Joseph laughed easily, which didn’t help Benjamin’s temper. Mr. Callender caught my eye and smiled at me, as if he and I were above this sort of talk but were indulging the children.

  “We have little to do but daydream,” he said to me. “Victoria has declared her intention of marrying a prince. But she has not yet decided whether he should be Italian or French.”

  Victoria flushed and raised her chin. “Well, I would,” she said. “Once we leave here, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. Unless I’m too old.”

  “If I had a ship, just one,” Benjamin said, “there are fortunes to be made, selling guns or transporting labor—like the Chinese; there are millions of them and they’ll pay to be brought to California. You can carry thousands and just offload them. Then I’d buy arms and sell them in the Orient, on my way to pick up another cargo of Chinese.”

  “Ships go down,” Joseph pointed out.

  “Not mine.”

  “You think you’re so realistic, but you’re just like the rest of us,” Victoria told him.

  Benjamin squirmed in his chair, but looked stubbornly at his sister.

  Mrs. Callender had been gazing absently out the window, but now she rose. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go to the kitchen. Victoria?”

  “Mother,” Victoria protested, with a gesture of her hand that included her dress, and me. Mrs. Callender waited patiently. “If you insist,” Victoria said, rising from her seat, with visible reluctance.

  “We have no servants,” Mr. Callender told me. “We live quite modestly.”

  I changed the subject. “That is an interesting portrait.” I looked at the painting above the mantel. It was not, really, but I didn’t want Mr. Callender to feel the need to apologize to me.

/>   “Do you think so? It’s a relic of happier days.”

  I looked at it carefully. The two children stood side by side on an oriental rug, stiff as mannequins. Their eyes stared out at me. The younger boy was four or five; the girl nearer my own age. The boy was the center of the picture, his halo of golden curls surrounding his round face, his expression angelic. He wore velvet and lace; his mouth turned up at the corners, his skin glowed pink and white. As if she were in the portrait to emphasize the beauty of the boy, the girl was in shadows, dark-haired and plain. She too wore velvet and lace, but her face looked serious and her eyes held a hint of sadness.

  “You can guess who they are,” Mr. Callender said.

  “You and your sister?”

  “Yes. We had nurses, of course, but it was Irene who took care of me. She dedicated her life to me, I’m afraid; and that kept her from marrying at a proper age. I worried about that, I urged her to go out and meet people. But she said she preferred not. We never expected her to marry, my father and I. When I married, I thought she would always live with us, that we might be her family. I know Priscilla hoped the same. I thought we might repay her earlier sacrifices.”

  “You must have been happy when she did marry,” I remarked, still looking at the portrait. This girl had become the wife of Mr. Thiel, beloved wife, I remembered.

  “Why of course.” He paused. “I wished her all happiness, of course. We saw her much less frequently after she married. I don’t think Joseph remembers her at all, and certainly not Benjamin nor Victoria. You ought to tell Miss Wainwright about your studies, Joseph.”

  “She wouldn’t be interested,” he said.

  “But I would be. I’m very interested in education,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Yes, I can see you would be. I’m studying the usual thing, don’t you know.”

  I bit back the sharp rejoinder that was on my tongue. “Do you study with your brother?” I asked Benjamin.

  “Who needs to know that stuff?” he asked me, angry. “Only gentlemen.”

  “Like it or not, you are a gentleman,” his father reminded him. Benjamin looked angrily at me, as if that were somehow my fault. Joseph laughed again. “Although you have lamentable tendencies toward the barbarian,” Mr. Callender continued.