The Glass House People

Title Page

Table of Contents

...

Dedication

Copyright

Epigraph

May

1

2

June

3

July

4

August

5

September

6

HARCOURT, INC.
ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO LONDON

Dedicated to my grandmother,
Mabel Catherine Reiss,
and
to the memory of my other grandparents,
Elsie May
and
William Earl Kauffman,
and
Edmund Lewis Reiss

Thanks, also, to
Clifton Raphael
for the use of his name!

Copyright © 1992 by Kathryn Reiss

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should
be submitted online at
www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to:
Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.HarcourtBooks.com

First Harcourt paperback edition 1996

This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations, and
events portrayed in this book are either the products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously for verisimilitude. Any resemblance
to any organization or to any actual person, living or dead, is unintended.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reiss, Kathryn.
The glass house people/by Kathryn Reiss.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Beth and her brother discover that their
mother has been estranged from her sister and the rest of her family
because of the mysterious death of a man both sisters loved.
ISBN 978-0-15-231040-0 ISBN 978-0-15-201293-9 (pbk.)
[1. Family problems—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.
3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.] I. Tide.
PZ7.R2776G1 1992
[Fic]—dc20 91-26850

Text set in Simoncini Garamond
Designed by Lydia D'moch
I K M O Q R P N L J

Printed in the United States of America

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais"

Summer came early that year. Everyone agreed that the heat was uncomfortable already. Weather forecasters predicted that as the summer went on things would become worse. Fans whirred on high in all the bedrooms in the house on Spring Street.

The couple in the big front bedroom had kicked off their sheets and fallen asleep at last, peacefully unaware of the silent activity in the other bedrooms.

In the corner room down the hall, the young woman sat in an armchair with a sketch pad on her lap. She used a thick black stick of charcoal to sketch from memory and in minute detail the face of the man she loved. She was smiling as she shadowed his cheeks and with deft strokes added a sparkle to his eyes.

In the small pink bedroom the younger girl lay staring at the ceiling, an open romance novel facedown on her stomach. She was feeling slightly smug because the story in the paperback book simply could not compare with her own real-life romance. She stretched out her long legs, adjusted one shoulder strap of her baby doll pajamas, and felt a little shiver of excitement tingle at the back of her neck despite the warm breeze from the fan, as she imagined her own next chapter.

The young man typing on the sunporch left his desk to sit at the window. He chewed thoughtfully on the plastic cap of his pen as he stared out at the stars. His eyes widened for an instant as he thought he saw a meteor streak across the night sky. Then there was another—and immediately another. It was astonishing. It was a whole parade of shooting stars just for him! He took off his glasses and polished the thick lenses on his T-shirt. Then he replaced the glasses on his nose and sat watching, chewing the pen, waiting for more. But nothing happened. And after another minute the faint glow from the tails of light faded away completely.

They had been on the road for six whole days—›motel after motel for three thousand miles. On the map it looked a snap—just a nice long blue line stretching across the country. But off the map it was mountains and desert and rivers and plains, all the way from California to Pennsylvania. Beth Madigan sat in back most of the way, glaring at the map.

She glared at the back of her mother's head, too, just visible over the top of the headrest. Sometimes if she glared at someone hard enough, that person would start to fidget, feeling the power of her eyes. But her mother was impervious. At sixteen,
Beth
should have been the one having an identity crisis, not her thirty-seven-year-old mother. With all Beth's carefully made summer plans on hold and God-knows-what ahead, not to mention the mammoth zit about to erupt on her chin, she was
entitled
to a crisis of major proportions.

Beth pressed her cheek to the window, felt the heat of the glass on her skin despite the air conditioning, and thought about Ray, all those thousands of miles back there in Berkeley. He'd be working in the glass shop all day and teaching the evening class after hours. She longed to be with him. For a moment the smooth pane of glass against her cheek became the soft flannel of his shirt as it had felt on her skin when he'd hugged her good-bye. Then the flannel became glass again, as hard and unfeeling as her mother.

She glanced from the window to the red head of her brother, Tom, next to her mother in the front seat. Poor Tom. He was entitled to a crisis or two of his own—his zits were worse than hers, he'd never even had a girlfriend yet, and he was going to miss the computer camp he'd been so excited about. Fifteen was a prime age for crises, too. But since their mother had chosen this summer to "get her act together" (as she insisted on putting it), no one else mattered. Beth sighed heavily, then leaned forward and tapped her mother on the shoulder.

"Can I drive again, Mom?"

"Thanks, honey. But we're almost there."

Beth slouched back and slipped on her earphones, turning up the volume on her Walkman until the beat drowned out the Lite Rock tapes her mother insisted on listening to. She stared out the window.

Their old, battered car had cruised the highways between Berkeley and Philadelphia for six days now. Beth's mother, Hannah, normally so scatterbrained, drove with a strange intensity, piloting the car smoothly, relentlessly back east, back to the hometown she hadn't seen for twenty years. Beth, who had passed her driver's test soon after she'd turned sixteen in March, had driven whenever she could persuade Hannah to relinquish the wheel. Driving gave her something to think about other than what awaited them at the end of their journey.

Most of the six days on the road Hannah seemed determined to keep hold of the wheel, as if holding it tightly gave her some kind of courage. And since Tom got carsick unless he sat in the front and looked straight ahead, Beth was stuck most of the time in the backseat with Romps, their old schnauzer, and all the bags and piles of junk that wouldn't fit anywhere else. She read one cheap detective novel after another as they crossed the mountains and the deserts and the plains, until the plots blurred into a single, predictable murder with one half-baked solution.

When her tape ended, Beth pulled off the headphones. "You'll really like Philadelphia," she heard Hannah telling Tom. "We can take a day or two and explore the historic district. I haven't seen it since I was a child."

"Didn't you go there a lot when you lived at home?" asked Tom.

"Not really. I don't think you ever really see the touristy things if you live in the place."

"Yeah, like how we never ride on the cable cars—even with San Francisco right there."

"I took you and Beth when you were little," said Hannah. "But I guess you don't remember."

Beth thought she recalled riding on a cable car with her mother. She remembered wearing a jacket with a red hood and holding tightly to her mother's hand on one side and to the hand of a man on the other. That might have been her father. Or was he already dead then? She remembered the house they lived in when she had that red jacket. It was a big, rambling house just over the hills from Berkeley, with a sagging front porch and chickens in a pen in the back. The man could have been her father or any other member of their communal household. Now she and Hannah and Tom lived in an apartment in Berkeley right near the highway. Her mother had finished high school through a correspondence course she'd begun when Beth and Tom started school, and she now worked as a general secretary in the English department at the university. Beth tried to help out by buying her own clothes and lunches at school with the money she earned at Glassworks, the stained-glass shop where she'd met Ray.

"This is it," Hannah said suddenly, turning the car onto the exit ramp. "This is really it! Oh, my God, this is it!" Her hands gripped the wheel so tightly her knuckles shone white.

"Hey, guess what, Mom," said Tom.

"What?"

"This is it." His voice was dry.

She frowned at him. "I still don't think you and Beth know what this means to me, to go home again after all these years."

"Guess not."

Beth didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. Of course she and Tom didn't understand what "going home" meant to their mother. But how could they? Hannah had always been silent on the subject of her family. "I left them when I was seventeen," she'd told Beth and Tom once. "Didn't even stay to finish high school I was miserable living there, and they were happy to see me go. I've never wanted to go back. There's no reason to go. I can't relate to them. I don't expect I'll ever see them again—and that's fine. People don't have to stay with the families they're born to, you know. People can build their
own
families. It's better that way." That had been when they were still in the big house on the other side of the Berkeley hills. Hannah had wanted to stay with the people she'd chosen as family—especially after Beth and Tom's father died. Even a few years later, when the group house broke up and the three of them were alone in the little apartment, Hannah remained adamant: "In the end, we each have to make our own way in the world," she told Beth and Tom. "Never look back."

Beth had noticed that each day, as the car sped further east, Hannah became increasingly nervous and tense. She talked more and drank coffee nonstop as she drove. Once at a rest stop she bought a pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing hard. Beth and Tom stared in amazement. "You don't smoke, Mom!" Tom exclaimed.

Hannah's voice trembled as she lifted the cigarette for another long draw. "I do now." Then she looked up at the surprise in their faces and threw the cigarette down with disgust. "No. I won't let them get to me! I swear it!"

That was when Beth got the feeling there might be some trouble ahead.

Now Beth stretched her long legs out around Romps and rubbed his ears. The little dog settled himself across her legs, his gray muzzle resting on her stomach. She scratched him automatically, and he moaned a little.

"Mom? Romps sounds weird."

"I'm sure he's fine," said Hannah, glancing over her shoulder. "Is your seat belt fastened, Beth? You know it isn't safe without—oh, look!" She broke off and pointed out the window. "There's the Waverley! That was the movie theater we'd go to every other Saturday. Imagine—it's still here!"

"How extremely thrilling, Mom."

"And that's the candy store—I can't believe it's still in business!"

"Fascinating. Awesome. I don't think I can stand it."

"Oh, Beth." Hannah sounded wistful. "I wish you'd take an interest. This is where I grew up! And it's going to be our home for the summer. We would have come here years ago, if I'd had my act together then."

"I liked your old act better. And I wish you'd let me stay with Ray. He said it would be fine. He has plenty of room in his apartment You know, Mom, I had my whole summer planned out perfectly, and now it's totally wrecked!"

"Honey, we've been through this a hundred times. You're too young to be left behind while I'm on the East Coast—especially with a man ten years older than you."

"Look, please don't start in about Ray again. Mom, when you were only a year older than I am, you ran away from home and got married!"

"Yes, I know." Hannah's voice was soft. "But I see now I was wrong to do that. I was too young. In any case, it's time to go back. I need to. And more important, you need to meet your grandparents. They're getting older. They won't be around forever."

That was the new Hannah speaking. The one with the identity crisis. The old Hannah had no regrets about anything. Beth preferred the old self-assured one, the one who had always taught her, "Move forward. Never look back."

This was looking back in a big way right now.

The car veered sharply to the right. "Whoops!" cried Hannah. "Almost missed the turn! This is it, kids. Spring Street. Here we are!" Her voice was happy, but Beth caught the nervous tremble in it.

Romps moaned again. He was panting, pink tongue hanging loosely.

Despite the indifference she longed to assume, Beth craned her neck to see out the window. After six days of fast food and cheap motels where they had to smuggle Romps in after dark, she welcomed a real house. She welcomed any change of scene from the never-ending stretch of highway. Soon she would be meeting her grandparents, her mother's parents. Henry and Clara Savage. Her mother had been Hannah Savage when she last saw them. Beth figured it was no wonder her mother had run off to get married—anything to change a weird last name like that!