The Glass House People (4 page)

She heard her mother, Aunt Iris, and Grandmother on the stairs and then in the upstairs hall outside her door. "It's so nice to be back," Hannah said. "I'm glad you've let me come back."

"You're our daughter, Hanny Lynn," said Grandmother simply.

"Yes—but I didn't know whether I'd be welcome."

"There's a lot of water under the bridge now. Still, families need to stick together." Grandmother's voice grew fainter as she walked down the hallway to the bedroom she shared with Grandad. "Families ought to take care of each other. Good-night now."

"Good-night," Hannah said. "And good-night to you, too, Iris."

Aunt Iris started to laugh. The hair on the back of Beth's neck prickled.

"That's a good one, Hanny Lynn. That's a good one!" laughed Aunt Iris.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Iris." Hannah's voice was tight. "I'm going to bed."

"Doing what you're good at, hmm, Hanny?" The laughter became a cackle. "Glad to be back in your own little bed—or would you really rather be all tucked up in the Lodge?"

"Shut up, Iris."

"That's what I thought."

"I am perfectly happy to be back in my old room."

Aunt Iris's shrill laughter skidded under Beth's closed door. "Ha! Oh, right, Hanny Lynn. That's rich! You'd rather be in that little single bed when you could be in the big double bed instead? All cozy and warm with the man of your choice? And we know who that would be, don't we? Don't we just!" This time her laughter seemed more like sobbing to Beth, who sat up tensely on her bed, eyes riveted on the door.

"Iris, I'm telling you—" But Hannah lowered her voice to a whisper, and Beth couldn't make out the words. Then, after she heard the clicks of two bedroom doors closing, Beth got out of bed and tiptoed to the sunporch to see what Tom thought of the exchange in the hallway. But he was crashed out on his bed, still in his clothes, with the fan on high and aimed directly at him. His curly hair, the same color as Beth's, flipped up and down on his forehead in the current of air. He was snoring gently and, clearly, hadn't overheard a thing. Beth unplugged his fan and took it back to her room. She stood it on the radiator under the window and directed it at her own bed.

The bed had an old smell, and the mattress dipped uncomfortably in the middle, holding Beth like a hammock. She'd left the door to the sunporch open so that the night air coming through the screens could circulate freely between the two rooms. She heard creaking as Tom rolled over in his narrow bed, and she was glad she and Romps were in a big double one, bumps and all.

A double bed. What had Aunt Iris meant by saying Hannah must really want to sleep in the double bed? Which double bed? And what was the Lodge? Beth turned on her side, scratched Romps's ears, and reached for her journal on the nightstand. As she opened the diary to begin writing, she tried again to picture her mother living here as a girl. She couldn't.

As if thinking about Hannah had summoned her, the bedroom door opened slowly and Hannah stepped in. "Are you awake, Beth?" she asked.

"Yes." Beth slipped the journal under her pillow.

"Romps has to sleep outside in back, honey." She stroked the dog. "Is Tom awake?"

"Nope."

"Yes, I am," he said groggily, standing in the doorway. "Beth stole my fan. I can't sleep without that fan."

"Well, I'm glad you're awake. I want to talk to you both."

Tom threw himself across Beth's bed, and Hannah perched on the side. "So, kids," she said. "Shall I ask what you think of this place?"

"Better not," muttered Beth. "We might tell you."

"Oh, Mom!" Tom struggled to keep his voice low. "This is going to be awful. Why didn't you tell me how weird everybody is?"

"Your grandparents aren't weird," Hannah defended them. "Grandad has been ill, and Grandmother—well, she's been sad, I think, for the past twenty years. I hurt her much more than I ever realized by leaving home."

"I don't blame you for leaving," said Beth "I'd run pretty fast if I had a sister like Aunt Iris. I just don't see why you wanted to come back."

Hannah leaned back on the bed. "Coming back isn't easy for me, Beth. After so long. But It was suddenly something I knew I had to do You keep saying I'm having an identity crisis, Beth, and maybe you're right. But I feel as if things fell into place for me this past year. I realized I've been on the run for a long time, and yet I haven't been really happy doing what I do. Dating men who don't mean much to me, working at a job I don't enjoy, living just about as far from my family as I could get and still be in the same country ... At least I've had you kids! You mean so much to me, both of you. But I want things to change for me."

"I know, I know," said Beth. They had heard this before. It was all her mother had talked about the last few months. She was going to stop the casual dating she'd been doing for years and start spending her time studying. She had applied to Mills College in Oakland, only a few miles from their apartment, and was accepted to begin in the fall as a new freshwoman. She planned to major in English and get a job working for a publishing company once she'd received her degree. And she wanted to repair the broken bridge back to Philadelphia and see her family again after twenty years.

"Why did you leave in the first place?" asked Tom. "Was it because of Aunt Iris?"

Hannah twirled a lock of her soft brown hair. "I've told you before. I left home just before I turned eighteen. I wrote immediately and told them that I was all right and that I was getting a job and that I didn't want anyone coming after me, hauling me back home as a runaway. I knew that once they were sure I was safe, they'd leave me alone. They wanted me gone as much as I wanted to be gone—well, let's just leave it at that for now. There were problems, and I didn't want to stay and wait for them to work themselves out. I didn't think there was any way they
could
be worked out."

"But now you think they could have been, is that it?" asked Tom.

"Not really. But I do think I probably shouldn't have left when I did. I was angry and hasty. You both must know what it's like to do things you regret later, and then not want to change things because you're too proud."

Tom nodded, but Beth just lay back staring at the ceiling. There was an interesting crack up there. It looked like the outline of a man's head.

"Well, I wanted to get out, and the place to go seemed to be California. I took all my savings out of the bank—it wasn't much, just a few hundred bucks—and bought a train ticket. I figured I'd get myself some kind of job when I got to San Francisco. But instead, I met your dad on the train. We—well, we fell in love."

"On the train?" asked Tom.

"Oh, well, it was the sixties." Beth said dryly. "You know: love and peace? Dad was a hippie type. You've seen the pictures."

"It was the early seventies," corrected Hannah with a smile. "But you're right. We fell in love—I was so young! We were both just babies."

Beth pictured Ray's face, his thatch of straight blond hair falling over his forehead. Her mother hadn't been too young to fall in love at seventeen. Neither was she, at sixteen.

Her dad had been young, too—only nineteen—when he'd met Hannah on the train. Beth knew this because, although Hannah rarely spoke about her life before she left Philadelphia, she loved to tell stories of the adventures she'd had with their dad. He was from New York and was planning to move out to California, where, he said, the action was. Hannah was ready for action, too, she said, so they got married when their train arrived and worked at odd jobs in San Francisco until finally, a year later, they ended up in the group house with a dozen other young people. Both Beth and Tom had been born right there—not in a hospital but attended by the resident midwife—surrounded by their parents' friends in the old house with the sagging front porch.

But then, when Beth was five and Tom was four, their dad and two friends from the group house had been killed in a car accident. The three young men had been drinking their homemade brew, Beth and Tom knew, and their dad had been at the wheel when the car smashed through the guardrails and careened off a highway overpass in San Francisco late one night. He was only a dim memory to Beth now, though the pungent smell of a wood fire could conjure the feeling of strong hands holding her up to watch a bonfire in their backyard. She knew his face only from photographs.

"I married for love," Hannah said now, "but I really shouldn't have been away from my family that young. I was ready to fall in love—maybe I was desperate for it. And I was, as I said, on the run. That's never the best way to leave home. I thought about that a lot this past year—the way I left. I'd die if either of you kids left me that way. And I knew I had to get in touch with my parents again. Can you believe I never told them about you kids, never told them when your dad died—? Nothing."

"But you've never told us what you were so mad about, Mom. You'd have to have been pretty furious to stay away so long." Tom was asking an old question. Beth waited to see if this version of the answer would be any more informative.

Hannah just shrugged. "I was having a hard time. We all were. And the twenty years just seemed to fly by. When you stay away that long, going back seems impossible, and you rarely even bother to think about it. But then, as I've said, I started wanting different things for myself this past year. A new life. College. And connections again."

"As you've said and said and said," muttered Beth. The conversation seemed to be moving, as it had so often back in Berkeley these past few months, toward Hannah's lecture about the Necessity of College. Beth had heard it often and resented every word. It was fine with her if her mother decided to go to college. Fine! Let her get her bachelor's degree and a master's degree—even a Ph.D., if that's what she wanted—but let her leave Beth out of it. Beth had her own plans, ones her mother once had approved of—even encouraged. These plans didn't include college or law school or degrees from anyplace on earth. She wanted to own a stained-glass shop with Ray and live with him. They'd have an apartment above the shop and work together and teach classes and have loads of time just to enjoy each other. Leave it to Tom to carry out their mother's new goal for her children; he could become a college-educated computer wizard. But Beth intended to keep her hands busy with glass patterns and tools, not computers and books. She was exhausted now and wanted only to write in her diary and sleep.

"What's wrong with Aunt Iris?" asked Tom, and Beth forced her eyes open again.

"Oh, well, polio," said Hannah. "And something else, now. I'm really shocked to find her so emaciated. I'll have to talk to Mama about her. Find out when this started. But she had polio as a child, one of the last cases, I think. She's ten years older than I am and had it before I was born." Hannah laughed sadly. "I was always jealous of that limp, if you can believe it! Mama absolutely fawned over Iris because of it. And I always felt left out, just because I was normal. You wouldn't know to look at her now, but Iris was gorgeous. Long red hair, a beautiful figure. Next to her I was a mouse. She was an artist, too—maybe you get your talent from her, Beth. After she finished school she stayed home and painted. She actually sold a few oil paintings and won a state competition. She was working on paintings for an exhibit in Philadelphia the summer I left. God—she had everything. It didn't seem fair."

Beth digested this information in silence, comparing Hannah's description to the Iris she'd met that afternoon. How bizarre!

Hannah stood up. "I'll let you two get to sleep now. We can talk more tomorrow. I hope—" She hesitated. "I hope you won't mind too much being here. It's only for the summer."

Tom unplugged the fan and stumbled back onto the sunporch with it. The springs creaked as he flopped down onto his bed. Beth resolved to steal it back as soon as he started snoring.

"Mom?" She caught Hannah's hand to detain her. She lowered her voice. "I heard Aunt Iris out in the hall earlier. She said something about the Lodge—about how you wished you could sleep there instead of your room. What's the Lodge—some sort of summer home?"

Hannah grew pale under her suntan. She stood motionless next to Beth's high old bed, then shrugged slowly. "The Lodge? Why, that's just this room, sweetie. That's all."

"This room?" Beth stared at her. "What do you mean, 'that's all'? What's the big mystery, then? I'll change with you if you want to sleep in here."

"No!" The word was almost a gasp. "No, that's okay. My room is just fine. Just where I want to be. Iris was kidding."

Oh yeah?
Beth remembered her aunt's sharp, hysterical laughter. She burrowed down under the sheet, fingering her diary under the pillow. "But why was this room called the Lodge?"

"Oh, just because Mama and Dad used to rent it out to lodgers—you know, boarders," said Hannah, her voice now rather vague and tired. "Just for extra income. No big deal at all."

She left then without another word, taking Romps with her. But as Beth lay in the valley of the mattress, the sheet tangled around her sweaty legs, she felt sure her mother was lying, that the Lodge had been a great big deal after all.

Beth awoke to the chatter of birds outside her open window. She lay listening for a moment, then turned her attention to other sounds. Tom was snoring. Downstairs the screen door to the porch banged. After another minute she heard a car start up. Tom's snoring broke off abruptly.

She waited until he came creeping through her room. "I didn't want to go down alone," she greeted him. "Hang on a minute till I get dressed."

He went sleepily down the hall to the bathroom, and she jumped out of bed and into her shorts and oversized T-shirt. When she looked out into the hall, she saw that her mother's and Aunt Iris's bedroom doors were shut. The door to Grandmother and Grandad's room at the end of the hallway stood open. Tom came out of the bathroom and followed her down the narrow flight of stairs.

The living room was empty. No one was in the kitchen, either, but Beth found a note on the counter.