The Glass House People (5 page)

Hanny Lynn,

I've taken Dad to his physical therapy appt. There's plenty of food. You and the children just make yourselves at home.

Mama

"No wonder Grandmother's fat," said Tom from the doorway to the dining room. "Look at this spread!"

Beth pushed in behind him and stared at the round table. She could make a wonderful stained-glass window based on the feast before her. It would be round like the table itself, with panels to represent all the different dishes of food. Ray liked it when artists came up with new ways of using glass, not just making the same designs of flowers and birds. There were boxes of cereal and a white-glazed jug of milk on the table, a platter of bacon, another of fried potatoes, a plastic pitcher of orange juice, and a huge urn of coffee. Beth lifted the lid of a warming pan and found half a dozen fried eggs and something that looked like square sausage patties.

"That's called scrapple," Tom told her. "I saw a whole brick of the stuff in the fridge."

"I think I'll pass," said Beth, eyeing it doubtfully.

They piled their plates. Although Beth hadn't been able to eat last night with the family around the table, she found herself starving now. She gobbled an egg and drank some juice, calculating in her head the time difference between here and Berkeley. She would call Ray at eleven o'clock—just before he left for the glass shop. After watching Tom devour square after square of the scrapple, she tried some for herself. It was delicious, she found with surprise. Fatty and sausagey—not the kind of food they ate much at home. Her mother was into health food and had all sorts of herbs and beans sprouting in pots in the kitchen. They hardly ever ate meat.

Beth had two pieces of scrapple and another egg on toast, and while she ate she told Tom about what she'd heard Aunt Iris say about the Lodge the night before, and what their mother had said about how they'd taken in lodgers when she was a girl.

"Totally weird," he muttered, munching toast.

Usually Beth didn't confide much in Tom, but she had the feeling that she might need an ally while living in this house. She was also getting the feeling that something creepy had happened here once. And it seemed to her that with Hannah back home now, something might happen again.

"What do you think went on here, Tom? Why is Aunt Iris so mad at Mom?"

He pushed his plate away. "Do I know? I'm just praying the time flies by so we can get out of here."

But he sat at the table with her a while longer, mulling over what the Lodge might have to do with Aunt Iris's hostile behavior. When they heard footsteps in the hall upstairs, they both stopped talking at once and listened.

"Mom's getting up," whispered Tom.

But then they heard the uneven shuffle and knew it was Aunt Iris. Without speaking, they jumped up from their chairs, carried their plates to the kitchen sink, and slipped out the back door into the driveway.

"We'll take Romps for a walk," said Beth, and she went to untie the dog from the elm tree in the backyard, where Hannah had staked him last night.

"Yeah," agreed Tom as they set off. "A nice long walk. And I mean long."

They started around the block, past the corner where the ice-cream van had been the evening before, down to Penn's Pike. There were a few children on tricycles on one of the side streets, but otherwise the neighborhood was quiet. When they passed the Waverley Theater, Beth looked for a house that might be Monica's, but there were only shops. Beth made a mental note to phone Monica later that day to set up a time when they could go see a movie. It seemed a good strategy to stay out of the house as much as she could.

When they returned from their walk, they could hear voices upstairs raised in argument. Their mother's sounded angry: "I don't know what you mean, Iris!"

"Mom's up," said Tom.

"Tell me about it." Beth climbed the stairs. Her grandparents' bedroom door was closed now, and the angry voices rang from inside. She stood in the hallway for a moment, fighting the impulse to creep down the hall and listen outside the door. Ray had laughed at her once and said it was a sign of her youth that she liked to snoop. Still, it was hard to resist such an impulse when her own mother was yelling only a few feet away. "I absolutely refuse to live under a cloud anymore!" Beth heard Hannah cry and knew her mother wasn't talking about the weather.

But she clenched her teeth and went back downstairs, wandering aimlessly through the rooms of what was to be her home for the summer. The whole house was as tidy as her best friend's room back in Berkeley. Beth hadn't thought anyone in the world could rival Violet for being the neatest neatnik, but possibly Vi had met her match in Grandmother. Everything was scrubbed and polished. Not a speck of dust anywhere. The pillows on the couch were plumped up and smooth, as if no one ever sat down. All signs of the breakfast feast in the dining room were gone already, and the round table gleamed with polish. Beth's house tour took her through all the rooms—living room, dining room, kitchen, and pantry—and even down to the basement.

It was cooler down there and as orderly as the rest of the house, with shelves along the walls stacked full of canned food. At first Beth thought they must be earthquake provisions, but then she remembered that there weren't any quakes here. She figured that Grandmother must have been born during the Depression years and had pack-rat tendencies, always wanting to stock up in case hard times came again.

In a corner of the basement Beth saw a stack of white canvases and shoe boxes. This time she forgot about Ray's criticism and, after wiping cobwebs off the top box, lifted it. Inside she found dozens of tubes of oil paint. She opened the second box and found watercolors, thin paintbrushes held in bunches with rubber bands, and palette knives. She replaced the box tops thoughtfully, then turned to rummage through the stack of canvases. But voices in the kitchen upstairs stopped her before she'd brought them out into the light, and she turned guiltily away.

***

The first week passed quietly, though the tension between Aunt Iris and Hannah seemed to deepen. Beth called the number Monica had given her several times, but a man's voice on an answering machine Said no one was home. She left her grandparents' phone number and a message reminding Monica they'd planned to see a movie sometime. Then she waited.

She waited, too, for a letter from Ray. She had sent him a postcard each day of their journey across the country and a long letter the day after they'd arrived in Philadelphia. She'd given him the address of the house on Spring Street even before she left Berkeley and hoped there would be at least one letter waiting for her. As yet she had received nothing. And she had phoned him every day—twice some days—but heard only a cheerful message on his answering machine saying he would be home later. Sometimes she called just to hear his voice.

At least there was Grandad. When she wasn't taking Romps on long rambles around the neighborhood, Beth slipped upstairs to visit him. Grandad lay in his bed most of the day with the door closed and the air conditioner on high. His room was the most comfortable in the house, and she'd settle in the chair near his bed with relief at escaping the heat of the other rooms. Before she sat down, though, she always checked to make sure Aunt Iris wasn't lurking in one of the corners.

Grandad asked Beth to tell him all about her life up to this point. "It's a shame we've missed knowing each other all these years," he said, and although she waited for stronger criticism against her mother, none came. So Beth told him what she could remember of their years at the group house and spun long tales of her adventures at school and with her best friend, Vi, who was one of triplets—three sisters, all with flower names. Jasmine and Rose were an identical pair, but Violet looked different. Beth told Grandad how she and her friend had been inseparable, almost like sisters themselves, until she'd met Ray last year.

Then she launched into the wonderful story about Ray—the expurgated version.

"This Ray," Grandad asked, "he works after school?"

"No, Ray's out of school. He's the full-time assistant to Jane, who is the owner. Ray's a fantastic artist who teaches the glass classes on weekends." She explained about her art classes at school and how her teacher, Mr. Hunter, had said she showed—in his words—"great promise" when her class spent a few weeks learning to cut and shape glass for small stained-glass windows. He had suggested she take stained-glass classes at Glassworks, and that's where she'd met Ray. The first class was on Saturday afternoons, but she soon moved on to the more advanced workshops two evenings a week. Then she started working at the shop after school as well.

She told Grandad how she felt about Ray and about her plans for their own glass shop. Grandad said it sounded like a fine idea to go into business, but he hoped she wouldn't stay in a relationship with an older man. "That sort of thing never works," he said.

"Look at Princess Diana and Prince Charles! He's twelve years older than she is." She never believed the supermarket tabloids' accounts of trouble in that fairy-tale marriage. "Ray's only
ten
years older than I am!"

Grandad just shook his bald head.

What Beth didn't tell Grandad was the important stuff. The stuff about how Ray made her feel. How he looked in his light blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the hairs on his strong arms glinting in the yellow lights over the worktable. The turn of his fine wrists as he held a glass cutter, the strength in his long fingers as he carved clean shapes from the colored panes. How he bent his head in concentration over his work, straight yellow hair falling over his forehead; how his eyes lit up when he saw her watching and his face broke out in that huge grin, white-toothed and happy. How he called her "Babe" in a voice that could make her tremble. She had dated a few guys at school before, but nothing about them had reached into her heart the way Ray did. Nothing about them made her want to throw herself into their arms and never let go. Nothing about them had her planning for a joint future. Only Ray had that power.

On other days, Grandad would tell stories from his childhood. Even Tom, bereft of his computer, often sat with Beth next to Grandad's bed and listened. He told Beth once that Grandad's stories were the only things keeping him from going crazy in this old house with all these old people. Beth agreed it was the same for her.

Grandad's stories were mostly about his boyhood during the Depression. His father had died when he was only nine, and his family had been so poor that he and his two brothers had to stand by the train tracks in hopes of picking up the pieces of coal that dropped from the coal cars as the trains chugged by. They'd use the coal in their stove to heat the little house where they lived. Tom took notes in a thick spiral notebook while Grandad spoke. He told Beth that once he got back to a computer, he'd write everything out. He already had a title for the book:
Out of the Coal.

When Beth and Tom asked for stories about when their mother was a little girl, Grandad would grin and scratch his bald head. "That's an easy order," he'd say. "Hanny Lynn was the star of a lot of stories around here." Stories about how four-year-old Hannah stole a chocolate bar from the candy store and hid it in her little toy stove up in her room. And how she'd been spanked and made to return it when Grandmother found it the next day. How Hannah and Aunt Iris had once, during a three-day raging snowstorm, pretended that the little sunporch, where Tom slept now, was a boat. The two girls slept out there, ate meals out there, and basically, said Grandad, got along much better than they normally did.

"You mean they normally fought all the time?" asked Tom.

"Well, they didn't have much in common. Mostly stayed out of each other's way. You know, with Iris ten years older, they just didn't have many of the same interests." And then he grew quiet.

Grandad's reminiscences covered only so many years and no more. Beth couldn't get a single story out of him about Hannah when she was a teenager or when she left home. When Beth pressed him, he frowned. "Those were the dark years," he said once, his face grim. "Nobody wants to be reminded now." And Beth and Tom didn't dare press any harder. At least not then.

If they weren't up with Grandad, Beth and Tom spent a lot of time that first week sitting out on the glider swing on the front porch. Tom finished his computer manuals and read
The Lord of the Rings.
Beth read the last of the mysteries she'd brought from California and then sketched some ideas for future stained-glass projects. She designed a window for her shop with Ray—a big rose-colored heart floating in a night sky dotted with stars (she'd use clear prisms for the stars) and the name of the shop etched inside the heart: Rising Star. She would have to ask her mother if anyone would mind her working on it here this summer. It would fill in all the boring hours. The cool basement would make a good workplace. She'd have privacy down there. She went up to her room for her diary and wrote down a list of the colors of glass she would need for the project.

She stepped out of her room into the hall, planning to go downstairs to look up the names and addresses of Philadelphia glass shops in the phone book. But when she saw that the door to Aunt Iris's bedroom was open, she stopped. Usually the door was closed. Beth looked inside, catching her breath when she saw Aunt Iris in a chair facing the window. Like the rest of the house, the room was spotless, with gleaming oak furniture. Out the window Beth could see Romps's elm tree with the rope swing still hanging from one branch as testimony that little girls once played there. The chair where Aunt Iris sat looked rigid and uncomfortable. There was a narrow single bed made up with a white bedspread, the corners and sides tightly tucked under the mattress. Beth thought it looked like a hospital bed. There was a large dresser next to the window, with a frame rising from the back, where once a large mirror had hung. But now the frame was empty, holding nothing but blank wall.