The Glory Hand (11 page)

'Weird:

The wooden sculpture had been carved from a single log with crude strokes, like primitive idols Cassie had seen in
National Geographic.

'A wolf?' Robin ran her fingers over the raised hackles on its back. Cassie stepped closer. Its teeth were bared, and its eyes . . . they were ice-blue luminescent stones, like those on the
Harpy
figurehead that hung over the mantel at Cliffs Edge.

'Cute
,' Robin said.

Cassie read the plaque at the base of the statue:
'To Soledad, Casmaran's beloved mascot, in fond remembrance (1945-58). Gift of the Seniors, 1958:

'Hell of a lot of work for one dead dog. I mean, why didn't they just have him stuffed?'

'You're gross!' Cassie laughed, but she avoided glancing at the statue again.

The trail led them back to the lawn, where a forty-eight-star American flag snapped in the breeze on a flagpole in front of the lodge. Cassie stared down at the sundial at the base of the flagpole. Its copper face had oxidized green with age, and the Roman numerals and signs of the zodiac etched around its edge were barely legible. She read the inscription: '
And at my back I always hear, time's winged chariot drawing near . . .'

it's busted,' Robin said.

'Come on.'

'Seriously.' Robin checked her digital watch, it's 4.58. But this thing thinks it's still noon.'

Robin was right. The blade of the sundial shot a shadow over the twelve. It seemed to Cassie as if at Casmaran, time had ground to a halt, as if everything were frozen the way it had been when her mother was there.

'Well, it's been a gas.' Robin yawned. 'Let's find our cabin and break open the Famous Amos I stashed in my bedroll.'

'You go ahead,' Cassie said. 'There's someone I've got to

see.'

Miss Grace . . . Cassie wondered why the Director hadn't been there to greet the bus, why she hadn't seen the Director's office among the camp buildings. When she asked a group of campers playing catch on the baseball diamond where to find her, the girls rolled their eyes and laughed. Finally one of them pointed to a trail leading into the woods.

Cassie followed it around the corner of the lodge where an herb garden behind a chicken-wire fence rustled in the wind. She recognized most of the plants: basil and tarragon and flowering sage - herbs her mother had grown on Nantucket - but there were others with red-tipped leaves and barbed branches, their smell so foul she couldn't imagine they could be used in cooking.

The sun hung low over the lake, and in the gathering shadows, she stumbled among a ragged row of granite slabs that thrust out of the ground. It took her a moment to realize that they were headstones, that she was walking through what had once been a cemetry. But why was there a burial ground at a girls' camp? She picked her way through the petrified thicket, squinting to make out the inscriptions. The names of the dead had been worn away by time, no doubt dissolved by a hundred harsh winters along with the bones buried beneath them. On only one stone could she decipher the words: '
Choose Death.'
Choose death over what? Cassie wondered.

When she emerged from the graveyard at the edge of the woods, and turned for one final look, something struck her as odd. There were no crosses on the headstones. It looked as though someone had broken them off.

The trail led into a corner of the forest where she hadn't been with Robin. A yellow light in the distance tipped the pine needles with gold, and she headed towards it.

The cottage where the light burned seemed too small to be an adult's house. Sturdy yet whimsical, it looked more like a playhouse built for a child by a wealthy, doting father, the chocolate-brown shutters stenciled with cupids, the door carved with the signs of the zodiac. Dovecotes cut in the shape of rabbits and squirrels adorned the steep, peaked roof, but she could see no pigeons roosting there. Nestled among the trees, the cottage looked like an illustration from a book of Grimm's fairy tales, as cozy as a childhood memory.

She stepped onto the porch, where a single wicker rocking chair creaked in the breeze through the sighing pines. A broad-brimmed straw bonnet hung from a peg on the wall beside an umbrella with an ebony handle. The birdhouse swinging from the eaves was an exact copy of the cottage, right down to the tiny rocking chair on its porch. She gripped the brass knocker on the cottage door and let it fall with a sharp clap. With a flurry of wings, a crow that had been plundering the birdhouse darted away.

She waited. Listened. No answer. She knocked again.

No sign of life. Only the flicker of the gas flame in the coach lamp at the threshold. She tested the door with her toe, and it creaked open.

Inside the cottage, under the low-beamed ceiling, night had already fallen. Heavy lace curtains veiled the windows, smothered the air in their shroud. It felt as if it had been night here for years. 'Miss Grace?' she called, but not too loudly, suddenly unsure whether it had been right to barge in like this. A grandfather clock ticked in the stillness, its pendulum missing every third beat, like a failing heart. She called again, and was relieved when there was no answer.

Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she could make out the flocked wallpaper, a love seat covered in blue velvet, with wooden legs carved into lions' paws, and two matching wing chairs, their lace antimacassars yellow with age.

And everywhere - on bookshelves and table tops and inside display cases - were fragile porcelain figurines: Royal Doulton clowns and children with soulful eyes, Toby mugs winking and leering, and a white unicorn like the one she had seen in a Cybis ad in the
New Yorker.
A handful of clay animal figurines, evidently made in Arts and Crafts, nestled among them, horribly crude by comparison.

7 could eat you upV

The shrill voice startled Cassie, and she spun around.

'Cassandra Broyles!' A figure hunched motionless in the shadows before the cold hearth, like one more porcelain figure too fragile to touch. With an electric hum, the wheels of her chair began to turn and it rolled slowly towards Cassie. 'You look just like your mother!'

Cassie was astounded. How could the old lady know her name? She had said it with a sigh of satisfaction, as if relieved to see a long-lost friend after a painful separation. 'Miss Grace?'

A brittle laugh from the wheelchair. 'You expected Casmaran's Directress to be young, fast on her feet, did you?'

'No, I. . .'

'Not to worry. I have everything well under control. Delegation of authority, that's the key. My counselors are first-rate. But then, why shouldn't they be? They were Casmaran campers, every last one of them!'

Cassie felt ashamed of herself for having been frightened. Miss Grace was ancient, and a cripple. It had been cruel of the campers to make fun of her. 'I wanted to thank you,' * she said. 'For letting me in so late, I mean. I know you turn
f
down a lot of girls, and . . .'

'It was my pleasure, child.' She chuckled. 'I knew that we ■ would get you at Casmaran sooner or later.'

The wheelchair rolled over a floor switch and a fringed Tiffany lamp on a side-table blinked on. Cassie could see : Miss Grace more clearly, her skin almost transparent, a thin ; membrane revealing veins and arteries beneath it, like ! frayed wiring, her dark red lipstick outlining lips that had all j but vanished with age. A hairnet as fine as a spiderweb held
f
her silken-white chignon in place, and the robe wrapping i her frail body was as silvery as her hair, the heavy satin, 1 Cassie thought, that you were either baptized or buried in. Cassie's own maternal grandmother had never looked that old, not even at the age of ninety, when Cassie had visited her in her sickroom on Beacon Hill. The senile old woman ; had so hated facing her deteriorating body that she'd ordered all mirrors removed from the house.

'I do wish I could welcome you with a big hug. But
quel dommage,''
Miss Grace sighed, 'I'm as good as dead from the neck down.' Her hands lay still in her lap, their faded lace gloves revealing patches of flesh as yellow as the fabric ; covering them. Miss Grace smiled gratefully as Cassie took her hand. It felt terribly light, as if the old lady's bones were hollow, like a bird's, and Cassie set it down carefully, afraid the least pressure would break it.

'To see you at long last . . .' Miss Grace's voice trailed off. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts, as glazed as the eyes of the Toby mugs lining the mantel, and Cassie felt as if the old woman's distant stare was really seeking out the spark of her mother within her, poting over memories: 'What a gift to be able to lay eyes on you before . . . Well, j none of us is going to be here forever, are we, Cassandra?'

Cassie sensed the old lady was fishing for a compliment. 'You look very well to me.'

'Your mother wasn't much of a fibber, either,' she chuckled, 'but thank you, dear. Thank you, anyway,' her laugh ended in a dry cough. 'You know, child, your mother

was one of the sweetest young ladies ever to bunk up with us at Casmaran. The horrid event that took her
-quelle tragidie
- it was like losing a daughter. But then, she must have told you how fond we were of each other.'

'Oh, yes.' Cassie thought of the letter. Her mother
had
been writing her like a daughter. But why hadn't she ever mentioned Miss Grace - or Casmaran - to her?

'I feel I'm in the strangest sort of limbo,' Miss Grace murmured. 'Betwixt and between. Right now I'm with you. Tomorrow I may be traveling over to join your mother, on the Other Side.'

'Don't talk like that,' Cassie said, feeling it was expected of her.

'Well, when I do make the journey I'll tell her just how splendidly you turned out.' Cassie squirmed, and as if sensing her discomfort, Miss Grace sealed her thin lips. She twitched her head, and Cassie realized she was gesturing to the table beside her. Careful to avoid knocking over a sculpture of etched glass - Jonah inside the whale - Cassie picked up a china cup of what smelled like green tea and raised it to the old lady's lips. 'I must make a pretty picture ... a fine sight!' Miss Grace said, the liquid dribbling down her chin. 'Growing old is never beautiful, Cassandra. The tragedy is not that one feels old - but that one feels young!' Cassie wiped the corners of Miss Grace's mouth with the hankie on her lap. The lipstick left a dark stain on the lace. She wanted to ask about her mother, wanted to hear what she had been like when she was her age, but Miss Grace rambled on: i'd like to be right out there with my girls, of course: soccer and swimming and riding ... I was quite an equestrian in my day. Now . . .' She shot a glance towards a brass telescope on a tripod by the window. 'I still keep an eye on things. But every year the woods grow thicker . . .' She laughed. 'Pretty soon all I'll be able to see are the crows in the trees!' Cassie offered her another sip from the cup, and tea dripped from the old lady's mouth onto Cassie's hand. Cassie wiped it away quickly, as if old age might be catching.

'I used to have Soledad to keep me company, bless his soul . . .'

'Your dog?' Cassie remembered the wolflike staue in the woods, with its shimmering eyes.

'The girls wanted to buy me another pet after he passed on, but I don't have to tell you, Cassandra, how once you lose a loved one, it's impossible to try to replace it.'

Cassie squirmed at the awkward comparison to her mother, but excused it - the old woman must be senile.

'Don't misunderstand me, Cassandra. My life isn't as lonely as it sounds. I have many wonderful companions.' With an electric hum, Miss Grace's chair whirled around and Cassie followed her out of the parlor into an alcove bare of furniture. Its walls were a mosaic of photographs of campers from floor to ceiling, a shrine in faded sepia, black-and-white, and color, each picture framed in wood or mother-of-pearl or sterling silver. '
This
,' Miss Grace's eyes widened,'
This is my immortality.'

Cassie stepped closer. In a sepia photo girls were wading in the lake, wearing bloomers that extended to the ankles, but with looks of daring on their faces, as if they were being photographed stark naked. In another, a girl in a striped cape, the word 'Liberty' lettered on a tinsel crown, held a wooden sword to the throat of a kneeling girl dressed as the Kaiser.

'We've given the Republic doctors, lawyers, judges . . . Leaders in business. Three first ladies,' Miss Grace said. 'Behind many an important man, there's been a Casmaran girl.' She made a little smacking sound with her lips, and Cassie guessed she was relishing a sermon she repeated to everyone who had ever visited her here. 'We were preaching equality long before all this Women's Lib nonsense. Our girls have always been doers - not just a bunch of empty-headed debutantes. They marched in the vanguard of women's suffrage and the Temperance crusade, though I must confess I always found the Temperance thing a bit silly . . .' She continued without taking a breath: 'Of course, Casmaran can't take
all
the credit. Our campers have always been of good family . . . the
finest
families. They come to us girls, and they leave young ladies.'

Cassie was scanning the pictures on the wall. 'Is my mother here?'