The Hellfire Club (39 page)

BOOK VIII

THE CUP BEARER

F
OR A LONG TIME
, P
IPPIN SAT IN THE WARMTH AND THE FLICKERING LIGHT OF THE FIRE WITHOUT SPEAKING
. H
E GAZED INTO THE OLD WOMAN’S FACE
. A
FTER ALL SHE HAD TOLD HIM, THE WHITE WHISKERS SPROUTING FROM HER UPPER LIP AND POINTED CHIN NO LONGER FRIGHTENED HIM
. N
OT EVEN THE SKULL FROM WHICH SHE DRANK HER FOUL BROWN POTION, NOR THE HEAP OF SKULLS BEHIND HER, FRIGHTENED HIM NOW. HE WAS TOO INTERESTED IN HER STORY TO BE AFRAID.
“I
DON’T UNDERSTAND
,”
HE SAID
. “
YOU ARE HIS MOTHER, BUT HE IS NOT YOUR SON
?”

73

FOR WHAT SEEMED
to her an endless succession of seconds, Nora could not speak. She could not even move. The decisive old woman before her, her necklaces of antique coins, of heavy gold links, of pottery beads, silver birds, silver feathers, and shining red and green stones motionless on her chest, her broad hands planted on her knees, sat tilted slightly forward, taking in the effect of her announcement as Nora stared at the firm black eyebrows, clever black eyes, prominent nose, full, well-shaped lips, and rounded chin of Helen Day. The Cup Bearer, O’Dotto—Day and O’Dotto, the two halves of her last name—unknown to Davey because his grandfather had thought Italian names too proletarian to be used in his house.

The woman said, “Jeffrey, you should have told her
something
, at least. Springing all this on her at once isn’t fair.”

“I was thinking about being fair to you,” Jeffrey said.

“I’ll be all right,” Nora said.

“Of course you will.”

“It’s a lot to take in all at once. I’ve heard so much about you from Davey. You’re legendary. They still talk about your desserts.”

“Whole family has a sweet tooth. Old Mr. Chancel could eat an entire seven-layer cake by himself. Sometimes I had to make two, one for him and one for everyone else. Little Davey was the same way. I used to worry about his getting fat when he grew up. Did he? No, I suppose not. You wouldn’t have married him if he’d been a great lumbering bag of guts like his grandfather.”

“No, I wouldn’t have, and he isn’t.”

“Who am I to talk, anyhow?” Helen Day seemed almost wistful. “Davey must have missed me after his parents got rid of me. Poor little fellow, he’d have had to, with those two for parents.”

Nora said, “He once told me he thought you were his real mother.”

“His real mother hardly spent much time with him. Hardly knew he was in the house, most of the time.”

“And of course even
she
wasn’t his real mother,” Nora said. “You must have been at the Poplars when the first child died.”

Helen Day put a forefinger to her lips and gave Nora a long, thoughtful look. She nodded. “Yes, I was there during the uproar.”

“Daisy and Alden didn’t even want a child, did they? Not really. It was Lincoln who made them adopt Davey.”

Another considering pause. “The old man let them know he wanted an heir, I’ll say that. There weren’t too many quiet nights on Mount Avenue during that time.” She looked away, and her handsome face hardened like cement. “According to Jeffrey, you wanted to talk to me about my sister.”

“I do, very much, but can I ask you a few questions about other people in your family first?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Other people in my family?”

“Is Sabina Mann your sister?”

The old woman flicked her glance toward Jeffrey.

“We had to see Ev Tidy,” Jeffrey said. “His number is unlisted, so I called Sabina and asked her to invite him to her house.”

“Which she was delighted to do, I’m sure. I bet she bustled in and out with lots of cheap cookies and cups of Earl Grey.”

“It was Gunpowder, and she only bustled in once. I have to admit that she was peeved with me.”

“Gunpowder,” said Helen Day. “Dear me. She’ll get over it. You wanted to talk to Everett about Shorelands because of his father, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” Nora said.

“And was he helpful?”

“He had some ideas,” Jeffrey said, with a warning glance at Nora which did not escape his mother’s notice.

“I won’t pry. It isn’t my business, except for what concerns my sister. But from what I remember of Everett’s father, he couldn’t have had much to say about Katherine. It was my impression that he’d scarcely talked to her. Couldn’t be much there to excite poor old Effie and Grace.” When Nora looked confused, Helen Day added, “My sisters. They’re the fools who saw that movie and hired a lawyer.”

“You’re right,” Jeffrey said. “Bill Tidy had no idea what Katherine was writing.”

“Hardly a surprise. The whole idea is mad. Now I am informed that this madness has infected the wretched man who stole you out of a police station.” She shook her head in disgust. “Let me answer your question. No, Sabina Mann is not my sister, thank the Lord. She was Sabina Kraft when she married my brother Charles. Thereby completing the severing of relations between my brother and myself which began when he changed his name.”

“Why did he change his name?”

“Charles hated my father. Changing his name was no more than a way to cause him pain. He did it as soon as he turned twenty-one. The disgrace nearly cost Effie and Grace what little minds they have. Katherine didn’t care, of course. It didn’t mean anything to
her.
Katherine was like a separate country all her life.”

Nora was thinking that Helen Day, who had apparently not protested Lincoln Chancel’s desire to change her own last name, was no less idiosyncratic than her sister.

“You weren’t close to Charles or your two other sisters?”

“I got along with the Deodatos a lot better than my own family, if that’s what you’re after. Good, sensible, warmhearted people, and they were delighted to take Jeffrey in when it became obvious that I couldn’t cope with being a single mother. I certainly wasn’t going to subject my little boy to
Charles
, never mind Sabina, and Effie and Grace could scarcely take care of themselves. But here was this glorious clan, full of cooks and policemen and high school teachers. I was so fond of them all, and they had no problems with my way of life, so there was never any difficulty about my seeing Jeffrey whenever I could. When I left the Chancels, I knew I had to come back to this part of Massachusetts. This was my home, and it was where my husband died. It’s the one place in the world I’ve ever really loved. Jeffrey understood.”

“I did,” Jeffrey said. “I still do.”

“I know you do. I just don’t want Nora to judge me harshly. Anyhow, between us all, we did a pretty good job with Jeffrey, didn’t we? He’s done a lot of interesting things, even though his Mannheim half meant that other people had a lot of trouble understanding them. There’s a lot of me in Jeffrey, and a lot of Katherine, too. But Jeffrey is much nicer than Katherine ever was. Or me either, come to that.”

“Katherine wasn’t nice?”

“Am I? You tell me.”

“You’re beyond niceness,” Nora said. “I think you’re too good to be nice.”

Tiny pinpoints of light kindled far back in the old woman’s eyes. “You just described my sister Katherine. I’d like you to remember my offer. If you ever find yourself in need of a safe place, you’d be welcome here. You would learn to cook every sort of cuisine, and you’d be able to put away some money. We operate on a communal basis, and everybody shares equally.”

“Thank you,” said Nora. “I’m tempted to sign up on the spot.”

“I should have known,” Jeffrey said. “The famous Helen Day Halfway House, Cooking School, Intellectual Salon, and Women’s Shelter strikes again.”

“Nonsense,” the old woman said. “Nora understands what I mean. Now we are going to talk about my sister Katherine, so you can stop fretting.”

“Halleluiah.” Jeffrey went to the other sofa and sat down facing them.

“Did Katherine ever talk to you about her writing?” Nora asked.

“I can remember her reading some poems to me when she was twelve or thirteen and I was about nine. It was an occasion, because Katherine was always very private about her writing. Not her opinions, mind you. If she thought something was absurd, she let you know. Anyhow, as I was saying, I used to see her writing her poems all the time, and once I asked her if I could read them. No, she said, but I’ll read some of them to you—and she did, two or three short poems, I forget. I didn’t understand a word, and I never asked again.”

“But later on? When you were both grown up?”

“By that time, we didn’t talk to each other more than once every couple of months, and all she said about her writing was that she was doing it. She did call to tell me she was going to Shorelands. She was pleased about that, and she was going to stay with me for a couple of nights when she left. I was up here, and Katherine lived in New York—by herself, of course, in Greenwich Village, a tiny apartment on Patchin Place. I went there two weeks after I came back home from Shorelands. I knew she was dead, I hope you take my word for that.”

“What did you think had happened to her?” Nora asked.

“Years later, that silly old windbag Georgina Weatherall pretended to think Katherine had run away with some drawing of hers and changed her name to keep out of sight. What a story! Katherine never stole anything in her life. Why should she, she never wanted anything. It just made Georgina look better than having one of her guests die so far off in the woods that you could never find her body.”

“You’re positive that’s what happened.”

“I knew it the second I saw that ridiculous woman. Katherine would have known just how to ruffle her feathers, and the last thing that kind of woman can stand is the thought that someone is laughing at her. It was exactly like my sister to provoke a fool like that, and then decamp a split second before she was ordered off the premises. It was just her bad luck to die in the midst of this particular jaunt, so that we could never give her a burial. Her heart caught up with her at the wrong time, that’s all.”

“How did Georgina know to call you after she disappeared?”

“Katherine gave her my number. Who else’s? She wouldn’t have given her Charles’s number, or Grace and Effie’s, heaven knows. Katherine always liked me more than any of the rest of them. I want to show you some things.”

She stood up with a rattle and rustle of the necklaces and went through the arch. Nora and Jeffrey heard her giving orders in the kitchen, then the slow march of her footsteps up a staircase.

“What do you think she wants to show me?” Nora asked.

“Do you think I ever know what my mother is going to do?”

“What’s wrong with Grace and Effie?”

“They’re too normal for her. Besides, they were scandalized that she went off and worked for Lincoln Chancel. They thought it wasn’t good enough for her. My aunts don’t much like what she’s doing now, either. They don’t think it’s very ladylike.”

“Hard to see how it could be any more ladylike,” Nora said.

He smiled. “You haven’t met Grace and Effie.”

“How did they wind up with this notebook, or whatever it was, the one that caused all the trouble?”

“My mother used to keep her sister’s papers in the basement here, but after she had a couple of bedrooms put in downstairs, she didn’t have much room left. Grace and Effie agreed to take them—four cardboard boxes, mostly drafts of stories and poems. I looked through them a long time ago.”

“No novel.”

“No.” He looked back toward the arch and the kitchen full of women. “By the way, despite the way she talks about Lincoln Chancel, or even Alden and Daisy, my mother’s still loyal to them. Don’t mention what we were talking about with Ev Tidy, okay? She’d just get angry.”

“I saw the look you gave me.”

“Remember, when she stopped working for them, she recommended Maria, who was about eighteen and just off the boat. Maria hardly even spoke English then, but they hired her anyhow. They hired me, too. She thinks the Chancels have done a lot for our family.”

“I never did understand why Alden and Daisy fired her,” Nora said. “She was like a member of the family.”

“I don’t think they did. She quit when she had enough money saved up to start this business.”

The treads of the staircase creaked.

“I’m sure Davey told me that they fired her. Losing her was very painful for him.”

“How old was he, four? He didn’t know what was really going on.” He gave her a tight little smile as his mother’s footsteps came down the stairs. “Too bad they didn’t send him out to Long Island. It might have done him some good.”

“Might have done him a lot of good,” Nora said, and turned toward the kitchen to see Helen Day, flanked by three of her assistants, leaning over a copper vat. She inhaled deeply, considered, and spoke to an anxious-looking girl who flashed away and returned with a cup of brown powder, a trickle of which she poured into the vat.

The long day caught up with Nora, and she felt an enormous yawn take possession of her. “How rude,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Helen Day marched back through the arch, apologizing for the delay. She sat a few feet away from Nora and lowered two objects onto the length of brown corduroy between them. Nora looked down at a framed photograph on top of a spring binder so old that its pebbled black surface had faded to an uneven shade of gray. “Now. Look at that picture.”

Nora picked it up. Two little girls in frocks, one of them about three years old and the other perhaps eight, stood smiling up at the photographer in a sunny garden. The smaller girl held a doll-sized china teacup on a matching saucer. Both girls, clearly sisters, had bobbed dark hair and endearing faces. The older one was smiling only with her mouth.

“Can you guess who they are?” asked Helen Day.

“You and Katherine,” Nora said.

“I was playing tea party in the garden, and wonder of wonders, Katherine happened along and indulged me. My father came outside to memorialize the moment, no doubt to prove to Katherine at some later date that she was once a child after all. And she
knows
what he’s doing, you can see it in her face. She can see right through him.”

Nora looked down at the intense self-sufficiency in the eight-year-old girl’s eyes. This child would be able to see right through most people. “Did you find this picture in her apartment?”

“No, that’s where I found the manuscript. This picture was on her desk in Gingerbread, and it was the first thing I saw when I went there.
Good heavens,
I said to myself,
look at that.
You know what it means, don’t you?”

Nora had no idea what it meant, but Helen Day’s eyes and voice made clear what it meant to her. “Your sister felt close to you,” she said.

The old woman reared back with a rustle of necklaces and pointed a wide pink forefinger at Nora’s throat. “Grand-slam home run. She felt closer to me than anyone else in our whole, all-balled-up family. Whose address and telephone number did she give in case of emergency? Mine. Whose picture did she bring to Shorelands and put right in the place of honor on her desk? Mine. It wasn’t a picture with stuffy Charles, was it?”