Gates of Paradise Read online

  "Yeah, there's a lot of work, but every time I start on something, Mr. Tatterton changes his mind and starts me on something else."

  "Changes his mind?"

  Parson shook his head. "I don't know. I was hired to repair the pool, so I started mixing the cement, but I only just got started when Mr. Tatterton come out and asked me what I was (loin'. I told him and he looked at the pool and then at me as if I was crazy. Then he says his father told him never to fix somethin' 'less it was broke. 'Huh?'! says. 'The hedges have to be trimmed all along the pathways in the maze,' he tells me, and sets me of to do that. Meanwhile, all the cement I mixed gets hard and is wasted.

  "But he pays good." Parson shrugged and went back to the television set.

  "But what about the pool?"

  "I ain't askin'. I do what I'm told. There, now this should work just fine." He turned on the set and fiddled with the channels and controls. "Want this on?"

  "Not right now, thank you, Parson."

  "No problem."

  "Parson, what is it like in the maze?"

  "Like?" He shrugged. "I don't know. Peaceful, I guess. When you get deep in it, that is. You can't hear much on either side, and then . . I guess because it's so quiet, you imagine you hear things." He laughed to himself.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Couple a times I thought I heard someone walking about in one of the corridors nearby, so I shouted, but there was no one. Late yesterday, I was sure I heard footsteps, so I -got up and found my way over a path and then another and another, and what do you think happened, ma'am?"

  "What?"

  "I got lost, that's what." He laughed hard. "Took me nearly a half an hour to get back to where I was working."

  "What about the footsteps?"

  "Never heard 'em after that. Well, I gotta get goin'."

  "Thank you," I called.

  After he left I stared out the window. The sky was as blue as Mommy's eyes when she was radiant and happy. My eyes must be gray now, I thought, as dull as a faded, old blue blouse. But the world outside sparkled with life and light; the grass was deep green and looked cool and fresh, the trees were in full bloom, and the small, puffy clouds looked clean and soft like freshly plumped pillows.

  Robins and sparrows flitted from branch to branch, excited by the prospect of a warm, wonderful afternoon. I would gladly change places with one of them, I thought, and become a mere bird, but at least a creature who could move about at its own will and enjoy what life it had.

  Mommy and Daddy were gone, Luke was seemingly beyond reach, and I was shut up in this old house with only therapy and hot baths and medicine and doctors to look forward to. And for how long, I did not know, nor would anyone be able to say.

  I snapped out of my self-pity when I saw Tony's Rolls-Royce approaching. When the car came to a stop near the cemetery, I wheeled myself as close to the window as I could get. I saw him get out and go to my parents' monument. He knelt before it and lowered his head. He remained that way for a long time, and then, suddenly, the mysterious man appeared again, approaching from the wooded area. Tony didn't seem to hear or see him approaching.

  The figure stood beside him and then placed his hand on Tony's shoulder. I watched and waited, my heart suddenly thumping, but Tony didn't look up. After a few more moments the man left him and went back to the darkness of the woods. Then Tony got up and went back to his car.

  It was as if only I knew the man had been beside him. I couldn't wait for Tony's arrival. I wheeled myself to the front of my bedroom and faced the door.

  It was nearly two hours before Tony came to my room. I was dying to ask him about the man at the cemetery. I wanted to call for him, but I thought my curiosity was too trivial to justify making him come right up. He'll be here any moment, I kept telling myself, only the clock ticked and ticked and he didn't come. What was it Roland used to tell me whenever I was impatient--"A watched pot never boils"?

  I tried to fix my mind on other things and looked over the books Tony had had sent up to my room. They were all novels by authors I had never heard of. Nineteenth-century writers like William Dean Howells. Some were described as "period pieces." Others were "novels of manners." It was as if Tony wanted me to live in a bygone age.

  At last he appeared. Immediately, almost frantic with curiosity by this time, I asked him about the man in the cemetery.

  "What man?" Tony's smile remained frozen on his face, but the warmth that had been under it momentarily slipped away.

  "I saw him step up beside you when you were at my parents' monument."

  He stood there in my doorway blinking as though he had to refocus on the real world. Then he released a deep breath and came forward, his smile warming again.

  "Oh, I keep forgetting you can see the family cemetery from your window." He shrugged. "He was only one of the grounds people. To tell you the truth, I was so involved. with my sorrow at that moment, I can't remember which one he was or what he wanted."

  "Grounds people? But Rye Whiskey said---"

  "Anyway," Tony chirped, slapping his hands together, "it's time for your first tour of Farthy. Mrs. Broadfield says you have earned it. Are you ready?"

  I gazed out the window again, looking in the direction of the cemetery and the woods. Clouds, as long and thin as witches' fingers, blocked the sun, laying shadows over my parents' monument.

  "I should go to the cemetery, Tony."

  "As soon as the doctor okays it. Hopefully tomorrow. In the meantime I'll show you something special, something nearby."

  He came around my chair and grasped the handles. Why wasn't he telling me the truth about the man? Was he afraid it would disturb me? How could I get him to tell me the truth? Maybe Rye would know. I'd have to arrange it so Tony wouldn't know I had asked.

  I felt his warm breath on my forehead, and he planted a soft kiss on my hair. The gentleness of that caress took me a bit by surprise. He must have seen it in my eyes.

  "It's so good, so wonderful to have you here, and to be able to take you back through time with me."

  "But I'm an invalid, Tony, a sick, crippled person." I don't think he heard me.

  "To regain the beautiful memories, to seize happiness once again. Few men get such an opportunity once they have lost it."

  He began pushing me out of the room.

  "Where are we going?"

  "The first thing I want you to see is the suite of rooms I had prepared for your parents when they came to Farthy for their wedding reception. They were so lovey-dovey, just as newlyweds should be."

  I had often tried to imagine Daddy and Mommy as young people, newly discovering one another. I knew they had first met when Daddy moved to Winnerrow. Mommy told me they fell in love the moment their eyes met.

  But she had never described her good memories at Farthy. I was sure there had to be some. So I listened keenly as Tony rattled on, describing how they laughed and clung to one another, how excited my father was to see Farthinggale, and how much Tony had enjoyed showing him around.

  "When I first set eyes on your mother, I couldn't get over how much she resembled her own mother," he added as we turned out of the suite and headed down the long corridor. "Just as you do, my dear. Sometimes, when I close my eyes and hear you speak, I think I'm back in time and listening to Heaven, and when I open my eyes, there is a moment when I'm not sure. Have all the years since she left me been simply a nightmare? Can I return to the happier times? If you want something enough, pray for it enough, can't it happen?

  "All of you run together in my mind sometimes. as if you are not three, but one woman, Leigh, Heaven, and now you, so similar in voice, in demeanor, in looks. You're like sisters, triplets, instead of mothers and daughters," he said softly, hopefully.

  I didn't like the way he clumped us together. It was as if I weren't Ala individual, my own person with my own thoughts and feelings. Of course I wanted to be like Mommy, even look like her, but I wanted to be myself, to be Annie, not Leigh; Annie, Heaven's daughter, not a c
lone. Why was Tony so intent on ignoring that? Didn't he know how important it was for everyone to feel like her own person? How would he like it if people called him "just another Tatterton, like all the rest"? I made up my mind that later on I would bring up the topic. I wasn't the only one who could be taught new things.

  I turned my attention back to the tour of the house. I hadn't noticed much about the upstairs portion of the house when they first brought me in and up to my room, but now I saw how heavily worn and frayed the hallway rug was. Many of the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling had blown bulbs, and there were cobwebs clinging to the fixtures. The drapes over the few windows were closed, so that the corridor was dark, especially the section into which Tony was wheeling me.

  "This entire section of the house had been left untouched for years. The rooms were originally my great-grandparents', but in honor of your parents, I had them redecorated and refurbished. I knew what pleased your mother and had it all ready when she arrived. You should have seen the surprise on her face when I opened those double doors."

  He laughed, but it was a strange, thin laugh, the laugh of someone who was laughing at things no one else could share, the laugh of someone locked in his own, very private world. When I leaned back and turned my head to look up at him, I saw that he was looking far off into his own memories.

  Couldn't he see how worn and frayed the corridor was? Didn't he smell the musty odor?

  "No one travels these hallways anymore. I don't permit anyone to go into these rooms," he added, as if he had read my mind and knew I wondered why he hadn't sent the maids in to clean and dust and polish.

  When we crossed into the area he said had been reserved, we seemed to move into even darker quarters. Large cobwebs caked with dust draped between the corridor's ceiling and walls. I wondered if even he, himself, had been back. He stopped before two great double doors made of pickled hickory wood. Each had long, thin waterstains down its front. Some of the stains looked fresh.

  Tony dug a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket. When he unlocked the doors and turned to me, his face took on a strange brightness, his eyes awash with excitement. He must have looked like this the day he surprised my parents with the suite, I thought. Were his recollections so vivid that he could cast himself back through time and behave as though it were happening for the first time today?

  "The suite of Mr. and Mrs. Logan Stonewall," he announced, as if they were alive and standing beside me.

  He threw open the doors, which groaned on their hinges, moaning warnings. Unable to wait for him to come back around to push me, I took hold of the wheels myself and moved the chair forward, and to my utter astonishment, my complete surprise, before me was an impeccably maintained suite of rooms: clean and polished and dusted, sparkling behind these deceiving old doors in this apparently deserted section of the great house. It was as if we really had stepped over some invisible border of time and reentered the past.

  Tony laughed again, this time at the expression on my face.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?"

  Everywhere I saw my mother's favorite color: wine red. The French Provencial furniture was upholstered in that color fabric, picking up the colors in the large Persian rug. The walls were done in a floral-patterned cloth paper, which picked up on the reds and whites in the upholstery and rug. Over the two large windows hung antique silk drapes, behind which were sheer curtains. But everything looked brand new.

  Tony confirmed my thoughts.

  "Everything has been replaced and restored to what it was. This is the way the sitting room looked the day your mother and father stepped into it for the first time."

  "Brand new?" I asked, puzzled. He nodded. "But . . why?"

  "Why? Why . ." He looked around as though the answer were obvious, "Why, maybe someday you and your husband will come to live here. Anyway," he said quickly, "it makes me feel better to bring things back to the way they were when we were all happier. And I can afford to do it, so why not? I told you I was going to bring Farthinggale Manor back to the way it was in its most glorious days."

  I shook my head. Someone might say this was the way a very wealthy, elderly man indulged himself. But why bring back a painful memory? Mommy refused to have anything to do with him all these years, and all these years he held on to his memories of her and Daddy, refusing to permit time to erase them. Why?

  "I'm afraid I still don't understand, Tony. Why was it so important to keep it . . . as it was?" I pursued. His face hardened.

  "I told you. I have the means to do it."

  "But you have the means to do many things, new things. Why dwell on the past?"

  "The past is more important to me than the future," he replied, almost snapping at me. "When you're my age, you'll realize how precious good memories are."

  "But with the rift between Mommy and you, I would have thought this painful for you. She was gone from your life; she was--"

  "No!" He looked furious. "No," he repeated, more calmly. Then he smiled. "Don't you see, by doing all this"--he extended his arms--"I've kept Heaven as she was to me . . always. I've cheated Fate." He laughed, a thin, hollow laugh. "That, my dear, is the true power of great wealth."

  I simply stared up at him. He looked at me and shook the wild look from his face.

  "But now come look at the bedroom. See what I have done here." Tony moved ahead and opened the bedroom doors. More tentative, a little reluctantly, I wheeled myself up to the entrance and gazed within.

  Even the huge king-size bed looked lost in this enormous room, the floors of which were covered with a beige carpet so soft and thick, I had trouble wheeling over it. It was like wheeling through marshmallow. It was obvious that this, too, was a brand-new carpet.

  All the linen was new. The bedspread matched the apricot canopy, and there were rust-colored throw pillows as well. I turned to the right and looked at the white marble vanity table, resting at the middle of a marble counter that ran nearly the length of the room. Under the counter were drawers framed in wood the shade of the marble counter. Above it was a wall of mirror, the edges of which were trimmed in gold.

  Something on the vanity table caught my eye, so I wheeled myself closer. There was a hairbrush there with strands of hair still caught in it, silveryblond strands. I took the brush into my hand and studied it.

  "That was Heaven's," Tony whispered beside me. "When she had hair like Leigh's. She had done it herself, as if Leigh had come back through her, don't you see?" he asked, his eyes wide, wild and bright. My heart began to pound. "The hair is . . . it is Leigh's hair. It wasn't just Heaven's hair dyed . . . Leigh was coming back. I. . ."

  He saw the look of amazement on my face and shrugged, taking the brush from my hands and gently running the tip of his finger over the strands of hair.

  "She looked so beautiful with that hair; that color was so right for her."

  "I liked her better with dark hair," I said, but he didn't seem to hear me. He stared at the brush a while longer and then put it back on the table as though it were part of some valuable museum collection. As I looked over the counter and dressing table, I spotted other personal artifacts--hairpins, bobby pins, combs, even crumpled tissues, tinted yellow by time. Some of the things I saw were very personal things.

  "Why would my mother leave these things here'?" I turned when he didn't answer immediately and saw he was staring down at me, his mouth curved into a half smile. "Tony?" He continued to stare. "Tony, what's wrong?" I turned my chair about so that I faced him completely. It snapped him out of his daze.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. Seeing you seated there in your chair . . I saw Heaven seated at her vanity table, dressed in her nightgown, brushing her hair just before she would go to sleep."

  How odd, I thought. Why would he be in Mommy's room watching her prepare for bed? That was more like something a husband would do with a wife, not a step-grandfather with a step

  granddaughter. He was talking about Mommy as if she were Jillian, the wife he had lost. It was spooky. Maybe
he was losing his mind and I had the misfortune of being here just as all that was beginning.

  "You watched her preparing for sleep?" I couldn't help but ask.

  "Oh no, I would just come by and knock, and while I was standing in the doorway, she would answer my questions or converse while she continued to brush her hair," he said quickly; too quickly, I thought. He had the tone of a man guilty of something.

  "Oh. But Tony, why did my mother leave so much after she left Farthy?" The counter was still covered with her powders, her bottles of perfume and cologne, cans of hair spray.

  "She had doubles of everything so she didn't have to pack that much whenever she went to Winnerrow," he replied, also with that quickness that made me wonder if he were telling the truth.

  "It looks more like she fled from here, Tony," I replied, so he would know I had not accepted his explanation. I wheeled closer to him. "Why did she leave so suddenly, Tony? Can't you tell me now?"

  "But Annie, please--"

  "No, Tony, I must tell you that I appreciate all you have done for me and for Drake, but I worry, knowing how things were between you and my mother. Sometimes I feel there are things you are hiding from me, bad things, things that would frighten me away."

  "But you must not think--"

  "I don't know how much longer I can remain here without knowing the truth, no matter how ugly or painful that truth might be," I insisted.

  His sharp, penetrating gaze rested on me with deep consideration. His eyes blinked when he made his quick decision, and then he nodded.

  "All right. Maybe you're right; maybe it is time. You seem a lot stronger today, and I do feel badly about the hard feelings between your mother and me. Also, I don't want there to be a wall of secrets between you and me, Annie. I'll do anything to prevent that."

  "Then tell me all of it."

  "I will." He pulled a vanity chair from the table and sat down in front of me. For what seemed to be an eternity, he sat with his elegant, well-manicured hands templed under his chin, saying nothing, and then he lowered his hands and looked around the room. "This is the right place to confess . . . in her rooms." He looked down and then up at me, his eyes as sad as a motherless puppy's, a puppy longing to be cuddled and loved. I took a deep breath and waited for him to begin.