Whitefern Read online

  “I dragged her back, and then I had to put us both in a hot bath. You slept through it all.”

  “Glad I did,” he said. He started away again, then stopped and turned back. “I don’t know about her, about us keeping her here,” he said. “This might be getting to be too much. I’m afraid to bring some of our clients here now.”

  “What? What else would we do? She’s my sister. We won’t put her in some institution.”

  “Well, that’s why I want you to sign those papers ASAP. You’ll be spending most of your time caring for a mental case,” he said, shrugging. “I’m going up to bed. I need my sleep.”

  I sat for a while longer, thinking about him, how disappointing he could be. I remembered once talking about him with Aunt Ellsbeth when I was just seventeen and Arden had given me an engagement ring. She and I went for a walk, and she asked if I really loved him. When I said I did, she told me she hoped I would always feel that way about him, but she warned me, “He’ll change. You’ll change. You may not love him as much as you think you do now.”

  I didn’t want to give her credit for ever being right about anything—she was so mean to my mother and especially to Sylvia—but not considering the things she had said as true or important was just foolish self-denial. It was also self-denial to ignore how lonely I was and how much I longed for the company of another, more experienced woman.

  I went up to the cupola to get Sylvia and have her go to bed. For years now, I’d been the one who told her it was time to go to sleep and the one who woke her in the morning. I was her living alarm clock. Sometimes, even though she was very hungry, she would wait for me to tell her it was lunchtime. How would she live without me, especially in this house? If something happened to me, she would surely be sent to an institution, where Papa was sure she would be abused.

  When I stepped into the cupola, she was still hard at work on her painting, so entranced by it that she didn’t hear me enter and likely hadn’t noticed how much time had passed. I watched her for a moment, amazed and pleased at how devoted to her art she could be. Anyone watching her would never believe there was anything seriously wrong with her. She looked so beautiful and so intense, focusing her mental abilities and talent on her work.

  Slowly, I inched up behind her and looked at her picture.

  I immediately felt a cold chill.

  She had made a reasonably realistic likeness of the woods between the cemetery and Whitefern, and she had done a good job of creating an overlay of fog, but coming out of it was the ghostlike figure of Papa.

  And the way she had drawn his face made him look like he was desperate either to get away from something or to get to something, get back to Whitefern . . . perhaps to save us all.

  A Flood of Emotions

  There were many times before this when I thought I could drown in my own sorrow. Often after my mother’s death, I had felt lost and alone in our big house. Shadows grew darker and drowned out the kaleidoscope of color our stained-glass windows would normally cast over the patterned rugs and furniture. My chameleon-colored hair, which Papa called a hat of rainbows, was dull and lifeless.

  When I was younger, Whitefern was a house echoing with wishes. I wished I could go to school. I wished I had friends and could go to sleepovers. I envied the freedom other girls my age enjoyed. I read about them in books. I even wished the first Audrina was alive and well, an older sister with whom I could spend hours and hours talking, taking walks, and learning how to flirt with boys.

  After Momma died, clocks were haunting with their eternal ticking, amplified by the silence around the piano Momma had once played so beautifully. Papa drifted in and out of sadness, anger, and guilt. He went from room to room mumbling to himself. Sometimes, when he stepped out of a shadow, it looked like it had stuck to his face no matter how bright the light.

  Aunt Ellsbeth wasn’t a great help to my father or me. Later, as talk about Sylvia increased, Aunt Ellsbeth constantly warned me about my father, telling me that now that my mother was gone, despite his permitting me to go to school, he would find ways to chain me to him and Whitefern forever. The most important way he would do that, she explained, was to make me Sylvia’s caretaker for the rest of Sylvia’s life.

  “When she’s brought home, that’s what you’ll be,” she whispered, her eyes on fire with warning. “She’ll be the chain that binds you forever to Whitefern and your selfish father.”

  Her warnings tempered my excitement over having a little sister finally coming home after almost two years of special care. In time, I realized her warnings about Papa came from her disappointment at his choosing my mother over her. There was still bitterness in her, a bitterness her daughter, Vera, would inherit, although many times I thought Vera didn’t need to inherit bitterness from anyone. She was capable of being vicious and mean all by herself, first to me and then especially when it involved little Sylvia.

  Both my aunt and Vera mocked her when she was first brought home to us. They seemed to take joy in pointing out her disadvantages and slow development. I vowed to myself and to Sylvia that I would work with her and make her as normal as I could. It was a promise I made to my dead mother, too, so that instead of feeling put upon as Aunt Ellsbeth predicted I’d be, I felt responsibility and love. Maybe Aunt Ellsbeth was right to tell me Papa took advantage of that, but I wasn’t about to stop caring for my little sister, either to spite Papa or to satisfy Aunt Ellsbeth.

  I suppose I should have realized earlier that Sylvia would be attracted to art. When she was just three, I gave her my prisms, and she loved toying with the colors she could create. No one thought she could feel deeply about anything, but I began to realize that there was a real person in that troubled body struggling to have its mind keep up with it as it grew. Now I understood that she wasn’t interested in art just because of her fascination with colors and shapes. Art was far more to her than a way to pass the time and amuse herself. She needed it. It was her way of talking to others, of expressing the deeper feelings inside her. Deaf mutes had sign language; Sylvia had art.

  I wasn’t any sort of an expert about it, but I knew that an art teacher would help her technically and show her how to explore more with the brushes and colors. He or she wouldn’t change or add to what Sylvia wanted to say. That came from a place inside her, words and feelings bottled up, trapped by her shyness and inability to say outright what she felt. But if her art teacher improved her techniques, it would help those who looked at her pictures to realize what she was saying, what she was depicting and expressing, and of course, that would make her happier. She would be able to speak to more people and, in a small and different way, leave the confines of Whitefern.

  Perhaps most important, art was her way of escaping from herself, because in a real sense, her undeveloped mind had become her prison. All these thoughts crossed my mind as I studied her new picture. Without instruction, she had somehow achieved more, used her colors more effectively, and drawn her outlines of people and animals more clearly. I supposed there was something to the idea that people could develop their talent naturally. Perhaps she could do much more with formal instruction, I concluded.

  “Is that Papa?” I asked, studying the picture and pointing to the image of him. “Coming home?”

  She turned slowly and looked at me like someone emerging from the darkness. It was as if she had been in a trance while she had worked. “Papa? Papa is home,” she said, nodding.

  It didn’t surprise me to see her come up with this idea. Whitefern certainly had its ghosts. Relatives like Aunt Mercy Marie were referred to so often it was easy to feel they had just passed through a room. Sometimes, when I came upon Papa sitting in his favorite chair and looking like he was dreaming with his eyes open, he would glance at me and say, “You never leave Whitefern. Whitefern is part of you. Even after you die, you will be here.”

  I was sure he had said similar things to Sylvia, who might not understand
what they meant at first, but with repetition, the idea might have taken hold. Even though these past days she looked like she was waiting for Papa or imagining him still alive, I didn’t realize how deeply she believed it. Maybe Papa had specifically assured her that he would always be with her. Whatever he had told her privately he made seem like a secret. I was sure of that. So it didn’t surprise me at all that the picture she was doing represented her hope. Papa would not be lost to us, to her. As long as she talked about him, painted him, and looked for him, he would never be gone.

  Why discourage that? I thought. What harm did it really do to anyone, even to her? It reminded me of the play Harvey, the story of a man who imagined he saw a giant rabbit that was his companion and kept him happy. His sister had come to realize that taking away his imaginary friend would only make him miserable.

  Besides, maybe Harvey was really there. What harm was there in believing in magic, believing in something beyond the often dull reality that our monotonous daily lives could cast over us like a net to keep us from the joy of our imaginations?

  Yes, maybe Papa really was watching over us, watching over Sylvia especially. His soul, so stained with guilt for many reasons, had to cleanse itself or God would send him to hell. He had to help us in order to save himself. I could believe this. I wouldn’t tell Arden my idea, of course, but I could believe it.

  “It’s time to go to sleep, Sylvia. You can finish working on your picture in the morning, after breakfast.”

  She nodded, stared at her work for a few moments as if she was looking through a window to be sure Papa was still there and wouldn’t be gone in the morning, and then put away her pencils, brushes, and paints neatly in the cabinet Papa had bought for them. She followed me to her room. I watched her prepare for bed. She was quieter than usual. I sensed something different about her. She washed her face and brushed her teeth and then fixed her hair the way I had taught her, but every once in a while, I caught her glancing at herself in the mirror and smiling like someone who knew an important secret.

  “Do you think you will be able to sleep alone tonight, Sylvia?”

  “Yes, Audrina.”

  “Will you cry out in the middle of the night or go walking around the house?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You won’t go outside without me, will you?”

  “No. I don’t have to,” she said. I knew what she meant, but I didn’t want to keep talking about it. Maybe I was afraid to think about it, especially tonight. After all, I had grown up in this house with visions and voices calling to me from the deepest places in my mind born out of my rocking-chair dreams. No one could appreciate what Sylvia was thinking more than I could.

  “All right. I’m going to sleep, too, then,” I said. I kissed her good night and put out her lights, but I didn’t close the door. I never did. She never liked the door closed. The sounds the rest of us made gave her comfort.

  Arden was still awake when I got to our bedroom. I was surprised that he was sitting up and reading a folder, looking like he had quickly sobered up.

  “I thought you were tired,” I said.

  “I am, but I remembered some work I had to get done. I don’t simply work an eight-hour day, you know. Things happen before the market opens and after it closes. There’s not much room for blundering, especially when it’s someone else’s money and your reputation depends on succeeding even with the smallest portfolios. This is a word-of-mouth business. Success breeds more success. It doesn’t take many failures to sink the ship.”

  “You don’t have to tell me all that, Arden. I watched my father work for years and saw how concerned he could be about every little detail.”

  “Not in the beginning,” he muttered. “If there wasn’t Whitefern money, what would have become of you all? You’d be out on the street, that’s what. He had lots of losses.”

  “Why think of that now? He became a very well-respected businessman. Everyone makes mistakes, even you, especially in the beginning.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever . . . he didn’t have to concern himself with reporting everything he did to your mother, did he?” he snapped back.

  So that was it, I thought. He was putting on this show to emphasize again why he wanted me to sign those papers. He wasn’t really doing anything important.

  “Did it ever occur to you that I might want something more in my life, Arden? I’d like to be part of the work, the business Papa built. I’d like to do things outside of this house.”

  He put his papers down. “Oh, really? And just how do you propose to do that and continue to be a nursemaid for your brain-damaged sister?”

  “She’s not brain-damaged. Don’t say that.”

  “No, she’s just sloooooow. Call it whatever you want. Well?”

  “She’ll be taking art lessons. I’ll find other ways to keep her occupied and independent. You’d be surprised at some of the progress she’s made. She’s not as helpless as you think. I’ll arrange for more professional tutoring in all subjects. In time—”

  “In time, in time . . . what’s to say she won’t run out and start digging up your father’s grave again? Please. You’ve chosen to keep her here, so you care for her, full-time. So do it. I do the work we need to keep the house and our lives going, and to do that, I need to be in total control. End of story.”

  He could be so frustrating, I thought. I went into the bathroom and started to wash my face and brush my teeth.

  “If we had a child, you wouldn’t even hesitate two seconds to do what I ask,” he called. “You’d be busy being a real mother instead of a nursemaid to a woman who should be in an institution.”

  I felt the tears coming to my eyes and put my toothbrush down and took deep breaths. If anyone should realize how sensitive I was to sexual failure, it was Arden, and not simply because he was my husband. He knew the psychological problems I had. He had witnessed why. His own words when we were younger echoed in my mind: “Audrina, I’m sorry. It’s not enough to say. I know that. Now I wish I’d stayed and tried to defend you.”

  Were those words all lies?

  I went to the door.

  “You know I want to be a real mother, Arden. You know I want that very much. We can keep trying. The doctor didn’t say it would absolutely never happen.”

  “Sure, we can try until I dry up,” he muttered.

  “Men don’t dry up. You were the one who told me Ted Douglas made his much younger wife pregnant, and he’s seventy-eight.”

  “So he says,” Arden muttered. “I’ve seen that young wife of his out and about. Who knows if he really was the one to father her child?”

  “Where? Where did you see her?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is you should think more about being a housewife than a stockbroker. I’m the stockbroker. Get a hobby. Do needlework or join a book club, and have the women over for tea and talk like some of the other brokers’ wives I know. I don’t know why your father did this, this vengeful thing!” he said, slapping at his papers.

  I returned to the bathroom. Neither of us said another word. He had put out his table lamp and turned over so that his back was to me, clearly telling me that he would not be trying for us to have a child tonight. I lay there looking up at the darkness and thinking. Maybe I would give in to what he wanted and just sign the papers. It would bother me for a while that I had defied Papa’s final wishes, but I had my husband’s wishes to consider. And I did recall my mother telling me not to be too talented, not to be better than my husband at anything: “Men won’t approve if it’s likely you’ll earn more money than they do.” Even when I was young, that sounded very unfair to me. Why were men more important than women?

  I didn’t want to think about it any more tonight, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember happier times, especially the early days, when Arden was so loving and devoted to me.

  I dozed off dreaming
about a Christmas dinner when Momma and I put up decorations, but something woke me not more than a half hour later. My eyes just popped open. There was a familiar sound in the house, a sound that belonged in nightmares. I turned slowly toward Arden, but he was dead asleep, breathing heavily with an occasional snore.

  I sat up and listened harder. It was there. I was not dreaming or imagining it. The sound was hypnotizing. I didn’t need anyone to tell me why. It buzzed in my brain. I rose like a sleepwalker and left the bedroom. I thought the hall lights flickered as if the house was sending warnings: Stay back. Don’t go. The floor creaked, and the wind seemed to be scrubbing the windows. There were many cracks around frames in this old house. The wind whistled through them. Curtains danced, and above me at one point a chandelier gently swayed.

  My heart began to pound. Despite all I had learned about the deception under which I had been raised, I couldn’t help imagining that there was a first Audrina. For most of my childhood, I would swear on a stack of Bibles that she whispered to me whenever I was alone. Be me. You must be me, or I will be dead forever and ever.

  When I told my father about that once, he smiled and kissed me. “Yes,” he said. “That’s good. That’s what we want. Listen for her always.”

  Practically tiptoeing now, I walked toward the first Audrina’s room. It would always be called that, and it would never be used, nor would any of the toys and dolls ever be taken out of it. Arden thought that was sick and sometimes ranted about it.

  “We could give all that stuff to the children of poor people. We’ll make a big thing of it and have the newspapers take pictures. People will commend us for our charity, and guess what, we’ll get more clients, more business. That’s the reason most people announce their charitable gifts, most companies. They want more business, tit for tat.”

  “Just leave it alone,” I warned him. At an earlier time, I would add, “Maybe our daughter will have those things.”