House of Secrets Page 7

  “Perfectly. Ryder calls it serendipity.”

  “Does he?” She handed the dress back to me.

  “Do you have a pair of earrings that might work with it?” I asked.

  “I think I do,” she said. “They’re not real diamonds, but they’re pretty. A young man gave them to me when I was working in New York.”

  “You never told me you had a boyfriend in New York,” I said.

  “It was weighted too heavily on one side.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He thought he was my boyfriend more than I did, but I couldn’t break his heart and not accept a birthday gift, could I?” she asked, smiling.

  “Can I have my hair done for the prom?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know where to go for that,” she said. “Mrs. Marlene, as you know, cuts my hair.”

  “Alison’s calling her hairdresser to see if she can get me in.”

  “Sounds like you have a good friend,” she said. “If not, we’ll figure something out. That dress will need to be cleaned, you know, but Mrs. Levine will take care of that, too.”

  “Thanks, Mummy.”

  She turned back to her meat loaf preparations.

  “Bea Davenport was quite unhappy about all this, and she and Ryder had some words,” I said. I thought she had better know so she could be prepared for the nastiness that was probably on the horizon.

  “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  “Maybe Dr. Davenport needs to operate on her heart,” I said.

  She started to smile, even laugh, but stopped herself. “Now, don’t you go and fan the flames, Fern Corey,” my mother warned.

  “I won’t, but I don’t think anyone really has to fan them. They’ve got their own winds.”

  I went to hang up the dress.

  After dinner, just as I had begun my homework, Alison called to tell me she had persuaded her hairdresser to work on my hair right after he worked on hers. She made it sound like she’d had to move heaven and earth.

  I thanked her as profusely as I could.

  “I’ll bring some ideas for the cut and style that he gave me last week. You can look at them tomorrow at school. He’s very good, as you can tell from how he does my hair.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is everything all right there?” she asked. I knew what she meant.

  “Bea Davenport won’t be any sweeter to me or my mother, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure Ryder will be having a talk with Dr. Davenport, though.”

  “Ryder really dislikes her,” Alison said. “He told me some other things about her on the way to my house, things you might not know.”

  She was making it clear that she had Ryder’s deep trust and knew more about what went on in the Davenport family than I ever could.

  “Probably not.”

  Whatever she believed, I still felt that I had shared something with Ryder in the attic that was very special, something neither Alison nor any other girlfriend he might have could share. It was as if we were on a different radio frequency, one not within their reach. I did feel from her tone and the looks she had given me that Alison sensed a bond between Ryder and me, a bond she didn’t understand and didn’t care to understand.

  “I often wonder why Dr. Davenport married her,” I said, “but then there’s Sam. She’s a great kid. I love Sam.”

  “Maybe that’s how your mother rationalizes you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No matter how you came about, she’s pleased with you, isn’t she?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So? Well, let’s not depress ourselves or talk about this stuff, especially in front of Ryder, and make him unhappy. What about the earrings?”

  “My mother has a pair for me.”

  “Good,” Alison said. “Thank your lucky stars. You’re going to have a lot of fun, Fern, even with Paul Gabriel. I remember my first prom. I wasn’t crazy about going with Jason Marks, but I practically ignored him and enjoyed myself.”

  “You won’t be ignoring Ryder,” I said.

  “Of course not. And he won’t be ignoring me,” she added.

  “No,” I said. Of course not, I thought, which was why she would have much more fun than I would.

  “Anything else I can do for you?” she asked. Whom was she out to impress now?

  “No. I’m fine. Thanks, Alison.”

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  After I hung up, I lay back on my bed and looked up at the ceiling, thinking.

  Why did she have to say that about my mother? Was that a common thought among people who knew me, knew us?

  Everyone, especially people my age, struggled with the question Who am I? There were so many other questions dependent on the answer. Where do I belong? Whom should I be with? What should I try to make of myself?

  We fluttered about, twisting and turning, starting down one path and then another, terrified we would make a decision that would ruin the rest of our lives. Maybe we didn’t say so aloud, but I was certain that fear was in everyone’s heart.

  Here I was, sixteen, and there were still so many questions, things about my mother I did not know. I was around enough adults to know that most of them enjoyed cherry-picking their pasts to recall and share events that had pleased them, moments they cherished.

  My mother seemed afraid to do that. Every time she began, she stopped and retreated to talk about something minor, something that would enable her to forget.

  But forget what?

  Years from now, would I be like that, too, perhaps with my own daughter?

  How would I describe the first prom, the first real date I had gone on? I liked the boy I would dance with enough, but my eyes would be on another, someone in love with someone else, someone he wouldn’t mind remembering. His date would be the same. She would have no trouble talking about her prom.

  I would try not to be, but I knew I would be jealous.

  Look happy and as beautiful as you can, I told myself, and don’t for a moment appear dissatisfied and ungrateful. Think of it as a coming-out party. You’re emerging from one of the forgotten places in this great house, and you’re going to stir memories that were sleeping too long in the corners. They were memories surely filled with music and laughter.

  Bea Davenport might hover like a large, angry cloud over everything in Wyndemere, but a ray of sunshine would drill through and light a path toward resolving the ever-present question, Who am I?

  Should I continue on this path?

  I must not stop searching for the answer. The only thing slowing me down was my fear of it.

  4

  IT WAS A week of preparations and so much excitement at school that it was almost impossible to concentrate on schoolwork. I was on the phone almost every night with one of my girlfriends whose envy practically dripped through the receiver. I tried to remain modest about all the attention I was getting, but it wasn’t easy to control my own enthusiasm. Our lunch table remained confined to Ryder, Paul, Alison, and me the whole week, but our friends hovered around us. Some, like the girls on Ryder’s prom committee, interrupted every day to ask a question that had an obvious answer. Every girl in the school who had not yet been asked searched the remaining uncommitted boys in the senior class, practically begging for an invitation. A few actually initiated the invitations themselves.

  All week, I moved through the hallways like a queen bee surrounded by drones buzzing with questions about my clothes, my hair. Many made comments about other girls who were going, to provide me with information about their preparations, as if I was in some grand competition. It was all quite new for me. In science class, Mr. Malamud’s description of how a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly had an unexpected meaning. It was suddenly a way to view myself and what was happening to me. When he said the caterpillar first digests itself, but certain groups of cells survive to turn it into the beautiful butterfly, I thought maybe I was doing that.

  To fully grasp the responsibility of bec
oming a young lady, the princess all of us young ladies thought we were becoming, I had to put away childish things, digest them. Suddenly, being loud and giggling over silly comments and clownish, immature actions had to stop. I became more aware of how I dressed every day and what I said to anyone. I wanted to be more demure, move more gracefully, and care about my posture. I studied Alison continuously, trying to capture that same soft smile, that look in her eyes that, without being arrogant, clearly said, What you’re complaining about or wanting to do is childish.

  By midweek, I thought I had aged a decade more than my juvenile, self-indulgent classmates. Some of the more jealous ones were already whispering behind my back, conspiring to have me clearly labeled snobby. How ironic, I thought. It wasn’t long ago that my being what Bea Davenport practically shouted in the halls of Wyndemere, an illegitimate child, had me traveling on a level quite a bit below most of my classmates. Maybe I was a real Cinderella after all.

  This infatuation with a newer, more mature self-image reached a climax on Thursday, when I nearly failed a math test. Mr. Wasserman, my teacher, scowled at my paper when he handed it to me.

  “You know this material, Fern,” he said. “These are careless errors.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I was sure he knew the reason for my inattentiveness. Students weren’t the only ones who gossiped about their activities in our relatively small school.

  He shook his head. “Compartmentalize,” he prescribed. “When you’re in my classroom, you’re nowhere else.”

  “Okay,” I said. He was one teacher I didn’t want to disappoint.

  Pamela Sommes overheard him and had a broad smile on her envious round face. If she were the last girl on earth, the last boy would force himself to turn asexual. It wasn’t only my thought, either, but that didn’t lessen my embarrassment and regret. The truth was that I was nearly in tears by the time the bell rang. I didn’t know how many times during classes I had doodled images of myself in my new dress and failed to listen.

  After school on Monday, Mr. Stark had driven my mother and me to Mrs. Levine’s home. She was an elderly lady who operated a tailor shop out of her house, actually not too far from where Alison’s family lived. Ten years ago, my mother had a box of clothes for me that needed some tailoring, and she had brought me to Mrs. Levine’s shop. Apparently, from what I could remember, the clothes were of some high quality and worth adjusting and fitting for me. When I recalled that, I wondered if they could have been something else discovered in the attic. Perhaps my mother had been told where to look for them. I couldn’t imagine her simply going up there to forage about with clothes for me in mind.

  On the way to Mrs. Levine’s this time, I asked her about it and quickly saw from the way Mr. Stark looked at her that the answer was something neither cared to explain. That only sharpened my curiosity.

  “Why are you thinking about that now?” my mother asked, sounding suspicious.

  “I don’t know. It just came to me. Whose clothes were they? Why is it such a secret, anyway? Whose hand-me-downs were they?”

  “They were all like new, Fern,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t call them hand-me-downs.”

  “Yes, I remember that. I never really thought of them as used clothes, but whose were they? Why is it such a secret?” I cried again, exasperated.

  “You might as well tell her,” Mr. Stark said. “She’s old enough now and knows how to keep things to herself.”

  I looked at my mother with anticipation.

  “Dr. Davenport had a younger sister,” my mother said softly. “She died when she was about six. He was about nine at the time.”

  “What? I never heard any mention of her. I never saw a picture of her. I don’t understand. How did she die?”

  “She had a malfunctioning heart valve. She died in her sleep one night. Elizabeth Davenport’s way of handling her sorrow was to deny that her daughter had ever existed. She closed up her room, which is still closed today, and got rid of anything and everything that belonged to the child. Except some of the clothes that for some reason were stored in the attic. I think Simon Davenport insisted on holding on to something.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Holly,” my mother said. “I believe it was Simon Davenport’s grandmother’s name.”

  I sat back, shocked. How could someone’s, a little girl’s, existence be completely erased? What a horrible thing. I sat up quickly.

  “Where was she buried? There was a grave for her, right? Does the doctor visit it? Has he brought Ryder there?”

  “Oh, Fern, why bring all this up now?” my mother moaned. “It was a horrible tragedy for the Davenports. Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with such things. My own father was like that. If something annoyed or displeased him, he simply denied it existed.”

  “Like you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But where is Holly buried?”

  “She wasn’t buried, Fern. She was cremated. I think her remains are in some vault. Can we stop talking about this?” my mother pleaded.

  Mr. Stark nodded. “You should listen to your mother,” he said.

  “But Dr. Davenport gave you those clothes for me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I thought about it some more. “I bet that was why he wanted to be a cardiac surgeon. I bet every time he helps someone, he brings his sister back to life.”

  My mother turned sharply and looked at me, surprised at my quick analysis.

  “Right?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Does Ryder know this? He’s never mentioned it.”

  “I don’t think so, Fern. Don’t you be the one to mention it to him, either,” she warned.

  “What about Bea Davenport?”

  “I don’t know who knows what now, Fern. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say she doesn’t know and wouldn’t care about it anyway.”

  “Does Mrs. Marlene know?”

  “Oh, Fern, please.”

  A heavy silence fell over the three of us for a few moments.

  “How strange all this is,” I thought aloud when I realized something else. “I’m going to wear Dr. Davenport’s first wife’s dress to the prom, and when I was little, I wore his sister’s clothes. And it all came from the attic. Secrets. More secrets,” I muttered.

  My mother bit down on her lower lip and turned away.

  Later, I tried to concentrate on what we were doing at Mrs. Levine’s, but it was difficult to forget what my mother had told me. It was actually more of the reason I was so distracted at school, but I couldn’t mention it, of course. I began to rake through all my childhood memories, especially the ones that involved Ryder, but I could think of nothing, not a reference, and not anything in the house that suggested Dr. Davenport once had a younger sister.

  Mrs. Levine raved about Ryder’s mother’s dress and how beautiful I was going to look in it when she was finished with the adjustments. Every time she referred to how she remembered me as a little girl, I thought about Holly Davenport. It gave me an eerie feeling to think that perhaps all those times when I was little and felt a shadowy presence moving about me in the house, I was sensing Holly’s spirit.

  That following day at lunch, Ryder had noticed something different about me. Despite Bea Davenport’s efforts to build a chasm between Ryder, Sam, and myself, Ryder and I were often sensitive to each other’s feelings. Just like I could look at him and read that he was upset about something, he could look at and read me.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked me when the bell rang ending the lunch hour and we had started out.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  He thought for a moment and must have concluded that I was simply very nervous about attending the prom. He knew, of course, that this was my first formal date, too. Like everyone else, I had met boys at the mall or at sporting events, but none of those budding little romances ever flowered. I had no expectation of developing a romance with Paul, ei
ther.

  Ryder had another suspicion about my subdued manner. “Bea is not going to cause us any more trouble,” he promised as we walked in the hallway. Alison caught up. “My father and she had another argument. He didn’t think she should have prevented Sam from going into the attic with us.”

  “My mother says she scowls at her more, but she hasn’t said anything or increased her complaining. She hasn’t reduced it, either,” I added, and he laughed.

  “Paul will come to Wyndemere first on Saturday and pick you and me up, and then we’ll go to Alison’s house to get her,” Ryder said. He thought a moment and added, “I want you to come into the main house when you’re ready. We’re not having Paul go around to the servants’ entrance to pick you up. I’ll tell you exactly when Paul’s arriving.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “This is not a delivery,” he replied, his eyes sharp and determined.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t think Bea Davenport can make a fuss over that,” my mother said that afternoon when I told her what Ryder wanted me to do. “But I’ve often been wrong about how picayune that woman can be. She’d make a good drill sergeant for someone’s army.”

  The next day, Ryder laughed when I told him what my mother had said.

  “I keep her out of my room,” he bragged. “And lock my personal things in a trunk in the closet just so she can’t get her snoopy nose into it.”

  “Everything is set at the beauty salon for Saturday,” Alison piped up. I could see that she didn’t want to hear anything more about Bea Davenport. I was sure Ryder and she had exhausted the subject between the day in the attic and now.

  I had to get myself more into all this, I thought. I had to do what Mr. Wasserman told me to do in class, compartmentalize and shove all the static out of my mind. I was going with my mother after school to do a final fitting of the dress at Mrs. Levine’s on Thursday. Both Alison and Ryder knew.

  “Can’t wait to see you in it,” Alison said dryly. I sensed she didn’t really think it would look good on me.