“Will Daddy and Mother say I’m just a child until I’m twenty-one. Even if they say eighteen, it’ll be forever until I find out if I can make it as a singer.”
As often happens, the book in my memory library most applicable to the situation occurred to me when I had given up trying to recall a volume and a scene that might be helpful. “Do you remember Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, when they set a trap for a Heffalump?”
Isadora regarded me as if she might be justified in asking if I’d visited the wine cellar. “I recall something about a deep hole with a honey jar at the bottom for bait. But what was a Heffalump? I don’t remember. And what the heck does that have to do with this?”
“Having given little thought to what a Heffalump might be like, Piglet panicked when he thought they actually caught one. Might a Heffalump be fierce with pigs? Surely it was a monster. But after much fretting and fear, Piglet discovered the beast at the bottom of the trap was just Pooh with his head stuck in the honey jar. There was no such thing as a Heffalump.”
Isadora cocked her head as though to suggest there must be more I meant to say. When I only cocked my head in response, she said, “You’ve been a great teacher, a lot better than Miss Blackthorn, but I must have been daydreaming in class. Are you drawing an analogy? I don’t see anything analogous between a nonexistent Heffalump and my parents. My parents—our parents—they’re real, and they make the rules. So your point is?”
“You’re worried that Franklin and Loretta will be Heffalumps and thwart you just when it matters most that they understand you and approve of what you want to do with your life. But that won’t happen. You’re worried about nothing. They love you, Izzy. They’ll trust you, and they’ll find a way to feel safe about you leaving the Bram and going out on your own.”
She frowned. “How can you be so sure?”
“There’s a perfect argument to be made in your favor. They’re too fair and self-aware to resist it.”
“What argument?”
“You leave that to me when the time comes. You just work on your voice, your technique, and tell me when you’re ready to ditch this dump. Now play that new Cole Porter song for me.”
Porter’s hit musical on Broadway was rich with compositions in his unique, literate style. The title song was a little risqué, but it had an irresistible swing to it. Having heard it once, Isadora was able to play it note for note—“Anything Goes.”
The following night, two weeks before Christmas, I had the same dream—with a few variations—that disturbed my sleep on the fourth of January, nearly a year earlier, on the night of the day Gertie recovered from septic shock. In the glow of a dream moon, I walked above the works of Nature and humanity as though on a bridge of glass. Southwest lay the lights of suburbs. As before, I drifted eastward until the sway-backed barn and leaning silo appeared. I descended to the earth, crossed the lush meadow. This time no horse appeared with or without a monstrous rider. I ghosted through the walls of the weathered house. The living room was furnished in the odds-and-ends style of items acquired cheaply at country auctions. After a silence, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” swelled through the house, but not as I’d heard Isadora play it. This version was distorted, sinister, suggesting impending violence. Intuitively, I knew whose voice would give new and ominous meaning to Cole Porter’s words if there were to be any lyrics in this rendition. Only one person from all the days of my life was wicked enough to match the menace in the music. I felt that if I heard his voice, I would be inviting him back into my life. I heard myself say, “Home,” as one might evoke the name of the son of God to ward off a vampire, and I sat up in bed, free of the dream place, safe in the Bram.
I wasn’t able to return to sleep. Because the Clyde Tombaugh Club had ceased to engage in post-midnight adventures, I was reading more books recently. And I was doing a lot of thinking about what I read but also about the meaning and purpose of my strange life and gifts. I once believed my limitations allowed me no purpose other than to endure, but that philosophy no longer made sense. My life was rich with experience of the Darkness that isn’t just an absence of light and of theLight we feel but cannot see. I was beginning to understand my reason for being. Fulfilling my purpose required paying a high price. For that price, I was grateful. Anything of great value will have a daunting cost whether we pay in money or in any of the many other currencies with which we settle the debts we owe one another. The essence and impact of my life was to be a friend of this family and never to leave them in times of trouble, to repay their love twice over, to pay with my life if necessary. I got out of bed and went to a window. Gazing at the sea of stars, I marveled that a miscreation like me could be granted a purpose as fine as this and perhaps the power to fulfill it.
And so December laid down its days on the way to Christmas and year’s end. Having officially retired on December 22, Julian and Victoria Symington spent two days with us as guests rather than as employees, for an early celebration of the holiday, before leaving for their new home in San Clemente. Although I had known them only four years, it was hard to say goodbye, harder for Franklin and Loretta and the siblings than for me.
Before she and her husband left on the morning of the twenty-fourth, Victoria came to the library, where I was reading Thomas Hardy’sWessex Tales. She settled in an armchair served by the same Tiffany floor lamp that shed light on my book. As I putWessex Talesaside, she said, “We already said our goodbyes last evening, but I can’t leave it at that, Addie. There’s something I need to know if it can be known. It’s not just curiosity, dear. It’s ... I guess I’m hoping you yourself might somehow be proof.”
“Proof of what?”
Instead of answering, she said, “That first day at the Bram, you met Anna May and you knew.”
“Knew? What did I know?”
“That she was troubled.”
“Well, ma’am, anyone could have seen it.”
“Not everyone did, child. But you knew at once. And all that with her brother.”
“I didn’t know about Connor. I just saw she was anguished about something and repressing it.”
Mrs. Symington nodded as if I had agreed with her. “You also knew about Miss Blackthorn when no one else did.”
“The children said something. I realized what it meant, what Miss Blackthorn was doing. That’s all.”
“And then there was Rafael.”
I said nothing.
“You brought that poisoned chunk of meat to show us.”
“I was worried an intruder wanted to kill him to clear the way. A burglar or something. And of course it turned out to be Connor’s friend, Willy Maxwell.”
Her voice and manner were not those of an interrogator. She impressed me—at this moment, although never before—as being a melancholy but still hopeful seeker of something that her heart needed and her mind resisted providing. “Addie, did you really throw those other chunks of tainted meat over the estate wall?”
“I didn’t mean to poison coyotes—or anything else.”
