The Green Sickness
Aug. 2nd, 2017 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI have two-thirds of the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story written. Which is better than no thirds of the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story written, right?
In any event, I’m off to the Southern Tier in a couple of hours where I will be doing no writing whatsoever.
So! In the interests of keeping some kind of momentum going – it’s waaay too easy to push partly written manuscripts aside and never, ever look at them again – I am posting that two-thirds of a ghost story here.
Where it can reproach me into finishing it when I get back.
THE GREEN SICKNESS
for Brian Buchbinder
(i)
She’d recognized the thing on the street instantly when she spied it from her bedroom window. She’d seen it before but not for a long time. A very long time.
Horseless carriages they’d called them then, and indeed, the vehicle that rolled past her window did look more like a carriage than it did like a modern automobile with its canopy, its oversized wheels, its brass sconces in which - most improbably against this damp dawn - white candles flickered. The horseless carriage glided past the townhouses on Massachusetts Avenue without a sound and disappeared when it made the turn onto Dupont Circle.
She saw it, and her hand fluttered to her throat, her breast.
The telephone began to ring. Voices rose in the rooms below. Muffled footsteps mounted the staircase.
But she already knew.
She felt a sadness then as though she’d left a place she was waiting to be called back to, a place that had touched her heart though she hadn’t wanted it to. A sadness that could only be filled by inconsequential interactions with strangers.
And this is why when the first reporter arrived an hour later, she was dressed and ready to receive him. He was a ferrety looking young man with slicked back hair, probably a Jew. She sipped coffee from a porcelain cup that had been painted by her stepmother but did not instruct the help to offer the young man coffee.
“Your feud, of course, was legendary,“ the young man said tentatively.
“There was no feud,” the old woman said. “She was my cousin.”
“But she was the wife of a Democratic President. And you were the wife of a Republican Speaker of the House – “
“There was no feud,” the old woman repeated sharply. “There were sometimes… differences. These things happen among families. Do your people not have families?”
The young man flushed. He was a very awkward young man sitting there on her exquisitely embroidered Herendon sofa with his right leg crossed over his left, showing gangly bare ankle because he couldn’t be bothered to wear trousers of the proper length. He consulted his notes. “And you will be going to the funeral?”
“I will not be going to the funeral. She did not want a funeral. Unlike the many others who will be attempting to capitalize on her death, I will abide with her wishes. She was my cousin.”
The young man looked so miserable then that against her better judgment, the old woman found herself pitying him. She leaned forward, gave the offending ankle a rap. “If you must buy off the rack, do try and find yourself a tailor who can do something about this. I am going to tell you a story, young man, about Nell when she was a girl. Perhaps it will explain something of the complicated nature of our feelings toward one another to you; perhaps not. Your editor will not want to publish it in any event. But I will tell you anyway.”
And the old woman half-closed her eyes. Lay back in the embroidered easy chair that looked more like a throne than any piece of household furniture had the right to look. Began to tell a story.
(ii)
The closest thing to freedom was her bicycle. She pumped up Connecticut Avenue furiously, feet on the handlebars, just so she could coast down to Dupont Circle at breakneck speeds.
The boys – most of them – fell off their bicycles when they attempted this feat. But she never did.
Twelve hundred miles away, her famous father stormed a famous hill.
Of course, Alice – that was her name, Alice; like the girl who tumbled down the rabbit hole – ignored her implacable stepmother’s reprimands. Alice was 14, and if 14 – as her stepmother cautioned – was too mature to be cavorting unchaperoned with ruffians of the opposite sex, it was also too mature to listen to a woman who was both ugly and old, and who sat in Auntie Bye’s parlor all day darning old socks though certainly Alice’s father was rich enough to purchase new. Alice’s father was rich enough to purchase anything.
Her nonchalance toward authority emboldened the boys. One afternoon, one of the boys - dressed as a prank in his sister’s clothes - knocked on the front door. The frightened housemaid showed him into the house, presented him as a caller to Alice’s stepmother.
That was the breaking point for Alice’s stepmother.
The following morning, her stepmother summoned Alice into Auntie Bye’s parlor to give her the news. It was midsummer. To be young, to race headlong down steep cobblestoned grades under majestic shade trees in midsummer, these were the closest things to Heaven. But Heaven coexisted with Hell.
“You will be leaving Friday,” Edith added. “And returning Friday fortnight.”
“But I don’t wish to leave Friday,” said Alice.
Edith laughed merrily. “And Mrs. Ludlow Hall doesn’t wish to receive you either. Friday or any other day. But it is your father’s wish. And he will not be refused.”
To Edith, clearly, this was clearly the end of the conversation. But Alice stood by the room’s door, digging her heels into Auntie Bye’s Persian carpet, as if there were
something more to say.
“I will disgrace you,” Alice told Edith finally.
“Indeed,” Edith replied. “And how will your behavior be different then from what it is already?”
Sent away to visit her ugly cousin Nell! That was the disgrace. That was a calamity.
(iii)
“My favorite niece,” Papa dubbed Nell.
A small kindness that cost him nothing – these were Papa’s favorite kindnesses – for no one ever saw Nell after her mother died. Her mother’s mother – the addle-brained Mrs. Ludlow Hall – had whisked the girl and her two younger brothers away to a gloomy estate called Oak Terrace in the far off Hudson Valley.
Shortly upon arrival, the youngest brother had promptly died. Papa had not been invited to the funeral. The boy’s own father, Papa’s brother, had not even been invited to the funeral.
Since that time, there’d been one visit to Sagamore Hill. At Christmas time, five years before. A closely supervised visit: Mrs. Ludlow Hall had been very clear on that although she had declined to accompany her granddaughter herself.
“And how did you arrange that?” Alice’s stepmother asked Papa. The family had gathered in Papa’s study on the ground floor of the country estate to await the arrival of the two relations: the girl from the Hudson Valley countryside and her father from New York City. Two bear skins and a zebra skin lay on the floor; above the black mahogany fireplace protruded the heads of a giant stag and a giant oryx.
“Livingstons they may be, but they’re poor as church mice,” Papa said. “I reminded her who holds the purse strings to Nell’s estate.” That was a confusing and therefore disagreeable thing about Alice’s cousin: She was called “Nell,” which was short for “Eleanor,” but her father was also called “Nell,” which was short for Elliot.
“Little pitchers,” Edith said with a warning glance toward Alice.
“Oh, come, come, Edith,” said Papa, “The sheer egoism of a man who would brand his progeny with his own appellation as though she was a poor reflection of himself –“
Edith, who was well acquainted with egoism, merely smiled.
“And do you know how he came by that nickname?” Papa continued.
“I do not,” Edith said although, in fact, she did.
“When we were boys, we lived in the city on Broadway and Bowery Road, and one afternoon in late December, Elliott went out walking. When he came home hours later, he returned without his overcoat. Claimed he’d intercepted a street urchin stealing coal but that the miserable child was so downtrodden that he could not turn the boy over to the authorities, indeed he felt moved to give the boy not only his own overcoat but all the money in his pockets as well.
“’What a heartwarming story!’ I said. ‘Mr. Dickens himself could write a novel about you for you’re sweeter than Little Nell!’” Though it had been 25 years since the joke had first been made, Papa threw his head back and roared with laughter at it. “And that is how he got his monicker!”
“Such an amusing story,” said Edith. “The boy, young Gracie Hall. Is he not coming as well? Does Elliot not wish to see his only surviving son?”
“Oh, Nell cares nothing for little Hall,” said Papa dismissively. “He cares only for Nell.”
Through the windows of Papa’s study, the day was bright and still. It had snowed that morning. In the afternoon, the sun came out, but the temperatures had dropped so that the snow formed crystals on the trees surrounding the palatial Sagamore Hill estate looked exactly like some kind of fruit blossom. Eerie. Beautiful.
“Alice, please go down to the kitchen and ask about the progress of the jam tarts that will be served for tea when our guests arrive,” Alice’s stepmother instructed.
“Why don’t you ring and ask yourself?” Alice said.
Her stepmother said nothing but turned her head to stare at Alice’s father. “Oh, come, come, Princess.” he said. “Mollify Mama, there’s a good girl.” And turned back to explaining to Ted – Alice’s half-brother, the eldest of her stepmother’s sons – the proper way to shoot an elephant. “You see, their hides are very, very thick –“
Needs must. Alice dawdled through the large central hall, the drawing room, the dining room. Cook and Mary Sweeney didn’t notice her when she walked into the kitchen. They were deep in conversation, their heads close.
“He has a silver tongue on him, make no mistake,” said Mary Sweeney. “He could charm the birds from the trees.”
“Oh, he could charm the skin off a snake,” said Cook.
“He could ransom his soul back from the devil with a single flattering word,” said Mary Sweeney. “The old woman relented, and angry she must have been when he reverted back to his ways. They hid the liquor, you know. But he said the girl must have a ride into town in his fancy motor car. So off they go, himself, the girl, and his dogs. Those old Dutch towns are dry, so he must have had to search long and hard, but finally he finds a place.
“’You wait for me here,’ he tells the girl. ‘I’ll be but a minute.’ And he gives her the straps with the dogs.
“And she stands out there hour after hour. It grows dark. It grows cold. And finally the coachman from the big house finds her and fetches her home. They’d sent him out hours ago but he didna know where to look –“
Alice tapped her foot impatiently, and the two women looked up.
“Mrs. Roosevelt wants to know about the jam tarts,” she announced.
“Oh, I’m sure Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to know more politely than that,” Cook said. “You tell Mrs. R that there was enough jam to make the tarts though, to be sure, none left over, so I don’t know about Mr. R’s toast points tomorrow.”
Alice hesitated. “Of whom were you speaking?” she said.
“Of whom were I speaking?” snorted Cook. “Why of me great-great grandfather, not that it’s any business of an insolent girl’s.”
Alice made a face at her.
When she got back to Papa’s study, Ted, Kermit, Ethel, and even baby Archie were clustered round the window to watch the small whirlwind that was making its way through the fields and belts of woodland that surrounded the big house. The blowing snow resolved itself as it grew closer into the figure of an automobile moving slowly along the whited-out road.
“Look! It’s Uncle Nell! He’s here!” Kermit hooted.
“Well, Teedie,” said Edith rising and smoothing her skirts. “I must have a word with Mrs. Sweeney before he’s at the door to keep a close eye on the housemaids. Shall you come with me to greet him?”
“You may bring him to me,” said Papa grandly. “And Edith - no spirits. No matter how hard he may entreat. He will entreat. And he can be quite persuasive.”
###
His daughter arrived the following day and missed the jam tarts. She’d traveled first by train, then by ferry, then by train again – and the unexpected snow stalled the train – and finally by carriage. Mrs. Ludlow Hall had sent her in the care of a coachman.
“Most inappropriate,” Edith murmured to Auntie Bye, Papa’s older sister, who’d just arrived from Washington D.C. for the Christmas festivities.
“Perhaps,” said Auntie Bye who was as sensible as she was kind-hearted. “But the distance between the train station in Oyster Bay and Sagamore Hill needs must be traveled by coach. Perhaps Mrs. Ludlow Hall was thinking of that. Was it the same coachman who … ?”
“It was! And he –“ And then Edith noticed Alice. “And why are you here?” she snapped. “Go upstairs to the nursery and find your cousin. Make her go outside. The fresh air will do her good.”
“I’ll come with you, Princess,” Auntie Bye said, reaching for Alice’s hand. “You must not mind your stepmother,” she added when they’d left the drawing room. “It is just her way.”
“I hate her,” Alice said.
“The two of you could learn to love each other better,” Auntie Bye allowed. “We were such good friends, Edith and I, when we were growing up, friends of the bosom. And of course, we are good friends still. But she has changed. She has had… disappointments. And, of course, she understands she must not allow disappointments to change her. But they do.”
“By disappointments, do you mean my mother?” Alice asked.
“Oh, Alice,” laughed Auntie Bye.
Laughter gave way to surprise when aunt and niece walked into the nursery, for there sat Uncle Nell cross-legged on the floor with a Lilliputian teacup in front of him and Cousin Nell across from him, surrounded by a gaggle of Alice’s old dolls; her ugly, eager face smiling. In the act of pouring imaginary tea from the very real teapot that had once belonged to Alice’s mother. Sitting on a chair that had been hand-carved and gilded especially for Alice in the shape of a throne.
“I do not give you permission to play with my toys,” Alice said grandly and kicked the shabbiest of the dolls so that all of the dolls toppled over like dominos, and Uncle Nell’s teacup shattered on the floor.
“Oh, Alice,” Auntie Bye said again. Uncle Nell leapt lithely to his feet like an acrobat. Cousin Nell crept off the throne and began collecting the pieces of the broken china, furtively trying to fit them together.
This was the other disagreeable thing about Alice’s cousin. For even with the dissolution of alcohol softening his jaw line, puffing the flesh around his eyes, glazing his eyes with a yellowish cast, Nell’s father was a handsome man, much handsomer than Alice’s own Papa. And he moved with the sinuous grace of a cat.
Her mother, Mrs. Ludlow Hall’s dead daughter, was said to have been the most beautiful debutante of the ’81 season: Bliss Baker had wanted to paint her.
Yet Nell looked like a toad. Her eyes popped out of her head like a gargoyle’s. Her teeth protruded like a beaver’s.
Alice was beautiful. She’d always been told she was beautiful, but she knew she would have known it without being told. She was beautiful; Nell was hideous; and yet the two motherless cousins shared a marked physical resemblance: How could that be?
###
The visit was not a success. Papa had devised a roster of entertainments for the children; Papa’s children knew better than to complain.
But Cousin Nell with her pained eyes, her diffident voice, her habit of putting her hand in front of her mouth when she spoke as though this might disguise her large protruding teeth – it didn’t; it only made it even more difficult to hear a single word she said – Cousin Nell had been so obviously frightened by the physical nature of Papa’s entertainments and by her rough-and-tumble cousins that it drained much of the fun out of the holiday traditions and games.
Christmas was celebrated with a familiar assortment of activities. After church, stockings bulging with treats and trinkets were emptied. Papa rose from the dinner table (roast goose and braised chestnuts) to deliver an impromptu speech in which he denounced the new fad of cutting down living trees and putting them on display in the parlor. “Like slaves adorned with chains and dragged before the Roman consuls!” thundered Papa. “How do such monstrosities help us better appreciate the miracle of Christ’s birth?”
At the end of Papa’s speech, the party toasted him. Papa even poured a small amount of wine into a glass, diluted it with water, gave it to Alice. She liked that, she wanted more. Edith frowned at Papa and shook her head, almost imperceptibly.
Edith couldn’t deny Uncle Nell the opportunity to toast, however, and Uncle Nell seized that opportunity merrily to propose ever more toasts. To Edith. To Auntie Bye. To Alice. To his dead wife. To Papa’s dead wife, Alice’s mother. (Papa scowled.) To the United States of America. He grew jollier and jollier with every improvised homage.
A skating expedition to the old Mill Pond had been organized for the afternoon. Alice hated skating on ponds. All you could do was spin round and round and round till you made yourself dizzy.
She was startled by how a graceful skater Uncle Nell was. His brackets and lunges and pivot turns far outshone Papa who could barely keep step with his wife even when they skated together holding hands. This fact did not endear him to Papa, Alice noted. Papa did not like to be outdone in anything but particularly not when it came to matters involving physical exertion.
Cousin Nell was trussed up in so many layers of furs and overcoats that she looked like a fat beetle. She watched her father hungrily from the banks of the pond.
When her father declared, “You must have a go, too, dearest Nell!”, she answered in a serious voice as though she was offering up her flesh to some dreadful martyrdom, “I will do anything my dearest Papa wants me to do.”
Of course, Nell was the clumsiest oaf ever to put her foot on ice; of course, she fell – almost immediately. With a blood-curdling scream.
“Now, see what you’ve done!” Papa thundered.
“Do stop orchestrating, Teedie,” Edith said wearily. “The child twisted her ankle, nothing more. It is not serious. Perhaps she ought to go back into the house. Perhaps we all ought to go back inside the house. It has been a long day.
Uncle Nell hoisted his daughter into his arms and carried her off to the nursery. Auntie Bye herded the rest of the children into the drawing room where the piano had just been tuned.
“You shall play, and we shall sing,” said Auntie Bye said to Alice. “I do love Christmas carols.”
“But I don’t know any Christmas carols by heart,” Alice said.
“Then fetch the sheet music from the nursery,” said Auntie Bye.
Needs must. Alice looked forward to the time when she’d be all grown up, and needs wouldn’t ever again. She bounded up the oak staircase that led to the second floor and pushed the door to the nursery open.
There sat Cousin Nell. Once again, she’d usurped Alice’s throne. Her hair was down; it fell in ringlets around her naked neck and shoulders. Her feet and legs were likewise bare, and her skirts and petticoat were pushed all the way up to her thighs.
Her father kneeled before her. Nell’s toes were in his mouth. His eyes were closed; he made slurping noises as he gobbled at his daughter’s feet.
He did not see Alice, but Nell’s eyes were wide open, and she met Alice’s shocked stare with an unblinking gaze of her own. She tilted her chin, squared her shoulders, went right on looking at her cousin until the other girl flushed furiously and backed out of the room.
Alice told no one what she had seen – what had she seen? who would she tell? – and eight months later, her uncle was dead. Fallen from a window. In Virginia. He’d survived the fall but expired two days later.
The family was eating breakfast.
“Yes, but how did he come to fall from a window?” Alice asked. “And what was he doing in Virginia?”
“You may not have more jam,” Alice’s stepmother told Kermit sternly. “You have had quite enough jam.” Then she regarded her stepdaughter as she might regard a
a particularly annoying flying insect.
“He is buried in a church,” Edith said. As if this explained anything at all. “In the vault where Mrs. Ludlow Hall stores her dead daughter. Quite near Oak Terrace. So that little Nell can visit. And Gracie Hall, too, of course. When he is home from school.”
It was the first time Alice had heard the name of the house where her cousin lived.
It was to this house that her absentee father, preoccupied with expanding the boundaries of the great American empire, proposed to banish her five years later. A prospect devoid of any attraction whatsoever.
(iv)
Oak Terrace looked like the type of place where the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” might go to seek employment as a cook. It stood in the middle of the wood. The wood was so dark that the trees growing there looked dead even in the middle of the summer.
Just in case this didn’t make the house seem funereal enough, Mrs. Ludlow Hall had had the windows on its ground floor enshrouded in heavy damask draperies that were never drawn open, not even on the hottest days. A small boy had been conscripted from the neighboring village – Tivoli! It was called Tivoli! – to beat the flies off with an ancient ostrich plume. The boy wore livery, and he was strictly forbidden to speak to the cousins.
A longcase clock – a relic of Mrs. Ludlow Hall’s distinguished Livingston ancestry – stood against the fading wallpaper, ticking loudly. On the dial above the clock face, an angel held a flaming scroll emblazoned with the words, “And There Shall Be Time No Longer,” an injunction that the clock took seriously for though its hands kept accurate time, it struck erratically at all hours.
Mrs. Ludlow Hall herself had something of the arrested child about her. She wore her dresses short, and they were adorned with frills; she spoke with a slight lisp. For an hour in the morning and another hour in the afternoon, she sat in the sitting room to which the two cousins had been relegated, occasionally attended by Cousin Nell’s spinster aunts, her vaporish, gaunt, and silent daughters. Prayer and consternation were more constant companions. There were so many sins to catalogue and so many sinners to worry about.
Because their unruly, unpredictable natures made it difficult for children to refrain from sin, Mrs. Ludlow Hall thought it best for children to be segregated from adults except for these brief visitations. Nell ate separately from the adults, and in the summer months, was not tutored but left to devise her own amusements to pass the hours. As her guest, Alice was forced to join her.
Nell had grown taller and rangier in the five years that had passed but in all other respects seemed exactly the same. She was polite, but she resisted every attempt Alice made at conversation beyond the replies demanded by rudimentary politeness. She did not initiate dialogue. Instead she read books – Oak Terrace had an enormous library – and after dinner, she went up to her bedchamber to nap. After three hours, she returned to the sitting room to read until supper. After supper, she retreated once again to her bedchamber.
None of this would do, thought Alice. Not the dark house; not the ugly, silent cousin; not the ghastly, girlish, and devout Mrs. Ludlow Hall.
Nobody tried to intercept her on the third day when she left the sitting room to wander out the front door The mute little boy did not even look away from his ostrich plume. But the mad and ancient clock struck thirteen times.
###
However hot it had been sitting bored and restless in the sepulchral sitting room, it was even hotter outside. Not a branch stirred; not a bird chirped: The silence, like the heat was total.
But then, there came a noise.
And, there! It was again.
A rhythmic, thudding noise repeated at irregular intervals. It came from the back of the house.
Once Oak Terrace may have been attended by symmetrical and orderly gardens, it was impossible to tell. There was still a ribbon of gravel, overgrown with weeds, that curved through thickets of oversized brambles and monstrous shrubbery towards the back of the house. Alice inched her way along it, holding her skirt up over her face to avoid being scratched. She could almost feel the humid air she displaced as she moved as though it were bathwater.
The path crept along the outline of the house, then turned a corner, and abruptly, Alice found herself in a small grass clearing. The sudden sunlight was blinding. When her eyes adjusted, she made out a tattered net and a young man in grey flannels who was pounding balls with a racket across the net. Every so often he paused in his pursuit to pick the balls back up. Muttering to himself.
A tennis court!
“How jolly!” cried Alice.
The young man regarded her coldly. “Ah, yes. The cousin. Miss van Roosevelt, I presume?”
“Nell didn’t tell me a tennis court was here!”
“Nell doesn’t care for physical pursuits. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed. We haven’t been introduced. I’m Valentine Hall, Nell’s uncle.”
“How d’you do, ” Alice said with her most fetching smile. “May I play? I’m so frightfully dull.”
“That depends,” the young man said. “ Are you any good?”
“I am excellent,” Alice said with a toss of her hair.
“There are extra rackets in there,” said the young man, nodding at a shack. It still retained some remnants of its roof.
Alice was an able player, but she was no match for Valentine Hall. “Why, you’re no good at all,” he said disgustedly, throwing down his racket. Rummaged through the pockets of his trousers. Pulled out a silver flask. Took a long draft from the silver flask.
“I’m very good,” Alice said indignantly. “You are just better.”
Valentine Hall regarded her unfavorably. “In 1888, I won the Men’s Double’s title at the U.S. National Championships. Did Nell tell you that? No, of course not. Why would she?”
“Why, if you’re that good, you can teach me to do better,” Alice coaxed.
“I have no interest in silly little girls,” he said.
“I’m not a little girl,” said Alice. “I’m almost 15.”
“Even less interest then,” he said, taking another draft from the flask. “Go find Nell and play.”
“Nell is taking a nap –“
“Oh, is that what Nell told you,” he said. His laugh sounded like a growl. “We all have games we don’t want others to know about, don’t we Miss van Roosevelt? You will find Nell in the carriage house. Doing what it is she does when she thinks herself unobserved.”
His voice grew low and vicious. “Now, get out,” he said.
These people were frightfully rude, thought Alice. She had no idea where the carriage house was, but she had no intention of asking.
On the other side of Valentine Hall’s tennis court, the wood closed tight again. She stumbled against a tree root and almost toppled over the edge of a steep precipice. A brackish smell suffused the air: She supposed it was the Hudson River.
At the base of the hill, she was surprised to find a small road. It was well maintained. And the end of the road stood a barnlike structure with a sharply eaved roof. It padlocked door was wide open.
The inside of the barn was dark. Again, Alice’s eyes struggled to adjust to the changes in light levels, but when they had, she saw the thing standing in the middle of the space was a motor car. Nell was sitting in the passenger seat and beside her sat a man Alice recognized as the coachman who’d accompanied Nell on her trip to Sagamore Hill five years before.
“Is that your dead father’s motor car, Nell?” Alice asked. She began to laugh. “Whatever do you mean by sitting in it like that?”
The coachman looked abashed. He touched his fingers to his cap. “Beggin’ your pardon, Miss,” he said. “She don’t mean anything by it and it do bring a smile to her lips. So few things do.”
Nell said nothing. She did not look at Alice. She stared straight ahead.
###
Nell did not rejoin Alice that day.
“Your cousin has been taken ill,” Mrs. Ludlow Hall announced when she came into the sitting room later that afternoon. The longcase clock had just struck eleven; Mrs. Ludlow Hall was wearing a pink dress. Alice had never before seen an adult woman in a pink dress.
“Ill?” snorted Alice. “She’s not ill. She’s –“
Mrs. Ludlow Hall raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Nothing! Perhaps it is the heat! It is so very, very hot here.”
“Are you feeling the effects of the heat?”
“I? No. Papa says I have the constitution of a horse!”
“Mr. van Roosevelt compares his daughter to a mare. How delightful,” said Mrs. Ludlow Hall. “Are you familiar with chlorosis?”
“No –“
“Well, that is what the doctor says your cousin has. Chlorosis. The green sickness. You need not worry about catching the infection. It is not contagious. I will write to your mother, however. Perhaps she will want to send for you.”
“I’m sure she would not want to strain your hospitality if my cousin is ill,” said Alice hopefully.
“Although likely, she will not send for you,” Mrs Ludlow Hall continued with a sigh. “And how do you sleep?”
“I sleep well,” Alice said.
“There are mice, you know. Oak Terrace is an old house. If you lock your door before you go to sleep, that will keep the mice out.”
It was not unusual for Mrs. Ludlow Hall to sound silly. But this did not make any sense at all.
In any event, I’m off to the Southern Tier in a couple of hours where I will be doing no writing whatsoever.
So! In the interests of keeping some kind of momentum going – it’s waaay too easy to push partly written manuscripts aside and never, ever look at them again – I am posting that two-thirds of a ghost story here.
Where it can reproach me into finishing it when I get back.
for Brian Buchbinder
(i)
She’d recognized the thing on the street instantly when she spied it from her bedroom window. She’d seen it before but not for a long time. A very long time.
Horseless carriages they’d called them then, and indeed, the vehicle that rolled past her window did look more like a carriage than it did like a modern automobile with its canopy, its oversized wheels, its brass sconces in which - most improbably against this damp dawn - white candles flickered. The horseless carriage glided past the townhouses on Massachusetts Avenue without a sound and disappeared when it made the turn onto Dupont Circle.
She saw it, and her hand fluttered to her throat, her breast.
The telephone began to ring. Voices rose in the rooms below. Muffled footsteps mounted the staircase.
But she already knew.
She felt a sadness then as though she’d left a place she was waiting to be called back to, a place that had touched her heart though she hadn’t wanted it to. A sadness that could only be filled by inconsequential interactions with strangers.
And this is why when the first reporter arrived an hour later, she was dressed and ready to receive him. He was a ferrety looking young man with slicked back hair, probably a Jew. She sipped coffee from a porcelain cup that had been painted by her stepmother but did not instruct the help to offer the young man coffee.
“Your feud, of course, was legendary,“ the young man said tentatively.
“There was no feud,” the old woman said. “She was my cousin.”
“But she was the wife of a Democratic President. And you were the wife of a Republican Speaker of the House – “
“There was no feud,” the old woman repeated sharply. “There were sometimes… differences. These things happen among families. Do your people not have families?”
The young man flushed. He was a very awkward young man sitting there on her exquisitely embroidered Herendon sofa with his right leg crossed over his left, showing gangly bare ankle because he couldn’t be bothered to wear trousers of the proper length. He consulted his notes. “And you will be going to the funeral?”
“I will not be going to the funeral. She did not want a funeral. Unlike the many others who will be attempting to capitalize on her death, I will abide with her wishes. She was my cousin.”
The young man looked so miserable then that against her better judgment, the old woman found herself pitying him. She leaned forward, gave the offending ankle a rap. “If you must buy off the rack, do try and find yourself a tailor who can do something about this. I am going to tell you a story, young man, about Nell when she was a girl. Perhaps it will explain something of the complicated nature of our feelings toward one another to you; perhaps not. Your editor will not want to publish it in any event. But I will tell you anyway.”
And the old woman half-closed her eyes. Lay back in the embroidered easy chair that looked more like a throne than any piece of household furniture had the right to look. Began to tell a story.
(ii)
The closest thing to freedom was her bicycle. She pumped up Connecticut Avenue furiously, feet on the handlebars, just so she could coast down to Dupont Circle at breakneck speeds.
The boys – most of them – fell off their bicycles when they attempted this feat. But she never did.
Twelve hundred miles away, her famous father stormed a famous hill.
Of course, Alice – that was her name, Alice; like the girl who tumbled down the rabbit hole – ignored her implacable stepmother’s reprimands. Alice was 14, and if 14 – as her stepmother cautioned – was too mature to be cavorting unchaperoned with ruffians of the opposite sex, it was also too mature to listen to a woman who was both ugly and old, and who sat in Auntie Bye’s parlor all day darning old socks though certainly Alice’s father was rich enough to purchase new. Alice’s father was rich enough to purchase anything.
Her nonchalance toward authority emboldened the boys. One afternoon, one of the boys - dressed as a prank in his sister’s clothes - knocked on the front door. The frightened housemaid showed him into the house, presented him as a caller to Alice’s stepmother.
That was the breaking point for Alice’s stepmother.
The following morning, her stepmother summoned Alice into Auntie Bye’s parlor to give her the news. It was midsummer. To be young, to race headlong down steep cobblestoned grades under majestic shade trees in midsummer, these were the closest things to Heaven. But Heaven coexisted with Hell.
“You will be leaving Friday,” Edith added. “And returning Friday fortnight.”
“But I don’t wish to leave Friday,” said Alice.
Edith laughed merrily. “And Mrs. Ludlow Hall doesn’t wish to receive you either. Friday or any other day. But it is your father’s wish. And he will not be refused.”
To Edith, clearly, this was clearly the end of the conversation. But Alice stood by the room’s door, digging her heels into Auntie Bye’s Persian carpet, as if there were
something more to say.
“I will disgrace you,” Alice told Edith finally.
“Indeed,” Edith replied. “And how will your behavior be different then from what it is already?”
Sent away to visit her ugly cousin Nell! That was the disgrace. That was a calamity.
(iii)
“My favorite niece,” Papa dubbed Nell.
A small kindness that cost him nothing – these were Papa’s favorite kindnesses – for no one ever saw Nell after her mother died. Her mother’s mother – the addle-brained Mrs. Ludlow Hall – had whisked the girl and her two younger brothers away to a gloomy estate called Oak Terrace in the far off Hudson Valley.
Shortly upon arrival, the youngest brother had promptly died. Papa had not been invited to the funeral. The boy’s own father, Papa’s brother, had not even been invited to the funeral.
Since that time, there’d been one visit to Sagamore Hill. At Christmas time, five years before. A closely supervised visit: Mrs. Ludlow Hall had been very clear on that although she had declined to accompany her granddaughter herself.
“And how did you arrange that?” Alice’s stepmother asked Papa. The family had gathered in Papa’s study on the ground floor of the country estate to await the arrival of the two relations: the girl from the Hudson Valley countryside and her father from New York City. Two bear skins and a zebra skin lay on the floor; above the black mahogany fireplace protruded the heads of a giant stag and a giant oryx.
“Livingstons they may be, but they’re poor as church mice,” Papa said. “I reminded her who holds the purse strings to Nell’s estate.” That was a confusing and therefore disagreeable thing about Alice’s cousin: She was called “Nell,” which was short for “Eleanor,” but her father was also called “Nell,” which was short for Elliot.
“Little pitchers,” Edith said with a warning glance toward Alice.
“Oh, come, come, Edith,” said Papa, “The sheer egoism of a man who would brand his progeny with his own appellation as though she was a poor reflection of himself –“
Edith, who was well acquainted with egoism, merely smiled.
“And do you know how he came by that nickname?” Papa continued.
“I do not,” Edith said although, in fact, she did.
“When we were boys, we lived in the city on Broadway and Bowery Road, and one afternoon in late December, Elliott went out walking. When he came home hours later, he returned without his overcoat. Claimed he’d intercepted a street urchin stealing coal but that the miserable child was so downtrodden that he could not turn the boy over to the authorities, indeed he felt moved to give the boy not only his own overcoat but all the money in his pockets as well.
“’What a heartwarming story!’ I said. ‘Mr. Dickens himself could write a novel about you for you’re sweeter than Little Nell!’” Though it had been 25 years since the joke had first been made, Papa threw his head back and roared with laughter at it. “And that is how he got his monicker!”
“Such an amusing story,” said Edith. “The boy, young Gracie Hall. Is he not coming as well? Does Elliot not wish to see his only surviving son?”
“Oh, Nell cares nothing for little Hall,” said Papa dismissively. “He cares only for Nell.”
Through the windows of Papa’s study, the day was bright and still. It had snowed that morning. In the afternoon, the sun came out, but the temperatures had dropped so that the snow formed crystals on the trees surrounding the palatial Sagamore Hill estate looked exactly like some kind of fruit blossom. Eerie. Beautiful.
“Alice, please go down to the kitchen and ask about the progress of the jam tarts that will be served for tea when our guests arrive,” Alice’s stepmother instructed.
“Why don’t you ring and ask yourself?” Alice said.
Her stepmother said nothing but turned her head to stare at Alice’s father. “Oh, come, come, Princess.” he said. “Mollify Mama, there’s a good girl.” And turned back to explaining to Ted – Alice’s half-brother, the eldest of her stepmother’s sons – the proper way to shoot an elephant. “You see, their hides are very, very thick –“
Needs must. Alice dawdled through the large central hall, the drawing room, the dining room. Cook and Mary Sweeney didn’t notice her when she walked into the kitchen. They were deep in conversation, their heads close.
“He has a silver tongue on him, make no mistake,” said Mary Sweeney. “He could charm the birds from the trees.”
“Oh, he could charm the skin off a snake,” said Cook.
“He could ransom his soul back from the devil with a single flattering word,” said Mary Sweeney. “The old woman relented, and angry she must have been when he reverted back to his ways. They hid the liquor, you know. But he said the girl must have a ride into town in his fancy motor car. So off they go, himself, the girl, and his dogs. Those old Dutch towns are dry, so he must have had to search long and hard, but finally he finds a place.
“’You wait for me here,’ he tells the girl. ‘I’ll be but a minute.’ And he gives her the straps with the dogs.
“And she stands out there hour after hour. It grows dark. It grows cold. And finally the coachman from the big house finds her and fetches her home. They’d sent him out hours ago but he didna know where to look –“
Alice tapped her foot impatiently, and the two women looked up.
“Mrs. Roosevelt wants to know about the jam tarts,” she announced.
“Oh, I’m sure Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to know more politely than that,” Cook said. “You tell Mrs. R that there was enough jam to make the tarts though, to be sure, none left over, so I don’t know about Mr. R’s toast points tomorrow.”
Alice hesitated. “Of whom were you speaking?” she said.
“Of whom were I speaking?” snorted Cook. “Why of me great-great grandfather, not that it’s any business of an insolent girl’s.”
Alice made a face at her.
When she got back to Papa’s study, Ted, Kermit, Ethel, and even baby Archie were clustered round the window to watch the small whirlwind that was making its way through the fields and belts of woodland that surrounded the big house. The blowing snow resolved itself as it grew closer into the figure of an automobile moving slowly along the whited-out road.
“Look! It’s Uncle Nell! He’s here!” Kermit hooted.
“Well, Teedie,” said Edith rising and smoothing her skirts. “I must have a word with Mrs. Sweeney before he’s at the door to keep a close eye on the housemaids. Shall you come with me to greet him?”
“You may bring him to me,” said Papa grandly. “And Edith - no spirits. No matter how hard he may entreat. He will entreat. And he can be quite persuasive.”
###
His daughter arrived the following day and missed the jam tarts. She’d traveled first by train, then by ferry, then by train again – and the unexpected snow stalled the train – and finally by carriage. Mrs. Ludlow Hall had sent her in the care of a coachman.
“Most inappropriate,” Edith murmured to Auntie Bye, Papa’s older sister, who’d just arrived from Washington D.C. for the Christmas festivities.
“Perhaps,” said Auntie Bye who was as sensible as she was kind-hearted. “But the distance between the train station in Oyster Bay and Sagamore Hill needs must be traveled by coach. Perhaps Mrs. Ludlow Hall was thinking of that. Was it the same coachman who … ?”
“It was! And he –“ And then Edith noticed Alice. “And why are you here?” she snapped. “Go upstairs to the nursery and find your cousin. Make her go outside. The fresh air will do her good.”
“I’ll come with you, Princess,” Auntie Bye said, reaching for Alice’s hand. “You must not mind your stepmother,” she added when they’d left the drawing room. “It is just her way.”
“I hate her,” Alice said.
“The two of you could learn to love each other better,” Auntie Bye allowed. “We were such good friends, Edith and I, when we were growing up, friends of the bosom. And of course, we are good friends still. But she has changed. She has had… disappointments. And, of course, she understands she must not allow disappointments to change her. But they do.”
“By disappointments, do you mean my mother?” Alice asked.
“Oh, Alice,” laughed Auntie Bye.
Laughter gave way to surprise when aunt and niece walked into the nursery, for there sat Uncle Nell cross-legged on the floor with a Lilliputian teacup in front of him and Cousin Nell across from him, surrounded by a gaggle of Alice’s old dolls; her ugly, eager face smiling. In the act of pouring imaginary tea from the very real teapot that had once belonged to Alice’s mother. Sitting on a chair that had been hand-carved and gilded especially for Alice in the shape of a throne.
“I do not give you permission to play with my toys,” Alice said grandly and kicked the shabbiest of the dolls so that all of the dolls toppled over like dominos, and Uncle Nell’s teacup shattered on the floor.
“Oh, Alice,” Auntie Bye said again. Uncle Nell leapt lithely to his feet like an acrobat. Cousin Nell crept off the throne and began collecting the pieces of the broken china, furtively trying to fit them together.
This was the other disagreeable thing about Alice’s cousin. For even with the dissolution of alcohol softening his jaw line, puffing the flesh around his eyes, glazing his eyes with a yellowish cast, Nell’s father was a handsome man, much handsomer than Alice’s own Papa. And he moved with the sinuous grace of a cat.
Her mother, Mrs. Ludlow Hall’s dead daughter, was said to have been the most beautiful debutante of the ’81 season: Bliss Baker had wanted to paint her.
Yet Nell looked like a toad. Her eyes popped out of her head like a gargoyle’s. Her teeth protruded like a beaver’s.
Alice was beautiful. She’d always been told she was beautiful, but she knew she would have known it without being told. She was beautiful; Nell was hideous; and yet the two motherless cousins shared a marked physical resemblance: How could that be?
###
The visit was not a success. Papa had devised a roster of entertainments for the children; Papa’s children knew better than to complain.
But Cousin Nell with her pained eyes, her diffident voice, her habit of putting her hand in front of her mouth when she spoke as though this might disguise her large protruding teeth – it didn’t; it only made it even more difficult to hear a single word she said – Cousin Nell had been so obviously frightened by the physical nature of Papa’s entertainments and by her rough-and-tumble cousins that it drained much of the fun out of the holiday traditions and games.
Christmas was celebrated with a familiar assortment of activities. After church, stockings bulging with treats and trinkets were emptied. Papa rose from the dinner table (roast goose and braised chestnuts) to deliver an impromptu speech in which he denounced the new fad of cutting down living trees and putting them on display in the parlor. “Like slaves adorned with chains and dragged before the Roman consuls!” thundered Papa. “How do such monstrosities help us better appreciate the miracle of Christ’s birth?”
At the end of Papa’s speech, the party toasted him. Papa even poured a small amount of wine into a glass, diluted it with water, gave it to Alice. She liked that, she wanted more. Edith frowned at Papa and shook her head, almost imperceptibly.
Edith couldn’t deny Uncle Nell the opportunity to toast, however, and Uncle Nell seized that opportunity merrily to propose ever more toasts. To Edith. To Auntie Bye. To Alice. To his dead wife. To Papa’s dead wife, Alice’s mother. (Papa scowled.) To the United States of America. He grew jollier and jollier with every improvised homage.
A skating expedition to the old Mill Pond had been organized for the afternoon. Alice hated skating on ponds. All you could do was spin round and round and round till you made yourself dizzy.
She was startled by how a graceful skater Uncle Nell was. His brackets and lunges and pivot turns far outshone Papa who could barely keep step with his wife even when they skated together holding hands. This fact did not endear him to Papa, Alice noted. Papa did not like to be outdone in anything but particularly not when it came to matters involving physical exertion.
Cousin Nell was trussed up in so many layers of furs and overcoats that she looked like a fat beetle. She watched her father hungrily from the banks of the pond.
When her father declared, “You must have a go, too, dearest Nell!”, she answered in a serious voice as though she was offering up her flesh to some dreadful martyrdom, “I will do anything my dearest Papa wants me to do.”
Of course, Nell was the clumsiest oaf ever to put her foot on ice; of course, she fell – almost immediately. With a blood-curdling scream.
“Now, see what you’ve done!” Papa thundered.
“Do stop orchestrating, Teedie,” Edith said wearily. “The child twisted her ankle, nothing more. It is not serious. Perhaps she ought to go back into the house. Perhaps we all ought to go back inside the house. It has been a long day.
Uncle Nell hoisted his daughter into his arms and carried her off to the nursery. Auntie Bye herded the rest of the children into the drawing room where the piano had just been tuned.
“You shall play, and we shall sing,” said Auntie Bye said to Alice. “I do love Christmas carols.”
“But I don’t know any Christmas carols by heart,” Alice said.
“Then fetch the sheet music from the nursery,” said Auntie Bye.
Needs must. Alice looked forward to the time when she’d be all grown up, and needs wouldn’t ever again. She bounded up the oak staircase that led to the second floor and pushed the door to the nursery open.
There sat Cousin Nell. Once again, she’d usurped Alice’s throne. Her hair was down; it fell in ringlets around her naked neck and shoulders. Her feet and legs were likewise bare, and her skirts and petticoat were pushed all the way up to her thighs.
Her father kneeled before her. Nell’s toes were in his mouth. His eyes were closed; he made slurping noises as he gobbled at his daughter’s feet.
He did not see Alice, but Nell’s eyes were wide open, and she met Alice’s shocked stare with an unblinking gaze of her own. She tilted her chin, squared her shoulders, went right on looking at her cousin until the other girl flushed furiously and backed out of the room.
Alice told no one what she had seen – what had she seen? who would she tell? – and eight months later, her uncle was dead. Fallen from a window. In Virginia. He’d survived the fall but expired two days later.
The family was eating breakfast.
“Yes, but how did he come to fall from a window?” Alice asked. “And what was he doing in Virginia?”
“You may not have more jam,” Alice’s stepmother told Kermit sternly. “You have had quite enough jam.” Then she regarded her stepdaughter as she might regard a
a particularly annoying flying insect.
“He is buried in a church,” Edith said. As if this explained anything at all. “In the vault where Mrs. Ludlow Hall stores her dead daughter. Quite near Oak Terrace. So that little Nell can visit. And Gracie Hall, too, of course. When he is home from school.”
It was the first time Alice had heard the name of the house where her cousin lived.
It was to this house that her absentee father, preoccupied with expanding the boundaries of the great American empire, proposed to banish her five years later. A prospect devoid of any attraction whatsoever.
(iv)
Oak Terrace looked like the type of place where the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” might go to seek employment as a cook. It stood in the middle of the wood. The wood was so dark that the trees growing there looked dead even in the middle of the summer.
Just in case this didn’t make the house seem funereal enough, Mrs. Ludlow Hall had had the windows on its ground floor enshrouded in heavy damask draperies that were never drawn open, not even on the hottest days. A small boy had been conscripted from the neighboring village – Tivoli! It was called Tivoli! – to beat the flies off with an ancient ostrich plume. The boy wore livery, and he was strictly forbidden to speak to the cousins.
A longcase clock – a relic of Mrs. Ludlow Hall’s distinguished Livingston ancestry – stood against the fading wallpaper, ticking loudly. On the dial above the clock face, an angel held a flaming scroll emblazoned with the words, “And There Shall Be Time No Longer,” an injunction that the clock took seriously for though its hands kept accurate time, it struck erratically at all hours.
Mrs. Ludlow Hall herself had something of the arrested child about her. She wore her dresses short, and they were adorned with frills; she spoke with a slight lisp. For an hour in the morning and another hour in the afternoon, she sat in the sitting room to which the two cousins had been relegated, occasionally attended by Cousin Nell’s spinster aunts, her vaporish, gaunt, and silent daughters. Prayer and consternation were more constant companions. There were so many sins to catalogue and so many sinners to worry about.
Because their unruly, unpredictable natures made it difficult for children to refrain from sin, Mrs. Ludlow Hall thought it best for children to be segregated from adults except for these brief visitations. Nell ate separately from the adults, and in the summer months, was not tutored but left to devise her own amusements to pass the hours. As her guest, Alice was forced to join her.
Nell had grown taller and rangier in the five years that had passed but in all other respects seemed exactly the same. She was polite, but she resisted every attempt Alice made at conversation beyond the replies demanded by rudimentary politeness. She did not initiate dialogue. Instead she read books – Oak Terrace had an enormous library – and after dinner, she went up to her bedchamber to nap. After three hours, she returned to the sitting room to read until supper. After supper, she retreated once again to her bedchamber.
None of this would do, thought Alice. Not the dark house; not the ugly, silent cousin; not the ghastly, girlish, and devout Mrs. Ludlow Hall.
Nobody tried to intercept her on the third day when she left the sitting room to wander out the front door The mute little boy did not even look away from his ostrich plume. But the mad and ancient clock struck thirteen times.
###
However hot it had been sitting bored and restless in the sepulchral sitting room, it was even hotter outside. Not a branch stirred; not a bird chirped: The silence, like the heat was total.
But then, there came a noise.
And, there! It was again.
A rhythmic, thudding noise repeated at irregular intervals. It came from the back of the house.
Once Oak Terrace may have been attended by symmetrical and orderly gardens, it was impossible to tell. There was still a ribbon of gravel, overgrown with weeds, that curved through thickets of oversized brambles and monstrous shrubbery towards the back of the house. Alice inched her way along it, holding her skirt up over her face to avoid being scratched. She could almost feel the humid air she displaced as she moved as though it were bathwater.
The path crept along the outline of the house, then turned a corner, and abruptly, Alice found herself in a small grass clearing. The sudden sunlight was blinding. When her eyes adjusted, she made out a tattered net and a young man in grey flannels who was pounding balls with a racket across the net. Every so often he paused in his pursuit to pick the balls back up. Muttering to himself.
A tennis court!
“How jolly!” cried Alice.
The young man regarded her coldly. “Ah, yes. The cousin. Miss van Roosevelt, I presume?”
“Nell didn’t tell me a tennis court was here!”
“Nell doesn’t care for physical pursuits. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed. We haven’t been introduced. I’m Valentine Hall, Nell’s uncle.”
“How d’you do, ” Alice said with her most fetching smile. “May I play? I’m so frightfully dull.”
“That depends,” the young man said. “ Are you any good?”
“I am excellent,” Alice said with a toss of her hair.
“There are extra rackets in there,” said the young man, nodding at a shack. It still retained some remnants of its roof.
Alice was an able player, but she was no match for Valentine Hall. “Why, you’re no good at all,” he said disgustedly, throwing down his racket. Rummaged through the pockets of his trousers. Pulled out a silver flask. Took a long draft from the silver flask.
“I’m very good,” Alice said indignantly. “You are just better.”
Valentine Hall regarded her unfavorably. “In 1888, I won the Men’s Double’s title at the U.S. National Championships. Did Nell tell you that? No, of course not. Why would she?”
“Why, if you’re that good, you can teach me to do better,” Alice coaxed.
“I have no interest in silly little girls,” he said.
“I’m not a little girl,” said Alice. “I’m almost 15.”
“Even less interest then,” he said, taking another draft from the flask. “Go find Nell and play.”
“Nell is taking a nap –“
“Oh, is that what Nell told you,” he said. His laugh sounded like a growl. “We all have games we don’t want others to know about, don’t we Miss van Roosevelt? You will find Nell in the carriage house. Doing what it is she does when she thinks herself unobserved.”
His voice grew low and vicious. “Now, get out,” he said.
These people were frightfully rude, thought Alice. She had no idea where the carriage house was, but she had no intention of asking.
On the other side of Valentine Hall’s tennis court, the wood closed tight again. She stumbled against a tree root and almost toppled over the edge of a steep precipice. A brackish smell suffused the air: She supposed it was the Hudson River.
At the base of the hill, she was surprised to find a small road. It was well maintained. And the end of the road stood a barnlike structure with a sharply eaved roof. It padlocked door was wide open.
The inside of the barn was dark. Again, Alice’s eyes struggled to adjust to the changes in light levels, but when they had, she saw the thing standing in the middle of the space was a motor car. Nell was sitting in the passenger seat and beside her sat a man Alice recognized as the coachman who’d accompanied Nell on her trip to Sagamore Hill five years before.
“Is that your dead father’s motor car, Nell?” Alice asked. She began to laugh. “Whatever do you mean by sitting in it like that?”
The coachman looked abashed. He touched his fingers to his cap. “Beggin’ your pardon, Miss,” he said. “She don’t mean anything by it and it do bring a smile to her lips. So few things do.”
Nell said nothing. She did not look at Alice. She stared straight ahead.
###
Nell did not rejoin Alice that day.
“Your cousin has been taken ill,” Mrs. Ludlow Hall announced when she came into the sitting room later that afternoon. The longcase clock had just struck eleven; Mrs. Ludlow Hall was wearing a pink dress. Alice had never before seen an adult woman in a pink dress.
“Ill?” snorted Alice. “She’s not ill. She’s –“
Mrs. Ludlow Hall raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Nothing! Perhaps it is the heat! It is so very, very hot here.”
“Are you feeling the effects of the heat?”
“I? No. Papa says I have the constitution of a horse!”
“Mr. van Roosevelt compares his daughter to a mare. How delightful,” said Mrs. Ludlow Hall. “Are you familiar with chlorosis?”
“No –“
“Well, that is what the doctor says your cousin has. Chlorosis. The green sickness. You need not worry about catching the infection. It is not contagious. I will write to your mother, however. Perhaps she will want to send for you.”
“I’m sure she would not want to strain your hospitality if my cousin is ill,” said Alice hopefully.
“Although likely, she will not send for you,” Mrs Ludlow Hall continued with a sigh. “And how do you sleep?”
“I sleep well,” Alice said.
“There are mice, you know. Oak Terrace is an old house. If you lock your door before you go to sleep, that will keep the mice out.”
It was not unusual for Mrs. Ludlow Hall to sound silly. But this did not make any sense at all.
