Babel. Pandemonium. Marrowbones and cleavers. The world was about to end, or so Ellen thought when Hal Craxton’s voice came roiling like thick smoke through the upstairs window. How she knew that her daughter was in danger she’d never be able to explain. She had left Peg with the others in the gatehouse. But she sensed with instinctive certainty that Peg had followed her up to the Manikin and was entangled in whatever crisis had prompted Hal Craxton’s yell. Ellen ran back along the drive in the direction she’d just fled, into the house, up the stairs, and came to a panting halt just inside the guest room, where Hal Craxton was methodically slapping his wife back and forth across the face.
At first Ellen thought he was trying to revive her from a drunken stupor, until she noticed that he held Lilian’s wrists in one restraining hand. Only then did she become conscious of her daughter, who after moving a few steps away from the bed suddenly lunged forward and threw her fists against the man. He was insensible to the assault, too intent on hurting his wife, and he kept on beating her without pause, as persistent as a factory machine slapping labels on bottles. He hit Lilian’s right cheek with his open palm, slammed her left cheek with the back of his hand, slapped her right cheek again, then left, then right, smearing blood across the pale skin while Lilian’s head rocked beneath the force of the blows. And in the next moment Ellen found she was no longer a spectator—she had scrambled into the midst of the tempest, intending to stop the violence, hardly a simple feat, though she did succeed in planting herself between Hal and the bed, which enabled Lily to roll away and gave Peg a chance to claw Hal’s face. Peg was eager to kill, and if she’d happened to have a knife handy, the blade would surely have ended up in Hal Craxton’s heart.
But she had only fists and teeth and nails, and with these she pursued her offensive. Soon Lily was caught up by the momentum of the attack, then Ellen, too. They set upon their common enemy alongside Peg while he flailed wildly in defense. The women knocked, kicked, battered blindly, and just when they were beginning to get the better of Hal Craxton, just when they were about to devour him alive, he slipped out from the center of the melee and, true and honest craven that he was, retreated from the room.
Leaving behind three women, three weird sisters, or so they looked to themselves in their bloody, disheveled state. Three powerful sisters. When Lily covered her split lip with her hand and began to giggle, Peg joined her, as though the amusement were a song, a cackling round, and Peg laughed along so eagerly that Ellen couldn’t help but add a few chuckles herself.
They laughed the way bruised survivors of an accident might laugh, relieved to the point of madness. But their relief was short-lived. It took just a connecting flash of recollection for Ellen to see in her mind what she had never witnessed—Hal Craxton taking advantage of her daughter. Nothing funny about that, or about a husband beating his wife, and these girls had no right to feel so lighthearted. No, it wasn’t proper—Ellen indicated her disapproval with a scowl, and as soon as Peg became aware of her mother’s change of mood she sobered, too, catching a gulp of laughter in her throat and holding it there. Only Lily’s gaiety continued. With Ellen and Peg looking on in silence, her laughter grew more hysterical and gradually, steadily, transformed into a wail.
That should have marked a turning point—a turning away from the hysteria and confusion back to the events leading up to this night. Together the three women should have explained and confessed, comforted and admonished. Some resolution, however forced, should have been reached. But the effort toward a resolution was never begun because Hal Craxton decided to return right then and take control, using words instead of force this time. He stood in the center of the room and mopped his face with a hanky. After staring at the women for a moment with a frightened, trapped-fox expression, he shook his head as though to rattle his memory, and said, “I don’t know what came over me.” He waited for someone to respond, but the women contemplated him in silence. He caressed his chin with his palm and after a minute murmured, “Mrs. Griswood, please accept my apologies. And you, young lady.” He nodded his remorse to Peg. “And Lily, my dearest Lily. I beg your forgiveness. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
A strategic apology, Ellen thought. Although she didn’t doubt Hal’s sincerity, she resented his tactic. By apologizing, he was reclaiming his honor and asserting himself as the directing presence in the room. And to Ellen’s disappointment, Lily gave in, subordinating herself with the most melodramatic of gestures: she ran to him, collapsed to the floor, and embraced his knees, pressing her bloody lips against his trousers as though begging for her life. And it was just this—her life as Mrs. Craxton—that she clearly wanted to preserve.
A glance toward Peg confirmed to Ellen that she shared her mother’s disappointment. Indeed, without waiting to see where the reconciliation would lead, Peg whirled around and rushed out of the room.
Ellen started to follow her daughter but first was compelled to take one last sweeping look around the room. She assigned it all to memory—the drapes, the wallpaper, the flagstone fireplace, the chest of drawers, the barren whatnot, and the oil painting hanging above the bed. She’d never taken the time to study the picture at any length before. There’d been no reason, since it was obviously an amateurish still life. But despite its ordinary qualities the image of the brace of pheasants sprawled across a table lingered like a light spot behind closed eyes, and it became conflated with the scene she left behind. As she descended the stairs after her daughter, the spindled banister wobbly beneath her hand, she pictured the slaughtered pheasants with human faces, husband and wife, their colorful plumage caked with blood.
* * *
On the final night, the stars in the heavens turned into sugar sprinkles, the moon was a twist of lemon, and all the servants and their children slept soundly, gathering their strength for the various journeys ahead of them. All except Junket and Peg, who, unable to sleep, had wandered separately to Craxton’s Pond. Peg was dragging a stick through the shallows when Junket came upon her. Fishing for lost memories. Two childhoods spent in this unreal place. Tomorrow they would enter the Real World, or so Junket believed. He didn’t much care where they went, as long as he kept Peg near him. They were brother and sister now, irrevocably connected, an inadequate intimacy but better than nothing, from Junket’s point of view. The taboo made it necessary for him to love her without wanting her—or such was his self-deception. Artifice of kinship. Peg would be his sister forever.
“Whatcha thinking?” he asked gently, settling on the ground beside her.
She threw a pebble into the pond. In the darkness, it seemed to Junket that the water swelled into the shape of a hand that reached up and grabbed the pebble.
After a minute, Peg said, “I don’t know what I want anymore.”
Junket tried to comfort her with his own enthusiasm. “We’ll be in a new place by this time tomorrow, and by the end of the week we’ll have reached my uncle’s house. The ocean … I’ve never seen the ocean. Maybe I’ll be a fisherman!”
“I don’t care what happens.”
“But don’t you want to leave? You ran away once. Why did you run away?” Junket had never asked Peg this question because the answer seemed too dangerous—it had something to do with Hal Craxton, who had mistreated Peg, used her rudely. The nature of the abuse was clear, though the extent of it remained hidden behind the whispers of adults.
Peg let the pause lengthen into what seemed a permanent silence, a noisy, nighttime silence filled with the cicadas competing with the frogs for attention, the crickets rubbing their wings raw.
“Stupid, stupid boy,” Peg finally said, repeating the insult that had so shaken Junket that night he shot the snowy owl. But this time she did not throw the words at him. She charged him with his stupidity in a fond, slightly ironic tone of voice. And Junket, rather than feeling diminished or insulted, simply felt frustrated by his ignorance. Peg knew so much about how the world worked and what to expect from it. And she had reasons for everything. Junket had lived too narrowly to understand such complex things as a girl’s motivation for running away.
“I ran away from myself,” Peg said after a minute, her words obviously packed with meaning, though Junket still didn’t understand.
“You’re … you’re perfect,” he blurted, and immediately felt ashamed for revealing his admiration in such simple terms. But Peg put her arm around him, giving him the sort of hug that both comforted and discouraged him.
“You think so, eh? If you only knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Knew about me and Lilian Stone. Now do you understand?”
He answered her with silence. What was there to understand? Peg admired that hotshot girl. So what? Such admiration wasn’t a flaw in her character. It was just a temporary mistake.
“Forget it, then,” Peg said, which made Junket feel that understanding was his responsibility. So he worked at it while they both contemplated the water and waved away mosquitoes and blackflies. He tried to consider Lilian Stone through Peg’s eyes, tried to fathom the meaning of the conjunction: Me and Lilian Stone. Maybe Peg felt like she had lost her friend to an unworthy husband. But it was more than that. More, perhaps, like love.
Now a boy of such provincial experience might be disgusted by the inkling of what he perceives to be an unnatural love. Or such love might seem as natural as any other variation he’d ever observed in the wild. For Junket, the possibility that Peg actually loved Lilian Stone in the same way that he loved Peg filled him with respectful awe. So she could love, too. He had never quite believed her capable of love—or, more accurately, he’d flattered himself to think that if Peg wouldn’t love him, she couldn’t love anyone. But she’d loved fancy Lilian Stone. Junket thought he knew exactly how Peg felt and tried to find a way to convey his sympathy without embarrassment. That the intimacy Peg desired had been anything more than imagined never occurred to Junket. He assumed that Peg had restricted her love to a fantasy, and he was honored by her confidence. Me and Lilian Stone. He thought he understood the implications; he would go on believing that he and Peg had loved and suffered equally.
He squeezed her hand. This gentle pressure had a stunning effect, releasing from Peg a rush of sorrow so engulfing that Junket’s first impulse was to throw Peg into the water and rid himself of the burden. But this selfish and all-too-familiar urge was as short-lived as it was contemptible, and Junket collected the sobbing girl into his arms.
“Don’t despise me,” she cried, clutching him, “don’t ever despise me.”
He stroked her hair and soothed her, assured her that he wouldn’t despise her, promised to love her forever. This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? To hold her and speak of his love. Yet how subdued this love was—celibate and dependable. They would go to each other for comfort through the rest of their lives. The purity and strength of this affection couldn’t mask the fact that it was insufficient, that Junket would always want more of Peg than she was willing to give him. But he found comfort in the knowledge that he could provide comfort. No one would ever come between them. They would live in that glass world they’d invented as children, loving others but trusting only each other.
After Peg had calmed, they sat together listening to the night sounds—frogs and insects, a hoot owl in the distance. The air itself seemed to radiate a soft, buzzing sound, the sound of energy, of conduction and flux, of tiny particles in motion, spinning in a wild, rigorous dance.
It must have been nearly midnight when they stood up and headed back to the gatehouse. They’d already packed their suitcases. Tomorrow Win Gill would drive them in the truck the twelve miles to Kettling, and from there they’d set out on the long train ride to Halifax, where an uncle of Lore’s had settled years ago—and prospered, by all accounts.
When they stepped from the wooded path onto the grass, they both halted, as though struck by an identical insight. Ahead of them, the Manikin was flattened into a silhouette, and the windows, painted black by darkness, hid the empty space behind the surface. Junket suddenly wanted to shatter a window—if he’d had his Maynard he would surely have fired it. Instead, he heaved a rock toward the house, but it fell far short, landing in the middle of the lawn. He wanted to try again, wanted to keep on throwing rocks until he’d shattered every window in that useless mansion. But Peg was tugging at him, so he gave up and accompanied her toward the drive and down to the gatehouse. As they walked along he hooked his arm through hers, desiring only to keep her close and to protect her, or to be protected.
* * *
Leviathan house, unwanted. Triton among the minnows. Folly clothed in warped, mossy shingles, a portico collar, false pillars, with a dirt basement for bowels, sloping floors, crumbling walls. Pity the house. Failed sanitorium. Giant kennel built to restore others and doomed to rot alone.
Don’t go, the Manikin would plead if it could speak. Don’t leave me.
Soon the house will lie empty, uninhabited. First old Boggio’s heart will give out and he’ll be found dead in the master bedroom after surviving behind that locked door for nearly two months, subsisting on meals carried up to him at night by the new cook—Nancy Gill, whom Hal will hire on the spot when she comes to the door one day begging for potatoes—and emptying his slops from the window into the garden below. Then Mrs. Gill will quit, choosing to endure poverty with her family than to exist in a state of tenuous dependency, vassal to Hal Craxton, as unpredictable an employer as you’ll ever find. And shortly before Thanksgiving, the mistress will desert the master—flocks of honking geese heading south will undo her, and she’ll drop to her knees in one more show of abject humility, entreat him to escape the coming winter, and when he refuses she’ll leave for Millworth on foot and from there catch the bus to Rochester. Hal Craxton will spend one horrific night alone in the Manikin, though what, exactly, he experiences during the wee hours he won’t tell; the next day he’ll take off after his wife, never to return. He’ll persuade her to join him on his travels, and together the two will wander the globe, miserable but determined tourists, dodging wars, both of them refusing to settle anywhere for long. Lily will die of cancer in 1949, but Hal will live on in stubborn health for another thirty years. And in all that time he won’t visit his country estate, won’t even arrange for the upkeep, though he’ll go on paying his taxes and will refuse all bids on the property, suggesting to the residents of Millworth that someday he intends to come home.
So the Big House will be granted, at last, a tranquil quiet, its privacy vast and impenetrable. All those spacious rooms and corners, nooks and crannies, cupboards, bookcases, closets, and the animals, don’t forget the stuffed animals—they will be left alone. No more children tormenting, no tireless housekeeper heartlessly scrubbing and dusting everything in sight. True, occasional intruders will be a nuisance, and the rats will claim the basement for themselves. But mostly the Manikin will remain free of the inconveniences of habitation.
There’s something wonderfully beguiling about an abandoned mansion. And the stuffed animals will only add to the mystery. Stories told about the house will become legends. Local gossips will invest the Manikin with magical qualities, and over time it will be turned into a provincial shrine, a necropolis of curiosities. Preservation experts will be called in, funds will be raised. The house will have a second life as a museum. Now there’s something to look forward to!
But I can practically hear the voice of despair: Toss me a match. An ember. A lit cigarette will do. I’ll give you a show for your money!
The Manikin, being just an inanimate structure and thus completely unreasonable, doesn’t realize that it has an obligation. What the thieves don’t take will be sacred one day. The house will be worshiped and eventually sustained by the citizens of Millworth, so there’s nothing for it to do but to wait patiently, in its untenanted misery, for time to spin out its plan.
You could say, I suppose, that time’s the culprit. Seize-an-opportunity time. Whereupon, anno Domini time. The Manikin will be left behind and eventually preserved as a representative of an extinct species, directly related to our feudal ancestors in Europe but still distinctly American, reminding us that the entire country once posed as a haven. But time has a tendency to plunder existence, to steal our sense of purpose. Abandoned by its owner, the house will have to endure the natural elements for over half a century without any material help from mankind.
Amazing, really, that it will survive such lengthy neglect, for the natural world looms on all sides, eager to take possession. Brier and holly will spread into wild tangles, the overgrown lawn will fill with nettles, climbing ivy will strangle the flowering vines. All evidence of the cultivated gardens and orchards will be eradicated by the jealous wilderness, until the Manikin will resemble nothing more than an ark floating upon a sea of weeds. If it were capable, the house would console itself by recalling pleasant memories—the sound of laughter, the smell of hop-yeast and salt-rising bread, the feel of fresh springwater coursing through its pipes. According to the stories, however, the house will survive its fifty-year abandonment not because of an inherent hardiness or even luck. It will survive the vandals and brush fires, lightning, hail, floods, and blizzards because it is guarded by the spirit of its most famous trophy—the snowy owl, an animal as formidable as it is rare in these parts, fierce carrion bird and, so they say, interlocutor between hell and earth.
In all likelihood, the Big House will stand intact far into the next millennium. There it perches on its broad hill-spur in the shadow of Firethorn, surrounded by a sloping lawn that falls and then rises again to the upland orchards. Half hermit, half monarch, it will remain insensible to the remarkable advancements of civilization—penicillin, television, fluorescent lamps, Mickey Mouse, crossword puzzles, women governors, John T. Scopes, Gertrude Stein, vitamin B—and as oblivious to the great betrayals of history, the broken treaties and mass murders, as a newborn child.