Chapter 17
Seventeen
I could not fathom why the stairs to the roof should be hidden from easy discovery, with the entrance through a greenhouse grotto.
The Bram had a conservatory with three tall, windowed walls and a domed glass ceiling of many panes with beveled edges through which sunlight descended as though in a rain of prismatic crystals, littering the limestone floor with geometric fragments of rainbow colors.
At night, as now, it was a jungled darkness of palm trees, lush ferns of numerous varieties, rhododendrons, and more, twined through with clematis and wisteria and night-blooming jasmine.
This cultured wildness drew the beams of our Evereadys into its feathery clefts and lacy lacunae, folding light away in its bowers, revealing little.
Sprays of small orchids—white and pink—were the exception to the rule of gloom, seeming to glow with a radiance of their own when our electric torches revealed them.
The fourth wall was a work of cunning masonry disguised as a natural rock grotto about twenty feet wide, fifteen feet from front to back, and roughly eight feet from floor to ceiling.
In the center of that space, a shallow pool glimmered with the lights we carried, like a magical lens through which we might look into a strange city extending deep beneath the Bram.
At the back of this little cave, a doorless opening led to a circular staircase of concrete steps and painted walls.
Rafael appeared enthusiastic about a visit to the roof.
He sprang ahead of us, taking the steps two and three at a time, at once disappearing around a turn, undaunted by a vertical race into blackness where our Evereadys could not reach.
When we arrived at the top, we found him standing on a landing in front of a midnight-blue door that bore an image of a silvery moon encircled by a ring of stars, as though a mystical revelation lay beyond.
Isadora unlocked the door and crossed the threshold.
I followed the others and discovered we’d come into a stair-head vestibule.
As I stepped into the cool but pleasant night air, onto a large section of roof that was flat and rimmed by a parapet, I asked, “Why all this? Why not just normal stairs, a plain door?”
“Mother and Father,” Isadora said, “wanted us to be raised in a place that teased our imagination and expanded our minds, a place that would be fun.”
“What we all know,” Gertrude added, “is they built it to tease their imagination, not just ours. They’re old, smart, and busy—but they like having fun as much as we do, though they’ll never say so.”
“They aren’t old,” Isadora said. “They’re just mature—though they’re in love with the idea of childhood.”
“That’s why they make good movies,” Harry said. “Groucho Marx was here for dinner last year with some other people, and he said, ‘Kids, you little goats, the reason your parents make good movies is because they’re basically children.’”
Isadora picked it up from there. “Groucho said, ‘I don’t like children, noxious little things, but I like your parents. I don’t like the three of you.
You’re too small and far less sophisticated than I am.
If you want me to like you, grow up. There’s no guarantee that I’ll like you, but as long as you don’t become critics, there’s a small chance of winning my approval. ’”
Mr. Marx had made such a strong impression that Gertrude, too, remembered part of the conversation word for word.
“He told us, ‘I would say it’s been nice meeting you, but I’m not a liar.
Now stop your annoying babble. Go to your rooms. There are hungry bogeymen under your beds, and if you don’t give them a chance to devour you, they’ll come down here and eat our dinner.
’ He was funny. Isadora thinks he was nice.
I’m not sure about that, but he was very funny. ”
“The thing is,” Isadora explained, “Mother and Father want us to be what they weren’t—and not go through what they went through. That’s why the grotto and the hidden stairs and the Merlin door, which is what we call it. That’s why the other quirky fun things about the Bram.”
“‘What they weren’t, what they went through?’” I asked.
“What they’ve come through isn’t for us to talk about. They’ll tell you when the time is right, when you’ve settled in and all the legal hooey has been dealt with.”
Even in an estate that seemed like Eden, in a beautiful house with exquisite finishes, with wonderful art and thousands of books, where there was compassion and friendship and love in abundance, a family history was likely to include dark chapters, sharp memories of suffering and even of despair. Such is the world.
We clicked off our Evereadys because the roof was bathed in moonlight.
In spite of Mr. Thomas Edison’s genius, which had for decades increasingly pressed back the darkness, Los Angeles and its many suburbs had not yet acquired sufficient glow to rob the night sky of its splendor.
We moved around the observation deck, wondering at the sea of stars among which were planets in the millions and forever beyond discovery.
Standing beside me at the waist-high parapet, Isadora pointed to a thin ribbon of light in the west. The Bram was on an upland, and we were more than forty feet above the ground.
From that high vantage point, we could see for miles, beyond all habitations, to where the moon pressed its reflection on the waters of the Pacific.
“I’m going to cross all that one day,” she declared.
“I want to see Japan and China. I want to see India. I want to see everything.”
Her ambition rendered me short of breath.
I could understand the yearning to experience all that the world had to offer, but I could not imagine having the freedom or the agency to fulfill such ambition.
With my deformities and limitations, the world would best become mine through books.
I didn’t want to see everything firsthand at whatever cost in misfortune, but instead to be safe from the many cruelties that were provided in greater abundance by new places and new people.
I had been made for a cloistered life, and miraculously I had at last been delivered into the security of Bramley Hall.
I was too grateful for this grace to be jealous of Isadora’s ability to one day indulge in wanderlust.
The house featured pitched roofs to the north and south, attics with oculus windows, and chimneys.
The only vertical element on the flat deck was in the center: a six-foot-tall obelisk mirrored on all four sides, supported by four stone balls resting on a black-granite plinth.
Moonlight as pale as frost gathered on the mirrors, and the mystery of the thing was a magnetism that inevitably drew us to it.
According to the siblings, the obelisk had no purpose other than to encourage them to marvel at it on a moonlit night, squint at it when it flared like a beacon in the sunshine, and fashion dreams around it, dreams that sometimes disturbed their sleep with delight and sometimes with terror.
I wondered how many parents, even among those who had the financial resources, would go to such lengths as Loretta and Franklin had gone to kindle wonder in their children and fuel their imagination; I decided the answer was very few.
We didn’t notice—but Rafael did—an item that had been tucked in the space between the plinth and the base of the obelisk, among the stone balls.
The shepherd growled and first reared up to claw at the object with his forepaws, but then he thrust his snout into the gap and finessed an envelope out of it with his teeth.
He dropped it at Isadora’s feet and licked his chops.
Picking up his offering, she sniffed and said, “It feels greasy, smells like bacon.” Someone had assumed—or known—the children would take me to the roof during the night’s adventure and had made sure Rafael would find what had been left for us by smearing it with a scent he couldn’t ignore.
Isadora put down her Eveready, and we focused our beams on her hands as she tore open the envelope.
A label from a jar of Gerber baby food—pureed peas—slid into her left hand.
She turned it over, but nothing was written on the back of it.
The other puzzle pieces had suggested a larger picture that would prove sinister when complete; this message appeared unrelated to the previous four.
“Maybe,” Gertrude suggested, “whoever’s tormenting us is just someone who likes peas a lot.”
“Nobody likes pureed peas,” Harry said.
“Babies like them. Babies think Gerber is the bee’s knees.”
“Well, I’m pretty damn sure it’s not some stupid baby leaving all these things for us to find.”
“Don’t say ‘damn,’ Harry.”
“Ha! You just said it.”
“This is creepy,” Isadora said when she took a closer look at the front of the Gerber label. “See? The picture of the smiling little tyke? Someone blackened his eyes.”
The eye sockets appeared empty, suggesting not that the chubby-cheeked symbol of the company was blind but rather that a malevolent presence lived within him, an entity with black eyes that could see as clearly in absolute darkness as in daylight.
“Maybe you should think about telling your parents, after all,” I advised.
“No, no! Nuts to that,” Harry said. “This isn’t a threat.
It’s just spooky. It’s still only a game.
We go running to Mom and Dad, we’ll look like big babies.
I’m not a big baby, and I don’t want to look like one.
Any of you makes me look like a big baby, the wrath of Harry will crash down on you like the Katmai volcano crashed down on Alaska. ”
“‘Wrath of Harry,’” Isadora said. “I shudder at the thought. Don’t you shudder at the thought, Gertie?”
“I’ll never sleep again,” Gertrude said.
Harry snorted with disgust. “Why couldn’t I have two brothers?”
“Relax, Katmai Harry,” said Isadora. “There’s no reason to tell mater and pater.
Alida worries too much. That’s what happens when you get to be seventeen.
You start worrying too much. She’s never going to tattle.
She’s true blue and loyal. The Clyde Tombaugh Club will find the miscreant who’s been tormenting us and wring from him an explanation. ”
We stood staring at the label in Isadora’s palm, transfixed.
Like a visitant materializing from the spirit world, a great horned owl swooped low over our heads, startling us.
As one, we doused our Evereadys. The huge bird, with a four-foot wingspan, soared to the steep roof of the south wing, settled on a chimney, and began to ask the eternal question of its kind.
The night was crowned with stars, and the moon poured light as pale as skim milk into the mirrored obelisk.
The air grew cold. Our exhalations shaped brief plumes.
I sensed change of some kind coming. Rafael made the thin beseeching sound with which he expressed the need for affection, and I knew how he felt.