Chapter 8
‘Allie? You’ve packed your bag?’
Alice appeared at the top of the stairs and looked down into the hallway, where her mother was adjusting the mirror and staring at herself at the same time.
‘I’ve packed my bag, Mom.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘I put it on the porch.’
Her mother looked up at her as if she’d just said she’d thrown it down the chimney.
‘What a place to leave it! What if something gets to it?’
Her father used to leave things on the porch, and it made her mother angry.
Once, they’d seen a mama bear making off with some biscuits and gravy her dad had left out there, wrapped up.
He’d been in bed for weeks then, not leaving, the windows and drapes tightly shut; and she hadn’t seen him for days, because he wouldn’t see her when he was like that.
Betsy had baked the biscuits to celebrate him getting out of bed.
He’d eaten them with greens and chicken and apple sauce and kept some back to take to an old friend’s mother in Orchard, but they’d been eaten.
It hadn’t mattered, of course, but it had mattered. Things mattered to him most dreadfully.
‘Okay. I’ll bring it in.’ Outside, it was still light, but Cemetery Supper, November the First, was the day one noticed not only that summer was over but that fall was far advanced: most usually because after Halloween the sun did not rise above the trees that covered the land from the town to the bank of the river, leaving the house in gloom for much of the day.
‘Bring it inside and check one more time you’ve got everything. There won’t be time tonight. We’ll be back so late and we may have to go to Valhalla after the supper.’
Alice ventured down the first two steps and sat down. ‘You’ve spent the last week doing nothing but helping him get ready, Mom. Surely you can leave some of the clearing-up till tomorrow.’
A cold wind whistled around the gatehouse, and suddenly the front door blew open with a bang.
Alice saw the world flung open to her, the grey skies, the orange-and-black trees, and the leaves whirling past in swift drifts of flame.
She heard a tinkling sound upstairs – something clattering to the ground.
The smell of fresh air, of outside, was intoxicating.
Her mother slammed the door shut, then leaned against it. ‘Damned door keeps doing that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to fix it.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Alice automatically.
‘It is okay,’ said Betsy. ‘It will be okay. Oh, honey – I’m so proud of you. I feel like –’ She gazed up at Alice, but her eyes glazed over and she turned back toward the kitchen. ‘Go finish getting ready. Wilder’s picking us up in ten minutes.’
Alice ran upstairs. She looked around her room: on the floor one of the blue-and-white cats lay broken into three pieces where the wind had pulled it off the shelf.
Alice heard the car coming along the drive, heard her mother call.
Once again, she held the sharp little pieces in her hands, staring down at the funny smiling face, then tipped them on to a sheet of paper and rolled it up.
Without knowing why, she carefully moved the rest of the treasures off the shelf into a headscarf she had on the dressing table.
She tied it tightly, wrapping another scarf around it, and, once she was downstairs, placed the bundle carefully into her overnight bag, and dropped the broken cat in the trash.
Cemetery Supper was held at 4 p.m. on the First of November every year, so that it fell midway between All Saints’ and All Souls’ days.
The point was not to have immaculate cuisine, nor silver plates, fine bone-handled silverware, the best crystal.
Rather, the day was one of trestle tables, folded and stored in the crypt of St Luke’s every year and unfolded only for this evening.
It was baked ham with a maple glaze and the last of the corn and the apples, and the best of the cider and the potatoes.
And it was eight families only. There was no room for the Delaneys, the Martins, and so forth.
Carly Gianotti’s mom, Jane, had gone when she was a Hicks, for the Hickses were one of the oldest families along the Hudson, but, when Vincent Gianotti, Carly’s dad, went to prison and Jane’s father died in the same year, Jane became a double-outcast – no living Hicks relative, and the wife of a felon.
The trestle tables were covered with simple checked cloths.
They were set up in the same place every year – the flat spot just outside one of the Maynard mausoleums, midway up the cemetery.
The old church was at the top, the lane and the river at the bottom.
The gravestones in that area were Maynard graves, and all identical in shape: long, thin and slightly rounded, and they stuck up around the tables like teeth in a mouth.
Nearby were the Jansens: Alice’s great-great-grandfather, grandfather and her dad.
‘Betsy!’ Mrs Cooper, the mayor’s wife, was removing Saran wrap from a container, her husband lifting cold chicken out of an ice box. ‘Come help us, will you?’
‘Of course,’ said Alice’s mother, and she pressed Alice’s arm with her gloved hand and said quietly, ‘You unpack our food, okay? Be polite.’
Alice set out the hams, the potatoes, the plastic plates and the paper napkins.
One by one their fellow diners arrived, wrapped up in the chill, bringing with them the excitement of the festivity, even as a cold wind sliced through the graveyard.
She poured them cider, her arms straining under the weight of the brown stoneware jugs.
Her mother lit a fire in the old metal brazier. The woodsmoke curled up around the graves. The attendees walked slowly through the stones, reading inscriptions, as Alice and then her mother finished laying everything out.
‘She’s a good worker, your Alice,’ Wilder Kynaston told Betsy, tearing off a hunk of bread and chewing it, then choking slightly.
He banged on his chest, coughing a little.
‘Look at you, Alice. You’re like your dad, here there and everywhere.
Good girl. You’re a young woman now, aren’t you!
Thank you.’ He patted her shoulder but she ducked away, and he stared at her in surprise.
He really doesn’t know I hate him , she thought, and she wondered what it must be like to be so oblivious.
She waved at Mrs Finkelstein, who was watching her, and thought of the packed bag in the hallway, the train she must take, the ceiling of Grand Central Station, aqua green and gold.
‘Wilder,’ said her mother, who was opposite him. ‘I think we’re about ready. Do you want to –’
‘Great idea,’ he said smoothly. ‘Betsy, will you – ah, thank you.’
Her mother struck her fork against her glass. The sound carried through the graveyard, as if it was calling out the dead, bouncing off the graves of Hickses and Jansens, Maynards and Kynastons past.
But everyone kept on talking. ‘Louder,’ murmured Wilder. Her mother struck the glass again, and nothing happened.
‘Hey!’ Alice’s mother called, hands round her mouth. ‘Wilder has something to say!’
Her voice, amplified in the shocked silence, rang around the cemetery. The families turned around, surprise mingling with disapproval on their faces. Alice saw her mom shrink away from them, as if she’d been slapped.
‘Thank you, Betsy, my dear,’ Wilder said, obviously amused.
‘Welcome! Why don’t we all sit down. We – ah.
’ He paused, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to say for a second.
Pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Yes. Welcome. Here we are, the descendants of those who founded this little town. Another year gone. Here’s to us,’ Wilder said, raising his glass.
‘And those who made us.’ He lifted his glass toward the white and grey headstones listing among the nodding gold grasses.
‘To those who gave everything so we could live in this blessed spot in peace and prosperity. Long may it continue.’
‘Well said, Wilder!’ someone called, and Alice looked up. It was Wilder’s agent, John Matheson. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning against a mausoleum. Alice had seen him around a few times over the past couple of weeks.
‘John! Aren’t you supposed to be with Teddy, my good man?’
‘She’s asleep,’ he said, scanning the assembled throng. ‘I wanted to come by. My, my, this is all very Shirley Jackson, isn’t it?’
‘Ha!’ Wilder gave a small chuckle. ‘Touché.’
‘They’ll love it. Here, Kynaston,’ Mr Matheson said, waving a hand over the assembled group. ‘Read these good people your new poem, why don’t you?’
‘Poetry, Wilder?’ said a voice, and Alice looked up to see Mrs Finkelstein, smiling, opposite her. ‘Something of a departure, isn’t it?’
The guests had shuffled toward the tables and were sitting down.
‘Read the poem,’ said Alice’s mother, nodding at Wilder, and something in the way her eyes met his made Alice’s stomach lurch. ‘Go on, Wilder.’
Wilder cleared his throat. Alice, squished between older people, looked at him and realized he was nervous.
‘Oh, thank you. This is – huh – this is a poem from my new work, which will be published next year by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.’ A hushed whisper of excitement ran like wind through grass. Wilder had a new work coming.
‘It’s a departure for me. It is a series of poems, a memoir, a novel, all intended to convey a story, the story of our country and what is happening, and my story too, I dare say. Huh .’ He cleared his throat again and swallowed. ‘It’s – it’s called “The Apple is the World”. Here goes nothing.’
The Apple is the World
The Apple is the World
It is the pip and the pippin,
It is the cock crow and the cox
It is the globe.
It is the peel and the peeling
The sweet and the tannin
The taut skin and the rough flesh
The apple is the world.
It is where I begin and you end
It is you, it is me
It is the orchard, it is the earth
The seeds of life
My seed
In you.