Chapter Four. Rose
CHAPTER FOUR
ROSE
My God, what was that? That face—that awful face, like something out of a nightmare or a Munch painting, desperate— furious—vanished.
Now there’s only water, and the blue-and-gold tile that Father imported from Italy.
But I saw it. Her. I did. She was right there, in the shallows, and she was so vivid …
I feel hot and dizzy. My heart is galloping like one of Thea’s Thoroughbreds. My mind spins, trying to make sense of it.
Was it a reflection, warped as Lou dove into the pool?
That doesn’t make sense. None of us have dark, bobbed hair.
Was it some sort of hallucination, brought on by the heat?
It isn’t that hot. And I’ve never seen something that wasn’t there before.
I fight the desire to cross myself the way Nanny does when we pass a black cat or a graveyard. We aren’t even Catholic!
“Rosie! Rosie, did you see?” Lou means her dive.
“Are you all right, Rose?” Grace asks. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stare at her. There isn’t any such thing.
But she’s watching me. Studying me, almost. Was it a prank? I’m no stranger to a little hazing, but at Miss Parker’s, that means a toad on one’s pillow, not—whatever that was.
And no one is laughing.
“It was aces, Lou,” I lie.
I sink into one of the cast-iron chairs, shaking, my stomach sour. “I’m feeling a little woozy.”
“It’s the heat. Poor thing.” Grace smirks. She hands me a bottle of Coke.
“Thanks.” I hardly know what I’m saying. My heart is still racing, my thoughts muddled. Am I losing my mind? Is this how it started for Anna—with strange hallucinations?
“Open it for her, Stanley,” Grace says.
Stanley grabs his Swiss Army knife from the table. “You want one, too, doll?” he asks Ella.
“Yes, please.” Ella’s shed her cover-up, but she’s hiding behind a Photoplay magazine and an enormous pair of sunglasses. She’s all arms and legs and pale, concave stomach in her candy-pink two-piece. She’s at the age where she goes back and forth: Look at me! My God, don’t look at me!
The Coke is sweet and fizzy on my tongue. Grace is still staring at me, her dark eyes searching—for what? A reaction to her prank? How could she have engineered that? A film projector seems impossible out here.
Eventually, she shakes her blond head and walks—stalks—to the diving board. She arcs beneath the water, long and lithe. The combination of natural athleticism and easy arrogance reminds me of Thea.
Thea was the first girl in our crowd to be kissed.
The summer after our third year, she necked with a friend of her brother’s in the back seat of his Bantam Riviera roadster.
When she told us, we were all abuzz with curiosity.
Neither our mothers nor our nannies had told us what happened between boys and girls in the dark.
A dozen of us packed into Thea’s dorm room, desperate for a little know-how: Did you close your eyes?
Where did you put your hands? Where did he put his hands?
Thea had tossed her thick hazelnut hair.
“It’s not like kissing your own arm at all.
Nor a pillow.” She sighed. She was playing at being exasperated by how hopeless we all were, but I could tell she enjoyed having the upper hand.
“Do you want me to show you?” Her brown eyes surveyed the room and landed on me.
I still don’t know what she saw. Why she chose me. We weren’t friends. “Rosie. Come here.”
I went. Perched on the edge of her bed, trembling and trying not to show it.
Thea’s hand was hot and firm on the small of my back as she drew me close.
She slid her fingers into the curls at the base of my skull.
“Close your eyes,” she instructed. Then she brushed her lips against mine.
Once, twice, three times. Her mouth was soft and a little sticky.
A few of the other girls giggled, scandalized. My eyes flew open. My heart was racing.
Thea drew back. “There. See? There’s nothing to it.”
But I had felt her trembling, too, her heart going like a rabbit’s.
Thea was—is, still—the star of the school’s equestrian team.
She tasted like ripe red apples; she smelled of leather and hay.
We kissed in empty stalls and the corners of the tack room all that fall and winter.
It wasn’t something we spoke of, even after our hands had slipped beneath one another’s snug wool sweaters.
Then Thea’s brother’s friend invited her to visit him at Penn, and Stuart Hayden asked me to the spring formal at Parkhurst, the boys’ school down the hill.
Thea’s notes in my mailbox grew few and far between.
By the time we went our separate ways for summer, it was already over.
“Do you have a steady, Rose? Rose?” Maggie asks, and I shake off my memories.
Knock it off, Rosie. This is a fresh start, remember? You can be a normal girl here. But you’ve got to stop mooning over Thea.
I give Maggie a bright smile. “No. Not at the moment.”
I’ve kissed a few boys in the year since Thea, but none of them rated. Not compared to her. And after what happened at the end of term, the boys from Parkhurst won’t be lining up to ask me out anytime soon.
Maybe there is something wrong with me.
Women have been institutionalized for less.
I’m shaking again. It takes effort to still my limbs.
“How about you, Ella?” Maggie asks. She’s sitting at the edge of the pool, her skirt hiked above her knees so she can dangle her feet in the water.
Ella flushes. I don’t think she has a steady, but I’m not certain.
We hardly see each other at school. The three-hour drive from eastern Pennsylvania back to Washington was the most time we’ve spent together since the Easter holiday.
I sat nervously gnawing the red varnish off my nails—an unattractive habit, I know—and wondering if I’d be welcome back at Miss Parker’s in the fall.
Ella dozed in a puddle of sunshine, snoring softly.
“No, I don’t, do y—” Ella grimaces.
“My husband died in an automobile accident the day before Christmas. Only two weeks after we were married.” Maggie’s eyes go wide and woeful.
“My parents didn’t approve of the marriage, on account of me only being fifteen, but my cousins have been kind enough to take me in.
Uncle Joe is going to find a wonderful home for my baby. ”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Ella says earnestly.
“You have our deepest condolences,” I agree.
I suspect it’s all a bunch of bunk. Maggie seems to enjoy—relish—savor her sad story a little too much. Is she really the Harrows’ cousin? Or is she one last wayward girl?
Maggie casts her gaze at the concrete, her lower lip wobbling performatively. “Thank you.”
“Grace, how long have you and Stanley been going together?” Ella asks.
“Forever,” Grace says. “Three and a half years.”
“I was a senior. Quarterback of the Lions. Coulda had any girl in town,” Stanley boasts, scrubbing a hand over his buzz cut.
“Gracie was only in eighth grade, but I knew she was gonna be the prettiest girl in Greeley. She was still kinda scrawny when I left for the army, but when I got back…” He wolf-whistles. “Check out the legs on my sweetie pie.”
Grace, somebody’s sweetie pie? More like sourpuss.
She does have nice legs, though.
I wonder how long Stanley’s been back. I was barely fifteen when the war ended.
Girls in my year wrote to brothers or neighbors or cousins, not boyfriends.
But sometimes the older girls read letters from their beaus aloud at dinner.
Some of them collected soldiers like trophies, like we used to collect Girl Scout badges.
Willa Randolph held the school record: She wrote to three boys in the navy, three in the army, two pilots in the air force, and three marines.
One boy was killed on Omaha Beach, and one at Iwo Jima, and Willa was really broken up about it.
Grace must be relieved Stanley made it back to her safe and sound.
“You got a hot date tonight, Coop?” Stanley asks.
Cooper is still splashing around in the pool with Lou. He’s like an advertisement for the all-American boy: blond and freckled and carefree.
“Nah,” he says. “Unless—hey, Lou, you wanna be my girl?”
Lou scrunches her nose. “No, thank you.” I’m proud of her manners till she adds, “Nanny says boys are more trouble than they’re worth.”
Grace lets out a loud barking laugh. She sounds like one of the seals we saw sunbathing on the pier in San Francisco last summer. “I like your gran.”
“Oh, she’s not our…” I kick Ella’s ankle and she trails off. If Grace finds out we had a nanny as recently as last month, at our big age? She’s bound to make fun.
“I know some girls would be happy to trade places with you,” Stanley says. “If I’m too much trouble.”
“Don’t be silly!” Grace hauls herself out of the pool and drops into his lap. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Stanley nuzzles her neck, one big hand on her thigh. My goodness. Ella is blushing behind her Photoplay. I didn’t bring a magazine, so I opt for the pool. The water is chilly, but I can see clear to the bottom and there’s nothing except a few leaves. What I saw earlier—
Perhaps it was only the heat, and the stress of the day. I try to put it out of my mind.
“It was nice of your father to fill the pool,” Maggie says.
“Father is very generous.” With his money, if not his time. “The tennis court is for Ella—she’s on the team at school—and the pool is for Lou. She’s part fish, I think.”
Maggie giggles. “What did you get?”
“A new Parker fountain pen and a stack of notebooks.” The writing supplies were waiting on the desk in my new bedroom. I was rather surprised to find them. Perhaps Father has read my clippings from the school paper after all. “How long have you been staying with your cousins?”
“Since March. For the first month, we were up in the main house.” Maggie shivers. More theatrics, I assume, because her round face is flushed with heat, and sweat darkens the sides of her green dress. “I don’t envy you girls, being stuck up there all summer. That place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“The hotel?” Despite the high ceilings and fresh paint, something about it did feel—off. Unwelcoming.
The spectral face in the pool doesn’t help.
But no one else seems bothered. Ella is reading her magazine; Grace and Stanley are necking; Lou and Cooper are taking turns diving into the deep end. It’s a perfect, picturesque summer afternoon.
“I’m sure the hotel will be spiffy once it’s finished. But when I got here, it was a real dump.” Maggie lowers her voice. “Did you see the bars on the windows? Grace said Uncle Joe used to lock the girls in at night. I know I should be grateful he took me in, but he gives me the heebies, too.”
“Has he mistreated you?” I feel protective. She’s only a year older than Ella.
“He yells a lot … I don’t think he’d dare lay a hand on me. My father wouldn’t stand for that. The way he treats Grace— But I mustn’t gossip.”
“Of course not,” I say solemnly.
“Grace said that girls died. One jumped from that old widow’s walk! I bet Joe drove her to it. He says any girl who ends up in that predicament is a slut with the morals of an alley cat … Not me, of course. I’m family. And a widow,” Maggie adds hastily.
“That’s awful,” I say sympathetically. Although an unwed teenaged girl, sent away by her parents, abandoned by her lover, might have other reasons to feel she couldn’t go on besides Joe Harrow’s lectures.
Coop swims closer. I wonder if he’s overheard. If he’ll defend his father.
“I’m telling you, something feels wrong here,” Maggie declares.
“I’m very sensitive to that sort of thing.
My nana was a spiritualist. The night she passed, I saw her standing at the foot of my bed, clear as day.
” She mimes crossing her heart, then sighs and lumbers to her feet with some difficulty.
“Pardon me, I have to go powder my nose.”
I watch her walk—tramp—trudge down the pea-gravel path. She obviously has a flair for theatrics. Is she making up stories, or is there some truth to it? Not about the spirits, of course, but about Mr. Harrow being cruel to Grace and the girls under his care. Something about the man makes me uneasy.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past Grace to try to scare Maggie with tall tales.
Cooper is leaning against the blue-and-gold tile of the pool, his freckled arms propped behind him. “Did you hear all of that?” I ask. He nods. “Is any of it true?”
“A girl did jump from the widow’s walk. One of the maids used to say you could hear her wailing.
But I’m pretty sure that was just the pipes.
” Coop grins at me. “It’s an old house. Maisie was trying to scare us.
Now Grace is doing the same thing to Maggie.
” He glances at his sister, his grin fading. Stanley has his tongue down her throat.
“So the hotel isn’t haunted?” I tease.
Coop swipes a hand through his wet hair and takes his time answering. “I don’t think a place has to have ghosts to be haunted,” he says finally.
The June sun is hot on the crown of my head, but I shiver.
What have we gotten ourselves into?