Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Victoria Frankenstein, III: Part 20


 

Seventeen

It’s nearly 500 miles from Lansingsburg, New York, to our home back in northeastern Ohio. Father and I didn’t talk much, but both of us, I knew, were thinking—a lot. Father suggested it would be a good idea to drive on, late into the night, and arrive home at a time when most everyone else was sleeping. We didn’t want to make a production out of our return. Just get home. Quietly.

I couldn’t disagree with that, so off we drove, and I was grateful when I saw no more signs for Niagara Falls. I was still tormented by that vision of poor Gil—if it had been a vision. But if not, what else could it have been?

***

We stopped once for gas—and a couple of other quick stops for refreshment—and pulled into our driveway just before dawn. No police tape was around the yard—no  indications that anything unusual had occurred there.

What did really happen? I wondered.

I soon found out. Very soon.

***

The next morning, Father told me he’d called the school to let them know I wouldn’t be there for a few days. I was, he’d told the secretary, “feeling poorly.”

The understatement of the year.

During the early part of the day, while Father worked on some articles to publish online, I went up to my laboratory/study, sat down, and did a lot of thinking—about what had happened, about what I must have thought had happened, about what I’d seen—or thought I’d seen.

When my mind felt flooded (as it did a few times), I took out that paperback book I’d bought from that drugstore rack back in New York—Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson. I loved it.

It begins with some very weird family history (not as weird as mine, though!). At one point the narrator recalls how, as a small child, she decided she would teach herself how to read. And she does it, crying out, “I am powerful! I have now the key to the Temple of Knowledge and there’s no longer stopping me ….”[i]

I laid down the book and smiled, Atkinson’s words reminding me so clearly of how I had felt throughout my life when I “broke the code” to whatever I was working on. Doing so does indeed make you feel as if you are powerful—as if you have acquired a passcode admitting you to a cavern full of new wonders—the way Bilbo Baggins must have felt when he saw the dragon Smaug’s lair, a cave full of gold and jewels.

I heard Father’s voice calling me from downstairs—how long had he been doing so? I opened the door. “Yes?” I cried.

“You have a visitor,” he said.

Puzzled, I hurried down, moved to the front door.

And saw, standing there, John Howard, my talented classmate who had played Dracula in our school production, a production that seemed to have occurred years ago—if ever.

This is going to be awkward, I thought.

***

“John!” I said, trying my best to sound friendly and cheerful.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Have I been somewhere?”

“I came by the house a couple of times,” he said. “Didn’t see any activity. No one answered the phone.”

“You’ve called?”

“Only a couple of hundred times.”

“Something must be wrong with the phone,” I said.

We looked at each other for what seemed like a week.

“Can I come in?”

“I don’t know—can you?” I asked, trying to sound like Mr. W., our English teacher, when he was trying to emphasize the difference between may and can.[ii]

We both sort of laughed. “Well, I definitely may,” he said, “but can I?”

“We’ll see,” I said.

And opened the door.

***

Again, we just stood there. I had no idea what he was thinking, but my mind was flying through recent events like a nervous chickadee. What does he know? How much have I hallucinated? How much actually happened?

John blushed and said, “May I sit down?

“You can,” I joked, “but may you?”

The tension was relaxing.

“How did Dracula, Baby! go on Saturday night?” I asked.

“About like Friday,” he said, “though we were all a lot more relaxed about it.”

“I’ll bet you were wonderful again,” I said before I’d even realized what I was saying.

John looked shocked, then quickly concealed it. “That’s kind,” he said.

“But true.”

“Well, thank you,” he said. Another awkward pause. “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here?”

“To practice the difference between may and can?”

He smiled—but more seriously so this time. “You’re very good at distractions,” he said.

“I hope so.”

He took a deep breath. “Some of us were wondering if you were all right … absent from school …”

“Of course I’m all right,” I lied. “Father had an unexpected … business trip … to New York and decided to take me along at the last minute.”

“New York,” mumbled John. “The city?”

“No. Upstate. Glens Falls. Albany.”

“Glens Falls!” he said. “Setting for that classic scene in The Last of the Mohicans.”

“You’ve read that book?”

“Read all five of those Cooper books,” he said.

“You’re a bundle of surprises,” I said.

“I hope so.” He then asked, “Did you visit Cooper’s Cave there?”

“We did.”

“Doesn’t look much now the way it looked in Cooper’s day.”

I stared at him. This was getting too weird. In my drug-dream, of course, he had been there.

“No,” was all I managed.

“And near Albany, you know, is the house where Melville wrote his first two books.”

I stared again. Then said, “You’ve seen the house in Lansingburgh, too?”

“Yes—though, if you were there, you know that it’s not open to the public.”

“No, not to the public,” I said softly.

“You’ve been inside?” he asked.

I said nothing. My brain felt like scrambled eggs.

***

And then it all spilled out like an upset bag of popcorn. I watched John carefully as he rambled on and on, and I did not detect—not in the slightest—any doubt. Or even surprise. He just listened. Focused on what I was saying.

When I finally finished dumping each popcorn kernel of the story, I said, “I know it all sounds crazy.”

“Well, perhaps,” he said. “But what if I told you I saw all of it in dreams the past few nights?”

“You did?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I thought I was going crazy.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

And then Father came into the room. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure,” he said to John.

“Oh, he’s my … friend John Howard.” Father looked at me. “From school,” I added.

“Nice to meet you,” said Father, extending his hand. Which John, who seemed embarrassed, shook.

“We were just talking about the show he was in.  Dracula, Baby! I saw it the first night. He said the second went well, too,”

“Well, good, good,” said Father. “Plays are tough to do,” he added.

“Not as much as confronting monsters in Cooper’s Cave,” said John.

Father quickly looked at me in shock. “How does John know—?”

“Beats me,” I said.

***

We all sat down. We talked awhile.

“I feel odd,” said Father, “talking this over with two eighth graders!”

“At least you can trust us,” said John—which was the precise thing I was thinking.

“We can’t just sit around,” said Father. “Dr. Eastbrook has certainly been looking for us.  He probably just can’t imagine we’d be somewhere so … obvious.”

And then the doorbell rang.

We looked at one another. Do we answer it?

Father seemed to have decided, stood up, and headed to the door. Only he didn’t make it quite there.

The door came crashing down, and in stepped three Blue Boyles—and, of course, Dr. Eastbrook. Who said: “You and your daughter are getting to be more than I can stand. I think it’s time we did something a little more … persuasive.”

I saw a brief fog fill the room, and when it quickly lifted, once again, a bunch of other people had arrived. A bunch of impossible people.

Mary Shelley, William Godwin, Frankenstein’s creature, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Aunt Claire, and a number of other writers and characters from the many books I’d read and loved. And from my imagination. Dr. Eastbrook and the Blue Boyles stood there, frozen. In fear? Surprise? Or was it, well, magic?

William Godwin (Mary’s father) stepped forward and spoke: “We will take these four with us,” he said. “To a different—but not necessarily better place.”

Mary Shelley—slender and with glowing red hair—slid silently toward me. She placed her small hand on my shoulder, said, “We have a kinship,” then stepped back into the group.

As they were leaving, I stopped Herman Melville and whispered something to him.

And then they were gone, the door was back on its hinges, and Father and John, who had been frozen the entire time, too, thawed and continued their conversation as if nothing had happened.

And Father said, “And what do you think, Vickie? About this problem.”

I smiled, “I think we should move somewhere a little more remote. For a little while.”

John looked unhappy.

I smiled at him. “Until it’s safe to come back.”  I added, “We’ll stay in touch online.”

John then smiled at me.

***

Father and I spent a long couple of days preparing the move—again. He went to get a rental truck to carry our things. No one in the neighborhood seemed to notice.

The last day—as we were carrying the last load of things to the truck—John came by.

He took me aside. “I had the strangest dream last night.”

“Oh?”

“You were whispering something to Herman Melville.”

“Oh?”

“And I could hear it.”

“So what did you hear?” I asked.

“‘You should start your whaling book with this: Call me Ishmael.’”

He smiled and said. “That’s odd.”

He squeezed my hand, and then we drove off. In my hand I clutched his email address—as if I would forget it. And swooping over the truck as we left town was Aunt Claire, who cried some kind of farewell. We hadn’t driven long before a massive snowstorm began, but it diminished as we drove farther and farther south.[iii]

***

We headed back down I-71, back to Franconia, the town we had lived before. I had asked Father where we were going, but he played it cool, holding me off. We pulled onto the street where we used to live—but not into our former driveway. But next door. Where Mrs. Eastbook and Harriet (her daughter, my best friend—my sister) lived. In their front yard was a FOR SALE sign—with another sign hanging over it: SOLD,

“Father—?”

And out the front door came Mrs. Eastbrook and Harriet—with suitcases.

I leapt out of the car and hugged Harriet.  Father did the same with Mrs. Eastbook.

They were going with us—wherever we were going.

I don’t think I’d ever been so happy.

As we pulled out of their driveway, I saw Mr. Leon sitting on the front porch where we used to live—where he had lived long, long before. He was smiling and gave us the tiniest wave.

***

I’ll not tell you where we went. Well, not specifically. We bought a house somewhere in north central Oklahoma, a place foreign to all of us. I guess we just wanted to disappear into geography. Father continued his online journalism, and my new mother, who, months before, had been granted a divorce from Dr. Eastbrook, found a job at a local library—an old Carnegie library that had somehow survived nearly 100 years after its construction. She loved it there.

John and I kept in touch via email, and in one of them he told me that Irv Washington had left Wisbech and was now attending a boys’ school somewhere in Canada, where his parents had moved. I thought about how I had once felt about him—and realized I no longer did. The changeable human heart …

***

At home, we all talked—a lot—and the adults cleared up some mysteries for me—and for Harriet, who, I learned, was fed up with her eighth-grade life—and had wanted a change. And had missed me as much as I had missed her—or so we told each other.

Harriet learned that our parents (my father, her mother) had been lovers years before—and separated before he knew that she was pregnant. With Harriet. We really were sisters—born less than a year apart, explaining how we could be in the same grade at school.

And Dr. Eastbook? What had he been doing?

For that information, they had to rely on me.


 

From Blue Boyle

We found your house. We smashed your door. The house was empty. Where did you go?



[i] This quotation indeed appears on page 113 in Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

[ii] I have no memory of saying this.

[iii] This really happened, that snowstorm in northeastern Ohio in early November, 1996.

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