The Treasures, page 2
‘Hey: please don’t tell anyone else about Merlin,’ he’d said.
‘Merlin?’
‘This guy.’ He’d opened his palm to show her the figurine. Most of the paint had worn off. ‘It’s kind of a comfort thing. I know if he’s there in my pocket, nothing bad can happen.’ And he’d smiled at her, and his golden hair had fallen in his face; she noticed it was getting longer, like a lot of other boys’ hair in Orchard that summer. His cheeks were pink, burned by the sun, fading into his tanned face. ‘Don’t you have anything like that?’
‘I do,’ she said, laughing, and his face relaxed.
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. I call them the treasures. Different ornaments and special … things.’ She felt herself going red. ‘It sounds lame.’
‘It’s not.’
‘They’re like … my good-luck charms.’
‘That’s cool. What’s your favourite?’
Alice thought for a moment. ‘I like the black bird. He’s mean-looking. But he’s beautiful too. And he’s got a bit missing where someone dropped him. He’s from England,’ she added.
‘Where do you keep them?’
‘On a shelf my dad built for them. My dad gives me a new one every year for my birthday. I never know what it’s going to be. He takes me to Mackie’s for a sundae, then gives me a clue and I have to find it.’
‘So you don’t carry them around?’
‘I don’t want them to get damaged. Or maybe I don’t think anything bad’s going to happen.’
He’d laughed. ‘I think that all the time.’ And he slipped Merlin back into his pocket, and they’d smiled at each other.
The following week he’d caught up with her again and asked her to the dance. ‘It’s cool if you can’t go,’ he’d said. ‘I thought it might be fun.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, nodding furiously, smiling at him. ‘I’ll ask my mom but I’d love to come with you.’
‘No, absolutely not, you’re too young, and he’s a senior,’ her mother had said. Alice, normally easy going, pliant even, had slammed her bedroom door and shouted, once inside, ‘You never let me do anything!’
This had been six weeks ago. She’d told Jack yes, though, the following week at school. She was definitely going. She thought the best way was to ask her dad when he was around, and the birthday sundae at Mackie’s was the perfect opportunity.
Sometimes her dad wasn’t well and had to stay in their bedroom, at the top of the tall, thin gatehouse where they lived. Once, he was in bed for a long time, and then he went away for a whole week, and when he came back he was real strange, like something from those zombie movies Mom hated. But soon he was back to being kind, and fun, and making plans. He was always making plans, her father. For the orchards he’d taken over, and where they’d live, and what Alice might want to do with her life, and what pies to bake; he was a good cook, making the apple pies, the apple sauce, the apple butter and cider and juice that had given him the idea to buy back the orchards from the Kynastons that had been in his family in the first place.
Bob Jansen had lived in Orchard all his life. He was one of the Cemetery families, his Dutch ancestors having settled along the Hudson nearly two centuries ago. He knew everyone and their children, the streets, the history. He bought Betsy flowers and sang her Frank Sinatra songs when she was down. He let Alice go for sundaes on Main Street, play in the sprinklers on Carly Gianotti’s lawn till after dark, roam around the neighbourhood on her bike, riding to the banks of the vast, silent Hudson River, where the mist rose like ghosts on the water, the pine trees fringing the pebbled edges.
The Hudson was the edge of everything. They said it was so deep in places that no one knew what was down there. Rumour had it there were sharks older than the Declaration of Independence, invisible in the black, ice-cold depths; Diane Hendricks swore they had swum there from the Arctic millions of years ago. She said they were growing larger and more dangerous, waiting till the day when they would glide into Manhattan and rise out of the water, snatching men and women from their cars on the George Washington Bridge, or from the river path, and eating them whole. But, for now, Diane said, they were just lurking. Waiting for the right time. Diane also claimed to have seen a skeleton’s hand poking out of a tomb in the cemetery in the churchyard where Cemetery Supper was held every year. She said there were hidden messages in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ if you played the 45 single at 33. She had heard Mr Tucker, the Orchard High School caretaker, was really a warlock.
Diane and Alice had been friends since they were babies, but this was yet more evidence of how they had grown apart, for, while Alice believed in ghosts, and though she increasingly thought society was bogus and needed to change, she did not believe Mr Tucker was a warlock. She could believe in the creatures lurking in the deepest fathoms of the river, though, just waiting. Alice felt life was like that sometimes: waiting. Waiting for things to start. To begin.
‘Dad, you know how you want me to be happy and it’s my birthday tomorrow?’ she began, once she and her father were seated at the table at Mackie’s, and Josie the waitress had taken the order. They always sat at the same table – the booth by the window, where, on one side, was the pink marble counter and the different sundaes on a sign behind it, and, on the other, the great glass view of the corner that looked down Main Street, toward the train station and the river. And they always ordered the same thing, ever since Alice was big enough to sit at a booth without sliding on to the floor. Her dad had a Rita Hayworth – chocolate, almond paste and glacé cherries smothered in chocolate sauce, because he loved Rita Hayworth and glacé cherries – and Alice had a Cemetery Supper Surprise, brownies chopped up into chocolate ice cream in alternating layers with marshmallows, angel frosting and a red strawberry sauce, and a crumbling stick of chocolate on top. When their order arrived, her dad would always taste her sundae and say he wished he’d ordered it.
Bob Jansen took a sip of water, then pushed the glass back to the right place. He didn’t answer.
‘Hey!’ she nudged him. ‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Allie?’ Her dad pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘I’m sorry. Sorry, honey. What did you say?’
Alice cleared her throat. ‘Can I go to the dance with Jack Maynard?’
‘What did your mother say?’
‘She said no.’
Her dad spread out his hands. ‘There you go.’
‘But I don’t think it’s fair, Dad. Jack Maynard’s a nice boy.’
‘Your mother knows best,’ Bob said, and he looked at her firmly but with the kind eyes that could never really be brought to anger. ‘He’s seventeen. You’re fifteen.’
‘Aw, come on, Dad. I’m sixteen tomorrow. I’m a sophomore.’
‘Don’t I know that?’
‘How should I know you know that? You’ve barely mentioned my birthday. Neither has Mom.’
‘Alice Jansen, shame on you for these untruths,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do – have you go across to Valhalla and ask Mr Kynaston if he’s giving me the day off? Because of all the plans? The plans, Alice?’
‘Mr Kynaston gave you the day off?’
‘He sure did. And he wanted me to go up to the town hall to get some permit for the orchards, transferring it to my name for our new business, and I said, “I can’t go, sir. It’s my Allie’s sweet sixteenth tomorrow.” And he said’ – and her father’s face creased into a smile – ‘he said – never mind what he said!’
‘What did he say?’
Her father put on a big, dramatic voice. ‘“You and that daughter – I’ll be revenged as I may!”’
‘Very good.’
‘Do you know what play that’s from, Allie?’
‘Much Ado about Nothing, Dad.’
‘Well done, Allie. We’ll go to Stratford-upon-Avon some day and we’ll see it.’
‘Promise?’
He put his hand on Alice’s. ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too, and yet I know not.’
‘Dad, stop,’ said Alice, sufficiently embarrassed by her father quoting Shakespeare to interject, though she was as gentle as he was, and hated doing it.
‘You want me to sing, instead? Loudly? You know there’s not a verse of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” I don’t know, Allie –’
Her dad had had a bad time the previous year, what with missing the first payment on his loan from the bank to buy the orchards. It had made him ill. So he’d had to go away that time, and when he came back to them he had acquired the LP of The Sound of Music. It just cheered him up, he said, Julie Andrews and her voice and those mountains and those kids. Alice knew he was in a bad way when The Sound of Music went on the record player.
Wilder Kynaston, routinely touted as America’s greatest living novelist, lived at Valhalla, a notable country house on the banks of the Hudson, a fairytale miniature castle with a tower, stepped gables, red roof tiles over creamy rendered walls and a finial-studded wooden porch that faced on to the Hudson. Wilder was her father’s boss, and erstwhile schoolmate, since both had attended Parnell, the exclusive boys’ school upstate.
When Bob was a boy, the Jansens had lost their money in the Great Depression and sold their orchards to the Kynastons; their family farm was demolished, houses built over it. Bob Jansen became a scholarship boy, taunted by his peers for his too-short blazer and the eagerness with which he studied, for he had to succeed now, to make some money for his defenestrated family. The Kynastons had been on the banks of the Hudson for even longer than the Jansens, before the Civil War, around the time of the last of the Munsee tribe. Most of the Munsee were long gone, of course, having died of fever or been slaughtered or moved on West. Always West.
Wilder’s first novel, Where Munsee Lived, was described as a quixotic masterpiece about one man travelling across America through different times and places. His second, Garson Quayle, featured a quixotic hero trying to find his place in the world. Alice had tried to read both, but couldn’t get past Chapter 4 of either. On the basis of these two books was Wilder Kynaston hailed as the next great American novelist, but, though he wrote short stories that appeared in places like the New Yorker, it had been almost ten years since he had published a novel. Some people said he wouldn’t ever publish again.
One afternoon, after Alice’s father had left school and qualified as an accountant (there was no money for him to go to Yale, as Jansen men before him had done), Bob had bumped into Wilder in a bookshop in Manhattan and though he, Wilder, was several years older than Bob, and though he, Bob, did not have money and Wilder did, Wilder remembered his old schoolmate and neighbour. They’d fallen to talking about literature, which led to the great event of 1958, when Bob Jansen saved Wilder Kynaston from some trouble with the IRS.
What this trouble was Alice was never quite sure, but it must have been significant, because after the crisis had been resolved Bob and Betsy were offered the Valhalla gatehouse and moved in when Alice was eight. In exchange for living there rent-free, Bob gave up his job at the accountancy firm and looked after the orchards, as well as Wilder’s business affairs – his tax, his finances, his deals with foreign publishers, the administration of family matters, and so on. While it meant he was always around for Alice and her mother, it also obscured the fact that Bob was not at all suited to this role of meeting someone else’s whims and needs, firefighting, managing many diffuse, boring, unpredictable tasks. The matter with the IRS had been extremely simple, easy for someone like him to solve. He didn’t care about bookkeeping or accounts. He wanted something of his own.
Fifteen months earlier, Bob had borrowed the money to buy back the orchards, hoping to revive them and his family’s name, which had once been synonymous with apples and apple trees in that part of the world. He would make apple sauce, juice, pies; have a stand at county fairs and Halloween and homecoming parades every fall. ‘Allie,’ he’d told her excitedly, ‘good times are coming our way.’
Alice had never known how to describe what her dad did. Mr Hendricks was a lawyer for an advertising firm. Jan and Tag’s dad, Mr Martin, was a pastor. Mr Logan worked in accounts. Carly’s dad was in jail for killing someone (accidentally: he ran a red and hit them with his truck, but still) but even he had run a bakery when he was around. But she knew, because her mother was always telling her, that this was nothing to be ashamed of, that she should be proud to be one of the Jansens of Orchard, and that her mother, being a Palmer and from Massachusetts, was also a person of importance.
Mr Kynaston was often away, so Alice was in the habit of wandering up close to Valhalla just to stare at the Hudson and the wooded hills on the other side and the Canada geese, flying in a V, silently, up the river. But she rarely went inside. Sometimes she’d look out for Mr Kynaston’s younger sister, Teddy, for on the first floor of the grand house, with its small interconnecting rooms like a series of tombs in a pyramid, there were photographs of her everywhere: a bob-haired, long-legged, darkly furious young woman.
Teddy Kynaston cast a long shadow, in the house and in the town, where stories of her exploits were legendary. The time the governess ran sobbing down the driveway past the gatehouse; the time she threw fireworks into the graveyard during Cemetery Supper, shouting, ‘They’re all dead anyway!’; the time she jumped out of the car rather than listen to her proselytizing father; the time she argued so hard with her brother she slapped him, giving him a bloodshot eye that lasted for weeks.
But more usually Alice would encounter Mavis the housekeeper, and sometimes Wilder Kynaston, snoring in a deckchair, or shouting poetry into the mist, whiskey in hand, or, once, throwing graham crackers into his mouth dressed only in a Hawaiian shirt and underpants. Alice knew he did not live up to his reputation of a great man of literature, but did not say this to her father, who was loyal to a fault. ‘He’s working on something now. When it does come, it’ll be the Great American Novel, wait and see,’ her father would say, while Mavis would silently move through the grounds, picking up the broken cracker pieces, the peanut shells, the empty glasses rolling on the lawn.
‘So what have you got me? A deer? Is it a deer?’
‘I’m not saying.’
‘A tennis racquet.’
‘I can’t see that fitting on the shelf, can you?’
‘Okay. Is it …’ Alice racked her brains. ‘I can’t think. Hey, Josie. Do you know what animal Dad’s gotten me for my birthday?’
Josie set down the sundaes, took the check out from her pad and slapped it on the table with a smile. ‘I’d be risking my life to tell you,’ she said, smiling at Alice. ‘But you’re gonna love it, honey. Thanks, Bob. And, hey, in case I don’t see you tomorrow, have a great day!’
Alice smiled at her. ‘Thank you so much.’ She looked down at the table, at the glistening red strawberry sauce, the brownies, the jelly, encased like geological layers in the curved sundae glass. ‘I’m so happy right now, Dad.’
Her dad blinked. ‘I’m glad, honey.’
‘So … what’s my present?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you can’t tell your mom, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it, Allie – she doesn’t know about it.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s hidden at Valhalla this time. And you have to find it.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll give you two clues.’
Alice picked up her spoon and drove it into the sundae, which was starting to melt. She touched the glass, the condensation slowly bleeding into the paper tablecloth in the late-afternoon heat.
‘What are the clues?’
‘The clues are … Well, Teddy’s the first clue.’
‘I don’t know Teddy. I don’t talk to Teddy.’
‘No,’ he said gently. ‘But perhaps you should. She’s probably lonely. You’d like her.’
‘She’s – weird.’
‘She’s not. She’s wonderful. Go find out.’ He was still blinking. ‘The second clue, it’s … “Sevenstones”. That’s the second clue.’
‘What kind of word is Sevenstones, Dad?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘It means I haven’t finished the clues yet!’ He rubbed his face again, chuckling at her fury.
‘Dad.’ Alice rolled her eyes. ‘Just tell me where the present is.’
‘I won’t. You have to find it yourself. Don’t go digging for it. It’s not buried.’
‘Why do you make everything into a story? Just tell me.’
‘The shelf will be full after this,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling a little, and she saw something in his eyes, an expression she would wonder about for the rest of her life.
Her father leaned across and dipped his long spoon into her sundae. ‘That’s darn delicious, Allie. I should have gotten one of those myself.’
And Alice laughed without meaning to, because she was still a little peeved. She reached out and stroked his coat sleeve, the smooth brushed cotton. The arm underneath, the feel of it, flesh and bone, his warm, comforting, steady form. ‘You always say that.’
‘I know I do,’ he said imperturbably, taking another spoonful of her sundae. ‘And you always say, “You always say that.”’
Afterwards, they walked down Main Street, the June heat shimmering in the early-evening light. They were making their way home, winding past the Victorian-era storefronts and white clapboard houses that lined the street and those off it, which she knew as well as anywhere. Mackie’s, the diner. Denny’s, the deli and the grocery store. The hardware store – Burt’s, though Burt had been dead for twenty years. The beauty parlour, where the mom of that new girl Dolores worked now, and where her mother went to get her hair blown out and swept up. The tiny town hall and tiny fire station, both barely needed for a town that took care of its own.
