Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [10]
Elizabeth bent to put her moccasin back on, and they continued toward the street. Squirrels were racing all around them, skimming over the grass and up the skeletons of the trees. “Lately we’ve got squirrels in the attic,” Elizabeth said. “No telling how they got there, or what I do to get rid of them.”
“When I was little Mrs. Emerson used to scare me to death,” said Benny. “Also Andrew, and Timothy a little too but that might have been just because he was Andrew’s twin. I wouldn’t even come in for cookies, not even if Mrs. Emerson called me herself with her sweetie-sweet voice. I’d heard stories about them since I was old enough to listen. That Andrew is violent. And do you know that Mrs. E. went to pieces once because she thought her first baby got mixed up in the hospital?”
“I hear a lot of people have that thought,” Elizabeth said.
“Maybe so, but they don’t go to pieces. And they don’t try and give the babies back to the hospital.”
Elizabeth laughed.
“I wonder if my mother would care to hire you,” Benny said.
“It’s not too likely. Besides, I believe I’d like to stay and meet these people.”
“When would you do that? Some don’t come home from one year to the next.”
“Well, one’s coming today, as a matter of fact,” Elizabeth said. “The one here in Baltimore. Timothy. That’s what we’re killing the turkey for.”
“I could ask my mother if she needs any carpentry done.”
“Never mind,” said Elizabeth. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Go on, now. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“All right. I hope you manage that turkey somehow.”
“I will.”
She climbed the steps to the veranda, unzipping her jacket as she went. Inside, the house was almost dark, filled with ticking clocks, smelling of burned coffee. The furniture was scarred and badly cared for. “Mrs. Emerson,” Elizabeth had once said, “would you like me to feed the furniture?” Mrs. Emerson had laughed her tinkling little laugh. “Feed it?” she had said. “Feed it what?” “Well, oil it, I mean. It’s drying out, it’s falling to pieces.” But Mrs. Emerson had said not to bother. She had no feeling for wood, that was why—the material that Elizabeth loved best. The hardwood floors were worn dull, black in some places where water had settled in, the grain raised and rough. In a house so solid, built with such care (six fireplaces, slate in the sunporch, a butler’s pantry as big as a dining room, and elegant open inserts like spool-bed headboards above every doorway), Mrs. Emerson’s tumble of possessions lay like a film of tattered leaves over good topsoil, their decay proceeding as steadily as Mrs. Emerson’s life. Strange improvements had been tacked on—a linoleum-topped counter, crumbling now at the edges, running the length of the oak-lined breakfast room, dingy metal cabinets next to the stone fireplace in the kitchen. In the basement there were five separate servants’ rooms, furnished with peeling metal bedsteads and rolled-up, rust-stained mattresses; on the second floor most of the doors were kept shut, darkening the hall; on the third floor there was an echo, the wallpaper was streaked brown beneath the shuttered windows, the floor outside the bathroom bore a black ring where someone had long ago left a glass of water to evaporate, unnoticed. The two attics off the third-floor rooms were crammed with playpens, cribs and potty-chairs, bales of mouse-eaten letters, textbooks no school would think of using any more. There was a leak beside one chimney which only Elizabeth seemed concerned about. (Periodically she was to empty the dishpan beneath it; that was all.) Mrs. Emerson, meanwhile, set antique crystal vases over the scars on the dining room buffet and laid more and more Persian carpets over the worn spots on the floors. The carpets glowed richly, like jewels, calling forth little sparkles of admiration from the ladies who came to tea. Elizabeth hated Persian carpets. She wanted to banish all their complicated designs to the basement and sand the floors down to bare grain—something she knew better than