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The first thing I should explain is how I came to find
myself sharing a rather large apartment building with only one other person.
Actually, I should correct that to say “a person and a half” because the person
in question was a woman who had a young daughter about five or six years of
age. So in reality there were three of us residing in the building, of whom
only two were capable of what I would consider rational thought. All the other
occupants had already left for parts unknown for the upcoming holidays. She
lived in the hall below mine, in an apartment approximately in the center of
the building.
The building itself was curious
in that it was long and narrow and only had the two floors, but sprawled for a
considerable distance because it was a renovated rope factory originally built
in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Back then they made long ropes
for sailing ships in there, and in order to get a continuous braid, the “rope walk” had to go
on for however long the ropes themselves had to be. Historically, some of these
buildings went on for nearly a quarter mile, but the one I lived in was
considerably shorter, being just a little over five hundred feet in length.
Rumor mill sources claimed it had originally been much longer.
It had bustled with activity for
nearly a century, but eventually steam power began to replace the sails and its
days were numbered. Then it gradually slowed down until finally, down to its
last few employees, it closed its doors sometime in the late eighteen hundreds.
After that it sat for decades,
remarkably undisturbed by the elements and preserved, so said the local
legends, by the sheer quantity of pitch, tallow, tar, and whatever else was
used on the ropes back then as a preservative. In the latter years of the
nineteenth century an enterprising development firm bought it and turned it
into an apartment building in anticipation of a college being founded somewhere
on the adjacent peninsula. Once the college opened, it was reasoned, both
students and faculty would need a place to live. It was an insider’s deal, but
the sagacity of the political informants who championed it quickly fell into
disrepute when the college never materialized. The way I heard it the entire
speculative process boiled down to a visit by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the
President of Bowdoin College and hero of Little Round Top in the Civil War,
who, over dinner in the nearby town of Bowford, once casually commented on how
nice it would be to have a branch of Bowdoin College situated in such a
beautiful area. By the time that idle thought reached the speculators, it was a
done deal, and it was assumed that Chamberlain’s reputation alone would make it
happen. So the old ropewalk was purchased and quickly turned into a rooming
house. Then, when Chamberlain showed no signs of expanding the college, funding
dried up, the speculators slipped away, and the building was once again left to
the elements.
Even the spelling of the town was
changed to accommodate the arrival of the college. Originally, it was a French
name, which was not surprising since the town was so near the border with
Canada. It was spelled “Beaufort” then, and only became “Bowford” after
Chamberlain’s visit, the “B-o-w” part intended to mimic the beginning of
“Bowdoin” and flatter the future patron. The “fort” became “ford” probably
through a simple language ambiguity. When I once pointed out to a local that
the “ford” part made no sense since “ford” usually meant a river crossing and
there was no river to cross, that person rather indignantly replied, “Well,
maybe there was a river here back then,” as if rivers came and went
geologically in the span of a few human lifetimes.
One of the consequences of the
renovated building never having been used for its intended purpose was the fact
that the plumbing, though primitive by today’s standards, remained functional
through its idle period. This, coupled with the appearance not of a college but
of a boarding school in the nineteen-fifties, saved it from eventual
extinction. A new group of speculators bought it, cleaned it up, and sold it to
the school as a dormitory. Since it was intended to address the housing needs
of a school located rather far from the nearest town, the designers’ original
plan included rooms for students and apartments for teachers, a curious anomaly
first seen as objectionable but later appreciated by the administration when
they came to realize that having teachers living in the same building ensured a
staff of hall monitors at no additional charge.
Because the plumbing was of an
antiquated design, though, the building had a curious anomaly—the only water
service the rooms had was a simple sink and a cold-water spigot. Hot water
could be had by filling a small water heater over the sink and heating it
electrically, but none of the rooms had bathrooms or toilets. To deal with this
the new developers had converted the old latrine-like water closet on each
floor to modern showers and toilet stalls. The arrangement worked fine and even
added a certain Victorian panache to the building, but I doubt that anyone
could ever have imagined the unexpected role this layout would play in what
happened there.
The upper floor, the one I lived
on, was dominated by individual rooms, some too small for more than one
occupant and others large enough for two beds and the meager amenities called
desks and bookshelves. Actual “apartments” of more than one room were to be
found mixed in with the rooms on the first floor. Rumor had it that some of the
apartments even had bathrooms, but since I had never been in one I could not
substantiate the report. All of these multi-room apartments were occupied by
teachers at the school who were married and/or had children of their own. Since
I was single I was shunted off to one of the one-room enclaves on the upper
floor. Also, since I was single, I was evidently deemed not worthy of the extra
space of a double room and thus ended up in one of the smaller, single-bed
rooms, which, “status” considerations aside, didn’t bother me at all.
I had come to the Ropewalk—the
building had retained the name of its original function—the year before, 1977,
because I was a teacher who had been looking for a job that would take me away
from the overdevelopment of southern New England. That euphemistic word
“development” had become synonymous with “special interests pandering” for me,
and I realized I had to either get away from it or do something desperate. So
when I found out about the job opening in northern Maine, I figured, “Well,
here’s a place that will escape the ravages of insider corruption for a while.
Why don’t I take it?” What worked in my favor was the fact that there were not
a lot of people anxious to move to the edge of the earth. I suspected that mine
may have been the only résumé they received.
I was a history teacher, one of
those dodo birds who were obsessed with knowing the truth behind history’s
constantly moving tides. Being single allowed me the latitude to go where I
wanted and do what I wanted, but denied me the comfort—which on some level I
equated with complacency—of actually bonding with another human being. I had
had two marriages, the first failing because we were simply too young and too
suffused with the residual efflorescence of the sixties, the second because,
despite moving into the seventies, I was not able to shake that sixties glow
from my overweaned sense of soul-mate idealism. It was doomed from the start.
Her father, an extremely pragmatic and highly successful businessman, had never
really liked me, thought I was too impractical.
“Drummond,” he’d once said—he
never called me by my first name, Egan—“You’re like the alchemists of the
Middle Ages. You’ll spend your entire life looking for some sort of elixir to
turn lead into gold while your family slowly starves.” He was probably right.
But history, and its sister, archeology, were full of characters much more
interesting than anyone I actually knew. The mundane had opened its umbrella of
mediocrity over all of us, leveled the playing field of the passions, given us
security, and made us all uninteresting.
The reason the building was empty
just then was because the Christmas vacation had started and all the students
had returned to their homes and would not be back until after the new year. The
teachers had also left to spend the holidays with family or other relatives.
The reason I was still in the building was because I wanted to take advantage
of the peace and quiet that would prevail when everyone else was gone. I had
set personal goals for myself, things I wanted to accomplish—as a history
teacher I had decided to enhance my professional reputation by writing a
history of the region—but had become negligent because I had allowed myself to
be interrupted and sidetracked by my many “acquaintances” among the students.
They visited me constantly. This came about because I
was the coach for the baseball team. No one else had wanted that sidebar
activity, and the program was threatened with shutdown until I, literally,
stepped up to the plate. I instantly became the athletic wunderkind. It didn’t
even matter how well we played; it only mattered that we played.
I had also started a martial arts club,
resurrecting my long-dormant abilities in that arena under the guise of
instilling a sense of personal discipline in the students. I had gotten my
black belt in Tae Kwon Do about ten years before, the culmination of an
interest developed in my adolescence. My instructor, a Korean master, had told
me I was “ideally suited” for the fighting arts, both because my six-foot
height was not so tall that I had too much body area to cover, and because my
long, lean legs—I’d been a runner in college—allowed me to kick to an
opponent’s head with no special effort.
He’d also encouraged me to
develop what he called “the look.” I had had a thin, black mustache in those
earlier years, and this, along with my dark hair, pronounced cheekbones, and
deep-set, dark eyes, could, with a carefully practiced sneer, make me look
quite threatening, an ability that went a long way toward unnerving an
opponent. “To fight is about unbalance opponent,” he’d said in his broken
English. “Psych him out,” was what he had been trying to say, and it worked
well, both in and out of the practice ring. It sometimes backfired with women,
though, so to soften my look I got rid of the mustache.
Nevertheless, I hadn’t practiced the art in so long
that I was seriously rusty and knew that I had become stiff, slow, and badly
timed. In spite of this, some of the students took to it like a fish to water,
warrior ethic and all. It was good exercise in any case, and I had no illusions
about aspiring to be some kind of champion. And it was safe; there were so few
people in that part of New England who had ever studied the fighting arts that
the chances that I would be challenged were extremely remote. And the mystique
of the art itself kept the undecided challengers at bay.
The one thing I was not qualified to coach the
students on was relationships, so I stayed away from that subject on the
pretense that their adolescent love and lust affairs were too far beneath me to
notice. The reality was I had absolutely nothing to tell them about how to make
a relationship work. How could I with my track record? In spite of that
shortcoming, I seemed to be inordinately popular through no conscious effort of
my own. But the upshot was, I never seemed to have a moment’s rest. I would no
sooner sit down and begin to work when the floorboards in the hall would creak
and announce the approach of one of my many “friends.” A moment more and there
would be a knock on the door. Once interrupted, I knew there was no hope of
returning to what I had been doing; my caller would invite himself in and
remain sometimes for hours either unloading his problems on my attentive ears,
updating the rumor-mill file with the latest suspicions, or simply bending
those ears with his talk. I was a good listener and because of that had become
a sort of unofficial father confessor, a decidedly one-sided virtue.
Thus conditioned to expect the
worst whenever I had an unoccupied moment, I soon abandoned all hope of ever
accomplishing anything as long as the building was full of people. I therefore
had been looking forward to the approaching holiday with a sense of relief, not
because it was Christmas but because I would finally have some time to myself.
Once everyone was gone, however, I found to my amazement that the stillness was
almost maddening. The vastness of the building only then became apparent, and
at one point I had this unsettling feeling that the whole world had either sunk
beneath me, or I was the only one who hadn’t gotten the message to move out. I
resisted the temptation to do the Robinson Crusoe thing and shout into the
empty hall just to hear if my voice would echo. I took the whole first day
getting accustomed to what I could only describe as the voluminous silence.
It was during that period that I
discovered I was not alone in the building after all. It happened on the second
evening while I was preparing my supper. The building had a communal kitchen on
the first floor, about halfway down the length of the hall. This kitchen, like
the communal bathrooms, was an afterthought added by the developers to cover
the possibility that there might be people who wanted to prepare their own meals
rather than eat in the school cafeteria. So one of the rooms was turned into a
no-frills kitchen. It had a stove, cold-water sink with its electric water
heater, refrigerator, cabinets, and two small restaurant-like bench booths. Not
exactly a class act but enough to get the job done. I was down there concocting
one of my no-frills meals when I was suddenly confronted with Margaret
Gillespie, one of the English composition teachers, who also, oddly enough,
doubled as a phys ed teacher. Her little daughter, Sonya, was with her.
I was caught completely off guard
by her sudden appearance. For some reason I felt that she, of all the people
there, would be one of those most anxious to leave the Ropewalk because of
stories I’d heard from my many student visitors about how unhappy she was. She
was young, married, and evidently bored to tears by the lack of social life in
nearby Bowford. Yet there she was, with Sonya in tow, still in the building
when everyone else was gone.
This was an interesting
development. Margaret was, by general consensus, a real “looker,” and most of
the men at the school, whether they articulated it or not, whether married or
single, yearned for some sort of contact with her—a touch, a moment of
discourse, a one-night stand, or, in some cases, an outright affair. She had
dark brown, shoulder-length hair and, although only of average height, moved
with an athletic suppleness that made her seem taller, or at least more
commanding, than she actually was. I surmised that this suppleness was a
product of her physical education activities, but since I knew nothing about
her I couldn’t be sure.
What I was sure about was
that there was something else about her that was so startlingly different that
I couldn’t help but notice her. It was her eyes; when I first met her at the
school, I’d noticed that her brown eyes had a slightly elliptical aspect to
them, oddly out of sync for a Caucasian, that had led me to believe that maybe
there was some oriental or possibly South American ancestor somewhere in the
family tree. It was none of my business of course, and whether that was true or
not was completely irrelevant in view of how well it all went together. Her
projected persona, out of reach but not lost on me, was one of quiet
self-assurance built on a subtle sensuality.
All of this resonated on an
instinctive level the moment I saw her, causing a reaction that I was sure
registered on my face for at least a passing moment. I recovered quickly,
though, assumed my usual “social neutrality” attitude, and smiled as she and
Sonya stepped into the kitchen.
If Margaret had an arresting
aspect to her it was nothing in comparison to her daughter, but for a
completely different reason. Sonya had always seemed strange to me, not because
she was in any way unattractive but because she was so different from both of
her parents. She had Margaret’s eye shape and color, but her mother’s
chestnut-colored hair and her father’s curly, blond locks were not conducive to
the straight, black hair that Sonya had and that seemed to grow unusually low
on her forehead. That could’ve been just the way it was combed, of course, but
when combined with facial features that I could only describe as somehow
unsettled, changeable, and amorphous, she had such an aspect of the rare and
exotic about her that she actually made me a bit uncomfortable.
Even stranger was her apparent
ability to actually use this unsettledness; she would look at me one way, then
change her position and expression and seem to be a completely different
person. “Rubbery” was the only word that came to mind whenever I saw her
features going through their odd metamorphosis. The first time I saw it I was
totally transfixed, standing there watching the child become some other child
right before my eyes, then reverting back to the original. But even while she
was doing that there was no point when her features seemed to resemble those of
her parents, and all I could think of was that some sort of genetic “back-tick”
was at work, one of those rare events that cause a child to look more like an
earlier ancestor than her actual parents.
What I found most remarkable
about this was that Margaret’s features didn’t reveal any of this ability. She
was, by all accounts, unselfconsciously attractive—really quite stunning when
dressed up for some school event—and her husband, tall, blond, and blue-eyed,
but with a slight propensity to put on a little weight, was still able to turn
a few female heads. How their offspring inherited this unusual characteristic
was, to me, the consummate genetic mystery. But there was no point in denying
what was true. I found the child oddly—and, admittedly, maybe
reluctantly—“different.” Naturally, I never uttered a word of this to anyone,
not even casually. Some things were better left unsaid.
“Margaret,” I said. “You startled
me. I thought I was the only one in the building.” I was taking some liberties
with my familiar tone. In actual fact she and I tended to move in different
social strata, and although I’d seen her almost every day at the school, I had
only ever spoken with her a few times at various faculty functions, and even
then only briefly. The truth was I hardly knew her at all.
Her response surprised me. There
wasn’t one. She simply stood there staring at me as if she hadn’t heard me.
“I didn’t realize you
could cook,” she finally said.
I took that at face value, which
is to say I assumed it was some sort of caulk to plug up the hole in the
conversation.
“I wouldn’t exactly call this
‘cooking,’” I said with a smile. “All I’m really doing is satisfying a
biological need. ‘Cooking,’ on the other hand….”
“Are you staying here right
through Christmas?” she interrupted. Little Sonya looked up at me with her
coal-black eyes. Her face was a rubber mask slowly crinkling into a smile.
“Ah, well, I don’t know if I’ll
actually be here on Christmas day, but I do plan on being here at least up to
the day before Christmas Eve. Would that be Christmas Fore-eve?” I smiled at my
own little joke but she didn’t pick up on it.
She seemed tense about something.
She smiled but I noticed, or maybe sensed, that it was a forced smile. Maybe it
was because even while smiling her eyebrows remained taut, as if she were
shielding her eyes from the glare of the overhead light. But the fluorescent overhead
was not harsh; indeed, as the gloom thickened outside, it was obvious that the
one light alone was barely enough for a room that size. Like virtually
everything else in the building, it was probably one more aspect of its
checkered construction legacy.
“Could probably use
more light in here,” I said.
She nodded and looked past me
through the window to the rapidly falling curtain of darkness outside. “It gets
dark early this time of year.”
I nodded.
“There’s a storm coming in,” she
went on. “Sleet, hail, snow, high winds. Coming right in off the ocean. I hope
we don’t lose power.” She stepped over to the window and peered out. “It’s
already started.”
In truth, it had. I could hear
the first faint hits of the sleet on the glass. I had been so intent on eating
that I hadn’t noticed. Beyond the sound of the sleet I could hear the pounding
of the surf on the rocky coastline, a scant hundred yards away. The Ropewalk
was located very near the ocean precisely because back then they were making
ropes for sailing ships. It would not have made sense to make the ropes in
town, five miles away as the crow flies but three times that by road, and then
have to pay some mule teamster to bring them to the harbor.
She hugged herself as if suddenly
cold. “So, how long are you staying?”
“At least until the
day before Christmas Eve.”
“Oh, yes, right. You just told me
that.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders. “Ah, Egan,
you realize that you, Sonya, and I are the only people in the building, right?”
“Actually,” I replied, “I thought
I was the only person in the building. I didn’t realize that you were still
here until now. So I guess I can’t say for certain that there might not be
someone else hanging around for a few days. And to be honest,” and here I
looked out at the gloom, “this storm might make it difficult for anyone to
leave for the next day or two. So if you or anyone else plan to leave, you
better do it now.” I realized the moment I said it that it could be mistaken
for an antisocial comment on my part, so I added, “Not that I wouldn’t want the
company. The emptiness is so huge it may take me a day or two to get used to
it.”
Once again she didn’t react to my
comment. Instead, glancing from the window to me and then back to the window,
she said, “So you’ll be here for at least the next four days? You wouldn’t, ah,
leave early or anything, would you?”
By this time I had brought my
dinner over to one of the booths and sat down to eat. Sonya climbed up on the
opposite bench and stared at my plate. “No, I won’t be leaving early. I plan on
using this time to catch up on some research and writing that I’ve been trying
to do.”
“What are you writing?”
“A history of this region,
including, eventually, the building of this establishment,” and here I waved my
hand in an arc towards the ceiling to indicate I meant the Ropewalk. “I haven’t
gotten too far,” I added.
“You should talk to
Sil,” she said. “He grew up here, knows all the stories.”
She was referring to Silio
Muraceau, the maintenance man. In fact, I had already considered approaching
him for that very reason but as yet had not had the chance. Or, for that
matter, summoned up the nerve. Sil was a large-boned swarthy man with jet-black
hair and something of an attitude. While only of average height, he had massive
shoulders and arms, and his constant scowl did not invite overtures of
friendship. “He doesn’t seem to be very friendly,” I said.
“He’s alright once
you get to know him. He’s an Indian, you know. A Native American.”
I nodded. “So I hear. People tell
me he knows all the legends going back through the memory of his people.” I
hoped I didn’t sound too patronizing. The fact was I had my doubts about how
thick the strain of Indian blood in his veins really was. Someone had told me
he was an Algonquin, and someone else had told me, no, he was an Abenaki, the
very group attacked and decimated by Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian
War. I, in my infinite patience, did not bother to inform the speaker that the
Abenakis were, in fact, members of the Algonquin group. I had long since
accepted that most people did not appreciate historical accuracy the way I did.
“What is his obsession with
keeping the grass mowed?” I asked. “I watched him several times during the
summer almost frantically attacking the lawn with the mower. It was like he was
locked in mortal combat with the weeds and brush. What’s up with that?” It was
a feeble effort on my part to add some levity to the conversation.
She smiled briefly and shrugged,
glanced out the window again at the gathering storm, then said, “So you’re not
aware of anyone else having stayed in the building?”
Something in her tone caused me
to stop eating. I studied her expression for a moment and realized there was
some meaning—a second question—behind the question. “No. Like I said, as far as
I knew I was the only one here. If you don’t mind my asking—why are you and
Sonya still here? Where’s Ben?”
Ben was her husband. His full
name was actually Benton, not Benjamin, and I knew from my student visitors
that it annoyed him whenever he received mail addressed to “Benjamin
Gillespie.”
“He had to attend a conference.
Can you believe that someone would actually organize and hold a conference
right before the Christmas vacation?”
“He couldn’t take the two of you
with him?”
“Well, not really. At least he
said he couldn’t. He’s coming by to pick us up on Christmas Eve. Then we’ll be
heading south to Connecticut. My parents live there. Benton’s, too, for that
matter. It’s about an eight hour drive, maybe longer if the weather doesn’t
improve by then.” She paused to pull Sonya away from the table. The little girl
had reached out for the food on my plate. “Is there any chance that you might
stay until Christmas Eve?”
“Sure, that might happen. If I
get on a roll with the project I probably won’t want to stop. The Christmas
Fore-eve plan is not carved in stone.” I smiled again at my little joke, and
this time a faint flicker of a return smile crossed her lips. “Why do you keep
asking if I know if anyone else is in the building?”
She drew Sonya to her. The little
girl wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg and stared at me. Margaret
stroked the child’s hair for a moment before turning her attention back to me.
“Because,” she said in almost a whisper, “someone else is. I can hear his
footsteps out in the hall when I’m trying to sleep.”
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