The Spite House(82)
“I’ll be caring for you and Owen now,” he said when he came to pick them up and bring them back to Texas. He expected them to believe it, too, that his aim was to actually care for them, not just legally abduct them. Rob them, in their time of grief, of what small joy they had left.
They were staying with their elderly cousins Jonas and Johanna in Alabama, before the storm that took their parents struck. Father sent for Mother a few weeks before. He wanted to show her the city where he planned to build their newly acquired assets into a true fortune. West Palm Beach, Florida.
The Miami area’s land-boom period was waning even before a devastating cyclone had crippled it two years earlier. Its economy further faltered after a run on the banks a year after that storm. This made it “ripe for redevelopment,” according to her father.
Eleanor was happy for her father’s enthusiasm, but not about potentially moving. They didn’t know anyone in Florida. Their closest relatives lived in Mobile, Alabama, more than six hundred miles from West Palm Beach. Cuba was half as far from West Palm Beach on a map.
Their cousins in Mobile, Jonas and Johanna, were more like Eleanor and Owen’s great-grandparents. They were twins, one a widow and the other a widower, who lived together in Johanna’s house in northern Mobile. They also took frequent trips to Jonas’s beach home in Beldame.
Eleanor and Owen were at the beach house when the storm that drowned their parents struck Florida. People knew for days that a storm might be coming. That Friday’s newspaper reported the cyclone killed twenty people in the West Indies. Johanna and Jonas still went ahead with the trip to Beldame. They said they only had so many summer days left and planned to make the best of each one.
More fatalities were reported in Saturday’s paper, and “HURRICANE MENACES FLORIDA” was the front-page headline on Sunday morning. Nonetheless, Eleanor felt no concern for her parents. The islands where people died were less advanced, less fortunate places where people lived in less stable homes. West Palm Beach was a more modern city that smart people flocked to and poured money into, according to her father. Surely they learned from the previous storm and rebuilt stronger houses afterward.
Her faith proved unfounded. Although the vast majority of the dead in Florida were migrant workers who lived in the lowlands near a place called Lake Okeechobee, many also died in West Palm Beach. Eleanor held out hope that her parents were not among the dead until their bodies arrived for burial in Mobile, one day behind Uncle Peter.
“Why can’t we stay with our cousins?” Owen asked when Uncle Peter told them that they were going to come live with him.
“They are older,” Uncle Peter said, not bothering to lower his voice even though Johanna and Jonas were only one room away, and likely heard him through the open door. “They need to be resting in their later years. Not chasing and bothering after you two.”
“We aren’t a bother to them,” Eleanor said.
“Good. I trust you won’t be one to me now that I’ll be caring for you.”
Eleanor’s parents had raised her too well to say what she thought: If you really cared, you would let us stay here for as long as we could, with people who love us.
Four months after taking them to Degener, Peter had to bring them back to Mobile. Johanna and Jonas had died within a few days of each other. They shared a single service and were buried on the same day. Eleanor heard someone at the service say that the twins seemed lost and hopeless after the children went away. As they were lowered into the ground, Owen cried aloud, “It’s not fair.” Eleanor hugged him and agreed.
Indeed it was not fair that their uncle had done this to their cousins, who she knew had not truly succumbed to illness, but to loss and loneliness.
* * *
Their uncle did not want them. So why did he take them in?
He certainly hadn’t built his emaciated house with the intention of ever having a guest, much less raising children in it. It appeared the only reason he’d delayed at all before coming to get them was because the house needed renovations to accommodate them. Uncle Peter gave up his third-story bedroom and workspace to Eleanor and Owen, moving himself to the top floor that had previously been his study. A month later, construction was finished on the jettied washroom hallway built to give his niece and nephew some semblance of privacy.
Eleanor eventually learned from the kids at Everlasting Arms that the top floor should have been called “the scowling room.” The orphans swore they saw him there most mornings and most evenings, standing in the window and glaring at them for hours. One child overheard a Sister say, “That man haunts that house.” From there “the Ghost Man” joined his previous nickname of “Scary Old Peter,” and that was before the orphans found out about his plot and tombstone in the cemetery, and the accompanying lore of his return from the dead.
The orphans saw Eleanor and Owen as outsiders, even though they shared the tragedy of having no parents. The children of Everlasting Arms were united in their fear of the spite house. Eleanor and Owen lived inside it, along with its strange, hateful owner, and that eclipsed any commonality.
Still, the orphans tolerated Eleanor and Owen as objects of subtle ridicule, because to fully shun them would have upset the Sisters. Sometimes that tolerance leaked into shows of courtesy and affection—a shared piece of fruit, or invitation to join them in a game—before the orphans would remember that Eleanor and Owen lived with the Ghost Man. Then the taunting would begin again.