Wilde Lake(24)

“It’s a sign,” she said. “How can it be anything but a sign?”

“Don’t be silly,” my father said. “And don’t blame yourself. Accidents happen.”

“Oh, I don’t. I don’t.”

And just like that, the fire seemed to give up, not unlike the witch vanquished by water in The Wizard of Oz. It shrank back into Miss Maude’s house, or what was left of it. There was a hole in the roof, broken windows, scorch marks. Her house was destroyed. Ours was spared.

“At least I had the presence of mind to grab my purse,” Miss Maude said. “I can go stay at the Columbia Inn, I guess.”

“You could have the guest room at our house,” my father said. “It’s always made up for Teensy.”

I swear AJ blushed in the firelight, thinking of Miss Maude on the other side of the wall from him, separated by only a tiny powder room. She’ll be able to hear AJ go to the bathroom, I thought.

“No, no, I wouldn’t dare put you out.”

She walked over to her car, a VW bug. Although she had on boots, she was bare-legged and the hem of her nightgown showed beneath her coat.

“What happened?” I asked my father. “How did it catch fire?”

“She told the firemen she lit a candle downstairs, then forgot to snuff it out before she went to bed.”

It was only when we went back inside that I noticed my father’s feet. “You forgot to put on your shoes?”

“I know,” he said. “I was in such a hurry to get you out, I didn’t think. You know how I fall asleep in my chair at night.”

He was walking from fireplace to fireplace, banking the fires we had allowed to burn. I went to his room to get his shoes, assuming he had kicked them off by his reading chair. I couldn’t find them, so I brought him his slippers.

“What did Miss Maude mean, saying it was a sign?”

“She’s been thinking about moving. I guess this will settle it for her. Although that’s a very silly way to be, Lu. To place emphasis on portents. Or horoscopes, or any of that stuff. She left a candle burning and her draperies caught fire.”

“I read my horoscope every day,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “You read it out loud to me.”

“That’s because it’s yours, too.”

“Yes, and do you really think that you and I have the same day every day, that what’s recommended for you applies to me?”

I did.

Miss Maude never spent another night in that house. It was razed a few months later, and the lot stood empty for years, which delighted AJ and me as it became our unofficial territory. That spring, glorious flowers came to life, peeping through the overgrown grass, the result of Miss Maude’s meticulous preparation in her first few weeks, her only weeks, in the house. They never bloomed again.



I was fifteen or sixteen before I realized that my father’s shoes were in Miss Maude’s house when it started to burn. As was my father. My father was shoeless in Miss Maude’s house, and they weren’t in the living room when that candle in the old Chianti bottle caught the drapes, or they might have had a chance to put it out. They had gone upstairs. Together.

I called my brother, in law school at the time. I assumed he had figured it out before I did, but I held on to the hope that I might, just once, tell AJ something he didn’t already know.

Of course he had pieced together far more than I had.

“It didn’t start that night, Lu. He’d been going over there since mid-December, after you were asleep and I was in my room. He’d tell me he was going outside to smoke his pipe—he knew you didn’t approve of him smoking and would give him hell if you picked up the scent of his tobacco in the house—but he didn’t come back for hours. Then one night I saw him leaving her house, and I knew.”

“Eeeeew,” I said.

“That’s how I felt then.” That’s how I felt when I was your age. I thought, So infuriating. “Now I’m happy for him. Although—you know, she wasn’t a widow.”

“What do you mean? She lied about being married?”

“She lied about her husband being dead. He was at Walter Reed, a double amputee.”

“But Daddy didn’t know that. He couldn’t have.”

AJ sighed over the line. It was the mid-1980s. A long-distance call was still something of import, minutes gobbling up money the way the still-novel Pac-Man ate his power pills, although my father never objected to me calling AJ. He wanted us to be close. He had encouraged the ritual of our weekly Sunday call and even allowed me to call before rates dropped if I had important news. However, he probably would have been appalled if he had known what we were discussing on this particular Sunday.

“How do you think I know, Lu? He told me so himself.”

“Uh-huh. No way. Daddy never would have been with a married woman. Besides, why would he tell you?”

AJ’s laugh was raw and sad. “I guess he wanted to warn me that everyone screws up sometime. Even our saintly father. He said she was a de facto widow—wouldn’t divorce her husband out of principle, but he was never going to come home, be her husband again.”

“So he argued against his adultery on the basis of a technicality?”

“Other way around. He insisted that he was guilty of adultery despite her situation. But he cared about her, in his way, although he was never going to get serious with any woman. At any rate, she saw the fire as a judgment and left.” A pause. “Miss Maude wasn’t the only one, over the years. There were others. Lu, did you really think our father, who was not quite forty when our mother died, went the rest of his life without female companionship?”