The Mailbox

Gideon did not go to bed. He lay down once on the iron bed with his sweater on, and the springs creaked under him, and after ten minutes he got up again.

He sat at the window that faced up the lawn. The cottage had one lit window until a little after eleven, and then none. At ten to five a light came on in it again. At five the pastry kitchen lit up, and he watched a small figure in white pass back and forth behind the glass.

He had spent the night on arithmetic, because his mind would not do anything else. His daughter was five years and nineteen days old. He had missed all of them. He had missed a birth in Burlington on a Sunday, with a bus driver at the wheel. He had missed whatever a first word had been. He had missed an afternoon last August when a cook of twenty-four had jumped off the dock in his shoes, and Gideon had been at a lenders’ dinner in Chicago or somewhere like it.

He had tried to get round it every way he could, and he could not make it come out smaller.

At six he picked up his phone and called his sister.

It rang five times. Bea answered with her mouth half in a pillow.

“Who’s dead?”

“Nobody’s dead.”

“Then it’s six in the morning, Gid, and I was up till two with the Boston carpet samples. They sent me eleven beiges. I’m going to hang up and you’re going to call me at nine like a human being.”

“Bea. Don’t hang up.”

There was a rustle, and then her voice came again, awake and sharp. She was twenty-nine and the only other Hallett child, and she had known him all her life. “What’s happened? Where are you? Are you still at the leaky one?”

“I’m at the Larkspur. I need to tell you something, and I need you to keep it to yourself. That means from Mother and from the office. It’s not to go anywhere.”

“You’re frightening me.”

“You have a niece.”

The line was silent. He could count on one hand the times he had heard his sister say nothing.

“Say that again,” Bea said.

“Her name’s Matilda. They call her Tilly. She’s five. She was born in March of 2022, here in Vermont.”

“March of ’22.” He could hear her counting, a beat slower than he had. “That’s the summer you ran away. The sailing summer. Gideon, you told me you taught children to tie knots.”

“I did teach children to tie knots.”

“You evidently had some time left over.” Then her voice changed. “Are you sure? I’m sorry, I have to ask it. People turn up, with men like you. Imogen has a whole speech.”

“She has Dad’s eye.”

“Oh,” Bea said.

“The left one. The wedge is in exactly the same place. She looked up at me on a dock yesterday afternoon and asked why my eye was broken the same as hers.”

“Oh, Gid.” He heard her sit up. “Who’s the mother?”

“Camille Bouchard. She’s the pastry chef here. She was a cook in the kitchen that summer. She’s head of the kitchen now, and she’s the best thing on the balance sheet. She has been for years, and nobody down there thought to look.”

“And she never told you? In five years?”

“She wrote to me three times, that autumn. She sent the letters to the house, to Jamie Rourke. It was the only address she had. All three came back to her unopened, with ‘refused’ written across them.”

Bea drew in a breath. “Refused by whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it wasn’t me. I could barely open my own eyes that fall, never mind anyone’s mail. Three letters don’t bounce by themselves. Somebody bounced them.”

“That’s what she said, more or less.”

“Is she furious?”

He thought of the lights going down in the pastry kitchen, one bank after another. “She was past furious a long time ago. She’s built a whole life without me in it, and it’s a good one. She told me I don’t get to want things yet.”

“I think I like her,” Bea said. Her voice was unsteady. “I’m coming up. I can be there by lunch.”

“No.”

“She’s my niece.”

“She doesn’t know she’s anybody’s niece. She’s been told her father lives far away and doesn’t know how to find them. What she hears next isn’t mine to decide, and it isn’t yours either. Camille decides that. I’ve been here four days. If a second Hallett drives up that road it’ll look like we’re moving in.”

Bea was quiet. Then she asked, “What’s she like, the little one?”

He looked down the lawn at the dock, grey in the early light.

“She’s serious. She corrects people. She sorts lake glass by colour and she keeps the cloudy pieces apart from the white ones, because white is from old dishes. She fell off the dock last summer. Now she’s walking back out along it one board at a time, and she’s got as far as the sixth.”

“That’s Dad,” Bea said, and laughed, and then he could hear that she was crying. “That’s Dad to the life. God help her.”

“Not a word, Bea.”

“Not a word. Not even to Desmond?”

“Not to anyone. It’s not mine to tell.”

“All right. Call me tonight, though. You sound like you haven’t slept.”

“I haven’t.”

When she had gone he sat with the phone in his hand. He had not expected telling her to feel like anything, and it had. One other person in the world now knew that Tilly existed and was glad of it.

At twenty past seven a yellow school bus stopped at the end of the drive with its lights flashing. He stood at the window. He could not see much at that distance. A woman in a white jacket came down from the cottage with a purple coat beside her. The purple coat climbed the steps of the bus and turned round at the top. Then the door closed and the bus went off toward Vergennes.

Camille stood in the road until it was out of sight. She did not look toward the boathouse. He had been told to stay on his side of the lawn, and he stayed there.

At eight he called East 74th Street.

His mother answered on the second ring. Rosalind Hallett was sixty-three and had been up since six every day of her life. He could picture her at the small desk in the morning room, sitting very straight, with her silver hair already pinned.

“Gideon. You’re in Vermont, Desmond tells me. Is it dreadful?”

“It’s cold. Mother, I have a question, and I’d like you to think before you answer it. In the autumn of 2021 I asked you whether anything had come to the house for a Jamie Rourke. You told me nothing had.”

There was a short pause. “I remember you asking. It was an odd name to hear. Half of it was mine.”

“Are you certain? That nothing came?”

“What is this about?”

“I’m only asking whether you’re certain.”

She did not answer at once. He knew that silence from his childhood. It meant she was choosing her words.

“I was at the Connecticut house until Thanksgiving that year,” she said. “I couldn’t be in town. You’ll remember that. I saw no such letters. If I had, I would have sent them on to you. Whatever you may think of me, I don’t keep other people’s post.”

“Who was at the house, while you were away?”

“The staff. People for the estate were in and out all that autumn with boxes. It was a wretched time, Gideon. I don’t know who stood in the front hall on any given morning. Has someone said they wrote to you?”

“I’m trying to get a date straight. That’s all.”

“You’re a poor liar. You always were, and it’s one of the better things about you.” Her voice softened slightly. “Come to dinner when you’re back. You sound tired.”

He said that he would, and ended the call.

He turned it over afterward and could not settle it. She had said that she saw no such letters. She had not said that none came. In October of 2021 she had told him nothing had come, and she had told him so from Connecticut, two hours from the front hall. He had not thought at the time to ask how she knew. She had wanted him steady that autumn, as everyone had. He could not tell whether he believed her, and it was a miserable thing not to know about his own mother.

Normally he would have taken a problem like this to Desmond. Desmond Pike had been his father’s closest friend for forty years and was the executor of his will. He had sat Gideon down at fourteen with the annual accounts of the Chicago hotel and a ruler, and taught him to read a balance sheet line by line. He had stood behind Gideon’s chair in front of the lenders that first September. He would know who had been on the household payroll that autumn and who had handled the post. One phone call would probably settle it.

But Gideon could not ask the question without saying why he was asking, and he had just told his sister it was not his to tell. He would find out some other way. He put the phone in his pocket and went to work, because work was what he had.

Wendell Paquette arrived at nine in a white truck with a ladder rack. He was about sixty, square and slow-spoken, in a canvas coat, and he had been roofing in Addison County since before Gideon was born. Winnie had found his name on the last of the three tar invoices. He was the one who had written on it, This will not hold. You need the valley rebuilt.

“Nobody called me back,” Paquette said, looking up at the north wing. “That was two years ago.”

“I’m calling you back now,” Gideon said.

They went up together. The morning was bright and cold, with frost still in the shadow of the chimneys. Paquette walked the slope like a man crossing his own kitchen. He knelt in the valley where the wing met the main roof and peeled back a slab of old tar with a flat bar. The metal underneath was aluminium, split along the fold and white with corrosion.

“There you are,” he said. “Somebody saved four hundred dollars in 1990-something.”

“I was in the attic on Monday. The boards are black for about twelve feet on each side. The rafters I could reach are hard.”

Paquette glanced at him. “You went up yourself?”

“I did.”

“Then you’ve seen most of what I need to see.” He stood and looked along the ridge. “I’d strip the whole valley and this slope of the wing. I’d put new boards wherever they’re soft, call it twenty-four feet. Ice shield under everything. Copper in the valley, sixteen-ounce, and proper step flashing at the chimney while I’m there. I won’t put aluminium back. If you want aluminium you want another man.”

“I want copper. What’s the number?”

“Eighty-six thousand. That’s if the boards are no worse than you say.”

“When can you start?”

“I’ve a barn in Addison till the end of the month.”

“I need this roof tight by Friday the seventh of May. That gives the plasterers three weeks. I need eight rooms ready to sell on Thursday the twenty-seventh, the day before Memorial Day weekend. What would it take to start Monday?”

Paquette rubbed his jaw. “I’d have to split my crew and bring my nephew’s boys on. That’s in the eighty-six, if you say yes this morning and don’t change your mind about anything.”

“Yes. I won’t change my mind.”

“You don’t want to sleep on it?”

“I haven’t slept on anything this week,” Gideon said. “Send me the contract by noon and I’ll sign it by one.”

They shook hands on the roof. From up there he could see the whole property, eleven acres and the long curve of shore, with the dock running out into blue water. Somewhere under his feet there was a bucket in Room 19.

Winnie was waiting at the bottom of the ladder with her arms folded over a grey cardigan.

“Well?”

“Eighty-six thousand for the roof. He starts Monday. Then the eight rooms. I priced those in the night. Ceilings, plaster, paint, the carpet taken out. Fifty-four thousand, if we use local trades and nobody gets fancy.”

“There’s pine under that carpet. I watched them cover it in 1987 and I said so at the time.”

“Then we’ll sand it and save on carpet. That’s a hundred and forty thousand all told.”

She looked at him narrowly. “And who in New York signs for a hundred and forty thousand dollars on a place their own memo says to sell?”

“I do. The chief executive can commit up to two hundred and fifty thousand on any one property without a second signature. This uses a hundred and forty of it. Desmond Pike will see it in tomorrow’s commitments report and he won’t like it. He’ll be entitled to say so. But the board can’t judge this inn on fourteen rooms and a bucket. On the twenty-sixth of June they’ll see twenty-two rooms and a real season’s numbers, and then they can vote.”

“That’s not a promise to keep us.”

“No. I’m only making sure you’re judged fairly.”

Winnie thought about it. “I’ve said no to eight calls for Memorial Day.”

“Take every booking you can for the main house. Put the north wing on a waiting list. When Paquette tells me it’s dry, you can call them back.”

“Hm,” Winnie said. He was beginning to learn that this was how she gave approval.

He worked through the rest of the day. He signed Paquette’s contract at ten to one. He walked the eight rooms with a plasterer from Vergennes and a notepad, and pulled up a corner of carpet in Room 17. The pine was there, as Winnie had said it would be. He did not go near the kitchen. Twice he smelled caramel in the back corridor and took the long way round.

At five he brought the signed papers to the front desk.

Winnie filed them. Then she reached under the desk and brought up a long wooden box of index cards, and walked her fingers through it to the R’s. She laid one card on the blotter between them.

It was in his own handwriting, six years old. Rourke, J. Boathouse room. Deposit $600. Under that was the address on East 74th Street.

“You look like a man who’s been told something,” she said.

“I have been.”

“It’s about time.” She tapped the card. “She came to this desk the last week of that August and asked whether I had anywhere to write to you. I turned the box round and let her copy it. I didn’t ask her why. By the second letter I didn’t need to. She was sick every morning in my staff washroom.”

He said nothing. He did not think he was meant to.

“They came back here, because this was her return address. I sort the post. I handed her each one myself, across this desk, with that word written on it. I watched her face three times. I’m an old woman, and I’ve seen a husband buried, and I don’t want to see that again.”

“I never saw those letters, Mrs. Ostrander.”

“So she tells me you say. I can’t know that one way or the other. I only know what I watched.” Winnie put the card back in its place and shut the box. “The inn’s mailbox is at the end of the drive. She walked down to it at noon every day that autumn, in her kitchen whites. She was five months gone before she stopped. She waited at that mailbox till November. Don’t you make her wait again.”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t tell me. I’m not the one you owe.”

He went out by the front porch. The sun was going down over the Adirondacks and the lawn was gold. Halfway to the boathouse he turned onto the dock and walked as far as the sixth board. It was bare. There was not a chip of glass left on it.

Up at the cottage a lamp came on behind a curtain.

He had set every deadline in his life himself, or had it set for him by a bank. This one belonged to a woman who had told him plainly that she did not know yet. He sat down on the end of the iron bed with the window open, where he could see the kitchen porch, and waited.
***