Read Constance for Free Online Page B

she said, the sweep of the mighty Hudson far below her, with the Catskills in the distance. It was called Ravenswood.
    It was all too good to be true. The old house with its tower on a bluff above the river, and this beautiful girl, clearly in flight from who knows what horrors she’d suffered there, it was a Romantic cliché, the whole thing. But for that I liked it all the more. In fact I hadn’t spent much time in the Hudson Valley. There was nothing up there apart from a few small liberal arts colleges, none of them of any interest to me. But this I kept to myself. It hadn’t escaped me that this girl got dreamy when she talked about Nature.
    She then produced a photograph and pushed it across the table. It was herself aged twelve sitting with her sister on the porch of that old house, which was as she’d described it and every bit as shabby as I’d imagined. It had a long porch, a tower, several steep gables, and what looked like a screened verandah,a kind of American villa with Gothic additions, and pretty run-down. And there she was in the foreground, clutching her school books and frowning at the camera, visibly nervous, her hair pinned up and her slim legs pressed tight together at the knees but splayed at the ankles. She wore white socks and brown sandals with a buckled strap. What a geek, she said as I studied the photo. I said I was sure she grew out of the awkward stage, all children do, but she said she didn’t, not for a long time. Had she yet, I thought.
    But Iris, the younger sister, looked like trouble even then: a tooth missing, hair all adrift, scabby knees, a true hoyden in the making, and those eyes!—even in that creased black-and-white photo there was no escaping those big dark liquid pools of shining life. Behind the two girls stood an eccentric-looking woman in faded corduroy trousers and a man’s shirt, and an old straw hat, and a trug, with a cigarette between her teeth, and I thought at once: English. I knew the type. And behind her, in the shadow of the doorway, a tall indistinct figure who reminded me of the pitchfork man in Grant Wood’s
American Gothic.
As I slid the photograph back across the table she told me, as though in answer to a question I hadn’t asked, that she wasn’t an extrovert like Iris but she didn’t believe she was
frail
, psychologically. She was a solitary, yes, and Harriet—this was the mother—hadn’t tried to make her otherwise—she hadn’t tried to make her anything—but she
had
encouraged her to love her little sister and always look out for her. In this way she’d helped create a bond between the sisters that was supposed to never come undone.
    Oh, she’d begun to talk now. The floodgates were opening, and I advanced with care.
    —Your mother looks like an interesting woman, I said.
    —Harriet’s dead.
    She lifted her head and stared at me as though to have me look upon her suffering and tremble. Her mother always wanted to be called by her first name, she told me, not
Mommy
or
Mom.
    —How old were you?
    —Twelve. Iris takes after her. I don’t know who I take after. Not Daddy, that’s for sure.
    She said this with a fierce light in her eyes and an angry little laugh:
Not Daddy, that’s for sure.
Oh ho, Daddy’s a problem. Then she said it was her mother’s presence in the house that gave the place a sense of home. A child takes this for granted, she said, that the mother’s the living heart of the home. It was all lost when Harriet died. This was said dispassionately, carelessly, but the child’s grief was not hard to detect. What’s happened to this girl, I thought. Why has nobody looked after her?
    As for the father, Morgan Schuyler, the doctor, she had no difficulty describing him: a terrible, lank, tousled, frowning man in a baggy gray suit with wide suspenders and big dusty brogues on his feet, and long clever fingers stained yellow at the tips by nicotine—
    She shivered, describing this monster. A house like that, there had to