“Well, who else do you think I’d be?” she asked, and followed that with a one-syllable laugh. She turned, and the woman who had first greeted me stepped up beside her. “What do you think, Mrs. McGruder?” Mrs. Winston asked her.
“A risk at minimum, Mrs. Winston. She has the face of an angel, however.” She drew closer and looked at me harder. “I see no trouble in her eyes now, but these eyes have seen trouble,” she continued.
“Exactly my thoughts,” Mrs. Winston said. “Well, come into the sitting room,” she said, “and we’ll see about you.”
Once again, I didn’t know whether to be amused or angry. I wasn’t at the Winston House to be interviewed for a job. I was there as a paying customer. They both stepped aside to make way for my entrance. I picked up my suitcase, hesitated, and then entered the house. Mrs. McGruder stepped forward quickly to close the door behind me.
I was pleasantly surprised by the brightness and the color scheme of the entrance hall. The walls had apple-green and white paper, divided into broad panels with white molding. The wainscoting was stained dark green. On the floor was a green-and-white-checked rug with a plain border, and against the wall were a settee and two chairs with white woodwork and green upholstery. The white console opposite was beneath a mirror. A green-and-white-lattice plant stand held purple and pale yellow irises. Ahead of us was a white stairway with box trees in green tubs at the foot of it. The air was perfumed with the scent of fresh spring flowers.
“This way,” Mrs. Winston said.
I followed them to the right to enter what I thought was a small, rather cluttered sitting room. Every available space was taken up with antiques—clocks, statuary, sepia photographs in old frames, music boxes, and, of course, leather-bound books with yellowing pages. The furniture looked as if it had been there from the first day anyone had moved into the house.
There were large, comfortable-looking mahogany chairs, a sofa, and two footstools grouped around the fireplace. To the right of that was a table with a lamp, some books and magazines neatly stacked, and two more chairs nearby. Across the way was a tall secretary with a straight chair. The woodwork, walls, and fireplace were a soft gray. The rug was a plain velvet, and the curtains were in a chintz pattern with green foliage. Despite how crowded the room was, it did look cheerful and cozy.
Mrs. Winston indicated the sofa for me, so I lowered my suitcase and sat. She took one of the chairs facing me, but Mrs. McGruder stood off to the side near the entrance.
“This rooming house has been in my family for over two hundred years. It didn’t begin as a rooming house, of course. Families were a lot larger back then, but over the years, as our family thinned out, some moving away, we began to take in boarders. I’ve been doing it from the day I was married to Knox Winston. We raised our two children in this house while we had three boarders. They became members of our family. I’m telling you this so you will understand why it is so important to us to know all about the people who want to stay here for however long that might be.
“Now, I will say, you are the youngest person ever to wish to do so. Naturally, then, we would want to know a little more than usual about you. If this is offensive to you, please be assured that you won’t be hurting our feelings by leaving right now.”
She didn’t look at Mrs. McGruder. I did and saw her staring at me so intently that I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated. In some ways, she reminded me of Mrs. Fennel, who had the eyes of someone who could look through your very soul.
I shifted my legs and nodded. “What do you want to know about me?”
“Well, for starters, why are you in Quincy?”
“I wanted to start my own life, and I wanted to start as far away from my father and his current wife as I could,” I began.
My story seemed to unfold as I told it, emerging from real events as much as from things I invented. My older sister Ava, when she was training me to take over her position in our family, had told me that we have a unique ability to fabricate on the spot. “We do it so well,” she had said, “that we come to believe what we invent.” She’d laughed. “Sometimes it’s impossible to distinguish what really happened from what we claim happened. It’s in our nature to be deceptive, because deception is protection. Whether you want to be a good liar or not, Lorelei,” she’d said, “you are.”
“My goodness, why do you want to be as far away as possible from your father?” Mrs. Winston asked, this time looking at Mrs. McGruder, who narrowed her eyes and nodded softly, as if she had always known what I was about to say or, more accurately, create.
“Where are you from?” Mrs. McGruder asked before I could respond.
“Southern California, Los Angeles,” I said.
She nodded at Mrs. Winston. “Thought so,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’m an only child,” I said. “I was very close with my mother. We were more like sisters.”
Mrs. McGruder liked that. She walked over to sit beside Mrs. Winston.
“In fact, I knew she was very sick before my father knew,” I continued. “During a routine physical exam, the doctor discovered that she had bone cancer. My father was never one to tolerate sickness and weakness, either in my mother or in myself. Whenever I was ill, he practically ran out of the house and always left everything for my mother to do, so you can imagine what he was like when she told him the bad news.”
“And they wonder if women are stronger than men,” Mrs. McGruder said.
Mrs. Winston nodded, pressing her lips together. “I should know,” she said. “I had to take care of my paternal grandmother, didn’t I? My husband found every excuse to avoid seeing her when she was in the hospital, too.”
“Don’t I remember. The burden you had,” Mrs. McGruder said, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. “Any other Christian soul would have collapsed under the weight.”
I could see I had begun to swim in the stream of their sympathy. I sighed and pressed my fingers against my eyes as if to stem the leaking tears.
“I was the one who took my mother to every doctor’s visit,” I continued. “My father was on one of his so-called business trips when I had to take her to the hospital that final time. He never said good-bye. I tried to do it for him, but my mother knew I was only trying. You can’t hide the truth from someone on death’s door. Lies and hypocrisy are turned away.”
“Poor dear,” Mrs. Winston said, nodding. She looked at Mrs. McGruder. “Some of us have no choice about when we have to grow up and put away childish things.”
“Amen to that,” Mrs. McGruder said, and clicked her tongue again.