The Children(11)
Those early months were a crash course in small injuries. They were unsurveilled, unimpeded, free to be scraped by branches, cut by rocks, bruised by everything, worked over like cheese on a box grater when they inevitably slid the wrong way off a tree’s trunk or down a creek bank.
When they were hurt badly enough, they went to Llewellyn, who patched them up with calm efficiency and without reprimand. He was easy to find, installed morning to night in an empty outbuilding that stood between the orchard and the house. It was built like a church in miniature: high and narrow, a severe American folly. He’d taken to calling it his studio.
Their father did not love the house. Not like the rest of them did. He slept inside it, and when the sun rose he trekked out the back door with his thermos of tea, which transmuted into wine or whiskey when the afternoon grew long. In the studio he kept himself in practice, reading plays and poetry and listening to old records, gospel and folk and soul. The guns he’d removed from the house were stashed there, though the children weren’t supposed to know that.
The studio was also the seat of his apothecary. There he lashed the children with peroxide, wrapped wrist sprains, kissed bruises. When mosquitoes flashed like loose change in the trees, he fed them match heads. And if their cuts bled through too many Band-Aids, he stitched them up, neatly as the cloth skin of dolls. His mother, he told them, had been a bit of a healer. A bit of a hedge witch, too. She knew what cooled a fever and soothed an itch; she knew what stopped a liar’s tongue or started a love affair.
Llewellyn planted his own witch’s garden in a ring around the studio. Dusty rosemary, glossy bay laurel, angelica frothing in green and white. Ennis looked up the new plantings in their father’s big flaking book of gardener’s lore. Angelica: longevity and protection. Bay: abundance and protection. Rosemary: purity and protection.
Often they found their father pacing the land, talking to himself, consulting marked-up scripts. Sometimes he made them act out a particularly thorny bit of stage business to see if it worked. Guinevere liked being hauled about like a mannequin, his warm hands on her shoulders, his eyes seeing not his daughter but a duchess, a maiden, a tricky society wife. In Venice he’d moved through their lives like a golden satellite, dazzling and disappearing on repeat. Here he stood still. He had no one to talk to, so he talked to his children.
He was, of course, a good storyteller. His favored topics: fairy tales, the theater, and women. There were two kinds of women in Llewellyn’s accounts. First, the lush population of aunts and cousins who peopled his Welsh childhood, alongside his sainted and long-dead mother. Second, girls.
All his tales of conquest bore a family resemblance. First looks leading to stolen kisses giving way to romantic pratfalls and acts of daring, culminating in a standard end: Llewellyn running away, a pack of angry brothers set like dogs at his heels.
“What about Mom?” Guinevere asked him once. She knew a little bit—Edith’s mother had been one of the producers behind Llewellyn’s Broadway debut, they’d met at the theater—and she wanted more. A funny story like the ones from his youth. Edith cast as a pretty, sharp-tongued girl, cutting Llewellyn down to size.
But her father looked startled. A sleepwalker tugged free of a dream.
“Edith.” He said her name like it was something he was turning in his hands. A device of indefinable purpose. If it hadn’t been twilight, if the liquid in his cup hadn’t yet turned into wine, Guinevere thought he might not have answered. He gave a funny smile and said, “Listen.”
Their cue to sit, to hush. They took it.
“I thought she was a ghost, the first time I saw her.” Almost apologetically he added, “I was playing Hamlet. My head was full of it. Death, soliloquy, that strong medicine of rigorous work. ‘My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’”
He said the line with sudden force, startling the children. The past didn’t startle. It crept closer, tightening around them like a focusing spotlight.
“It was the night before we opened. Our Broadway opening, we’d already had a run in the West End. I should’ve been gone, in bed, except I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I stayed and went over the blocking. Not just mine, everyone’s, the whole play. I’ve always liked to do that. Speaking the lines in my head—I didn’t want to overwork my voice. I was looking out at the sea of seats, thinking Ophelia’s bit. ‘And I a maid at your window, to be your Valentine.’”
His voice went feminine and somehow thrilling. Suddenly Guinevere could see him onstage. Not a man playing a woman playing Ophelia, but Ophelia herself. She shivered.
“I turned, and there she was. Standing next to the ghost light. I really did believe for a moment she was not of this world. She looked like . . . not Ophelia. Like Persephone. Fresh as springtime. With eyes like two holes in the ground.”
Guinevere glanced uneasily at Ennis. He was focused on their father.
“‘Easy is the way down to the Underworld,’” Llewellyn murmured. “‘By night and by day dark Hades’ door stands open. But to retrace one’s steps and to make a way out to the upper air, that’s the task.’” He raised a hand. “Her hair was so black I couldn’t see it at first. Only that face, like a little white flower. Queen of Flowers. Queen of Hell.” The hand that gestured around his head to signify black hair came fluttering uncertainly down. “And I was lost.”