“Your nursery? You were raised in this house, then?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but I never lived in that room. It’sfor someone else.”
The man didn’t care by then, what she said; he pushed herinto the door and kissed her, and she laughed, and kissed him too. I moved downthe stairs, feeling sick, feeling exhilarated. If she wanted someone, she couldwant me. Her eyes widened as I came closer, but the man didn’t see me, not soonenough anyway, only when I threw him into the wall.
“He hit his head hard,” the Glaire woman whispered, kneelingbeside him. “He won’t want me any longer, he’ll believe all the rumors. And hewas the only outsider I’ve seen in so long.”
“Don’t take his bones. Take mine,” I said.
“It’s not his bones I want,” she said, and she swung openthe door to the nursery. A maple bassinet trimmed in tulle stood in the middleof the room, casting a long oval shadow on a wooden crate. Her nursery, she hadsaid, but not the nursery where she had grown up; that was somewhere else inthe house, a different Glaire woman’s legacy. This one was supposed to be forher own child.
“Whose bones are in the walls then?” The memory of marrowsoured in my mouth. I wanted my bones in the walls, I wanted the house todevour me; who were the other skeletons in the foundation, if not young menwhose fathers gave them away?
“My mother’s,” she said, “and my grandmother’s, and soonmine.” She smiled at me then and her face did crack, the mask tearing until Icould make out a face flat and colorless and sneering.
“Let me stay,” I said.
“You couldn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “The fathersnever stay, that’s how I knew you were something worse. Didn’t your father tellyou the story already, or don’t you know?”
“I know that the Glaire woman told him to come back.”
“She told him no such thing,” she whispered. “She told himto go, and he refused. He stayed a year in this house, until my mother birtheda son. And then she expelled him. She told him never to return, nor to bringyou either. There should not have been a Glaire man, you see. It will be thedeath of the house, of the family. There are only supposed to be daughters.”
I was not in the least startled to learn that I was theGlaire woman’s brother; I had passed, by then, the threshold at which anythingstill could amaze me. “Don’t make me go,” I said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. “I wouldn’t. You muststay for as long as it takes. The rest of your life, if needed. As long as youneed to unbuild the Glaire house, bone-by-bone.”
◊
I do not encounter the Glaire woman often anymore. She hasgotten her daughter from some unsuspecting boy; she has assembled a nursery forthe child out of her own mother’s bones. She recognizes that the infant girl islikely to be the last in an ancient line, and naturally we both dote on thechild. But I emerge from my feast at intervals increasingly far apart, monthsand then years. The child wears a new parlor mask whenever I see her. Soon shewill put on her mother’s beautiful face; soon her mother will wear the mossyhair and eyes like stones. I go unchanged, besides the multitude of glancingwounds inflicted by plaster and drywall. Starving but never starved, gorged butnever sated.
I have seen my father through a dust-fogged gable window,distant and obscure, looking with longing upon the half-eaten shreds of thedelicacy which is mine. He lingered for a moment, he made as if to approach thefront door, but he had no claim any longer. It was mine now, it was more andmore inside me; we will not outlive each other.
The Fifth Gable
The first woman tolive in the four-gabled house fermented her unborn children in the wine cellar.When they came to term, she broke them open on the floorboards. Her heartiestson weighed half an ounce at birth. His face, curved to the shape of the Masonjar womb where he developed, stayed pink for an hour before he died in a puddleof formaldehyde and afterbirth.
The second woman to live in the four-gabled house pulled herchildren from the ground like stubborn roots. They came out of the soilsmelling of pollen, with faces like tulips. They were healthy until she cuttheir stems, and then they withered. They returned reedy and gray-faced to theearth.
The third woman in the four-gabled house said she had nochildren.
The fourth woman in the four-gabled house built her childrenfrom the parts of old radios and tractors. Their cries sounded like thespinning of propellers. Some of them could blink and one could even smile, butbreast milk fried their motors. In their mother’s arms, they dissolved intoheaps of crackling wires.
◊
The women had been married before, to ordinary men, but noone wanted to mention that, in light of what happened to the children.
The women in the four-gabled house no longer got manyvisitors.
◊
All through the month of September, the women in thefour-gabled house watched as a sober, clean-faced young creature walked downtheir street, past their house, to the end of the cul-de-sac, then turned andwalked back.
The stranger would not walk in a neighborhood asunfashionable as their neighborhood if she did not want something with thefour-gabled house and the women who lived there, they were sure of it.
“We should call someone,” said the woman who made her bed inthe second gable of the four-gabled house. “Get a neighborhood watch together.”
“Nonsense. She’s probably selling magazine subscriptions,”said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable of the four-gabled house.“Or collecting bits of metal for the war effort, or trying to interest us in aquilting bee so the orphans can have blankets. Or she’s from some society thathas asked her to come by our house, but the problem is that she’s just tooscared to do it.”
“Are we still frightening?” said the woman
