The Rectory

By Robert Hughes

When Laurel and her family find an old summer house on the far east end of Long Island, they hope also to find peace, as they recover from the sudden death of their young son. Amid the cobwebs and clutter of the old rectory, Laurel comes upon a century-old diary that details the story of a lonely woman who lived in the house, and who wrote about some of the eerie visitors who would call on her at night. Laurel also finds a book that seems to have the power to bring back her son. Is she under the delusion of grief, or is something more at stake? Her husband, her friends, and even herself, think she's in danger from her own fantasies. "The Rectory" explores how one lonely woman copes with loss, and to powers that prey upon the grief-stricken.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Hughes
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476090948

Book preview

Chapter 1

May 22

The path of longing is strewn with madness. Even severed tulips in their tepid water turn toward the drying sun and wither into husks.

Those who felt the cold allure of the rectory, its promise of fleeting happiness, its threat of unending wrath, still looked to it to nourish their delusions. Over its two centuries the rectory waited, waited for the hungry, the underfed. It was nonetheless inviting, a blemished and approachable lover, its knotted pine boards creaking underfoot, its boxy stairs a hazard for an unwary traveler’s tread, its small squinting windows walleyed and unnerving, one reading your secrets as another peered beyond you to ensure you were alone and yearning to connect.

Here where water curled around the land, which dipped its gnarled finger into the choppy waves, the houses brewed under the salt and wind and relentless seasons. Fishermen had built these places, or whalers had, used to the churning seas, the unhappy restless air. Now they were second homes, their rough enduring clapboard a sign of weathered charm for the unhappy restless folk who sought temporary refuge here.

Laurel, unhappy, restless, had lived her life with water as her boundary, her guide, her constant. She knew that out west where the mountains circled the high plateaus, people coordinated themselves in relation to the ridges, north or south or east, and got their bearings from the jagged outcroppings of geological anger. Her own compass was the Hudson, and she sensed its light, its tides, its effluvial moods, beyond the buildings to the west. She was no seafarer, but the sea was hers, like nitrogen and carbon dioxide, part of the atmosphere she breathed, the thoughts she exhaled.

Her Shelby loved the water too, and they would sit on the grassy slopes near the river, sometimes when the water was high, and the two of them would count the sailboats skittering over the breezy waves and the sluggish barges that lumbered below the bridge southward to where the harbor, which they only sensed around the curve of the island and the widening expanse of light, opened itself to the Atlantic.

He would have loved it here in Marion, on the far north fork of Long Island. Laurel could tell from how this house – which had been a rectory – stood just so, far enough from the bay to withstand the surging storms that would rack this narrow stretch of land in winter yet close enough so that a tang of salt crystallized the air around its hedges.

He would have loved it here, Laurel said, peering up at the house. She felt a glow of appreciation from it somehow. Stan turned to her. She could see in the slight upturn of his lips something that should have been a smile but now was more questioning than reassuring. She couldn't blame him. She sometimes didn't realize that she was speaking. Or that her conversations with Shelby might be heard by others.

Yes. He touched her shoulder, and she flinched. Just a bit. Stan went back to unpacking the minivan. Molly had already run into the house, or as Laurel had begun to think of it now, the rectory, behind Kevin.

They'd shared a house with Kevin and one of his friends for as long as they could remember, every summer, since before Stan and she were even married. Except last year.

Kevin came out again to help unload the car, which was heavy with paper goods, water bottles, groceries, canvas bags. I'm glad we're here, he said.

Laurel looked up at the house, its weathered clapboard, forest-green shutters, the screened porch with its indentations from the wind, the rows of narrow rectangular windows under the eaves, the little cupola sprouting from the roof. It felt somehow familiar.

I'm glad I'm here, too she said. It seems as if I know the rectory already.

It looks benign enough. He hauled the packages through the front door.

Laurel went in after him, holding her hands in front of her, blinded by the sudden shadow. She breathed in the musty lives that made this place a home, this house so long unoccupied yet bearing the laughter and the losses of a time before it would have known her.

In the porch she could smell the faint bliss of hydrangeas through the screens. She lowered her hand and ran her fingers along the ridges of a wicker chair. Beside the rocker were a chaise longue and a love seat, a small wooden table with its finish worn away. The hydrangeas blocked the house from the street and obscured the view but Laurel could already see herself resting here protected from the bugs, half outside, yet surrounded by flowers and the sighing sea breeze just beyond the hedges and the pachysandra lawn.

She sat in the rocker, and creaked it back and forth a few times, listening to the house. Branches rustled. Birds twittered among them. The air was light with late spring. She heard a chord, a briny C major.

Kevin was in a small room off the vestibule, seated at a large mahogany upright that was pushed against one wall under a heavy faded mirror. He looked over at her, his moist honey eyes hovering as they often did between childlike sweetness and canny determination. He formed a few wincing chords on the out-of-tune strings.

I'll set my keyboard up by the window, if that's okay.

You know it is.

His fingers traced a fractured melody on the keys.

I've written something for you.

For me. Kevin had a harem of singers who incorporated his art songs into recitals. Laurel's singing was, at best, amateur, though on occasion Kevin would ask her to sing for him while he played, and his expert musicianship coaxed something like adequacy out of her voice.

In memory. Perhaps a birthday blessing. I'll play it for you. Not just yet. Let's settle in first.

I'd love to hear it. She found the pieces of his face in the mirror where the silver backing hadn't flaked off. Thank you, she said to his shards.

I Took One Draught of Life.

He gave Laurel a puppy look. How a forty-five-year-old bald man managed to come off so young was beyond her. He had lost his mother just before Shelby left the world, yet he managed to face the continuing prospect of life without a family anchor. He had his career, his art. Laurel had her daughter. Her husband.

Laurel wanted to ask Kevin if his mother ever spoke to him now. Maybe not directly. Laurel remembered hearing Kevin's memorial work the month before, at a rehearsal in the glacial apartment of one of the many spectral benefactors whom he had gathered to him. The pentatonic calm of one line that the rising soprano had sung, two baby blots of dew reflect glimmerings of you, had stayed with her.

Molly called to Laurel from upstairs.

We haven't even been to see the bedrooms, Laurel said, half-pulling herself up the squared-off boxy stairs, which were too tall by far to make it easy to skip up and down them. Builders used to build box stairs when they finished houses in a hurry, since it was easier to nail in existing planks rather than take the time to measure for the tread of actual footsteps. She'd have to be careful on them. Going up, she felt a shudder, as if something had fallen past, or rather, through her.

Did you feel that?

The wind, maybe?

Molly had already claimed a room at the far end of the hall, near the door to the attic. The wide hall had a good landing, where a mirror hung over the depth of the staircase, opposite a wooden railing. Two rooms looked out on either side of the hall. At the end of the hall a doorway led to what Laurel figured was an attic.

Molly's room looked over the back of the house, to a field where a dark big tree shrouded the grass and out toward the stretch of the bay a hundred yards or so past it. Through the windows the masts of moored sailboats at the pier tilted in the lapping breeze like bleached whale bones.

Molly was lying on her bed, her head propped on the flat pillows there, her legs scissoring apart as if she were making a snow angel in the downy bedspread.

Can I sleep here, Mommy?

Of course you can, sweetheart. Laurel sat next to her and brushed her fingers along Molly's bangs. Kevin stood in the doorway. They didn't speak for a moment. Laurel felt conscious of him looking at her, conscious of her position there on the bed with Molly, conscious that, to Kevin, who tended to frame every sight as if it were a tableau in an art box of his imagination, Laurel must have looked like she was pretending to be a supplicating mother. Molly had her father's stoicism, his ability to shake the water from himself and get on with life. Shelby had been more like Laurel, seeking glimmerings in a spot of dew.

The room next to this one is for you, Laurel said to him after a minute. For you and Ian, if he gets a chance to visit from his teaching this summer. It seems big enough.

I'm sure it will be okay. Molly, would you like to help me set up my keyboard? He held out his hand to her. Kevin had an unaffected way with children.

Laurel's and Stan's room had a double bed, actually two twin beds pushed together and sagging a bit under the weight of long-gone bodies huddling there for warmth, a Shaker-style chair that served as a nightstand, a squat chest at the foot of the beds, a Dresden blue patchwork quilt folded in a neat rectangle atop it. A large bureau took up the wall opposite the bed. A white pitcher and bowl sat on a lace runner yellowed like a sun-aged newspaper. The silver backing on the mirror had flaked off here too, reflecting the room in puzzled slivers.

Stan was arranging the desk, placing his Lucretius, his Pliny, his Latin-English dictionaries, his laptop, legal pads, index cards just so. The desk had a heavy wooden paperweight sculpture of a curled and sleeping cat that seemed as if it had nestled there itself, as if the wood were breathing. Laurel touched it. It felt warm with life. But that was the sun.

Stan gave her a tentative smile. Is this okay? I'm not hogging all the room, am I?

The porch downstairs will suit me fine.

He came over to Laurel and bent to kiss her cheek. He placed a finger on her head and ran it down the curls of her hair, the kind of casual intimate gesture he had made when they'd first met in the roaring nineties at a party for her friend Alicia's first novel, back when literary gatherings were celebrations rather than hopeful wakes.

Their eyes met, his with the resignation Laurel had come to know better than any other expression lately, as if Stan had always just come back from the precipice of giving up on Laurel altogether.

This will help, I know, she said, taking his hand. Something about the place…

I hope so. I really do, Laurel. I need—

She pressed a finger to his lips. She knew he was about to say he needed her, Molly needed her, they both needed her. She'd heard it before, and played it back to herself countless times over the past year and a half. I know, Stan. I know. She kissed him then, feeling the bristles of his goatee. She left him to his books, his arranging, his concern.

An old green sofa, which looked like an American Sheraton from two hundred years ago, inhabited a good part of the parlor downstairs. It felt firm, but not uncomfortable. Almost new, in fact. Above the squat fireplace was a framed, yellowed map of the east end of Long Island, craggy with exaggerated inlets. Laurel found the town of Marion isolated past the causeway at the tip of the tine of the North Fork.

Where unceasing sea begins, Kevin said behind her. They stared at the map for a minute. She could hear Molly trying a tune on his keyboard in the adjacent room. Stan clomped down the box stairs and asked Kevin for advice about what was in season. Already discussing dinner. Maybe it would be like years before.

Laurel opened the creaking door of a closet built next to the fireplace. Its interior colored with streaks of bloody rust. An old andiron, an ash shovel, a bristle-starved broom leaned against one wall. Against another were some empty frames and a couple of paintings.

She pulled out two portraits of hollow-eyed forebears. One showed a spinsterish woman with a dead gaze and the other a timid-looking man in a clerical collar. The painter's skill didn't extend to much more than perhaps a general sort of likeness. Yet something in their faces had come through, some emotional energy, something that leapt out. It might have been the nature of those mock-Colonial portraits where everyone looked stern and remonstrating and Old Testament. It might have been fear. The woman looked somehow familiar, even with her yesteryear hair, her determined hazel eyes, her face like Jael about to hammer a nail into the head of Sisera.

Chapter 2

Later that day

Laurel kept out of the way when Stan and Kevin cooked. Her kitchen skills were indifferent at best, better suited to a child's palate than that of a husband who immersed himself in Roman culture and a cuisine of honey and garum. Shelby used to watch her in the kitchen, chatting with her as she thawed and reheated. He had eaten whatever she'd made without question, as boys often do, ever hungry, eager for more. Molly usually preferred Stan's dinners, and tolerated Laurel's lunches.

Before dinner Molly played for them a bit of the little Mozart sonata she had learned, the one in C that seemed so childlike in the first movement and later turned to G minor as if the tender sorrows of the world kept lapping back.

When the table was half-cleared they all remained seated, taking in their togetherness, talking of work. Kevin spoke about his new opera commission — The Professor's House — and his librettist, a drama critic who was learning quickly that it's easier to observe than to create. Stan let on a little about his novel on the love life of the Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius, about his De Rerum Naturam, about the Roman ideas of the afterlife and Lucretius's conception of nothingness in the face of our atomic essences. Laurel mentioned the memoir she'd been editing before she was laid off, a young woman's path to religious vocation, a kind of Teresa of Avila of the suburbs, minus the convent-building and visions. She said she might find some freelance work, but now that they were out there, she knew she wouldn't seek too diligently.

We're out here for the summer, but we always talk about work, Kevin said.

It's hard to relax. Time slips by, Stan said.

I can sympathize, Laurel said.

Laurel, this was your idea, Stan said.

I'm not complaining. This place is special.

Well, Molly already loves it, which is a relief.

Laurel knew that parents talked about their children more after they began to lose interest in or become distant from each other. Molly's friends or school would fill enough time between Stan and Laurel so that their silences were less heavy than they might have been.

So this last-minute rental might do for them all, considering they weren't even sure they'd be heading out there until a couple of weeks ago. Her therapist David, with his almost-handsome pockmarked face, had urged her to leave the city for a while. He tended to repeat her name twice, as if it were a lament. Laurel. Laurel. You need to get away. Which had broken the reverie into which she had usually sunk when they met, the long pauses between sentences as she looked at him, wondering how he'd grown up, before his lunar complexion had matured into something approaching character. Anything other than discussing herself.

I was just thinking of the piano we'd bought for Shelby, she had countered. "Molly has talent, but Shelby seemed to have a real gift for music. He could hear anything, even old stuff like Swanee or After the Ball, and play them immediately."

I was a musical prodigy, David had said. A pianist.

Laurel had looked around his bland undecorated corporate office, the cheap frame on his diploma, the whole witness-protection air of the place. A pianist.

Yes. Concerts and everything. But this life held more glamour for me. He indicated the room with his pencil, then stared at her for a moment. A joke. The pressures of practice and competition and my demanding, determined parents and the whole ferocious show-business world quashed my enthusiasm. Gone. Pfft. Over. I'm the ghost of a former talent.

You moved on.

He had nodded. His appraising gray eyes unnerved her. As if he had known she would always hold things back. She'd gone to David just those few times after Shelby's death, when her publisher urged her — back in the days when companies offered assistance and counsel rather than exit packages — to call the office help line for counseling. She had barely told Stan about these visits. Not that she'd told him much anyway in the past eighteen months. Laurel had shut down, as David termed it, when he meted out a frugal phrase describing aspects of her condition.

Laurel took his advice, and had actually found this rectory on the Internet, typing in the vaguest of search terms, house, old, atmosphere, sea. Especially sea. Pictures popped up that had a special resonance, as if she could sense life behind the windows. She had emailed.

It's a lovely, lovely place, the response came back. Pristine, to be honest, the note added. Practically a time capsule. Nothing's been touched in ages. Nothing needs to be. We've been trying to rent it out for years, but the owners wouldn't let us put it on the market till now. And the price is barely a third of similar rentals.

Laurel wrote back, And who are the owners?

A local family. No longer local. But very private. Interested?

She was. It was arranged. No human contact necessary and the house was theirs.

I think I'll like it here, she said to the table. Hadn't she already said the same thing several times today?

I hope so, honey, Kevin said. You keep drifting off like that we'll have to adjust your medication.

Upstairs, Molly was reading a tattered hardbound copy of The Secret Garden, which she'd found among the piles of old books that littered the parlor and the bedrooms. A small lamp on the bedside table cast a modest glow. She leaned the pages of the book toward the light and looked up when Laurel sat on the bed.

Will you be okay here, honey?

Molly nodded, keeping the book propped up on her chest.

We'll have to fix that light. It's not strong enough.

It's okay.

Laurel leaned over and stroked her hair. Molly had Stan's seriousness of expression, but a softness that Laurel already anticipated causing heartbreak in high school. Nothing could prevent that, though. Molly had accepted her brother's death as a great tragedy in their lives, but seemed to realize, even at nine, the unfairness of life.

Laurel kissed Molly's forehead. Another ten minutes, then lights out?

Okay.

You'll be good? This is good for us here. You know that, right?

I know. 'Night, Mommy. I love you.

Love you too.

Mommy?

She paused at the door.

Yes?

Where would Shelby have slept?

I don't know, honey. Upstairs maybe? We would have found space.

Molly considered this, then leaned back onto her pillow. Laurel closed the door, leaving it slightly ajar. She looked down the hall, toward Stan's and her room, toward Kevin's. She noticed a staircase there up to the attic.

She looked back at Molly, who had already nodded off, the book resting on her chest. Downstairs, Kevin decided to call it a night and Stan as well. He said he'd see her upstairs perhaps, not even attempting a parting kiss. He managed a little nod of understanding, as if she were to be forgiven daily.

Laurel sat in the parlor for a while, in a pool of light from the old-fashioned lamp, looking around her, up toward the ceiling, almost willing the air to produce a welcoming apparition, an angel of mercy.

At one point she thought she could hear a tumble of footsteps, then laughter, then Molly crying out. But when she looked in on her, Molly was fast asleep, silent as an afterthought. These houses had aural memories. Souls live on in perpetual echoes. Laurel found herself living on in the unending hours when she had first found Shelby unconscious in his bed that late winter night. She thought he too had cried out and had gone in to check on him one last time. When she'd bent over to kiss him she saw he was unmoving, not in sleep but in a