The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

In The Girl of the Lake, Bill Roorbach conjures vivid, complex characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary. Among the unforgettable characters Roorbach creates are an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past; and many more. These stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and unforgettable as Bill Roorbach's novels.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

Harbinger Hall

BOBBY MULLENDORE WAS SICK of sixth grade, especially without his best friend Jack B., plus it was spring. Painstakingly, key by key, a hard jab on each with his index fingers, he typed a missive in the exact language of the carbon copy Jack had given him as a good-bye treasure just this past fall, only adjusting the dates, and dropping in his own name:

Dear Mrs. Applegate: Due to a career emergency, we are moving as of 16 April 1963. Robert will attend his last class this Friday, April 13. He will start school in Asheville, North Carolina, a week hence. Please accept my apologies for this short notice. It could not be helped, and we regret it.

After twenty focused, difficult minutes, after typing the Sincerely yours one letter at a time, Bobby pulled the curled paper from the Royal Standard, flattened it carefully, and signed his mother’s name.

That afternoon at two fifteen, moving against the tide of the other kids leaving class, Bobby made his way to Mrs. Applegate’s desk. She was searching through a low drawer, sat up straight when he made a noise, looked surprised. And she just started talking, as she could do: “Robert! Well. Your homework is better the last few weeks. Your hands are much cleaner, too!”

Bobby made no response, just handed her the letter.

“Oh my!” said Mrs. Applegate.

“Yip,” Bobby said.

The next day, Mrs. Applegate sprang a surprise, just as she had for Jack’s departure: “Bobby Mullendore,” she announced, “is moving.”

MONDAY, BOBBY WORE THE same old clothes, but with the addition of one Sears Roebuck watch, a reviled Christmas present, strapped self-consciously to his wrist. Mom saw it and smiled inwardly but still visibly, knew in her Mom way not to say anything. Bobby walked to the bus stop clutching his lunch, stood there a minute in case Mom should look down the road, then leapt into the woods. Ancient Mr. Green stopped the old yellow beast, might have even honked (he didn’t like to miss a kid), but a couple of Bobby’s former classmates yelled out, “Moved! Moved!”

Bobby could hear Mr. Green croak, “Bobby moved?”

“Moved!” the kids cried.

Mr. Green: “Well okay, then!” The bus roared off, wouldn’t stop there again.

Bobby crossed Wahackme Road, trotted down to Dogwood Lane, ducked past Mrs. Smith’s, trotted down past the PRIVATE LANE sign, remembered to breathe, trotted along the high stone wall in front of the Schraeder’s house, then into the pine forest along the needle-soft path that would bring him to the old stone stable where he and Jack B. had found wondrous things: cigarette butts, beer bottles, a big-girl’s bra, a pair of tightie-whities with Brent Lovelace’s camp tags sewn in.

The stable was on the D’Arcy estate, Bobby knew, the centerpiece of which was a stone mansion five minutes on foot from the stable through well-kept forest on a wide bridle path. From another era, as Bobby’s dad phrased it. Jack B. and Bobby had often slipped up to the house at dusk to look in the windows, saw nothing but a maid once in uniform, and another time a small party—old people having dinner on the great stone patio. Jack B. had had the tuff idea of blowing squeals through long grasses, which they did. On the stone porch the party went silent in the night. The old people rose. “Now what’s that?” one said. And another: “That’s some sort of crane.” “Rare, I should think,” and pretty soon they’d left their desserts and come tottering across the lawn to investigate.

Bobby and Jack B. giggled back into the woods, blew parting calls all the way down the bridle path, luring the old folks on, then silence: the birds had flown. “Scared them off,” the one voice said. “Quite sure these are cranes,” said the other. The little knot of nine or ten old folks huddled there in the woods where any ogre might get them. “A harbinger, I should think,” that third voice said.

And then for months and months Bobby and Jack B. whispered those phrases under Mrs. Applegate’s nose: “Rare, I should think!” Stifled giggles. “A harbinger, I should think!” Gales of laughter, reprimands. The “I should think” became part of the comedy repertoire of the whole sixth grade: “Sloppy Joes for lunch, I should think!” The boys didn’t know what a harbinger was, and didn’t look it up, but Jack B. used the word to name the estate.

Bobby spent his first day of freedom in the abandoned stables of Harbinger Hall, inspecting every corner of the place, looking out every bubbled window, finding astonishing things to discuss in a possible letter to Jack B: six old horseshoes, a 1903 penny, a pair of girl’s underpants with two curled red hairs more or less pasted inside (Brent Lovelace’s girl Jenny Oswest had the reddest hair), rotting tack, the skeleton of a cat. He ate his lunch exactly at twelve fifteen at a desklike shelf in the groom’s quarters, no awful pressure to trade his Ring Dings for egg salad.

“FUNNIEST THING,” HIS MOM said at dinner (fish sticks and tartar sauce). “I saw Mrs. Crawford at the A&P, and she said she’d heard we’d moved!”

“Empty-headed woman,” Bobby’s dad said.

Bobby hadn’t thought till that moment that there was any possible flaw in his plan. But the train of conversation chugged quickly away from Mrs. Crawford (Benny C.’s mom) to a “communication” problem at Dad’s company in New York and then to a similar problem at Mom’s garden club. Bobby felt the safety of his plan settle in around him.

THE NEXT MONDAY, BOBBY stepped off the bridle path exactly where he’d stepped off each day the previous week, trotted into the forest on his recon trail till the mansion came into view. Now it was tree to tree, the Nazis in there holding Jack B., dark day, about to storm, and the microfilm in Bobby’s pocket in direst danger of getting wet in the rain and fizzing to deadly acid: he had to make the stone entryway where he’d brazenly hidden his G.I. poncho on Friday’s mission, a note to Jack B. folded inside it. Was Jack dead? Had Jack been able to decipher the encrypted message? The line of azaleas hid a machine-gun emplacement.

Bobby crawled on his belly in a stone-lined drainage ditch, then to the driveway portico and the grand entryway, breathing hard. His carbine, a polished stick, turned into a Luger lifted from a Nazi corpse. He tucked the weapon into his pants for the climb chink-to-chink up the stone wall of the entryway, a good twelve feet high. Bobby put his face in the void where the poncho would be. He held on to the rock crevices, muscles quivering with the effort. No poncho.

He climbed back down, pulled the heavy Luger from his pants, let it turn into a machine gun to be held with two hands. Who could have taken his poncho? The game had turned ninety degrees toward the real, and his fear turned with it. He flopped to his belly in the fine gravel of the drive, crawled the width of the great entryway, hidden only by the lip of the single marble step. Next corner of the house he peered around, peered into a study, saw the back of an old man writing at a desk! Writing orders to send Jack B. to the firing squad! Bobby stood, aimed his machine gun.

Exactly then Bobby heard two sudden steps in the gravel. An enormous hand grabbed his neck, another the belt of his pants, and someone lifted him off the ground. The game was over. This was one hundred percent real. Heavy foreign accent, however, very like that of the Nazis on TV, saying, “Vat does this mean!”

“I’m just a neighbor kid!”

“You are spyink!”

“I live over there!” Trying to point.

The man pulled Bobby up the step by the collar and belt, across the marble and through one set of massive oaken doors, then through a second set and into an expansive marble foyer. Bobby’s heart fluttered in his chest. He began to thrash, but the man just yanked him off his feet by the belt again, let him kick in the air.

The maid appeared, the very one, appeared on the great marble stair that rose straight ahead. She said, “Oh, is this the person who’s been . . . ”

“The same,” said Bobby’s captor.

“I’ll get Hilyard.”

And too soon a door opened and a butler came into the great foyer, an unmistakable butler in actual tails, carrying the poncho in front of him. He said, “This is . . . yours?”

“It’s just my raincoat,” Bobby said.

The butler produced the note to Jack B., read: “Attack-way 0900 hours-ay, illkay allway?” Then, translating: “Free you through back wall—stand clear for dynamite?”

“It’s just a game.”

“Use acid on maid’s face?”

“I’m sorry,” Bobby Mullendore said. He would not cry.

“What do you think, Dort? Shall we bother Mr. D’Arcy?” Hilyard said the master’s name in three distinct syllables like letters: D.R.C. He turned on heel. The hand at Bobby’s neck squeezed harder, urged him to follow. Prisoner and guards walked about a mile down a corridor of heavy doors to an elaborately arched stone doorway. The butler gave the gentlest knock. After a long, silent wait the thick door opened slowly.

“My,” said Mr. D’Arcy. He was the man Bobby had seen at his desk, the one Bobby had been about to machine gun through the great windows. He was way older than Grandfather, and more frail. He did not look kind.

“A game, he says,” said the butler.

“And what game was this?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“War?” Bobby said helpfully. “World War Two?”

“Do you call that a war?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

With the old man’s slow smile, Dort let go of Bobby’s neck, retreated silently down the hall. The butler lingered, but at a subtle nod from his master, sighed and padded off.

“Your name?” Mr. D’Arcy said.

“Bobby.”

“Come in, then, Robert,” Mr. D’Arcy said. “I’ve been expecting you.” He shuffled forward, impatiently waving for Bobby to keep up, as if Bobby were having a problem sustaining the old man’s tortoise pace. Bobby scoped the surroundings. The room was all dark wood. Books reached to the ceiling in dark bindings. The tall windows were filled with plants—some of them trees, really, growing in enormous earthen pots and pushing the dark, heavy curtains aside in their battle for sunlight. The floor was heavy reddish flagstone. A dozen tall floor lamps lit the whole warmly. The fireplace, set with a fire unlit, was tall as Mrs. Applegate—she could put her whole desk in there and stand behind it and her head wouldn’t even be up the chimney! The brightest spot in the room was Mr. D’Arcy’s desk, piled with books and papers and rubber stamps and a heavy old phone, all of it lit by two golden lamps. A tall accounting book lay open, a fountain pen uncapped upon it, work interrupted. Mr. D’Arcy straightaway recapped the pen, placed it in its golden holder. Bobby wasn’t scared at all, he told himself, something about all the books and lamps.

Mr. D’Arcy smelled of cologne, looked warmly stuffed—taxidermy in corduroy. He was carefully shaved, hair neatly trimmed, none of Grandpa’s long ear hairs and nose hairs, hair dyed black, it looked like, and shot through with white strands, all damply combed. The spotted hands had a little shake to them like conducting their own small orchestra. The face, when Mr. D’Arcy finally looked at Bobby, was large and serious, spots and lines, yet something kindly in there, something soulful and sad inside the hardness of the eyes.

“You want to play war?” Mr. D’Arcy said abruptly. And he marched around his desk to the bookcases, reached for a book, pulled at its spine, and a section of the bookcase slowly swung out into the room, a secret door straight from monster movies.

“Tuff,” said Bobby.

“Tough?” said Mr. D’Arcy.

“Cool,” said Bobby.

“Ah,” said Mr. D’Arcy.

In the new room there was just darkness until Mr. D’Arcy found the switch on the table lamp. When he closed the bookshelf door, the lamp was the only light. He said, “Our map room.” No windows, no door visible at all, but a fresh breeze coming from somewhere. Two walls were all big cabinets, narrow drawers. The other two walls offered complicated banks of roll-down maps. Mr. D’Arcy shuffled around the room, turned the switches on a dozen lamps, gradually lit a stately oaken table the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed end to end. A colorful map almost as long and wide as the table was already rolled out and weighted at its four corners with stout pyramids of iron.

What land did the old map show? Bobby bent to it with sharp eyes. It was like a painting, cracked and crinkled, hugely detailed, the lakes showing waves, the mountains green with white peaks, cities with ornate buildings, the borders with other countries orange and forbidding. The very lettering was foreign. Bobby had studied and imitated ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, knew the word cuneiform. But he didn’t know this alphabet.

Mr. D’Arcy let him look a while. “Now tell me Robert, to begin the game: what country is represented here?”

Bobby pored over the map, leaning into it, followed a great river with his finger. “I can’t read the names,” he said. The lines of latitude curved narrower and narrower to the top of the map where they nearly closed, forming a circle, and North was clearly enough delineated. Just off the thick paper, then, was the North Pole, correct?

Mr. D’Arcy said, “Of course you can’t read it. The alphabet is Cyrillic. That is your second clue.”

Make-believe? Was it a map of, like, Cyrillia? Bobby didn’t chance the answer. He kept up his close inspection, a creepy feeling tickling its way up his neck, walked slowly around the table away from the old man, examining the map all the while.

Mr. D’Arcy said, “One last, big clue: it is a country now part of the Soviet Union.”

“Russia!” Bobby said. Goosebumps rose on his arms.

“You are correct. Now. To make things easier, let us find a similar map marked in English.” Mr. D’Arcy shuffled to a bank of tall tubes, knocked on the correct one. Bobby helped him lift it—very heavy—and helped lug it to the table, and there they pulled it out, unrolled it over the first map, weighted it carefully flat with the iron pyramids.

“Russia!” Bobby said again. He recognized it now. He’d been hiding under his desk with the rest of his class for years in case these monsters dropped the atom bomb!

Mr. D’Arcy didn’t look like a spy. He only looked amused. He said, “Relics, these old campaign maps. I buy them at auction. What I paid for this would build a carriage house and two barns plus horses to fill a stable. But see how beautifully made. It shows the Russia of the tsars, and comes from one of their palaces. Now. Here’s our game. Let us call it ‘Russian Revolution.’ All right? And we are tsarists. Yes?” Mr. D’Arcy opened a drawer in the table, struggled to produce from it an ornate leather box, opened this carefully with both hands, tilted it to show Bobby what was inside: figurines—a dozen large handfuls of tiny metal people, nicely painted.

“We live over here.” Mr. D’Arcy walked around to Bobby’s side of the table very slowly, carrying the box of people. He placed it carefully atop the map, put a precise finger on St. Petersburg. “But it is summer now, so we are down here at our dacha, our summer cottage that is, just south of the great new city. The year is 1905.”

Bobby had his eyes on the figurines. Each was about one inch tall and there were hundreds, all seemingly different.

“Yes? Let’s put some players on the board. First, we’ll need a nobleman.” Mr. D’Arcy fished in the pile of little people, found a proud fellow dressed in a smart military-looking uniform. This he placed at the dacha. He said, “Our nobleman’s name, as our little game begins, is Count Darlotsoff. He is twenty-three years old—quite young to be running an estate, don’t you think? Quite young to be father of three children. But such was the time and place.

“Now, let us represent young Count Darlotsoff’s family.” Mr. D’Arcy emptied the leather box into the North Sea, shuffled a handful of people up next to Sweden, indicated with a quavering hand that Bobby should pick out the players as they were named. “Father, or the Old Count,” he said solemnly.

Bobby picked out a fat fellow in jacket and medals, put him near Count Darlotsoff.

“Now, Mother, or the Old Countess.”

And Bobby picked an overweight little thing in a gown painted red.

“Uncanny choices,” Mr. D’Arcy said.

Soon there was a crowd on the map in the area of the dacha, Count Darlotsoff’s relatives: his beautiful wife (a redhead like Jenny Oswest), their three children, her two sisters, their husbands, their six and eight children respectively, dozens of servants, two old aunts. The dacha was not a cottage at all, as Mr. D’Arcy described it, but several mansions surrounded by a dozen fine barns, huge fields. “The trees there,” Mr. D’Arcy said. “They were as big as our elms here in Connecticut—very large trees they were, Russian maples, I should say, in rows both sides of the lane. One looked down over long lawns to . . . what shall we call them? To terraced ponds, and past these one glimpsed the homes of the peasants, the Old Count’s people, as he called them, ‘My people,’ which he said as he might say ‘My cattle,’ people, as it happened, who were being stirred up by thinkers from St. Petersburg’s universities.”

The Old Count’s son, whom Mr. D’Arcy called the Young Count, was one of the troublesome thinkers. He’d taken the new philosophies deeply to heart, finding them humane, at least in theory, moderate and achievable. The serfs had been freed long before, in the year 1860, but freed only to economic slavery. The thinkers rose up with ideas to solve these problems: constitutional monarchy, social democracy, anarchism, nihilism, Bolshevism, Menshevism, land reform. The peasants began to covet the fields they worked.

Mr. D’Arcy gave Bobby a long look. “These are things we can talk about in the future, you and I, should you be inclined.”

Bobby nodded noncommittally, offered a polite smile.

Mr. D’Arcy fingered the figurine of the Old Count. “Him exactly,” he said. And then: “But I’m afraid our game starts with the violent death of this man, and with the revision, I should say, of the Young Count’s idealism.” The Old Count, it seemed, had cut off all but the most rudimentary foodstuffs to his peasants after the uprisings of 1905. He made hunting illegal, fenced off the ponds, saw trespassers and poachers hung. Mr. D’Arcy pointed at various places on the map as if the very neighborhoods and shop fronts and carriages were pictured there. The Neva blacksmith, he explained, Iosif Vladimirovich Alyoishin, became enraged when his dog was run over by the mounted escorts of the Old Count’s party, which had come into St. Petersburg to meet with the hated tsar. Iosif, a reader and declaimer of poetry, educated by the decrees of the Edict of Emancipation, eloquent far beyond his station, ran after the carriages, caught up with them at the Neva River Market, demanded restitution.

“And what do you think the Old Count said to kindly Iosif, Robert? Did he say he was sorry? Did he send a servant down next day with one of his two hundred forty-six dogs? No. The Old Count said this: ‘Well, blacksmith, call on butcher Evanitsky! You and your brothers won’t need your meat ration this month!’ ”

Iosif forgot himself and leapt, pulled the Old Count out of his saddle onto the cobblestones. And that might have been that, with Iosif hanged shortly, but the crowd surged in. There was no time for rope, no guns, none of that—the peasants pulled up cobblestones and bashed noble brains, carried the bodies through the market square, hung twelve of them on the iron spikes of the fence around the old church. The priest burst out, aghast, held his hands up for quiet, said: “You have proved to God that you are serfs always!”

Soon he was hanging from the fence himself.

Mr. D’Arcy gazed at the Old Count’s figurine a long time, said, “I’m glad you’ve picked him out—you’ve a marvelous eye—let us bury him. We’ll need a graveyard before we’re through, I should say! Let us put our cemetery somewhere beautiful, somewhere we won’t have to move it, here in Sweden, perhaps.”

Bobby flew the remains of the Old Count to Sweden with a slow, solemn hand, lay the fat little figurine on its back. In the ornate box of people he’d seen a priest, so he picked that figure out too, flew it slowly to Sweden, visibly pleasing Mr. D’Arcy, then found eleven nobles one at a time, flew them to Sweden, too.

Bobby said, “The tsar is like the king?”

“Bigger than a king! And his work of repression—repression is a holding down by force—the repression in those years was bloody, inhuman. All of life became so. Murder poured from the palace. The Young Count prevented what he could on his own lands through acts of kindness, but saw Iosif to the gallows, saw half the peasant men of the county hung, as well, for merely having been in the square. Then history moved forward. You’ll want to pick out some babies there, and more children, and some teens, and some young adults. Six in ten must be buried. Disease, largely, but common accidents as well.”

Bobby counted out a dozen babies and young children and youths and maidens, flew them solemnly to the growing pile in Sweden. Mr. D’Arcy stood as if at a funeral, watched each flight to heaven solemnly, none of the familiar adult hurrying or condescension when it came to make-believe.

When all the dead were safely buried, he said, “World War I broke out in 1914. The Young Count was less young now. His politics, which had formerly urged him toward an enlightened aristocracy, urged him now toward an unpopular parliamentarianism in which a monarch might have some role, however ceremonial. I hope you are following some of this, Robert. Good, good—smart boy—we’ll fill in the gaps presently—we have years to come in our friendship!”

Bobby grinned. He wasn’t having trouble following Mr. D’Arcy—there was the map in front of them, the. . .