Mommys boy, p.10
Mommy's Boy, page 10
In the firelight, his face looks younger and also more gaunt, like a mask has slipped and left the bone map beneath. He glances at the piano against the far wall. It is always closed, a dark mouth without teeth.
“She played every evening. Chopin, sometimes Debussy when she dared. You could tell how the day had gone by which key she struck first.”
He doesn’t look at me when he speaks. His eyes are fixed somewhere beyond the flames, a room behind the room. A little boy under the piano. The picture unfolds itself in my head as he speaks, as if he’s handed it to me and I am developing it under the red light of the fire. Small hands flat on the rug, the underside of the instrument a black cathedral of wood and strings. Mother’s foot working the pedal, slipper heel scuffed, blue silk hem brushing the top of his ears. Music hanging above him like weather.
“My father…” The word leaves his mouth like iron scraped across stone. “He liked order.”
He smooths invisible dust from the arm of the chair.
“He believed obedience was not a virtue but a fact. Like gravity. Or winter.” His mouth curves, but it isn’t a smile. “He would stand in doorways and watch. To be watched by him was to have your skin pulled tight.”
I think of the diaries, the ink that turned frantic in Isobel’s hand. He wants me to be perfect, but I am fading. The fire pops. Stuart flinches, then stills as if ashamed of the flinch.
“She was frail,” he continues, his voice softening into that private reverence reserved for the dead. “Delicate, he used to say, like he was praising a vase. Nerves, they called it then. But to me she was…” He searches the air with his fingers as though feeling for a word. “…light. She was what the house kept trying to speak.”
The boy crawls forward until his cheek presses to his mother’s ankle. She doesn’t look down because not-looking is safety, but she shifts her foot just enough to touch him with the side of her shoe. A secret language. Her hands flutter briefly from the keys, hover, return. In the doorway, a tall shape with a glass in his hand clears his throat. The melody tenses as if it knows it is being judged.
“She protected me,” Stuart says, now watching his own hands as if they might betray him. “From him. From the rules. From the lodge, even. She made small worlds inside big rooms. Our twilights were filled with blankets and stories in wardrobes. She would say, ‘You are only mine, aren’t you?’ and I would say, ‘Yes,’ and mean it.”
He looks up with a sudden nakedness I didn’t expect.
“I was hers, and only hers.”
The sentence hangs in the warm air, cooling as it settles. It is a confession and a boast and a wound.
“She made me her task,” he adds, quieter. “Her purpose. And I…” He moves his shoulders like a man adjusting a weight that was put there long ago. “I was good at being saved.”
The fire hisses. I feel the study leaning around us, listening. The portraits do not blink.
“What about him?” I ask. I keep my voice even. When I imagine his father, I imagine a vertical line through coat, belt, and expectations.
He says the next words like pulling splinters one by one.
“He believed love softens the spine. He would come into the music room with his hands in his pockets and walk around the piano as if inspecting a beast he had bought. He would list what he’d paid for. The tuition, repairs, wood for the winter, the new roof on the west wing. And she would keep playing, but softer and softer, like a woman backing down a corridor from a man who will not stop advancing.”
In my mind’s eye, the boy doesn’t breathe. He knows the sound of his father’s voice, like wool pulled tight over sharp things. He knows the smell of him. A cold wool coat and winter air and the sourness on his breath that meant this glass is not the first. The mother’s right hand misses a note. The father says her name as if it is a small offense. She begins again from the top.
“I heard what children aren’t meant to hear,” Stuart says, and his voice has the practiced blankness of someone stepping onto thin ice. “Not once. Not sometimes. Always. Doors don’t hold back sound in this house. They funnel it. They aim it right at your heart.”
He takes up his glass, doesn’t drink. The liquid smokes the crystal like captured fire.
“They would fight in the study after guests left. My father would close the curtains even at night. He said light breeds gossip.”
“What about your mother?”
“She cried where no one could see. In the Blue Suite. You can still smell her fear in there.” His glance finds me, swift, clinical. “You’ve smelled it.”
I don’t deny it. The diary’s phantom weight sits in my lap, laced with perfume and panic.
“She would press her wrist to her mouth so the sounds would go back down,” he says, and there is a faint astonishment in his tone, as though wondering how a body learns to do that?
“When he raised his voice, she would raise her music. When he raised his hand…” He doesn’t finish it. He looks into the fire until I understand he won’t finish it.
The boy in the flashback brackets his ears with his palms. The piano is an ocean above him, each chord a wave that breaks and retreats. A crack like a book slammed shut, a glass shattering its fragments. A woman saying “please” like a habit that used to work. Then a softer sound of persistent weeping, the rhythm of it finding the boy’s heart and tugging it into sync. He crawls out and pads down the hall, bare feet cold on wood. He stops at the crack of the Blue Suite door and sees an ankle. It shakes as if the leg is carved from winter itself. He hears her say it, almost the way actors say lines on a stage they hate.
“If you leave me, I’ll die.”
Stuart speaks the sentence with a perfect memory of cadence and pitch. The fire seems to quiet for it.
“She meant it,” he adds, but his mouth twists a little, as if even now he isn’t sure. “Or she meant for him to believe it. I believed it. I was… very good at believing her. I would crawl into her wardrobe and push my face into her dresses because they smelled like violets and not like him, and I would promise to be perfect and strong and quiet. She would put her hand into the dark and find mine and say, ‘My brave boy.’”
He laughs then, not kindly. “Bravery is easy when you are praised for it in closets.”
Something in me loosens. A recognition of his pain, maybe, or dread of him repeating the cycle now. The shape of his childhood pushes itself against me until it fits.
“You loved her like a job,” I say before I can edit myself. “And she loved you like a cure.”
He doesn’t flinch. He only tips his head, considering the truth of it as if it’s a painting hung a little crooked.
“What else was there?” he asks simply. “He demanded obedience. She demanded adoration. The house demanded… continuity.” He gestures to the portraits. “I learned to give everyone what they asked for and to keep the rest for her.”
“The rest?”
“Myself.” He finally drinks, and the swallow seems to cut on the way down. “I hid the parts of me that made him angry in the places that made her happy. I learned to hold my breath when I walked past his door. I learned to listen with my eyes. To the curve of her mouth after a guest said something unkind, to the tremor in the way she placed a teacup back in its saucer when she was holding in rage.”
His glance flicks toward me, quick as a blade.
“And I learned to watch for the moment someone decides they will leave.”
The room tilts a fraction. I think of the way his attention fixed on me in the Athenaeum as if fastening a brooch through skin. I think of how he says mine as if it heals him to hear it.
“What happened to her?” I ask, though I’ve read the shape of it in ink.
“She left in the only way that wouldn’t betray her own rules,” he says flatly. “She dissolved. It was a long, careful work. She missed meals and called it devotion. She forgot names and called it transcendence. She slept in the day and learned nocturnes at night as if darkness was the only place she could move without consequence. One October she began coughing. By February, she was speaking about me in the past tense.”
He turns the glass in his fingers. Firelight fractures in it.
“He called doctors, she called priests. The doctors said rest, the priests said prayer. She said perfection and then stopped saying anything at all.”
His face closes then, not with anger but with pride curdled into resentment.
“Weakness,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “She let him define the terms. She taught me everything about love except how not to drown along with the person who can’t swim.”
We sit in the sound of the fire eating its way through a log. The smell of resin grows sweeter as the wood breaks.
“You loved her,” I say softly, because the room needs a plain sentence to stand on.
“I was her purpose,” he corrects, and the words are stripped to bone. “It isn’t the same.”
He leans back, closes his eyes, opens them again.
“When she died, the house turned on its axis. He moved through it like a man going through the motions. He told me I would step into the role that kept the place breathing. He called it legacy. I called it air I couldn’t swallow.” A small smile that has nothing to do with humor visits his mouth and leaves. “So I left. To school. To studios. To cities that did not care about my name. I thought distance could cauterize that awful inheritance.”
“And did it?”
He considers. “It made it smaller, the way things get when you are far away. But smaller is not gone. The lodge kept a long finger on my collar. And when it tugged, I came back.”
For yourself, I don’t say. For the shrine, for the portrait, for the woman whose perfume is still arguing with the dust. For me, who arrived ready to be taught how to replace her. He sets his glass aside and looks at me fully for the first time since he began his story. The gaze is not the punishing one, not the proprietary one. It is the gaze of that boy under the piano, all pupils, all plea.
“You understand now,” he says quietly. “Why I make rules. Why I insist. She fell because no one held her upright. Because no one told her how to be strong.”
Images flicker through my mind. My spine straightened by his fingers, the door of the cabin latch dropping from the outside, Sophie’s tears, Amelia’s chin set like a blade. My body remembers being cold down to the marrow and still, some traitorous part of me wants to take his face in my hands and say the sentence Isobel taught him: If you leave me, I’ll die. Only I would mean if I leave this version of you, the one who believes love is a leash.
“I see what she asked of you,” I say instead. “And what he demanded.” I keep my voice steady. “And I see what you’ve asked of me.”
His expression warms, misreading assent where there is analysis. “To be strong,” he says. “To be better than her. To be the heart that does not fail.”
The words land like coins dropped into a well. They keep falling.
“I think,” I say carefully. “That she loved you so much she made you responsible for whether she lived. And that wasn’t love. That was need.”
He flinches as if I’ve touched a bruise. The old hardness rises like a reflex and a defense.
“She gave me everything.”
“She gave you a burden no child should carry.” My voice is almost a whisper. The wind presses at the shutters like someone listening at a door. “And you’ve been looking for someone to help you carry it ever since.”
Silence opens. The fire pops. He studies me, the vulnerability sliding as the hard surface re-forms. I can see the choice in him. To open or close, admit or command. For a heartbeat, the boy wins. His mouth trembles and his eyes shine.
“If you leave me…” he begins, and then stops, startled by his own mouth choosing her sentence.
He laughs once, thin and sharp, and looks toward the piano instead. When he speaks again, the man has returned, all smooth, collected, and persuasive.
“You won’t leave me,” he says, and it’s not a question. The firelight coins his certainty. “You understand me too well.”
I grip my hands in my lap so he won’t see them shake. Understanding is not the same as safety. Empathy is certainly not the same as love. I keep my eyes on the flames because if I meet his, he will make of my gaze a vow.
“I hear you,” I say.
He relaxes as if that counts. While the wind charts the windows and the portraits keep watch, I tuck away what matters. The knowledge that Isobel loved him so tightly she thinned him out and then poured him into a mold shaped like herself. That his father hammered the mold and called it a home. And that I have been asked to set like plaster around both.
He leans forward and takes my hand, admiration and possession braided in his grip.
“You are luminous,” he says, echoing his first word for her. The study approves with a gust in the chimney.
“You are strong,” he adds, as if saying it makes it so.
In the fire’s heat, I feel the chill of the cabin creep back into my bones, reminding me that strength and obedience are not twins. Love and enclosure are not two sides of the same coin. A boy under a piano learned the wrong lesson and grew into a man building the same room over and over, dragging his chosen into it and calling the closed latch a promise.
“I am,” I say, and let the sentence end where he wants it, while inside I finish the thought he can’t hear. I will not be yours in the way she was.
We sit in silence for a long while. There is little more to say. His voice, when it comes, is quieter than before. But it carries a fevered edge.
“You think you’re the first?”
I sit stiffly in the armchair, my hands pressed to the armrests as though they might anchor me.
“The first what?”
“The first woman I brought here. To the lodge.” He stops pacing, turning toward me. The firelight glances off his cheekbones, sharpening his face into something dangerous.
“There were others. After she died. I thought I could find someone worthy. Someone who might understand.”
A cold thread winds down my spine. “Worthy?” I echo, buying time.
He steps closer, his shadow swallowing the rug between us.
“They wanted my name. My money. The paintings, the inheritance. Trinkets.” His mouth twists. “Not one of them cared for what mattered. Not one of them understood the devotion required.”
The word devotion lands heavily, weighted with a meaning he hasn’t defined but I already know. The same word Isobel used, perhaps, when she pressed her wrist to her lips and whispered she would die if he left her. I force my voice steady.
“And what happened to them?”
His eyes flick toward the fire, away from me, as though the answer smolders there.
“They betrayed me.”
The silence stretches. I don’t dare press further. Betrayal here could mean anything. It could mean leaving, refusing, or disappointing. All equal crimes in his eyes. He resumes pacing, his hands flexing at his sides.
“They weren’t strong enough. They complained of the cold. The rules. They thought the lodge was a prison. Or a mausoleum. They didn’t see it for the sanctuary it is.” He turns on his heel sharply, facing me again. “They couldn’t measure up to her purity.”
Her. Isobel. Always the axis around which his life spins. The Blue Suite is not just a shrine, it is a test he has forced on every woman after her. My stomach knots. I see it so clearly now. He does not love me as myself. He never has. He loves me as an echo, a vessel, another attempt at resurrection.
He stops pacing altogether and strides toward me. His boots are soft on the rug, but the intent in each step is loud enough to shake me. He grips my wrists suddenly, his fingers iron around bone. The pain is sharp, immediate. I gasp, instinctively pulling back, but he holds fast. His eyes bore into mine, blazing with a desperate brightness.
“But you,” he says, his voice low, trembling with urgency. “You are different.”
My heart slams against my ribs. “Stuart…”
“You will never abandon me.” His grip tightens until I wince. His face hovers close, the firelight catching in his pupils, making them look endless. “Promise me.”
Terror coils in my throat. The room tilts. In that moment, I see what he needs from me. It’s not partnership, not even love. It’s a vow. The oath that binds me not just to him, but to his past, to his mother, to the house itself. I whisper because I have no choice.
“I won’t abandon you.”
His eyes close, and relief floods his face like a blessing. He releases me slowly, his thumbs gently brushing the red marks blooming on my wrists. Then he kneels, his forehead pressing briefly against the back of my hand, a gesture both worshipful and suffocating. When he looks up again, his smile is soft and boyish. Almost.
“Good girl.”
The words pierce me. I sit frozen, the ache in my wrists throbbing, the portraits above us staring with their cold, painted eyes. Inside, I understand the horror in full. I am not Ellen any more, not mother of Amelia and Sophie, not a woman with a past and her own wounds and her own choices. I am a vessel for his grief and his delusions. A mirror. A second chance to perfect the bond that consumed him and Isobel. And if I falter, if I betray him in any way, I know exactly what will happen. I will join the others who “didn’t measure up.”
14
The lodge has its own version of silence. It isn’t emptiness, but layers of absent movement. Floorboards that sigh even when no one is walking on them, pipes stuttering low in the walls, the distant tick of radiators straining against the cold. Every sound feels amplified because the rest is so hushed. At night, it’s unbearable.
I pad down the upstairs hallway. The portraits lining the walls tilt their gazes downward, endless generations of Drummonds watching me pass. The girls’ door is open a crack. Inside, Sophie is asleep, sprawled diagonally across her quilt, her thumb pressed stubbornly into her mouth. Amelia sits on the floor by the bed, knees drawn up, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looks up when I step in, her eyes wide and alert.
