Greenbriar Manor

Vivien's Vexation

Daniel woke up again at 3 am. He could feel something coming. Someone. The house was casting someone aside. He had lived through shifting shadows in hallways and secrets saved in attic spaces. This was different. He was almost a centenarian. One hundred years of Arkansas winter. One hundred years of birth and death. One hundred years of Greenbriar.  He pulled out his journal and out fell a tattered postcard from Paris. It had come from his sister Vivian ages ago the ends were soft and frayed from being read. She used to send them every week. He often wondered if their mother put too much responsibility on her. She had been a dancer and a dreamer. Ballet was not a happy dance. She often came home with broken toes and bloody slippers. Until she left for France that final time he wondered if she would always be kept in that box a doll spinning around in circles. How her story intersected with the present through the girl who had come to visit him. The house chose its own. 

He remembered how they had all left: 

 His twin brothers a decade younger than him had retired and moved somewhere nice and warm. Chessie lived on in her stories in the library. Salem had children somewhere. A vagrant she had said of her only son and his wife and a granddaughter about the age of Ingrim.  Salem had once kept the Vermont estate with Vera but it did not mean anything. The only relative Vera missed was Bridgette. He wondered if Vera had found her when she went beyond or if she too was wandering somewhere still searching to right that wrong. He thought of Fern. That laundress had no idea how much her mother had learned over a life with their family. Why she stayed on when pay was better elsewhere? Lorna had been given a choice, and she chose Martha. The Grey playmate of long ago. Martha and Mario were young and impetuous but ever so in love. How their faces brightened when Tad was born and then the dark bundle that was Marisol. Back then life was grand. The Manor was kinder then but somewhere along the way, Lorna became cross with the entire Green family because she was not given a station higher than a maid. He wondered if she had always been in love with Teddy and was angry more at his rejection than at her work. She endeavored to start away from them. She was going up to Boston to start again. One night she took a stuffed bear from Chessie's collection and stuffed every last piece of Vivien's jewelry into its chest. In a hurry to run away, she dropped the empty music box on the floor and its charm bent at an odd angle. The motor hummed and she danced but not gracefully. A broken thing. Vivien's husband Geno called the very next morning and said that there had been an accident. She had fallen off the stage during the end number of Swan Lake breaking her left foot in two places. She was inconsolable.

 The next morning when Lorna heard what had happened to Vivien from Martha, she immediately made a promise to never leave out on her own again. She tore up the train ticket and hid the bear in the attic in Martha's house with all the jewelry inside. Just in case she ever needed to leave again. Three weeks later, she met Fredric and a year later she was his wife and began to have their children. The boys went away with their grandparents to live and go to boarding school, but Fern stayed. She dutifully helped her mother until one day Lorna got a chill and the ragged breathing and raspy cough and it never left. Fern and she fixed the linens for the Greene estate at Daniel's request after he left it empty and then Vanessa and Jake's. 

Fern had no idea her mother knew Martha from childhood or what price she had paid to stay. Daniel was sure that whatever had plagued Lorna had been because of the betrayal of his sister's trust and livelihood. Although, no one could ever be sure. The house had called for Vivien, and she had stayed away. Vera had taken the music box and then it had returned in the room she occupied here as a child one stormy night in August, He saw a woman twirling in the parlor in circles in a beautiful pink dressing gown with a gold sash in a dream. He knew she was gone when they got the call the next day. She had been away too long dancing on the winds. You could still hear her giggle and almost feel the applause when the little music box was opened. It would hold her broken dreams here in the Manor. Yet, it could not hold her spirit. 

He thought again of Teddy. Brave and brash and fire red curls like a lion's mane. He had left home for Boston as soon as he could pay his way and ride a train. He broke his mother's heart renting a house and attending a Catholic church. He had dreams of becoming a priest or a poet but he died at twenty-seven from the flu. Wherever he had been the house knew he never would be home there. Daniel missed his brother the most. He thought of Fern telling me about the two little boys living at the Manor now. How they were inseperable. Maybe the house had begun to bring his dream alive through their bond. It was not always danger and darkness there. It had a heart. 

 Then, there were the twins running things from the warmth of Maui's sunny shores. They wanted nothing of the Manor. They had sold it to Vanessa only after talking it over with him at length. Vera and Mack had been a gift and a surprise. The twins had never written much and in truth they were more like Santa Claus appearing once a year to send random gifts to him. Keeping close to each other like the constellation they were named for. He knew that sooner or later one of them would be called home and there would be one left in the sun. Alone. Which he did not know yet. Liam was stronger and kinder than Malcolm. He had always been prone to draw and daydream it was no wonder he had become an architect. Malcolm was an investor and nothing appeased him but thick stacks of money. Nothing would ever bring him home emptyhanded not even death. 

Salem was the other child small and sullen but incredibly observent. She witnessed the horrible horse race that day and did everything she could to save Rabbit. When Marisol's little horse toy broke she bandaged it back together with a piece of linen rag from the attic. She was always trying to be helpful. She met a man while visiting Vivien and though they never married she had Linus' son. The change in him after the boy was born was brought on by the air raides and he never was the same again. The boy grew up and developed a free spirit mentatlity so common to twenty something in that day and left home with a backpack a guitar and a dream. He had thumbed all over the US by the time he found himself in Vera's pool house with a pregnant girl and no money. He thought it was dumb luck, but it was really family, Brittney had taken up with Frannie's daughter Mabel. One strange day everything shifted, and Vera ended up home in another place. Of that Daniel was sure. Not the homesteads either one but somewhere kinder. Salem had found Nova Scotia and settled there. She liked the cold and the work of saving tiny coastal puffins and whales from extinction in her retirement. She came home once to help take care of Brittney but she saw Vera everywhere in Vermont. Some ghost just couldn't die. So, she left and went home and maybe they all went with her. He was not sure about his sister and maybe that was a mystery the Manor had that not even he would ever know. 

Meanwhile:

In the tiny house Fern dug through an attic closet for some blankets and towels. Her mother was looking pale again and she was worried. The dark-haired little girl had invited her to come to the library for a tea party and she did not want to be late. As she pushed the soft linens aside, she saw a tuft of brown fur, but it was mottled like carpet muslin. Wooly and ugly and its eyes were glass and the color of cigarette tar. Every inch of her skin went cold, she got very dizzy and all the sudden the step stool she was standing on caved in as if the screws broke or it was pushed. As she hit the floor, she saw a tall lanky woman wearing a pink dress with a gold sash. Her ankle was dragging along behind her. The air in the house grew very cold and above her stood a little girl with dark green, emerald eyes and a trailing green bow. She thought it was Mari at first scaring her but then slowly she realized that it was her new friend. Instead of helping her up the girl looked at her with a mildly menacing curiosity and walked out of the kitchen turning only once to gesture for her to be quiet. Her mother was sleeping in the next room, but no one came to help her. But the tiny brown and white three-legged dog. He licked her face reassuringly and barked until Brooklyn's baseball cap drifted into view. He hurried to her and picked her up off the floor. As he bandaged her bruised ankle with scrap clothes from the attic, she heard a tinkling bell of a music box playing a song about coming home...She hugged Brooklyn and smiled a sleepy smile of thanks. He made her some tea and carried the linens to the main house himself. That bear was here again. Bridgette was home. Fern was hurt. Who was coming next? He thought of his father. He knew that in the hospital he would be safe from all this. Somehow , he just had to come home again. Ingrim and Mack rushed to meet him at the bus stop and handed him an apple and a candy bar. A treat from their teacher that they wanted to share with him. He had friends and this was home. Maybe it would hold this time. Maybe it would choose to let them all stay... if only Daniel hadn't left.