The Monsters of Templeton Read online

  “Vivienne,” he said hesitantly toward her nipples. “You have, ahem, perhaps heard of your father’s book?”

  “Nah,” said Vivienne, giving her chest a gleeful little shake to make the old man sweat. “He wrote a book? Wow.”

  In fact, she did know of the book, having received it in the mail with the fifty-dollar check she got every month from her parents. She even sent a rare note of congratulations, read three chapters, and then used it to prop up a wobbly leg on her bedside table. She simply forgot. The pot she smoked every day upon awakening, after eating, before bed, tended to make her forgetful.

  And so the lawyer refreshed her memory. The book was eight years in the making, he reminded her: her father had begun it long before Vivienne turned rebellious and left town for “freer waters.” The book, he said, was about Marmaduke Temple and a shameful secret he had. This secret affected Vivienne herself, her mother’s family, as well as the view of Marmaduke Temple in the eyes of American historians everywhere. The lawyer paused, then, for effect.

  “And what was the secret?” Vivienne asked, interested despite herself.

  The lawyer cleared his throat; rhetorical drum-rolling. “Your father proposed that your mother’s old Templeton family, the Averells,” he said, “are the descendants of Marmaduke Temple and a slave girl he owned named Hetty.” And he sat back, and looked up at her face for the first time all morning to see her reaction. There had been such tremendous outrage on all fronts since the book came out that the lawyer was expecting sudden shock to flit over my mother’s face.

  But a dazed smile burst out, instead. “Cool,” said Vivienne, “I’m a Negro.”

  In the time it took Chauncey Todd to digest this idea, the slow crunch of Vivienne’s mental machinery had brought her to a different place. Her face grew grave and disappointed. “Wait a second,” she said. “If my father was related to old Marmaduke and my mom was too, that’s incest, right? I mean, I’m a product of incest?” She felt this was a great tragedy. That explains it, she said to herself, though it was not quite clear what about herself had now been explained.

  Chauncey Todd dragged a hand over his bewildered face and sighed at the breasts. “Now, Vivienne,” he said. “We’re talking perhaps five generations here. Your parents were only slightly related.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Right.” She waited for a while, and then frowned again. “So, what’s the problem?”

  Chauncey Todd felt as if he were on a merry-go-round spinning out of control. He squeezed his eyes shut. And, thus safe against my mother’s magnificent though untethered bosoms, he explained as calmly as he could that Marmaduke Temple was perhaps the archetypal American, the first self-made man; that he, a Quaker, had slaves was scandal enough; and far worse, that he, a married man, had relations with his slaves—scandalous! It made everyone very uncomfortable. It shattered the idol that was Marmaduke Temple. He was not the man everyone had thought he was. After twenty minutes of impassioned speech, Chauncey Todd was panting, surprised at his own zeal, pleased with his eloquence. When he opened his eyes, Vivienne was gazing at him with more bewilderment.

  “So?” she said at last. “Like, he was a human being, right? Nobody is saying he was a god or anything. Human beings do shitty things sometimes. Oh well. We’re over it. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “Well,” said Chauncey Todd, “you are in the minority, here. The extreme minority. All of Templeton was greatly upset, I’ll have you know. And so was the nation’s historical community. Your father was berated for such speculative history. There was even talk of taking away his job at NYSHA. I, for one, as his confidant, know that he couldn’t bear the idea, and that he was bewildered with all of the negative press. He, like you, couldn’t understand what the brouhaha, if you will, was about. The poor, blind man,” he said soulfully, shaking his head, “had no idea what hit him. And so I do believe that perhaps your parents’ accident was not an accident.”

  “You know, Mr. Chauncey Todd,” said my young mother. “I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not like the relations were ever a secret or anything. My mother and grandmother always said they were related to Marmaduke Temple through something illegitimate. Like, they used to make this joke about it. They were always so proud of it. But they said they couldn’t prove it. I mean, all my daddy did was prove it, right? It doesn’t change the facts. I mean, it’s history. Like, what’s history, but the facts we find out later, right? I don’t know, it’s like I’m getting all deep now.”

  For a while, there was a silence between them in the dusty, walnut-paneled room. Chauncey Todd went to the window and looked down onto Main Street, where a small pack of young male joggers was going by, their thighs a skim-milk blue under their tiny shorts. “Health nuts,” he said with disdain. He turned back around, gave the breasts a doleful stare, then sat down again. “I suppose, Vivienne,” he said, “we should carry on and finish our business for today. Now, for the will,” he said, and pulled the document from a folder.

  This was when Vivienne learned that almost everything her parents had was gone. Edgewater, the brick mansion built by her great-great-great granduncle Richard, the rent of which supported her family for years, would have to be sold for tax purposes. The Gilbert Stuart oil painting of a fleshy Marmaduke Temple and the smirking painting of novelist Jacob Franklin Temple had to be taken off the walls of Averell Cottage and sold to NYSHA to cover the funeral expenses. Almost the entire library of first-edition Jacob Franklin Temple books would have to be sold off to pay other bills, though she should feel free to keep one of each book as a family memento, Jacob having been in the habit of keeping five copies of his own editions on hand at any time. The jewels of her great-great-grandmother, Charlotte Franklin Temple, would be sold, though Vi would keep the pocket watch inscribed to the authoress from her dear father. George had already donated to NYSHA all of the valuable papers: Marmaduke’s maps and letters and Jacob’s notes of admiration from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Morse and General Lafayette, etc. Vi would get the family Bible, Marmaduke’s wife’s prayer book, the large collection of baseball memorabilia collected by her father’s father—Asterisk “Sy” Upton, the longtime baseball commissioner. The only furniture she could keep was the furniture already in Averell Cottage. She had about fifteen thousand dollars in the bank when all was said and done, a gift from her grandfather at her birth, all that remained of Marmaduke’s millions.

  “The good news,” said Chauncey Todd, “is that you get to keep Averell Cottage. Your mother had held it in trust for you all this time.”

  Vivienne stared forlornly at the lawyer, who was sitting back and pinching the bridge of his nose. On her long bus trip across the country, she had come to the secret resolution to sell off everything, take the money, and buy a sweet, wisteria-covered house in Carmel-by-the-Sea that overlooked the ocean. She would be a poet: words, she always told me when I was growing up, burned her fingertips from her late teens until her twenties. Years later, she would read my clumsy high school essays and rearrange the words with great innate skill until they tripped lightly across the page. On the bus home, she had imagined in detail the long life she would live in the cottage by the sea, how she wouldn’t have to ever work again. We all have our theories about why people react the way they do, especially when they’re acting eccentric; mine is that those daydreams of Carmel-by-the-Sea were how she staved off the sorrow ticking at her from inside, the incomprehensible loss of both her parents at once.

  Now, in Chauncey Todd’s office, it looked as if she would have to stay for a little while to get ramshackle Averell Cottage back into shape, and then try to sell it. Even then, she would probably only have enough money for a decade or so in a smaller place than the one she longed for, and then she would have to get a job, if she weren’t a famous poet already.

  The lawyer looked at her pale face with its burning carbuncles of acne, and felt a tiny mewling movement of pity in his breast. “It is not much,” he said, not unkindly. “But it
can be a good life if you manage it well.”

  “Good. Fantastic,” she said. And Chauncey Todd, unaccustomed to the sarcasm of the next generation, took her at her word, and beamed her bosoms a tender smile. In response, Vi took her left breast in hand and shook it at him for a good-bye, then trudged home in her scandalous dress and cork shoes, the ratty zigzag of her part lowered into the lake wind.

  At home, she stood looking out the parlor window at the lake. Snow devils were whirling around on the ice, and the pines were spiked with white on the hills. Vivienne thought of old Marmaduke Temple boffing his slave, and laughed.

  Then, standing there at the window, she surprised herself. At one time, she had been a princess, an obedient Shirley Temple in patent-leather shoes and pink organza dresses. At one time, she declaimed to crowds of historians perched on the seats of antique parlor chairs, who sent streams of pipe smoke at her as they shouted “Hooray!” If she had done well with her declamations, her father would briefly press his hand against her cheek as he escorted her up to bed. “My girl,” he would say. “My brilliant girl.” Now watching the winter out of Averell Cottage’s windows, words she remembered from when she was little just bubbled up from nowhere. “In the spring of 1785 I left my family in New Jersey and traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness,” she said aloud in a sort of half-murmur, “…all was dark at first, and the trees cast a midday twilight upon me. Then there was a rift in the darkness, a cliff where the trees dropped a hundred feet from the mountain’s lip, and there I stepped into the light…There was no wind in this desolate New York wilderness, and all was calm. Suddenly before me rose a vision of ghostly buildings on the edge of the lake, a true city of spires and rooftops, a phantom bustle in the streets, smoke. I sank to my knees in the strange ferns.”

  The words of the man in question, Marmaduke Temple, at the epiphanic moment when he first laid eyes upon the place where he would build Templeton. This great, calm, heroic, rational man, now exposed as a base slave owner and philanderer among the unpaid help. What a lark!

  For a second, Vi considered the stern portrait of Marmaduke over the mantelpiece. “I like you better now that I know that about you, old guy,” she said, and laughed. Something about her laughter, how it echoed and echoed in the cold house, cracked her up even more, and she gasped, her ribs hurt, she peed herself a little. But then she stopped, positive that there was a moment when the face of the man in the portrait twitched into a smirk and a wink. A little complicit grimace.

  Vivienne gazed at the portrait, amazed, and then considered. She had seen stranger things, though those visions were usually induced by fun substances. But also, as a child, she often saw a ghost moving through Averell Cottage. To Vi, the ghost took the form of a giant quivering dove that left great misty feathers strewn about the house. A wink in oil paint was not outside the realm of possibility. She gave the portrait a little grin, winked back. Then she felt sick and ran to the bathroom to heave up her breakfast of canned pineapple, all she could find in the kitchen cabinets that wasn’t tinned pork or Jell-O. She had been feeling sick in the mornings. Her navel had swollen a little. Last month, she didn’t get a period.

  VIVIENNE, IT SEEMED, was pregnant.

  The story of my conception was one I knew from long before I could even speak: Vi’s eyes would always light up with joy and nostalgia when she described how she lived in San Francisco, in a commune, in what she liked to describe as “an experiment in free love,” though to me it always sounded like rented love, albeit rented cheaply. There having been four men but only three women in this commune, Vi never went to bed alone; and, as there were also always yogis and painters and sitar players and organic yogurt makers staying over, everyone, of course, was cordially invited to take part in the love fests.

  She was only seventeen, she always said, sighing. What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.

  On the day of the pregnancy test, Vi sat in her paper hospital gown, feet growing cold on the floor. The nurse, a girl three grades older than Vi in high school, was blushing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re pregnant, Miss Upton,” and she could not look Vi in the eye.

  Enter: me. Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, called a hippie-dippie “Sunshine” until I was two and already stubborn and refused to answer to that name.

  The moment Vi was told by that soft little nurse that she was pregnant, she knew she had to stay in Templeton. In the vague swamp that was my mother’s brain, she knew that she couldn’t kick the drugs if she returned to San Francisco, and that it would be almost impossible to find more in Templeton. Her heart was good, and she didn’t want to retard her little cooking baby. Also, if she were going to go back to San Francisco, she would have no idea which of the commune’s men had fathered her child; before I was born, any one of the four (plus) could have been my true father. When I was born, however, more than ten and a half long months after she came home—I was even pigheaded in the womb, she always said in explanation—she had pared my fathers down to three: she was fairly certain when she saw my pink skin that it wasn’t the black man. This was what she told me later, even when I was two years old, and couldn’t imagine what sex was. She was frank, my mother, always. And, until I understood the mechanics of the act, I loved the idea of having three fathers: if one was good, imagine being blessed with three!

  I was once sent home from kindergarten for making this boast. Mrs. Parrot squinted down at me with pity as she pinned the note onto my jacket, and gave me a pat on the head. When my mother unpinned the note in our old Volvo, she chortled, then at home pasted it into my baby album. Dear Ms. Upton, it read. Wilhelmina bragged today of having three fathers, for which I send her home as chastizement. Be wary of speaking of your promiscous past before impressionable kids. Little pictures have big ears. Mrs. P.

  “Can’t even spell, that wench,” my mother said as she applied glue to the back of the note, tears of laughter dampening her cheeks.

  But at the moment she greeted the little pulsing me in the hospital, hands spread over her midsection, Vi knew she would stay to raise her child in a healthy way, far from hedonistic temptation. She would be a good mother in Templeton, she decided; I would grow up safely there.

  To be frank, this part of the story always sounded a little fishy to me, but I could never figure out why. I just swallowed it. And, until I visited San Francisco later, I was grateful to have been raised in my small and beautiful town. Then, when I saw that gorgeous, gilded city under the fog, I regretted Templeton and its tiny ways, its subservience to the baseball tourists that came in hordes every year, its lack of even a decent movie theater. I regretted San Francisco’s transvestites in their lovely clothes, the cafés, the furniture stores with imported Indonesian furniture; I thought I would have been a different person, a better one, had I only been raised in a larger place. Like a fish, I thought, I would have grown to fit my bowl.

  Vivienne would probably have understood my desire for a larger childhood, had she thought about it at the time when she came home to Templeton for good. She may even have convinced herself to return to San Francisco, to give her child a larger life. But in the slow-warming spring that year, she was pregnant, poor, scared, jittery from coming off drugs, incapable of too much thought. It is easy to imagine the loneliness, the feeling of worthlessness from her lack of education, the solitude, the way the town turned on her. How she was even more isolated by her grand old house and her simultaneous poverty. As I grew, I would have a pool that my country-clubbing grandparents had put in, two in-town acres, a lake to play in all summer long, a short walk to the bakery or General Store. I would have enormous privilege. And yet I would have to pick my clothes out of a bin in the basement of the Presbyterian Church and during hard times run into the Great American grocery store to buy our cheese with food stamps. I would be Willie Upton, related to al
l those famous people, pet of every history teacher I ever met, the student NYSHA hired as a receptionist every summer and trotted out to show visiting writers, but also a girl who dressed in the bathroom stall during gym class, ashamed to let anyone see the state of her underwear.

  This, too, Vivienne saw as constructive, however; her favorite pedagogical tool was the old carrot-on-a-stick-plus-a-dash-of-the-spurs method. “Nothing,” she always said, “can be learned if you don’t work a little at it,” and so every (pagan) Christmas of ours, I had to smooth all the wrapping paper into reusable squares and roll the ribbons up into little nubbins before I was allowed to play with my toys, which were, for the most part, handcrafted wooden ducks from retired Vermont maple trees and puppets made by Guatemalan victims of domestic violence and other things of that ilk. Once, even, when I was six and learning to read big words by reading Anne Sexton’s Transformations aloud, I stumbled on penultimate. I sighed and blew the bangs off my head and said, “I can’t do it.”

  Vi smiled unperturbed over her knitting, and said, “Sure you can,

  Sunshine.”

  I threw the book across the room. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

  My mother pursed her lips, stood, went to the kitchen, made a whole plateful of whole-wheat graham crackers with natural peanut butter and local honey, and came back. She slowly began eating one with little moans of delight until I stood and reached for one, but then she held the plate away, and opened the book and put it back in my lap.

  I knew what she was doing; I refused to read the word; no way in heck would I read it; that big fat scheming meanie. And so I watched Vi as she chewed on the snack, fluttering her eyelids and licking her fingers and muttering, “Oh, this is the best snack I’ve ever had,” until she only had one left and I couldn’t take it anymore and I spat out many different versions of it; pee-null-time-ate, penuliti-mat-ay, puh-newl-too-mat, until I hit it, and she smiled and handed me the cracker and I gobbled it down greedily.