The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Read online

  In the spring, when the captain returned home from long voyages at sea, he brought his sister elaborate gifts: a hand-carved marionette from Italy with leather boots and a metal sword; a domino set made of ivory and ebony; a cribbage board etched into a walrus tusk bartered from the Eskimos; and, always, a bundle of purple lilacs.

  Throughout his stay, the purple blooms scented the air with their heady perfume, and the house was said to pulse with an eerie golden hue at night. Years later, even after the ship captain and his sister no longer lived in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane, the smell of lilacs could send impious ripples through the neighborhood.

  During those spring months, the church pews were unusually full.

  The entire neighborhood was built with little Fatima Inês in mind. Captain de Dores was the benefactor behind the post office, where he sent his younger sister packages from other ports. And he helped fund the elementary school, even after Fatima refused to attend.

  Following a rather peculiar incident involving the priest from the nearest Catholic parish, Fatima Inês was also the reason they built the Lutheran church. At his sister’s request, Captain de Dores had arranged for a visit from a priest to administer her First Communion. He commissioned a local seamstress to make her dress — a long white gown with tiny buttons up the back and a veil trimmed with pearls. He had the house filled with white roses for the occasion, and the petals from the blooms caught in Fatima’s lace train when she walked.

  When the priest set the host upon the rose of the young Fatima Inês’s tongue, however, the holy wafer burst into flame.

  Or so the story goes.

  The priest refused ever to return to the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane. A few months later, the new Lutheran church was holding its first service.

  The captain’s only request, if the neighborhood wanted the patronage to continue, was a yearly public celebration of Fatima’s birthday on the summer solstice.

  No one knew what to expect the first year. And then the gold-embossed carriages of emerald green, fuchsia, and tangerine appeared on the dirt path leading up Pinnacle Lane. Driven by small men in blue satin top hats and pulled by dappled ponies, the carriages were windowless except for the last. Through its windows the gathering neighbors caught a glimpse of the ringmaster and the contortionist twins of Nova Scotia. The impossible postures on display by all turned out to be the most talked-about part of the entire celebration, even after the elephants arrived.

  The celebrations grew all the more lavish and indulgent as the years went by: there were acrobats shipped in from China for Fatima’s tenth birthday; a gypsy woman with wrinkled hands and a crystal ball when she turned eleven; white tigers that lapped up giant bowls of cream when she turned twelve. The summer solstice soon became a holiday that was anticipated with as much excitement as Christmas or the Fourth of July, with attendants arriving from miles away to dance around the bonfire with white daisies woven in their hair.

  Fatima never attended the event herself. Occasionally someone — drunk on wishful thinking and mead — would insist that they saw her cloaked form perched on the roof with her birds, watching the festivities below with interest.

  But this was quite unlikely.

  Then one spring the captain didn’t return from sea. The summer solstice was celebrated with as much fervor as in previous years, but there were no white tigers, no gypsy psychics, no displays of sexual prowess by the contortionist twins of Nova Scotia.

  And no one had seen Fatima Inês in months.

  The day she was finally brought out of the house would later be remembered as a day when shadows seemed blacker, as if something more lingered in those darkened spaces. Curious neighbors came out to stand in the street and watch as Fatima Inês, wearing nothing but a tattered white dress covered in bird droppings and feathers, was taken from the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane.

  The young girl whose birthday they had celebrated for nine years had not aged a day since her arrival, that first day when the ship captain’s fingers had burned red at her touch.

  The doves Fatima Inês had kept as pets freed themselves from their hutches on the roof and bred with the local crows. Their monstrous young — ugly, mangled half-forms of both birds — plagued the neighborhood with their haunting calls and meddlesome intellect.

  What happened to the child, no one knew. Many believed she was taken to the Hospital for the Insane in Steilacoom.

  “Well,” the neighbors asked one another, “what else could they have done with her?”

  The summer solstice remained a celebrated event in the small Seattle neighborhood throughout the years. The house had few subsequent inhabitants — a family of gypsies lived there one fall, in 1910, and it was briefly used as a meeting place for the local Quaker chapter — but on the whole, it remained empty until the day my grandfather, Connor Lavender, turned his face to the Seattle sky.

  After the death of her siblings, Emilienne gave up her chic cloche hat. She grew her hair unfashionably long and pulled it into a tight spinsteresque bun at the nape of her neck — a failed attempt at suppressing her beauty as much as possible. She wore light dabs of face powder on her cheeks to hide the permanent track marks left by so many tears. Maman, her poor heart made all the more fragile by the loss of her children, soon disappeared completely, leaving behind only a small pile of blue ashes between the sheets of her bed. Emilienne kept them in an empty tin of throat lozenges.

  Then, one hot August day in 1924, while waiting in line at the local drugstore to purchase her powder, Emilienne took notice of the man behind her. He was leaning heavily on a dark wood cane.

  His name was Connor Lavender. He was thirty-one years old and had contracted a severe case of polio at the age of seven. He was bedridden for more than eight months, and, regardless of the number of chamomile compresses his mother applied to his little body, the disease crippled his left leg, forcing him to depend on a cane to walk. Whether this illness was a blessing or a curse, it exempted him from the draft, and Connor Lavender never served his country in the First Great War. Instead, he leaned on his cane and served customers at the corner bakery where he worked. His condition was the very reason my grandmother married him.

  Emilienne looked at Connor Lavender’s withered leg and his mahogany cane, and decided that such a man would have trouble leaving anywhere, or anyone for that matter. As sweat collected in the crease behind her knees and underneath her arms, she decided on her life with Connor Lavender. If he agreed to take her far away from Manhattan, she would be willing to give him one child in exchange. She would close her eyes as he made love to her so that she wouldn’t have to look at his misshapen leg.

  My grandparents married three months later. Emilienne wore Maman’s wedding dress. Just after the ceremony, Emilienne glanced in the mirror. She saw not her own reflection but a tall empty vase.

  Emilienne figured a loveless union was the best option for each of them. Best for Connor since, until meeting the desolate Miss Emilienne Roux, he had considered himself doomed to a life of perpetual bachelorhood, with single-serving soups and a widowless deathbed; and best for Emilienne because, if the past had taught her anything, it was that as long as she didn’t love someone, he wasn’t as likely to die or disappear. When they were pronounced man and wife, Emilienne silently promised she’d be good to her husband, as long as he didn’t ask for her heart.

  She no longer had one to give.

  As per his promise, exactly four months after Connor Lavender married Emilienne Roux, he gathered his new bride, collected their few belongings — including a rather finicky pet canary that Emilienne refused to leave behind — and boarded a train bound for the great state of Montana. But when it came time to bid the train adieu, Connor’s wife took one look at the rolling tumbleweeds and monotonous flat plains and simply said, “No,” before heading back to the stuffy, cramped sleeper car they’d called home for the last several days.

  “No?” Connor repeated, following her as he pushed his way pa
st the rest of the passengers, whose wives, he noted silently, had not refused to leave the train. “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean, no. I will not live here.”

  And with that began a conversation that would repeat for several hundred more miles as Emilienne rejected Billings, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and all the towns in between. Connor Lavender was so exasperated that he hadn’t spoken to his wife since they’d left the train station in Ellensburg, a town that had once famously burned to the ground completely. Emilienne took one look outside and said, “Whatever made them want to rebuild it?”

  I believe that by the time the train had reached Seattle, my grandmother knew she had run out of options. It was either here or continuing on alone. So when they reached King Street Station, Emilienne mutely gathered her things and finally departed from the train.

  In their quest for a home, my grandparents looked first at a Craftsman bungalow in Wallingford with a low-pitched roof and exposed rafters, but that proved far too expensive, even with the raccoon infestation in the basement. Then there was an old Victorian on Alki Point, but Connor worried that the nearby lighthouse would keep them up at night.

  It was a stone Tudor with a swooping roof and crumbling foundation that brought them to a small neighborhood in central Seattle. The house stood across the street from a school where someday, Connor imagined, their children would attend classes, where their tiny handprints in thick-colored paint would be among the ones covering the windows. Connor looked up at the sky just as a light rain started to fall. It was bewildering; the Seattle rain felt so different. The misty raindrops clung to every part of him, soaked his eyelashes, and seeped into his nostrils. It was while noticing this that Connor first saw the house on the hill.

  It stood alone on a hill at the end of the neighborhood’s main street, Pinnacle Lane, where the cobblestones gave way to a dirt and pebble road. The house was painted the color of faded periwinkles; it had a white wraparound porch and an onion-domed turret. The second-floor bedrooms had giant bay windows. A widow’s walk rested on top of the house, its balcony turned toward Salmon Bay. The cherry tree along the side of the house was in bloom; pink blossoms, their edges browned and withered, scattered across the porch.

  There were only two neighboring homes. One belonged to a man named Amos Fields, and the other closeted the Widow Marigold Pie’s black dresses. Overgrown rhododendron and juniper bushes obscured each house from view.

  The little annexed neighborhood was barely a stopping point for travelers on their way to the more established town of Ballard. On the right side of Pinnacle Lane stood the post office, the drugstore, and a brick elementary school; on the left there was the Lutheran church, with its austere walls and hard wooden pews. There was also an abandoned shop that had once sold wedding cakes and where hungry customers would soon find fresh bread and rolls hand-kneaded and marked by Connor Lavender.

  Moving was a quiet affair for the Lavenders since the only earthly possession they truly needed was Connor’s cane. There was also a tin of throat lozenges filled with blue ashes and a shoe box containing the remains of a tiny yellow bird. Pierette, who’d never been emotionally stable even in human form, hadn’t survived the weary cross-country train ride. Both were buried in the empty garden bed behind the new house, marked only by a large river stone.

  Emilienne walked through the house, her steps swaying under the girth of her swollen belly. She hadn’t thought it possible to get pregnant so quickly — she’d only been with her husband once before leaving Manhattan, and, with the limited space and bathing options available on the train, neither had initiated anything while aboard.

  It wasn’t until they’d reached Minnesota that Emilienne began to consider the possibility that she was pregnant. Halfway through North Dakota, Emilienne was able to put into words how she felt about it. Words like disappointed, infuriated, and trapped. When she finally told Connor, somewhere between Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, she chose words different from those in her head. He’d cried with joy.

  Emilienne ran her hand along the edge of the cast-iron sink before moving on to the dining room, with the built-in cabinets with lead-glass doors. She listened to the creak of the wood floors as she walked from dining room to foyer, hallway to stairwell. In a corner of the parlor stood the harpsichord that Connor had shipped from Manhattan; Emilienne planned to leave the instrument untouched. She wanted to watch as it acquired dust and the keys yellowed with age. The stubborn thing rudely refused and instead kept its glossy sheen, the keys always remarkably in tune.

  The neighbors regarded Emilienne the way most do when confronted with the odd. Of course, this was a tad more complex than an aversion of the eyes from an unseemly mole or a severely scarred finger. Everything about Emilienne Lavender was strange. To Emilienne, pointing at the moon was an invitation for disaster, a falling broom the same. And when the Widow Marigold Pie began secretly suffering from a bout of insomnia, it was Emilienne who arrived at her door the next morning with a garland of peonies and an insistence that wearing it would ensure a restful sleep that night. Soon the quiet whispers of witch began following Emilienne wherever she went. And to associate with the neighborhood witch, well, that would be an invitation for a disaster much more dangerous than anything the moon might bring. So her neighbors did the only thing that seemed appropriate — they avoided Emilienne Lavender completely.

  Fortunately, they found no fault with Connor — his strange wife hardly spent any time at the bakery — and the little shop began to thrive. Connor’s success could have been ascribed to a number of things. The location was certainly part of it — no passing parishioner could help but make a stop at the bakery on the way home from church, particularly on those Sundays when Pastor Trace Graves bestowed the congregation with the Holy Communion. Body of Christ or not, one torn piece of stale bread was hardly satisfying after a morning of Lutheran hymnody. If anything, it made those freshly baked loaves of sourdough and rye, displayed in the bakery window like precious gems, all the more enticing.

  Many preferred not to acknowledge it, but Emilienne certainly played a part in the bakery’s success, if only behind the scenes. She had impeccable taste and an eye for appealing design, for flattering fabrics and colors (of course she did — she was French). She used her natural talents in choosing the butter-yellow paint for the bakery walls and the white lace valances for the windows. She arranged wrought-iron tables and chairs across the black-and-white-tiled floor, where customers sat to enjoy a morning sticky bun and the wafting scents of cinnamon and vanilla. And though all these ingredients helped build the bakery’s recipe for success, Connor’s bakery did so well because Connor was an exceptional baker.

  He’d learned from his father, who took his crippled son under his wing and taught him all there was to know about feeding the New York masses: how to make black-and-white cookies, sponge cake, rum-and-custard-filled crème puffs. When Connor married Emilienne Roux and moved to Seattle, he brought with him those same recipes and served them with panache to the people of Pinnacle Lane, who claimed to have never before tasted such decadent desserts.

  So, naturally, Connor spent most of his time at the bakery, which for Emilienne meant whittling the hours away in the big house, walking her restless womb from one room to the next, waiting for her husband to return home. For night to fall. For time to go by. As the months passed, Emilienne watched the yellowed leaves of the cherry tree in the yard rot in the autumn rain. She watched mothers walk their children to school, watched her own body change — morphing daily into something foreign and abstract, something that no longer belonged to her.

  Pregnancy proved to be a very lonely time for Emilienne even though she was never alone: not on the day she married Connor Lavender, or when she refused to leave the safe haven of the cramped sleeper car, or even when murmurs of witch drifted up from the neighborhood and through the house’s open windows. They were always there. Him with his urge to speak despite his face having been shot off, and her with a cav
ern in the place where her heart once beat, sometimes with that child on her hip — that phantom child with mismatched eyes. And then there was the canary.

  Only when she daydreamed that she was back in that dilapidated tenement in Beauregard’s Manhatine — when the high notes of Pierette’s effervescent laugh still echoed through the hallways, when René’s beauty still rivaled her own, before Margaux had betrayed her — could Emilienne attempt to understand them. But Emilienne could rarely bring herself to think of her former life and all the pain that existed there. She’d moved across the country to get away from it — how dare they insist on following her! Her unwelcome guests — for unwelcome they were! — ​provided her little comfort. She refused to decipher the frantic gestures her dead siblings made and never stopped long enough to make sense of the silent words that poured from their lips. No matter how desperately they tried, she was determined not to listen.

  During her daily explorations, Emilienne discovered relics of Fatima Inês de Dores still littered a number of rooms in the large house: the gifts her brother brought home from his trips overseas. There was the marionette, the chess set, the glass marbles, and hundreds of porcelain dolls. Dolls with blinking eyes, with jointed arms and legs. Dolls with bonnets, dressed in saris, wrapped in kimonos printed with dragons and with tiny fans tied to their tiny hands. There were cowboy dolls riding saddled toy Appaloosas, Rajasthani dolls sent from India, Russian nesting dolls, fashion paper dolls. There was a giraffe the size of a small sheepdog and a rocking horse, its runners creaky with age. No one had had the courage to rid the house of them. Their watchful unblinking eyes might well have been the reason so few people had ever wanted to occupy the house.