But the old woman at City Hall had once been a young woman at City Hall. She had been there in 1903, when the Salford Devil had been sighted skulking along the squares at night, killing cats, terrifying women, shrieking at motorcars. City Hall had offered a bounty. What people brought in! An eight-foot gutshot snake. A small boy with his bellowing mother who wanted to teach him a lesson: “I have the Salford Devil here! I’ve come to ask the mayor to throw him in jail.” A curious foreign man presented a kangaroo (where did he get it?) painted the same lime green as the gas station, with a pair of wings fashioned out of a bifurcated umbrella. Most people who brought their devils forgot about the wings, but the wings were the essential part. The foreign man was deported; the kangaroo’s fate is unrecorded. One teenage girl carried, in a shoebox painted white, a dead bat dressed in a doll’s satin wedding dress, veiled, bouqueted, sides split to make room for its own born wings.
“The Salford Devil!” said the then-young woman of City Hall, before she looked closer and saw the beauty of the folded ears, the furred cheeks.
The girl was hurt. She cuddled the thing. “No, lady. She’s an angel. I found an angel.”
“We didn’t ask for angels,” said the woman. “No rewards for angels, and I mean none.”
A bat was a bat. A bird was a bird. You couldn’t make up a species by calling it by name, not petrel for Saint Peter, nor any of the other names the seabirds were known by: waterwitch, satanite, satanique, oieseau du diable. Bird of the Devil. Little rock.
Anyhow, said the old woman of City Hall to the old man of City Hall, it was time to write to the owner of the house to straighten out its future.
In this way, some months later, the owner of the abandoned house stood on Somefire Hill. (Supersum’s abandonment was finally as notable as its shape.) The neighbors took her for a stranger. They wondered whether to call the police. Bronze marceled hair, skin a shade darker, and a gap between her front teeth that made her look both voracious and elegant. Her tweed coat wasn’t the exact green of her eyes, but an altogether more alchemical color, and expensive, nipped in at the waist, the fur trim dyed to green plumage, the pockets angular and shocking. There was nothing about the coat that wasn’t magnificent. Its occupant looked like somebody who ate her dinner at midnight.
Over the years Minna Sprague had thought of her old house, dreamt of it. She thought she remembered every room, the pantries and bedrooms, her father’s study, the belvedere, the peculiar number of closets, more rooms than any three people could need (she didn’t think to count as a resident Margaret Vanetten, whose bedroom had been next to hers). But she couldn’t do the geometry, she couldn’t make it fit: the second floor in her head was twice as big as the first, as though the house were not an octagon but a nautilus shell, a spiral around the spiral stairs.
The letters from Margaret demanded love, which Minna had sent in homeopathic amounts, and very little else: postcards with her newest address (Toronto, Paris, New York, London, Paris again), reports on the weather, like any tourist. Who cared what the weather was like two weeks ago in Europe? It was something to say, something that cost Minna nothing. But the letters that Margaret sent got worse and worse.
Minna darling I remember when you were a baby and I held you in my arms. I wish you were a baby again. Your mother come back from the bowling alley or from a trip for a tournament and you just crying for me. I looked after you so, Minna! Such a good baby. You didn’t miss your mother at all. Then you got sent away and I thought that was a terrible thing. I was against that. I will say no bad thing against the dead but that was a terrible thing for your father to do when this was the home you knew. Some people will say he was broken but life breaks many people and they do not give up their children no matter their circumstance or family background. Come home, Minna. The house is big enough for all of us. When you marry I can nurse your babies for you, I am still a fine baby nurse. No matter how it looks to other people I don’t care. I was as a mother to you and I will be as a grandmother for your babies—Minna, come and I will explain all to you. I know you have love in your heart for me still because you were always such a fine and smart girl. I await your answer and I remain your loving Margaret Vanetten.
The letter that Minna received from the city through her uncle Benjamin was something else again: she was responsible for the house, for the birds inside, unless she wanted to deed it over. Now she opened the kitchen door—when she was little they never used the front entrance, which was boarded over anyhow—and it felt as though the whole weight of the house had been resting on that lintel. She never should have come. She went in farther. She thought about taking off one of her stockings to breathe through, but it was cold and already she was nervous about the neighbors. She didn’t remember them kindly. She’d worn her most ostentatious clothes because she knew that the best camouflage was a kind of flagrancy: you didn’t have to worry how people took you so much if the first thing they noticed was that you were rich.
The floors were not just dusty but covered in debris—chunks of plaster from the ceiling, bottles left behind by somebody who’d taken refuge there some years before. She understood that the neglect was her own, that she could have hired someone to fix the place up, rent it out. Then again, she’d been a child. What had her aunt and uncles been thinking? Well, they’d been mourning her father, too. The oldest brother. The smartest and quietest one. They did not know what they would do without him, never mind that he’d gone away, had married away, had written faithfully but rarely visited.
She felt she might come across his body, or her mother’s, though her mother’s remains were buried in the Salford Cemetery and her father’s sealed in an urn up in Oromocto. The neighbors had called the house the Wedding Cake because of the tiers, and that was what the plaster was like, ruined cake. She touched a wall and it crumbled away in her hands. The house was beyond saving.
She’d had an idea, when the letter had found her in Paris: she would donate the house and land to the city under the condition that it could be turned into a museum—not a museum devoted to her father (though Salford could do worse) but a history museum, with her father’s office preserved. In her father’s office, she was certain, was evidence. Of what? Of him, his strangeness, genius, goodness. Her mother she remembered as bosomy and flatulent, hot, grasping, an old woman already, when Minna was a young woman already.
She could go up, look out the window and see what the birds saw, what her father had seen the last day he was happy. Wondering when his darlings would be back—Bertha from Boston, Minna and her nurse from the public library. They’d come down Mims Avenue. “You wave at me,” he’d instructed Minna. “You won’t see me, but I’ll see you.”
The stairs were the best-built part of the house, and she climbed them to the second floor. The doors to all the bedrooms were shut. No, she wouldn’t open them.
The roof had fallen in. Of course it had: it hadn’t been pitched right, and years and years of uncleared winter snow and melt had collapsed it. On the dark desk was a glass of wine that time had boiled the moisture from, leaving one ruby clot at the bottom. The desk was otherwise blank. The shelves were empty. He was beyond saving, too.
In Oromocto, in his family, he was both prodigal and favored, gone away from them but never lost. His picture was in the parlor, the books he’d written around the house, and when she’d been sent there it was as if in recompense, as though she were coming back to lead his life, this light-skinned girlchild instead of their beloved Leviticus. She slept in his bed and inherited his old books and the depth of his siblings’ love: she was a loved child in Oromocto. “This was his real life,” her aunt Almira always told her. “He was so happy here. That woman made him miserable and left him to die in a bowling alley.”
In a way she believed that still, she could feel a sort of misery, like the afterheat of fire coming up through the floorboards. It felt distinct, familial. This was what he’d chosen. The heat of her mother. She missed her mother now, she realized, the bustling bossiness of her. She remembered being—how old? Too big for it, but lying across her mother’s lap and sneaking a hand up her mother’s shirt just to feel the lovely fatness of her, that roll across the tummy, the boiling heat.