Sunflower House

The sign had once been yellow.

It hung from a pair of iron posts at the end of a short cracked driveway, in the angle of two quiet streets in the old end of Germantown, and the weather had taken nearly everything from it. The paint had blistered and peeled in long curling strips. A hand-lettered sunflower, as large as a dinner plate, had faded to the color of a bruise. Of the words below it only a few remained, in ragged capitals, like the teeth of an old man: SUN LOWER HO SE. Someone had once tried to wire the missing letters back on. The wire had rusted through.

Leo cut the engine.

For a moment we sat in the car without speaking. It was late afternoon, the light thin and gold. A dog barked somewhere. A boy went by on a bicycle with a transistor radio strapped to the handlebars, playing something with a pulse like a heart, and the sound grew, and faded, and left the street emptier than before.

"Place gives me the creeps," said Leo.

"It's meant to."

"You think?"

"I think nobody designs a building to be sad," I said. "It is done to them. Slowly."

He grunted, and opened the door.

…

The main house stood at the back of a long yard of dead grass, and one saw at a glance that it was finished. It was a rambling three-story building of dark-red brick, built in the Quaker manner, with tall chimneys and plain deep windows, and it must once have been handsome. Now every window was boarded. Sheets of gray plywood had been nailed across them, floor to floor, and spray-painted with the names of boys who had long since gone home. The front door had been sealed with a steel plate. A buddleia had grown through the porch roof. The slates were slipping from the gable like scales from a dead fish.

Behind it lay a smaller structure, a low brick outbuilding with a stovepipe and a patch of kitchen garden gone to seed. Its windows, alone of all the windows in that place, were whole. A thread of smoke rose from its chimney. And on the porch, in a wicker chair that creaked at every motion, sat a very old woman.

She did not look up as we crossed the gravel.

She was small, even sitting. She had thick white hair twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck, and a long dark cardigan buttoned to the chin, and her feet, in heavy brown shoes, were set neatly side by side on the boards. Her hands lay in her lap. In them she held a loop of wooden beads, and they moved, bead by bead, between a thumb and forefinger as bent and knotted as the roots of a tree. I could hear the click of them in the stillness.

Her eyes were open. They were a pale, milky, opaque blue, like water in a saucer, and they stared past our shoulders at nothing.

"Mrs. Penhallow?" said Leo.

"Who's that?"

The voice was a surprise. It was small, but clear, with a lilt in it that took me back, so sharply that I felt it in my throat, to a boyhood spent in the west of England. It was Welsh. It had the rise and fall of a hymn sung quietly in a church.

"Captain Maddox, ma'am. Philadelphia Police. I called ahead."

"Ah, yes. The telephone." The beads stopped. "You'll forgive me for not getting up. It's the hip. And the other business." She turned her face a few degrees toward me. "There's two of you."

"This is Dr. Vaughn," said Leo. "He's—a consultant."

"English," said Mrs. Penhallow.

"Bristol," I said, "I'm afraid."

"Hm." It was the sound of a person who has heard worse. "Sit. There's a bench. Mind the third board, it's loose. I'd offer you tea but I can't see the kettle."

…

We sat.

It was a small, bare, dim room that opened off the porch, or rather a kind of glassed-in veranda with a stove at one end. Everything in it was clean. There was a rag rug on the floor, and a shelf of china, and a calendar from a hardware store three years out of date. On the wall hung a plain wooden cross. A cat, orange, enormous, was asleep on the stove. A smell of coal smoke and beeswax and old lavender hung in the air.

Leo began as he always did, clumsily and well. He explained who we were. He said that we were investigating a series of deaths. He said that certain names had come up in connection with the case, and that he hoped she might be able to help.

"Names," said Mrs. Penhallow.

"A club, ma'am. From a private school. The Golden Heart Society."

The beads stopped.

I had been watching her hands. I do not think she knew. They lay in her lap quite motionless, and I saw the wooden loop go slack between her fingers, and then, quite slowly, begin to tremble. It was a fine, rapid, helpless shaking, like the shaking of an old horse in the cold. The tremor traveled up her wrists. It reached her shoulders. And from the corner of one pale clouded eye there welled a single thick drop of water, which rolled down her cheek, and hung for a moment at the line of her jaw, and fell on the wool of her cardigan.

"You've come about Arlo," she said.

…

I felt Leo go still beside me.

"Who's Arlo, ma'am?"

"Don't." It was not unkind. It was weary, as one speaks to a child who has begun a game. "Don't pretend to me, Captain. I'm seventy-four. I can't see, but I can hear. I read the papers by the wireless, there's a girl at the church who reads them to me. I've heard about the people who died. I've heard the names." She drew a long, whistling breath. "I've been waiting for you for fifteen years. I thought you'd be sooner."

"We—"

"Let me tell it my way."

She put the beads down on her knee. She folded her hands over them, and turned her pale face to the stove, and began to speak.

…

"I was matron here for thirty-one years," said Mrs. Penhallow. "From 'seventy-four to the end. I came over from Cardiff as a girl of twenty-two, with a letter from my minister, and a cardboard case. I thought I'd do a year. I stayed till they shut the door."

"They were not bad years. Not at first. We had forty children. The Friends were good people, simple, they gave what they had. The food was plain and the beds were clean and no child went to bed hungry. We had a garden. We kept hens. In the summers they put the little ones in the yard and let them run."

She smiled faintly.

"I'm not telling you it was a palace. They were orphans. Strays. The ones the state couldn't place. Some of them came with a bruise or a burn, and some of them came with nothing at all, just a name on a card. You learn not to ask. But in thirty years I never saw a child here who didn't have, in the end, one thing he could call his own."

She stopped.

"Arlo was eleven."

The word hung in the room like smoke.

"He'd been with us since he was three. They found him in a carrier bag on the steps of the Germantown Friends Meeting, in January, with a note. His name is Arlo Wren. That was all. No mother. No father. Just a little boy in a blanket, half frozen, who didn't cry." Her voice softened. "He never cried. Not once, in eight years. He was a strange little thing. Dark, thin, serious, with enormous eyes. He would sit in the corner of the day room with a book on his knee and look at you over the top of it, and you'd feel that you were being added up."

"He was clever?"

"Clever." She laughed, a little breath. "Captain, I've never known a child like him. He'd read every book in the library by the time he was nine. We had a shelf of old encyclopedias, a whole set, the Britannica, someone's bequest. He read them like novels. He'd come to me and ask me how the sea made salt. How a clock knew what time it was. And if I said I didn't know, he'd go and find out and come back and tell me."

"He fixed things. The boiler, once. The wireless. A radio that had been dead for ten years. He took it to pieces on the kitchen table and put it together again and it played." The old face worked. "Eleven years old. I used to say he'd be a professor. I used to say it to the Friends. They'd smile at me."

"And friends?" I said.

She turned her head.

"Friends," she said, and the word was a small sad stone. "He didn't have any. He didn't play. The other boys left him alone, and he left them alone, and I thought that was how it would always be. He sat apart. He watched. He slept very badly, I knew that. I'd find him at three in the morning in the kitchen, with his eyes open." She paused. "And then Stella came."

…

"Stella Marsh," said Mrs. Penhallow. "She was nine."

I had a small pad on my knee. I did not write.

"She came in the autumn, from a hospital in Frankford. Her mother had died, there was a father somewhere, no one knew where. She was blind. She'd been blind from the day she was born. Her eyes were quite clear, you'd never have known it, they were a lovely gray, like pigeons. But they didn't move. They stayed in one place. I thought, God help her, she'll never settle."

"And she did?"

"Within a week." Her face seemed to loosen. "I'll tell you something, Doctor, I've been a long time with children and I've never seen anything like it. She was nine years old and she'd lost her mother and her home and her sight, and she came into that day room, with a nurse's hand on her shoulder, and she smiled."

"She had a smile that—" The old voice failed. She swallowed. "She had a smile that was like the sun. I don't say it to be pretty. It filled you. You'd see it and think, there's nothing in the world to be afraid of. The little ones followed her about like ducklings. The big ones brought her sweets."

"And Arlo?"

"Arlo," said Mrs. Penhallow, "went and sat beside her."

A silence.

"He just sat. Without a word. He took a book from his pocket and he began to read it aloud. It was an old copy of Treasure Island, I think, with half the cover off. He read it in a low voice, as if he were afraid someone would hear. And she turned her head toward the sound. And she smiled." She smoothed her skirt. "That was that. From that day he was never without her. He read to her every afternoon. He took her out in the yard and told her what was there, the hens, the sky, the color of the leaves. He described the sunsets to her. He was a very exact little boy. He'd say, the cloud over the chimney is the color of a peach, with a line of dark at the bottom, like a pencil. And she'd say, I can see it."

She was weeping openly now, with no sound.

"And she could. Do you understand me? She really could."

…

"There was a wall," said Mrs. Penhallow. "Between the two wings. The boys slept to the east, the girls to the west, and between them ran the old house wall, two bricks thick, and a heating pipe. It was a big iron pipe, from the boiler, running up through all three floors, and it came out of the ceiling of the dormitory and ran along the baseboard of the east wall, and then through the brick and into the girls' side. In the winter you could warm your hands on it."

"She used it," said Leo slowly.

"Every night."

The old hands stirred.

"I heard it, you see. I slept in the little room at the end of the corridor, and the pipe ran through my wall. Every night at nine, after the lamps were out, there'd be a sound. Three taps. Slow. Tock. Tock. Tock. And a minute later, the same thing from the other side." She nodded to herself. "It was her way of saying good night. He told me once what it meant. He said it meant I'm here."

"I'm here," I said.

"Three slow ones. I'm here. And three back." She touched her cheek. "I used to lie in the dark and listen. It's the loveliest thing I ever heard."

I found that I had stopped breathing.

I do not know how to explain the effect of those words. I had heard them before. I had heard them from a little girl in an ambulance, with a mask on her face, in the dark of a Kensington night. I knocked three slow ones. It had meant nothing to me then. It had been a child's habit, a thing from a brother. But a pattern, once seen, cannot be unseen, and I sat in that clean small room, with the orange cat asleep on the stove, and felt the old floor tilt under my feet.

Three slow knocks.

I'm here.

…

I was not listening to her any longer. I was looking.

It is a thing I do when I am moved. I cannot help it. I make my eyes busy, because it keeps the rest of me still. And in the middle of that old woman's sorrow, I found my gaze moving round the little room like a sparrow, from the stove to the shelf to the window to the corner by the door.

There was a wooden crate by the wall.

It was an ordinary orange crate, the sort that holds groceries. It stood on the floor beside the door, half covered with a cloth. A fold of the cloth had slipped, and I could see inside: a loaf of bread, two tins of soup, a bag of coffee, a paper carton marked in blue letters, Whole Milk. Pasteurized. The date on the carton, if I read it right, was the fourteenth of the month.

It was today's.

I looked at the stove. It was cast iron, old and black, and a coal scuttle stood beside it; and in the angle of the wall, half hidden behind the cat, was a small white electric heater with a modern dial. A new one. The cord ran from it, in a neat gray line, to a socket I could see from where I sat. It was plugged in. It was on.

I looked out through the window.

The main house stood in the last of the light, tall and dark, with its sheets of plywood and its collapsing slates. On the corner of the wall, below the eaves, a gray metal box had been bolted to the brick. It had a little round window in the front. Behind the window, I could just make out the face of a dial, and on the dial a thin white wheel, going slowly round.

An abandoned building, I thought. With the power on.

And someone using it.

…

"Mrs. Penhallow," I said gently. "Who brings you the groceries?"

She turned her face toward me.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The crate. By the door. The milk is fresh, and it was bought today. Who brings them?"

"Oh." The tears stopped. A kind of stillness came over her. "That's a young man. He comes on a Thursday. About four. He leaves it on the step, and knocks, and goes away. I've never seen his face."

"You've never seen him."

"I can't see, Doctor. Not since the spring of last year. He's very quiet." She felt for her beads. "He's never told me his name."

"Does he speak?"

"Not to me."

"Do you know who he is?"

She did not answer.

She sat quite still, with her head a little bowed, and her pale blind eyes turned toward the wall, and for a long moment I thought she would say nothing at all. Her fingers found the loop of beads and began to move. Click. Click. Click. And I saw a thing I will not forget: the faint, fierce, secret, protective stubbornness of a very old woman who has decided, for reasons that are entirely her own, to remember nothing.

I took out my pad. I wrote one word.

Thursday.

I underlined it.

…

"Mrs. Penhallow," said Leo, more gently than I had ever heard him. "What happened to Stella?"

"She died," said the old woman. "Of her heart, they said." She turned the beads. "I found her little clip next morning, in the gravel by the cellar door. A bit of yellow plastic, with a flower on it. She wore it every day. I gave it to the boy. I didn't know what else to do with it."

Leo looked at me. I said nothing. I wrote cellar door on my pad, and under it, clip.

We were at the door when she spoke again.

It was a very small voice. We had stood up. Leo had said what one says. I had my hat in my hand. The light had gone from gold to red, and the cat had opened one eye, and the whole low room seemed to lean toward us with the slow sad gravity of a house that is about to be left alone.

"The night they took her," said Mrs. Penhallow.

I turned.

She had not moved. She sat with her head bent and her hands in her lap and her back to the light. She spoke to the floor.

"I was in my room. It was late. Past eleven. I'd been in bed an hour." She drew a breath. "I heard it through the wall. I heard the pipe. Three taps. Slow. Slow."

The beads clicked once.

"I thought it was the boiler."

She said it with such flat and exhausted simplicity that I felt it go through me like cold water.

"I thought it was only the pipes."