Mary Modern - Prologue

the eighties through the teens
25 University Avenue
New Halcyon, Massachusetts

    The house has no name, though it is quite grand enough to warrant one. Joseph Dearthing, ancestor of our heroine, had it built in 1882 with proceeds from the sales of his two best-known inventions, an early carbon monoxide detection device and a piano-tuning apparatus constructed from a clothespin. When the house was new it had no street address, so mail was sent in care of the university a quarter of a mile away where he professed on Thursday afternoons. There had never been a question of naming the house, for its owner had come of age in a Five Points tenement and had little patience for the pretensions of other self-made men.
      That said, he built the quaintest house his children could imagine. His son Ambrose spent many a sunny afternoon toddling through a labyrinth fashioned from a bay laurel hedge, though at the time no one taller than he could possibly have become lost within it. To flank the house’s front doorway, Dearthing commissioned two stained glass panels depicting a pair of stern-faced seraphim from one of the finest artisans in Boston, and he was so pleased with these that he asked for a set of full-length pointed-arch windows for the dining room. No fairy-tale element went unrealized; there was even a three-story turret at the northwest corner. Dearthing’s daughter, Cecelia, fell asleep every night in a chamber shaped like the full moon.
      The visitor finds a surprise on the far side of every door. A mosaic of kaleidoscopic design covers the foyer floor; its intricacy may be fully appreciated only from a vantage point on the second-floor landing. Richly-colored William Morris paper covers the walls in every room. The first-floor study offers a choice of more than twelve thousand volumes, and in the dining room a twee Latin inscription spans the limestone mantelpiece. A series of smaller drawing rooms leads to the great room, where above the Carrara marble fireplace hangs a mermaid salvaged from the prow of an antebellum merchant vessel, her left breast cleaved in two. Dust never settles on the baby grand piano in the corner, and the heady stink of lilies in full bloom wafts through the conservatory door. One finds the watercolors on Cecelia’s easel beside the edelweiss surprisingly accomplished.
      The Dearthings will employ no other housekeeper once Mrs. Henry passes in her sleep in her attic bedroom in the autumn of 1914. Her windchimes will hang from the crossbeam for a hundred years afterwards. From the attic door, a meandering passage leads down a set of five steps, past the third-floor turret room, and down a spiral staircase to the family bedrooms on the second floor and the kitchen on the first.
      There is one secret passage known to Ambrose, his sister, and later his wife and three children as “the loop,” and no other living person is aware of its existence. Beginning and ending in the basement, “the loop” is comprised of two dark and narrow staircases that are wedged between rooms on the eastern and western walls, and that meet again in the open attic on the third floor. Entrances on each floor are known as “broom closets,” and one cannot gain access with an ordinary skeleton key. Though it was seldom exercised, Joseph Dearthing wanted the ability to traverse all four floors undetected; the loop would come in handy in the event of burglars, querulous houseguests, or naughty little ones sneaking out of bed on Christmas Eve. Granted, the loop is of scant interest to anyone outside the household, but the young Dearthings, like all children, cherish even the most inconsequential secrets.
      Most of the house’s curiosities are modern in origin though antique in influence, all the furnishings but one piece: a towering eighteenth-century Dutch curio cabinet in the dining room, carved from wood darker than mahogany, which features a Last Judgment scene of sorts. At the top of the cabinet a host of heavenly faces beams above the glassed-in shelves; cherubs blow trumpets and Christ sits enthroned. The side panels depict the story of original sin, and at the base of the cabinet, beneath the last drawer, are carved the gargoyles and the unrepentant swindlers, the faces of the damned. Joseph Dearthing purchased this piece of furniture at a New York auction house for what was then an outrageous sum. He justified the expense by claiming the cabinet’s presence would keep his children honest. In truth, it would only give them nightmares.