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"Oh, Trisha, I don't know. What if we're caught?" "We won't be. You want to see the letter, don't you?" she asked. "Well?" she pursued.
"Yes," I said. I looked into her eyes. "I want to see that letter very much."
The next night we sat in the sitting room and pretended to be interested in Agnes Morris's scrapbooks. It almost kept her from going out with her friends because she lingered so long to explain this picture and that and tell anecdotes about her performances and fellow actors. When Mr. Fairbanks, the clock, bonged out the hour, she realized she had to hurry to dress to meet her friends.
After she left we went looking for Mrs. Liddy and found that she had gone into her room to listen to the radio. Trisha looked at me and nodded. She went to Agnes's door and discovered it was unlocked, just as she had expected. When she turned the knob, I thought a dozen butterflies had been frightened inside my chest. It felt like their wings were flapping against my heart. I hesitated.
"What if she comes back while we're in there?" I asked.
"She won't. She's gone to a show. Come on," Trisha whispered. I looked back at Mrs. Liddy's closed door. The music from the radio could still be heard, but she could still come out and see or hear us. That would be terrible, I thought. Then I thought about Grandmother Cutler and how she would glare at me with her gray-stone eyes shooting devilish electric sparks.
"All right," I said and followed Trisha into Agnes's room. I hadn't seen past the curtain before. Trisha parted it and we entered.
It did feel like I was walking onto a stage and entering a set. We found the bedroom dimly lit by a small Tiffany lamp on the desk to the left. Agnes had an antique white cast-iron bed with white pine night stands on either side. There were oversized pillows and a white down comforter with pink trim. The wall on the right held an enormous mirror. A long vanity table was covered with jars and tubes of makeup, cold cream and powders. In the left corner were bottles of perfume, so many it looked like a shelf in the cosmetic section of a department store. As we drew closer, I could see that a ring of small bulbs lined the mirror. It even smelled like back stage.
There were two matching dressers on the left and a closet between them, the door now closed but a sign over it read, EXIT. I turned to Trisha with a smile of confusion on my face.
"She's taken things from stages and put them in this room. That's an actual makeup table from an old theater. And those drapes," she said, nodding toward the windows, "were made from actual stage curtains.
"Every morning she leaves this room, she pretends she's starring in a new play," Trisha added. I looked at the pictures on the walls. They were all pictures of Agnes wearing different costumes from the different productions she had been in. I recognized some of them from the scrapbooks.
Suddenly, it all struck me as being very sad. Agnes lived in the past because she had no present and no future. Every day she wove her memories together on a loom of fantasy to avoid facing reality, facing the fact that she was no longer young and beautiful and in demand. She lived vicariously through her talented residents. I began to wonder how much of what she had told us was part of an illusion.
"If the letter is anywhere," Trisha said, "it's probably on that desk."
We went to it and began to search through the papers piled in a rather disorganized manner—bills were mixed in with personal letters, theater periodicals and advertisements. We didn't find Grandmother Cutler's letter there. Trisha opened the drawers and rifled through them, but again, we came up empty-handed.
I touched Trisha's shoulder and indicated she should be quiet when I thought I heard footsteps in the corridor outside the door. We listened, but heard nothing.
"We better go," I said.
"Wait." Trisha gazed around the room. "This letter, it's probably part of some sort of scene in her crazy head. A secret correspondence . . ." Trisha mused aloud and studied the room like an amateur sleuth. "I remember this play we put on last year, a mystery . . . Agnes was there, of course . . ."
She walked slowly toward the bed.
"Trisha, let's forget it," I pleaded. Surely, if Mrs. Liddy came out, she would hear us searching in the room. Trisha held her hand up to indicate I should be quiet while she thought. Then she lifted the comforter a bit, knelt down and stuck her hand between the mattress and the box spring. She ran her hand along the side of the bed, came up with nothing and went around to the other side to do the same thing. "Trisha."
"Wait."
She knelt down out of sight. I stepped back to listen at the door. A moment later, Trisha stood up smiling with the letter in her hand. We met at the desk and
Trisha took the letter out of the envelope and spread it before us in the light of the small Tiffany lamp. I read it softly, aloud.
Dear Agnes,
As you know I have enrolled my granddaughter Dawn in the Bernhardt School and asked Mr. Updike to have her housed in your residence. I am relying on our friendship. I hate to place such a formidable bur-den on your shoulders, but frankly, you are my last hope.
This grandchild has been a terrible problem for us all. My daughter-in-law is absolutely beside herself and has nearly had a number of serious nervous breakdowns as a consequence. I can't tell you how much my son Randolph has aged because of this . . . this . . . I'm afraid I have to say it . . . bad seed in our family.
The irony is she has musical talent. Since she has done nothing but gotten into trouble in one public school after another because of her juvenile delinquency, which includes sexual promiscuity, I thought sending her to the school of performing arts might help. Perhaps if she is made to concentrate on her talents, she will be less of a delinquent.
The fault lies with all of us. We have spoiled her. Randolph has rained gifts upon her ever since she was an infant. She's never done a true day's work at the hotel. No matter what we ask her to do, she always complains.
Furthermore, I'm afraid she has become a rather sneaky person, not above lying right to your face. She even went so far as to steal from one of my elderly guests.
Even though I have warned her against it, she might stay in contact with some public school friends who have been bad influences on her. Watch out for that and please be sure she lives up to your rules and does whatever she is supposed to do. I will, of course, be speaking to you shortly in more detail about all this.
You don't know how much I and my family appreciate your willingness to take on what I would have to honestly admit is a major problem child.
