The Monsters of Templeton Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the bank when all was said and done, a gift from her grandfather at her birth, all that remained of Marmaduke's millions.
    "The good news," said Chauncey Todd, "is that you get to keep Averell Cottage. Your mother had held it in trust for you all this time."
    Vivienne stared forlornly at the lawyer, who was sitting back and pinching the bridge of his nose. On her long bus trip across the country, she had come to the secret resolution to sell off everything, take the money, and buy a sweet, wisteria-covered house in Carmel-by-the-Sea that overlooked the ocean. She would be a poet: words, she always told me when I was growing up, burned her fingertips from her late teens until her twenties. Years later, she would read my clumsy high school essays and rearrange the words with great innate skill until they tripped lightly across the page. On the bus home, she had imagined in detail the long life she would live in the cottage by the sea, how she wouldn't have to ever work again. We all have our theories about why people react the way they do, especially when they're acting eccentric; mine is that those daydreams of Carmel-by-the-Sea were how she staved off the sorrow ticking at her from inside, the incomprehensible loss of both her parents at once.
    Now, in Chauncey Todd's office, it looked as if she would have to stay for a little while to get ramshackle Averell Cottage back into shape, and then try to sell it. Even then, she would probably only have enough money for a decade or so in a smaller place than the one she longed for, and then she would have to get a job, if she weren't a famous poet already.
    The lawyer looked at her pale face with its burning carbuncles of acne, and felt a tiny mewling movement of pity in his breast. "It is not much," he said, not unkindly. "But it can be a good life if you manage it well."
    "Good. Fantastic," she said. And Chauncey Todd, unaccustomed to the sarcasm of the next generation, took her at her word, and beamed her bosoms a tender smile. In response, Vi took her left breast in hand and shook it at him for a good-bye, then trudged home in her scandalous dress and cork shoes, the ratty zigzag of her part lowered into the lake wind.
    At home, she stood looking out the parlor window at the lake. Snow devils were whirling around on the ice, and the pines were spiked with white on the hills. Vivienne thought of old Marmaduke Temple boffing his slave, and laughed.
    Then, standing there at the window, she surprised herself. At one time, she had been a princess, an obedient Shirley Temple in patent-leather shoes and pink organza dresses. At one time, she declaimed to crowds of historians perched on the seats of antique parlor chairs, who sent streams of pipe smoke at her as they shouted "Hooray!" If she had done well with her declamations, her father would briefly press his hand against her cheek as he escorted her up to bed. "My girl," he would say. "My brilliant girl." Now watching the winter out of Averell Cottage's windows, words she remembered from when she was little just bubbled up from nowhere. "In the spring of 1785 I left my family in New Jersey and traveled into the vast and melancholy wilderness," she said aloud in a sort of half-murmur, "...all was dark at first, and the trees cast a midday twilight upon me. Then there was a rift in the darkness, a cliff where the trees dropped a hundred feet from the mountain's lip, and there I stepped into the light...There was no wind in this desolate New York wilderness, and all was calm. Suddenly before me rose a vision of ghostly buildings on the edge of the lake, a true city of spires and rooftops, a phantom bustle in the streets, smoke. I sank to my knees in the strange ferns."
    The words of the man in question, Marmaduke Temple, at the epiphanic moment when he first laid eyes upon the place where he would build Templeton. This great, calm, heroic, rational man, now exposed as a base slave owner and philanderer among the unpaid help. What a