The Children

The last nanny had left suddenly, I knew that much. Ada said she had gone home to her family in Ohio, and that the children had taken it hard. She said this the way she said everything about the past, quickly and without looking at me, as if the past were a room she did not want me to open. I let it go. I was young, and I was happy, and I believed that happiness was a kind of information.

Eliot was eleven. He was beautiful the way children in old paintings are beautiful, with dark hair and a way of standing very still when he was interested in something. He could play the piano by ear, not well but confidently, and he had taught himself to read the weather. He would stand on the porch in the morning and tell you whether the afternoon would bring rain, and he was usually right. Fern was quieter. She collected smooth stones from the lake and kept them in a row on her windowsill, and she talked to the dog we did not have. They were both, by any measure, the kind of children you would want to spend your life guarding.

The school letter came at the end of the first week, in a thick envelope that Ada handed me at breakfast without comment. It was from the headmaster of a boarding school in New Hampshire, and it said that Eliot would not be returning for the autumn term. It said this in four paragraphs, and it said nothing. There was a phrase — “asked to leave” — and there was a phrase about “conduct not consistent with the values of the community,” and there was a sentence, near the end, that I have never forgotten: “We are sorry to lose him. He is a boy of unusual charm, and we have found that charm of that kind is sometimes its own difficulty.”

I read it twice. Then I read it again, because the first two times I could not believe there was nothing more to it. There was nothing more. The letter was the whole story, and the whole story was that nobody was going to tell me.

I asked Ada that afternoon, in the kitchen, while she was shelling peas. I tried to make it sound like nothing. I said, “What did he do?”

She did not pretend to misunderstand. She went on shelling for a while, and then she said, “He told lies. That’s what they said. He told lies to the other boys, and then he told them to the teachers.”

“What kind of lies?”

“The kind you can’t repeat.” She looked up at me then, and her eyes were older than her face. “You’ll find, miss, that at this house the children have always been a little ahead of their age. It’s the way they were raised. It’s the way their parents raised them. And then it’s the way the people who took care of them raised them after that.”

“Which people?”

She went back to the peas. “The people who were here before.”

I should have pushed. I did not push. I was twenty-three years old, I had a beautiful job, and I had already decided that whatever was wrong with the house could be fixed by loving the children harder. That is the kind of decision you make when you are twenty-three, and it is the kind of decision that gets paid for later.