Early Spring 01 Broken Flower Read Free

of the house, but we knew the door was kept locked. It was opened with what Ian called an old-fashioned skeleton key. Only Nancy, the maid, entered it once a month to dust and do the windows. I was always curious about it and longed to go into it and look at what had once belonged to him as a little boy. As far as I knew. Daddy didn't even go in there to relive a memory or find something he might have left from his younger days.
Mama told me this house was fall of secrets locked in closets and drawers. She said we were all better off keeping them that way. Opening them would be like opening Pandora's box, only instead of disease and illness, scandals would flutter all around us. I didn't know what scandals were exactly, but it was enough to keep me from opening any drawer or any closet not my own.
Ian's bedroom was next to mine but closer to our parents' bedroom, which was across the hall and down toward the south end of the house and property. Although they were originally meant to be guest rooms, all of our bedrooms were bigger than the bedrooms we had in our own house. Even the hallways in the March Mansion were wider, with ceilings higher than those in any home I had ever entered.
Along the walls were paintings my
grandparents had bought at auctions. There were pedestals with statuary they had acquired during their traveling and at estate sales. My grandmother was supposedly an expert when it came to spotting something of value that was underpriced. When she was asked about that once, she said, "If someone is stupid enough to sell it for that price, you should be wise enough to grab it up or else you would be just as stupid."
So many things in my grandmother's house once belonged to either other wealthy people who had bequeathed their valuables to younger people who didn't appreciate them or know their value, or wealthy people who had simply gone bankrupt and needed money desperately.
"One man's misfortune is usually another's good luck," Grandmother Emma said. "Be alert. Opportunity is often like a camera's flash. Miss it and it's gone forever."
She tossed her statements at us as if we were chickens clucking at her heels, waiting to be fed her wisdom or facts about the house and its contents. The truth was there was so much about it that I. even so young, thought was breathtaking, and I couldn't help being proud when other people complimented me on where I lived. Even my teacher, Mrs. Montgomery, who had been at Grandmother Emma's house once, made flattering comments, comments that caused me to be more conscious of its richness.
Some of the grand chandeliers hanging over the stairway, the hallways below, and the dining room came from Europe, and one was said to have once belonged to the king of Spain.
"The light that rains down on us now once fell on royalty," Grandmother Emma was fond of saving.
Did that mean we were magically turned into royalty, too, when we stood within its glow? She certainly acted as if she thought so. She walked and talked and made decisions like someone who expected it all to be written down as history. After all, the mansion was historic, why wasn't she?
No two rooms had the same style furniture. Ian and I were often given sermons about it so that we would fully appreciate how lucky we were to be living in the shadows of such elegance and culture. Everything, even the knobs on doors, had some significance and value. She made the house sound like a living thing.
"Each room in a house like this should be like a new novel," Grandmother Emma said. "Every piece should contribute to some sort of history and tell its own story, whether it be the saga of a grand family or a grand time."
Some of the pieces of furniture in the same room could have a different background and heritage, as well, whether it be a picture frame, a stool, or a bookcase.
The dining room had a table, chairs, and a buffet that was vintage nineteenth-century Italian and had once belonged to a cardinal. The sitting room, which was