The Ingenue: A Novel

Prologue

Nobody knows where the elves came from. In lieu of gargoyles, that pair of fairy-tale creatures has framed the doorway of the Harper mansion for as long as anyone can remember. Kneeling mischievously, their pointed ears sticking out from their stocking caps, they lie in wait. Watching the births and the deaths, the parties and the funerals, the beginnings and the endings. But who, every Harper for generations has asked, put them there?

When Georg and Emilia Harfenist had come over from the newly united Germany in 1871 (ein Kaiser, Emilia used to say—bah!), Georg was as pleased to shed the superstitions of his native land as he was to shed his name: they were now Harpers, and they didn’t believe in fairy tales. There was a practicality to America, a straightforwardness to it that suited him. You worked and you saved money; you used that money to buy land; that land was yours, and on it you could build a house for your family. Or, in his case, a mansion out of his wife’s Gothic dreams. Peaks and spires, towers and libraries, all perched on a cliff’s edge above Lake Michigan, with a view of the wild and wilding waters.

It couldn’t have been Georg who chose the elves. The plaster vines and roses curling around the ceiling of the foyer were as far as Georg would go in terms of whimsy. The Brothers Grimm, the Schwarzwald, the fairies, and, yes, the elves, too—they were a superstitious nightmare from which the grimly Lutheran Georg had awoken. Anyway, the timing was wrong. The elves themselves are a paler gray than the house itself. They haven’t seen the same number of Wisconsin winters, haven’t lived through the same sweltering Milwaukee summers as the rest of the house, which has deepened over time into charcoal, disappearing into the surrounding trees on dark nights.

Georg did set up his cream-bricked brewery downtown, and he did make the beer that made Milwaukee famous (and made the highways, when they came, redolent with the sweet-sickly smell of gasoline-tinged hops), and in turn, he made his fortune. Their fortune. But he hadn’t made any elves.

Who, then?

The Harpers multiplied slowly, like a fairy-tale curse: precisely one male heir each generation. And the men, without exception, were an ambitious and dour lot, just as the women they married had an inevitable whimsy that would have gotten poorer women sent straight to the asylum.

So yes, one of the wives could have done it. Which, though, would have dared?

Had Constance put them there sometime during the Depression? Unlikely. Constance was vaguely related to the Rockefellers, and it had been hammered into her from birth: unnecessary public displays of wealth were how you got guillotined. Besides, the family had been in such dire straits by that point that they’d sold off the brewery to a conglomerate. (Freddie had a few qualms about getting rid of his grandfather’s legacy but consoled himself that the house was legacy enough. The house, and the money from the sale that should have lasted them a century or more.) There wasn’t anything extra to spend on bizarre masonry.

Constance was fanciful enough for the elves, though, and fancy was what the house excelled at. Constance found this out the hard way when she tried to join the war effort a bit later, plowing up the back gardens and planting beets and carrots and potatoes. Though her Victory garden never grew, the hydrangeas and peonies flourished. Despite its founder’s intentions, the Elf House was never any good at producing anything practical. Beautiful, it could do.

To tell the truth, Evie was the most likely suspect. In 1950, Evelyn Harper was the first woman born into the family for four generations, inheriting all of Constance’s playfulness and all of Frederick’s ambition. It was certainly in Evie’s nature to have put the elves there. But she did not own the house until her father’s death in 1982, and by then the elves were a long-established fact. They peer from the margins of the 1942 photograph of Freddie in his uniform, about to embark on a brave journey overseas. They peek over the edges of photos documenting Evie’s graduation, her Daughters of the American Revolution induction, her wedding. No, the elves predate Evie by a long time.

Sometime after the unification of Germany, sometime before World War II. Nobody knows where the elves came from, but the elves are sitting there still. They are sitting there now. Perched on either side of the Elf House’s oaken door, watching the family pass under their motionless eyes. Though the family is not called Harper anymore. Her 1974 marriage turned Evelyn Harper into Evelyn Kreis.

And, anyway, Evelyn Kreis is dead.

Her husband stops in the February cold, his hand paused on the open car door. The last weeks have etched themselves onto his face, acid into stone. A round face, a wing of silver hair above, a Cary Grant dimple in the chin recently twisted just out of familiarity. A pleasant face turned uncanny by grief.

At the sound of the piano, though, a twitch of the forehead, and the sunbursts at the sides of his almond eyes lift. Evelyn Harper Kreis is dead, but there is music in her house. And now the house will sing once again.

Hello, the house, the man calls, pulling the oak door closed behind him. At his feet, a silver-and-white husky, more than halfway to a wolf, wriggles in decidedly unwolflike ecstasy. A palm on the pup’s head—

"I’m playing." Her voice is a low, annoyed buzz from the conservatory, but it makes him smile.

The man looks at the dog. A conspiratorial whisper: Should we go bug your sister, then?

She’s crescendoing as they approach the arched oak entryway, her corn-silk head weaving back and forth behind the piano.

"Danse Macabre?"

She nods, turning a page without looking up at him. The Horowitz arrangement.

It’s nice, he says, and she does look up at this, the two of them sharing a smile, though her hands keep going. The music is disturbing, discordant. Nice is the very last thing it is.

Above them, a dull thump. Another. Each one like a sack of flour being flung against the floor.

The dog’s ears prick up.

What the hell—

Oh, she says, her hands dancing madly over the keys. That’s just Patrick.

Patrick?

Yeah, she says, scanning the page in front of her as the notes twist, turn wild. He’s locked up in the attic. It’s stupid, she says, stopping to flex her fingers. The silence rings through the room as she looks at him with his own blue eyes. But I kind of hoped he’d be dead by now.

Outside, the elves wait. Frozen in time.

Chapter 1

Oh, wonderful! Yes, let’s never grow up. We’ll have adventures and seek treasure and hunt pirates and—

Peter Pan looked a little uncomfortable.

Ah. Well, you see, I didn’t exactly mean you, Wendy.

Wendy frowned. Then what did you mean?

Peter laced his fingers together, refusing to meet her eyes. Someone will have to cook and clean and generally look after things around camp, you know. And we thought—

Wendy stared at him in disgust. You want me to be your mother? No way. I’m ten. She stood up and beckoned to the fairy. Come on, Tinker Bell. Let’s you and me never grow up together.

—FAIRY TALES FOR LITTLE FEMINISTS:

WENDY AND THE LOST GIRLS, EVELYN HARPER KREIS

December 1991

Saskia was nine. Even at a run, it took her more than twenty minutes to check every room in the Elf House, but her mother wasn’t anywhere to be found. Saskia had even checked the guest rooms, the semi-haunted spaces with their sheeted furniture like ghosts, where Evie almost never went and where Sas ventured only when she was trying to scare herself. She sometimes thought that the souls of her mother’s ancestors who had lived here were lying among the ancient oak bedsteads and bookshelves, just waiting for their chance to rise up and tell her what she was doing wrong.

It was not unusual for her mother to disappear for extended periods. In general, Saskia’s parents treated her less like a kid and more like a miniature adult. At parties, with other parents, her mother always said that the best thing to do with children was to let them come up, not to make them grow up. Like Saskia was a blade of grass or a dandelion.

So Saskia was used to being alone in the big house. And though she didn’t mind the echoing solitude, Lexi had bribed her with the twin temptations of a trip down to Downer followed by a sleepover. She loved their sleepovers, which were filled with ghost stories they’d cribbed from the bone-curdling Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. Neither of them was technically allowed to read it, but that didn’t stop them. Nor did it stop their attempts to put what they’d learned into practice: summoning Bloody Mary, primarily, though Lex had a Ouija board that had been known to make an appearance.

But as much as Sas loved their sleepovers, she loved Downer more. Downer, the Main Street of Milwaukee’s East Side. Saint Nicholas had left her $10, and the bill was burning a hole in her pocket. She never had money. And $10 could buy any number of things on Downer: the popcorn truck sold dime candy in jars, Soaps & Scents had eighty-five-cent tea lights, Paperworks offered its stickers at a nickel a square. She could get eleven candles or 250 squares of stickers with her $10 bill, if she wanted them.

All she needed was to tell her mother, but Evie was nowhere to be found. There was only one place left to look. But the simple truth?

Sas was scared to go into the studio.

For decades, her mother’s subject had been women’s hands: the hands of famous artists, scientists, writers, actresses; the hands of washerwomen and seamstresses and mothers. She photographed them, she drew them, she was obsessed. The overall effect of going into her studio was like going into the woods, all those fingers like branches pinned on the wall. Like they were reaching out to grab you.

Saskia pulled on her snow boots with a sigh. Johann snuffled at her side, and she held the door open for him, letting him sprint out into the piles of snow. The snow went up almost to her knees, and she was tall for her age; everyone was always telling her. She wasn’t sure how true this was. She was Saskia-sized, that was all.

The studio was actually an old caretaker’s cottage that Evie had claimed for her own, a five-minute walk from the back door to the edge of the property. Surrounded by the northern pine copse, the cottage had had almost no sun reach its windows until last fall, when Evie had taken out the chain saw and cleared a gap in the trees herself.

Now, the afternoon sun slanted in the wide picture window, illuminating the gold of Evie’s head as she bent down over her drawings. Saskia liked to see her this way; it was the only time her mother’s expression ever resembled her own at the piano or her father’s at the cello.

At the door, she hesitated. Hesitated to break her mother’s concentration, hesitated to enter the forest of hands.

She gently brushed her knuckles against the door.

What?

What are you doing? Saskia asked, sidling up to the desk. The reaching fingers on the walls had disappeared, replaced by a strange parade of figures … not girls, exactly, their bodies were slightly too elegant for that. But not women, either: their eyes were wide, shining.

A new project. What do you think? Evie leaned back in her chair, a stick of charcoal still in hand as she crossed her arms.

Saskia tried to live up to the question, to the respect that it implied.

They’re pretty.

Hmmm.

She leaned closer. They’re … they’re interesting. Mom, what are they? Who are they?

Her mother set the charcoal down on the table, swiveled without rising to the electric kettle on the filing cabinet, and flicked it on.

You really don’t see?

Saskia looked again. The portraits lacked context, just bodies on blank white pages. But they wore old-fashioned dresses. Like—

Are they from fairy tales? she asked.

Evie swiveled back around as the kettle started to grumble. Bingo! she cried, pointing a finger at Saskia. Well done, Sas. Yes. I’ve decided it’s time to put these old drafting skills to some real use.

Evie taught drawing and illustration at the university, then came home and drew late into the night, until there was only the little orange circle of her desk lamp for light. Saskia could feel her mother itching to get back to work yet didn’t want to puncture the bubble of praise, wanting to remain as long as possible in its orb.

Fairy tales, she said again, bending over the sketches as if to study them.

Fairy Tales for Little Feminists, her mother corrected. Good title, isn’t it?

Saskia looked at the princesses. They weren’t Disney inspired, they were too elongated and sophisticated for that. She hated Disney anyway, everything except The Aristocats. Still. There was something more to her mother’s pictures, even she could tell. Something in the languid brushstrokes, in the blending of the colors.

Something more—and something strange.

Her mother, watching her face, laughed.

Come out with it, she said.

Well, aren’t you going to get bored?

Why would I get bored? Her mother looked genuinely perplexed.

Saskia swallowed. I don’t. They’re all so—same-y. Aren’t they? Don’t the princesses all kind of … look alike?

Evie’s eyes grew as round as whole notes.

That’s part of the fascination. All those princesses, all those witches, all those dead mothers…

Saskia winced.

Well, you need a good dead mother to set any princess off on her quest! Evie cried, palms to the ceiling. Any mother worth her salt would have stopped each and every one of these girls before she even got a foot out the door.

But why do you want to tell stories that have already been told? Saskia said.

Ah. Because there’s something new in them every time. And it’s only the sameness that helps us to see that.

Saskia watched her mother for a minute before admitting defeat. I don’t get it.

A knowing smile. You will. Hey—what did you want, anyway?

Oh! she said. Can I sleep over at Lexi’s? It was a perfunctory question—Lexi’s mom, Georgia, was one of her mother’s best friends, and the family lived next door.

But her mother, glancing for a millisecond back to the princesses on her table, had a funny expression on her face. Something tense under the relaxed looseness of her smile.

Of course.

Yeah?

"Of course, you could, Evie said tentatively, and sighed. I’m just nostalgic, I guess. The way you used to sit at the piano. We could just park you there for days."

I already … I already practiced, though. Besides, Mrs. Hauser’s sick, Saskia said, picking through the words carefully.

Evie’s head went up and down, like her sharp chin was being pulled by a puppeteer up in the ceiling.

Sure, she said finally. Well, you’re going to do what you’re going to do.

Back in the Elf House, Saskia stood frozen in the foyer for a minute. Two. Three.

Finally, she sat down on the staircase to pull her bright yellow boots off. And after padding in her socks back to the piano, she began to warm her hands up once again.

January 2020

In Saskia Kreis’s life, only three things ever made her special: piano, the Elf House, and Patrick. Three things are a whole lot more than most people get, but it is hard to feel gratitude now. Hard to feel it as she stands at the gates to the Elf House in the Milwaukee midwinter, bare hands against the Victorian iron, for the first time in two years.

She’s known for a long time that things with her mother weren’t right, haven’t been since she quit Juilliard. But she didn’t realize they were like this. Didn’t realize that they’d degenerated to the point where her mother wouldn’t tell her about the fast-moving disease that was eating her alive.

Didn’t realize that her mother wanted the news of her death to hit her like a house collapsing over her head.

It gnaws at her stomach, empty and bitter. Evelyn Kreis had seen something in her daughter that disturbed her, that made her withdraw. Saskia doesn’t know what it is. But that judgment—or rather, the fear of that judgment and its accompanying dismissal—has kept Saskia away from her childhood home for two years, ever since she lost her job. She couldn’t face disappointing her mother one more time. And her mother’s failure to tell her, to say: I’m dying? To say: Please, come back home?

It means that Saskia was right to stay away.

Three things made her special, and one—no, two of them are here in Milwaukee. The Elf House and Patrick. She’ll see him again; tomorrow, she’ll see him again. Two years since their last encounter. The thought makes her insides swoop and soar like the seagulls playing over the lake. What will he think of her, the way she is now?

The first thing that made her special has long been lost to history. Saskia Kreis used to be the next great American pianist. An ingenue, a wunderkind, a virtuoso. She’d had her first public concert at seven, her first recording at fifteen. But something—her talent? her desire? nobody knew for sure, though a handful of obscure internet forums speculated—had tapered out by the time she was eighteen. A promising future at Juilliard was cut off after only one semester, and Saskia had transferred to NYU, where she’d studied computer science (Computers! Evie had cried) and electrical engineering, graduating to a career as a mediocre coder.

Thing number two still exists. It is, in fact, more present than ever: Saskia Kreis is the heiress who will inherit the Harper mansion, the Elf House. Fourteen thousand square feet and thirteen bedrooms, full of fanciful plasterwork and custom woodwork, antique furniture and oversize oil paintings. Two acres of gardens and orchards stretching to cliffs, with a sandy beach below. Owing to a bizarre clause in her great-grandfather’s will that all subsequent Harpers repeated in their own, the house has to go to the next direct descendant in Georg Harper’s line. So it will skip over her father (though she’ll let him stay there, obviously—that’s never been a question) and land directly in her lap. That beautiful old house.

But even now, she’s remembering it rather than viewing it. Just as she has for these past two years. Because you can’t see the Elf House itself from the street. Passersby see only the gates, the lane of pines behind them twisting off somewhere toward the lake. You have to follow the gentle curve of the private road before it comes into view. Slate gray, with only a few details saving it from outright harshness. The pointed arches of the garrets, the stained-glass windows, the lacelike wrought iron lining the balconies. And, of course, the elves. A lovely house, a prime example of Milwaukee’s Germanic heritage. But the only time the public sees it is on the historical society’s annual garden tours of the East Side.

She sighs and opens the gates, feet crunching too loudly through the snow-covered gravel as she makes her way through the trees. As she comes closer to the Elf House; as the East Side fades away.

A good place to raise kids. That’s what residents always say about Milwaukee’s East Side. The sprawling Gothic and Tudor and Italianate mansions on the lake ceding to the properly contained Victorian single-families near the redbrick, leafy university. Beaches and boulevards, bookstores and barbecues. Lake Park delineating the limits of the neighborhood (it was designed by Olmsted, who designed Central Park—a fact the well-educated residents all know and occasionally trot out). Canopies of 150-year-old trees joining hands over side streets filled with kids on bikes.

After the grim necessity of the airport, the ramshackle houses and dirty piles of snow lining the freeway, the East Side feels like a fairy-tale village to Saskia. You’d think that two years away might give her an idealized image of her hometown. But here, in the richest part of the city, the image and the reality are one. It’s either wreaths and garlands, gingerbread houses lined with lights, or soft blue skies over sandy cliffside beaches that could be—and are—Instagram worthy, no filter required. Yup. A good place to raise kids.

But it has been years since Saskia Kreis was a kid to be raised, and the Uber driver, seeing her address, had rolled his eyes, though he hadn’t realized she was watching. A rich bitch. He hadn’t realized it’s her dead mother’s AmEx in her Apple Pay, slyly input by the older woman on her trip to New York the previous spring. Saskia had had no idea it would be Evie’s last trip there. Had Evie known?

She turns and there: there it is.

In the darkening light, the Gothic gables of the Elf House give off their own pearly-gray luster. There’s still something about the sheer expanse of the house that takes her breath away: the heavy stone arching with an unlikely grace toward the sky. Rows and rows of diamond-paned windows, bay windows, window seats. From the outside, you’d think the house was made for a bunch of Peeping Toms. Is that a shadow, flickering behind the living room curtains? But the house does that, too, the roaring winter fires in its dozen fireplaces creating their own ghosts.

As she climbs the steps, Saskia catches sight of the elves. Perched between her and the sky, the two floodlit stone creatures grimace back down at her. She hasn’t had this rush of fear (of what, that they’ll spring to life?) since she was a child, and she whirls back around, looking at the land surrounding her. Taking comfort in its elegance, its solidity. The dirty snow coating the city is untouched here, frosting the expansive lawn with fondant perfection. The lake is invisible beyond the cliff at the back of the house, but palpable all the same in the faint roar of the waves, the cawing of the hardy, ever-present seagulls.

It is the same. It has always been the same.

How do people buy houses? she’d asked her mother once she was old enough that money started to have meaning. Eight or nine and she was absorbing common figures for salaries and real estate listings, and the numbers didn’t seem to align. If you had a job that paid $30,000 a year, and even the cheapest house cost over a hundred grand, how on earth were you supposed to get one?

They wait for their parents to die, her mother had said. Breezily enough that Saskia hadn’t thought too hard about it; not breezily enough to be joking.

Little had she known. Except, of course, that her mother had known that this day would come. That someday, Saskia would be back here, ready to stand as next in line.

Evie had known. For the past six months, Evie had known. Ignoring Saskia’s calls, responding by text, by email. And Saskia, each time, feeling a small scratch of relief. She’s paying for it now; each scratch has come back to claw at her face. Your mother couldn’t stand you. You were less than nothing to her.

She closes her eyes.

The third thing: Saskia Kreis had once been adored. She had been Patrick’s whole world, and he had been hers, from the time she was fourteen until she’d left for college. She would have stayed—would have done anything for him, as teenage Saskia had earnestly said, all wide eyes and unpunctured hope. But he hadn’t let her. Had insisted that she go. And it broke her heart, and it broke all over again each time she saw him in passing at one of the Harper Christmas parties that were still called Harper more than a quarter century after anyone living in the house had borne the name.

Two years since they last saw each other at a Harper Christmas party, but nineteen since their last real conversation, his call breaking through the tangled cell networks into post-9/11 New York. Are you all right? Nineteen since he’d touched her with that probing tenderness. Nineteen since he’d let her go, set her free into the wild world, like the Cat Stevens song they’d both loved.

She’s vibrating with it, the desire to see him again. To tell him everything, to say: This is what my mother did. But it wasn’t my fault, was it? To have him tell her that she is blameless, that she is perfect, that she is free.

But the fantasy won’t hold for more than a few seconds. She keeps running up against it: What will he think of her now?

Because the truth is that Saskia Kreis was almost a lot of things, but now she is scraped bare inside like an artichoke, like somebody’s been at her with their teeth. She is thirty-seven years old. Her piano money is gone. She hasn’t had a real job in two years. Her boyfriend is married to somebody else. Her best friend is a lady from the boxing gym who would be very surprised to hear herself described in those terms.

She never said any of that to her mother.

She can’t say any of that to her mother. Anymore.

And yes, she’s mad about it. Saskia has known for a long time that a person can host multitudes, but she’s never felt anything like this combination of emotions, now, standing on the steps of the Elf House. Grief like a free fall. Rage like one of the mythical Furies. Desire, nostalgia, fear, curiosity …

These emotions are all she has right now, in this moment before she sees her father again. Her world is full of absent people.

She grabs her phone, starts texting.

You went pretty hard on me at the gym yesterday. I think you might have broken a rib.

In a few seconds, Gina types back: Toughen up, snowflake. I barely touched you.

She wishes she were at Gleason’s, sparring with Gina now. Barring that—

Wish you were here, she starts to type. But that’s not the kind of friendship they have, and she deletes it. Goes to check the messages from James that pinged onto her phone the second she landed.

Did you get in OK? Wish I could be at the meeting with you.

A code. A stupid, easily breakable code. He’s lucky that his wife trusts him; any idiot who’d actually read their messages would have cracked it by now. She stares at her phone, hands shaking from the cold. She sends a thumbs-up emoji as a new message comes in.

I’m so sorry about your mom. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.

But what does he think he can do? He can’t even admit he knows her.

She doesn’t feel guilty at the excitement ringing through her like a bell at the thought of seeing Patrick again. Saskia doesn’t feel guilty about much but, beyond that, she’s not in love with James. She’s never let herself think too hard about what the attraction is, beyond the fact of his hands. His beautiful hands, calloused and strong, shaping beautiful wood to craft beautiful furniture that beautiful people put in their homes. All that beauty aside, James is a bit stupid. She doesn’t mean it in an elitist way, he makes more money than she ever will and, besides, she’s sure there are smart carpenters out there. He’s just not one of them.

She’s stalling. And she shouldn’t have to think about him right now—wasn’t that the only possible upside of this? Of the whole horrible, screaming mess of this post-mother life that she’s now been thrust into? The howling loss, the suddenness of it, the disease’s work complete hours before her father’s phone call came. It feels like that kids’ game, Operation—Saskia’s fine as long as she avoids that part of her brain. But the second she remembers, the sensor buzzes, aggressive as a scream.

The only upside: a fresh start. Without her mother hovering at her shoulder, watching.

Saskia Kreis has never had a fresh start in her life.

Without her mother’s judgment, without the rolled eyes and slammed doors that have characterized their relationship since she quit Juilliard. Without the eternal hope that Saskia would once again sit down at the piano and begin to play.

After years of wishing her parents knew the truth of her life, the possibility of coming clean feels almost startling in its likelihood, its proximity. She can’t tell her mother anything, anymore; but she could bridge the gap, repair things, with her father. She can break through the skin of distant affection that’s characterized their relationship for as long as she can remember. Because the truth is that she should be mad at him, too; she should be furious that he’d been a conspirator in hiding her mother’s diagnosis—Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as rare and cruel as a witch’s curse—from her these past few months. But she doesn’t trust him enough to get really mad at him. She’s furious at her mother, furious and a little scared about what it says about her that she hadn’t been told. But toward her father, she feels just a little sigh of regretful understanding. Oh, well. That’s Dad.

So yes, she could tell her father. Tell him everything.

She could say: Dad, I lost my job two years ago. And I just couldn’t give you guys another reason to be ashamed of me.

Say: I’m not a team player. That’s what they say when, actually, you slept with the married boss and now he wants to get rid of you. The grown-up version of doesn’t play well with others, the commentary I’ve been getting my whole life.

Say: My contest winnings are all gone. I’m writing SAT questions at fifteen bucks a pop.

She can say it. She can tell him.

But the floodlights blast on again, the doorknob with its metal vines twists and, in a panic, she glances up at the elves. Their faces scrunched in knowing judgment.

She’s not going to say it.

This house has secrets built into its skin. It was never the place for truth.

As the door opens, she’s still looking up at the elves, but her father’s looking at her, and she pulls the sleeves of her coat down over her knuckles before he can see the bruises.

She meets his eyes.

And despite the last two years, despite the last thirty-seven. Despite herself.

Saskia thinks: home.

The place where she is known. The place where there is at least one special thing about her still. The place where, once again, she can be the person she thinks she is, the person she wants to be. Where she can be Saskia Kreis.

It was one of the hardest lessons of growing up: the failure of the world to take her at her own estimation.

In the meantime, what’s one more performance? What’s one more game of pretend?

She can do that much for him. And it makes her feel good, the decision. For the first time in a long