I told Helene how excited I was to be meeting the daughter of my friend Lily Geary. I took liberties with the assertion of friendship, but the passage of time allows for such indiscretions.
“Come on in,” Helene said. “You’re a teacher at Monroe, aren’t you? I saw your picture in the yearbook. I’m waiting for a woman to interview to tutor my daughter. She’s an hour late. Can you imagine that.”
She led me inside the kitchen, and a girl who appeared to be about fifteen, stood up and smiled. She was the spitting image of the Lily Geary I knew back in school, the same slender build, the same height, the same soft blond bobbed hair.
Looking at the young Lily Geary, I felt I was looking at the quiet, self-possessed girl who, like a good hostess, had reached out to me and so subtly demonstrated that she understood my discomfort at being an outsider.
The girl looked me in the eye and extended her hand. She smiled with the same directness and warmth of Lily Geary so many years ago.
“Do you tutor?” I heard Mrs. Rumstick ask from far off.
“Oh, yes,” I said. I didn’t, as a rule, but I certainly could.
Lily was a straight A student. I knew that because I checked her records each year. I didn’t bother asking why Mrs. Rumstick felt Lily needed a tutor? We made a quick agreement that I would come to the house three days a week. Lily expressed eagerness to show me where we would conduct our sessions. I ascended the wide staircase once again, bright and monumental in the light of day. Lily’s mother stood behind us as we inspected the room that served as a library in the front of the house. Dictionaries and atlases occupied one table. An old-fashioned spinning globe on a pedestal stood in one corner of the room. I saw the chair where Sheila had told me Lily’s father sat every evening, drinking his martinis and smoking endless cigarettes when he wasn’t berating strange girls from the projects for using the upstairs bathroom. The ceiling, unpainted in all these years, displayed a brown cloud above the chair, representing all of the smoke that had idled up from where he sat every evening. Something about Lily’s decorous smile as she welcomed me into the library and her mother’s detached attitude as she stood in the doorway told me I had been destined to return here just as I had been destined to meet Sheila and break into her house. Perhaps Lily and her mother had been waiting for me all along, knowing I would one day come along. I wondered if my emotional faculties were in such a state of disintegration that I was finding patterns and coincidences where none existed.
We agreed that I would return the next day at ten in the morning. During my first session in the quiet library with Lily, I gave her a short writing assignment and then went off to the bathroom I hadn’t visited in over forty years. The bathroom looked exactly as I remembered it from that fateful night. The toilet remained connected to its oak water tank high overhead. The black and white checkered floor and the tongue-and-groove wainscotting painted light green were as I had remembered. Above the deep cast iron enameled sink, the mirror had lost much of its silvering. I hoped that it would show me as a young girl once again and magically transport me to the night of Lily’s party so I could sneak away undetected without witnessing the argument that led to my expulsion.
I re-entered the wide hallway, dim despite the afternoon sun streaming through the bedroom windows to the west side. The door to the room where I had spied the fateful argument was closed, sealed against the past. To my amazement, I saw a man emerge from the stairway just as I re-entered the hallway. He looked to be in his fifties and sported a full head of wavy salt-and-pepper hair. I had not seen Maurice since peering at him through the keyhole in Sheila Benhart’s house, but this was unmistakably the same man, exuding the luxurious confidence of a conqueror.
“I am the tutor,” I said, feeling the burden was on me to identify myself. He showed no acknowledgment that I was Sheila’s friend from years ago. I gestured toward the room at the end of the corridor where Lily patiently awaited my return. Heedless of my presence, he bounded on up to the third floor, where I heard Lily’s mother greet him.
When I returned to the library, Lily said, “My mother’s boyfriend,” as she placed a sheet of paper in front of me with her paragraph rendered in beautiful penmanship. “In case nobody told you, my father died a few years ago.”
She locked her eyes onto mine, expecting a response.
“I think I’ve seen that man before,” I said. “His name is Maurice.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “He’s married. I don’t know what Mom sees in him. He has a reputation,” she said.
“What kind of reputation?” I asked.
Lily took a moment to formulate an answer.
“His last girlfriend died. Someone from the country club. My friends don’t think it was an accident.”
Lily told me that Maurice and her mother argued all the time. “The sole reason my mother wanted me to have a tutor was to keep me out of her hair while she entertains him. I can’t spend every day at the country club, you know. This whole tutoring thing is a sham.”
She expressed these sentiments calmly as if describing a new slipcover on the sofa. I said nothing, wishing to remain the tutor if only in name.
“My grandmother says I should look away from that which distresses me,” Lily said. “She says I should find something I am passionate about.”
“What are you passionate about?” I asked quietly.
“Going to school and having friends,” she said. “Maybe in a few years, it will be Arctic penguins.”
I couldn’t have expected more from any girl entering her freshman year of high school. At that moment, we heard an angry shout. Maurice’s deep voice reverberated through the old walls.
“He’s a beast,” Lily said.
Next, we heard Lily’s mother yell and the sound of china or glass smashing against a wall.
“She is a beast, too,” Lily added.
As my services as a tutor were obviously not needed, I could have departed at that moment, but I stayed, wanting the companionship, desperate to be part of Lily Geary’s family. If I couldn’t be friends with the old Lily, at least I could be friends with the young Lily. I fell silent, stymied, out of my element.
Lily, like her grandmother, possessed the social graces to transcend almost any situation.
“Would you like to play gin rummy?” she asked.
“Certainly,” I replied.
We played gin rummy for the rest of the tutoring session. Our time together over the next week involved card playing and sometimes checkers matches. Each time we heard the footsteps come up the stairs, through the hall, and up to the third floor, Lily looked at me, challenging me to say something. But this was her home, and I expected her to be the first to make an observation.
“Why didn’t you get married?” she asked me.
I told her about a boy I had met at Brown. We dated and then he married another girl he had met at his father’s country club. He told a friend that he was marrying his own kind.
“Why didn’t you marry your own kind, then?” Lily asked.
“I didn’t want to,” I said. I told her about another boy I had dated who scrapped his way up just as I had. He was a dentist now. But I didn’t want to be dragged away from the big old houses, the quiet, tree-lined streets, the heavy Sterling flatware. I didn’t say all this to Lily, but she must have known.
As the weeks passed, I established a friendship with the younger Lily Geary that I had never had the opportunity to establish with the older one years ago.
Then one day, Lily returned from the country club after an afternoon round of eighteen holes with some girlfriends to find her mother dead on the bedroom floor. An open gin bottle, an ill-secured throw rug, and the hard edge of a marble-top table attested to the accident her mother must have had while drinking.
The older Lily flew up from Florida for the funeral, and later I sat with the two Lilies in the big house while friends made themselves cocktails and ate finger sandwiches. The older Lily expressed pleasure at seeing me. I confided to both Lilies a theory that Maurice, based on what I had observed of his relationship with Madilyn years earlier, was responsible for the death of Lily’s mother. Needless to say, neither Maurice nor Sheila attended the funeral or the reception afterward.
“I would like to stab him,” the younger Lily said of Maurice.
“We all would,” the older Lily said, “but we must not do anything rash.” Then she added, “I was never really a friend of Sheila’s. She pretty much invited herself to my party that night. Do you remember that party, Monica?”
“Yes,” I said. How could I forget?
“She protects him, you know. If Maurice takes a fall, she does, too.”
I now understood that my expulsion years ago was the price I had to pay for Sheila to maintain her standing among her own kind. Sheila had pushed me into her world beyond the bounds of acceptability, which was painfully evident when I encountered Lily Geary’s father.
The older Lily looked at me, perhaps feeling that with my upbringing I would know how to dispose of a character such as Maurice. Over the next few weeks, I was not invited to the older Lily’s bridge parties or even to her dinner parties, but I was invited to join the two Lilies alone for dinner and card playing. I accepted the narrow opening I had been given into their lives through the portal provided by Maurice.
I enticed the two Lilies with ideas about how Maurice might be disposed of. These fantasies, woven with as much dexterity as I could muster, enabled me to make frequent visits to the redbrick mansion on Prospect Terrace.
One evening as I was drinking a highball with the older Lily after the young Lily had gone to her room to study, the older Lily said to me with a little laugh, “They used to say your father was called Joey the Strangler. Perhaps the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
I was not happy with such a comment, but I had come to accept that so much of what the two Lilies said to me reinforced my position as an outsider. I smiled and said, “I love you and your grand-daughter. I will do everything to help you.”
The older Lily nodded solemnly and reached out to take my hand just as she had when I attended her party years ago.
I received a note in the mail from Maurice soon after Mrs. Rumstick’s death. He wished to get together, audaciously suggesting my apartment as the meeting place. I responded noncommittedly, and promptly informed the two Lilies
With each visit to the two Lilies, three or four a week, I added nuance to my plans for inducing Maurice to take a long walk somewhere, perhaps up to Mt. Washington, where I could enable him to have an unfortunate accident. When I ran out of ideas, I recited the contents of more notes I claimed Maurice had written to me. I let the two Lilies know my plan had to be perfectly structured. Preparing for his demise was not something that could be done hastily. I intimated that there was no end to the tricks I had learned from my father.
One day, Maurice saw me on the street and gripped my elbow a little too harshly. He insisted that we get together. I managed to extricate myself from him with the vague promise of meeting him for drinks. I could now provide the two Lilies with further evidence of Maurice’s animosity toward me. They each looked at me with love and gratitude for the dangers I endured to exact revenge on their behalf.
I was prepared to parry Maurice’s evil attentions for as long as I could. I would do anything to avoid expulsion from the beautiful home the two Lilies occupied. I yearned for another legitimate note in the mail, for another challenge on the sidewalk, for the candlestick held aloft over my head. Life is so much less lonely when you know that someone wants to kill you.
All through the school year, I tended to my friendship with the two Lilies and embellished the illusion of revenge against the slippery Maurice. And then one day Maurice collapsed in his home after drinking a cup of tea. A perfectly healthy rock climber one day, dead on his living-room floor the next, a blue mug decorated with little white bunnies on the floor beside his head.
The two Lilies insisted upon giving me credit for something I didn’t do. They giggled like children throwing about a hot potato. I insisted that I had nothing to do with Maurice’s death. They both gave me an identical knowing smile. The older Lily’s eyes twinkled just as they had when she mentioned my father, Joey the Strangler. From that moment, I felt disinclined to court their affection.
And then Sheila appeared one day at my apartment door.
“It’s going to be so lonely down at Matunuck alone,” she said the moment I opened the door. “Come spend the weekend with me. I want to make it up to you. Please, Monica. We were such good friends.”
She seemed about to cry as she had that afternoon on her back stoop. She took my hands in hers, just as Lily had at her party when we were in high school. I gladly accepted the invitation.
[Image Credit : Photo by Teslariu Mihai on Unsplash ]
by 
Chris Fortunato
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Fortunato always brings his A game when it comes to mystery writing. The story is gripping and well-written. A great read!!
I loved this multigenerational story with its dramatic twists and turns. Also such fun to read a story set in my hometown, Providence, RI. Additionally, we have a male author as the articulate female narrator in this exciting tale.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (Warren Buffet). Is “The Two Lilies” a class warfare ?
En tous cas, j’ai beaucoup aimé ce conte de Chris Fortunato, très vivant, avec la description des pièces des maisons, avec les parties de gin rummy (j’adore ce jeu de cartes et ça change du bridge dont parle toujours Agatha Christies lol), la psychologie des personnages, Providence RI etc. J’avais l’impression de voir le scénario d’un film.
J’ai regardé dans un atlas si Matunuch Beach était loin de Prospect Terrasse et je me suis demandée si le manoir existait toujours …
Et le final : “the blue mug decorated with little white bunnies on the floor beside his head”, alors que des années auparavant on lui avait dit “Just don’t drink out of any of those mugs with the little white bunnies along the rims.”
Mystérieux. Fantasmagorique. Excellent !!!!
This book follows Monica as she thinks back to her childhood friends.
Monica spent a lot of her time growing up at her friend Sheila’s house and her parents took her in as their own.
Then something happens which suddenly causes the friendship to end.
Now she is older she sees her old friend again, and she wishes to be a part of that life again, until dark events lead to her taking a different path.
What happens to shift Monica’s view? What other old friends may she meet?
This novella is a great but is a very dark little read.
I did feel for Monica, but at the same time some of the thoughts she was having were very dark too.
Overall, a dark novella which looks at childhood friends and the longing to be a part of that life again.
A dark, strange little story. The yearning of a child – unresolved into adulthood, to be embraced into a different world and class – a world dangled in front of her, close enough to touch but not to hold. A world that is never going to accept her, but will feed off her neediness. She will always be available, She has no moral compass. The main character is beautifully and disturbingly drawn. There is an nightmarish sense of drift in this story, as it cuts through generations, like watching in fast forward as a person sleep walks through their own life. She is dislocated; her yearning for a kind of belonging that she sensed once, never quite found and then lost completely is the only anchor that she has. And what is painfully clear is that the world that she longs to be part of is actually completely rotten.