Six Fan Fics - 4. The Lament of Eleanor Calloway

From: The Castaway Hotel Grand Reopening by Bill W (Book 2, Chapter 2)

The Lament of Eleanor Calloway

It was a crisp January morning and the year was 1927. Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, prohibition was into its eighth year, and the first transatlantic telephone call had just been made.

Eleanor Calloway had met a man called James Hardy at the previous year’s July Fourth celebrations on Lake Wallenpaupack, and she was falling deeper and deeper in love with him as the days and months went by. The only problem was that he was a full ten years older than the nineteen year old Eleanor; and she knew full well that her parents would never, and could never, support their union.

Up until that July Fourth in 1926, Eleanor had been the party girl of the town; well, as much of a party girl as any self-respecting lady of the 1920s could ever bring herself to be. If there was a society ball she was there, if there was a church event she was there, even if there was a birthday party she was there; she even used to attend the local school plays and pageants just to have an excuse to begin a night out with the girls.

Everyone within fifty miles knew Eleanor by sight; she was the good girl, from the good family, who would marry some nice young man, and have a nice family. She would be a nice little wife, who would stay at home and cook her husband his dinner, and bake cookies, and have many many children, and be a nice little mother to them; oh, the best laid plans of mice and men.

Eleanor also had her weekly social calendar filled with bridge games, book clubs, and her numerous activities with the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution. After all, the Calloway family could trace their ancestry not only back to several militia who were based at Fort Augusta and aided in The Big Runaway (a mass evacuation of settlers from the communities along the Susquehanna River following a major campaign of destruction by Loyalists), but also to two members of the Continental Congress.

Joining the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution had been her father’s idea; he felt she would meet up with other nice ladies there whose families shared the same vision for the future of the country as he did. It was actually through one of these nice young ladies that Eleanor had first met James Hardy; James was the younger uncle of the young lady in question, and his attraction to Eleanor was both instant and obvious. Of course, Eleanor was bitten by the love bug immediately; James was very handsome, tall, with broad shoulders, and short jet black hair.

Since they started going out together, Eleanor had slowly distanced herself from her friends and her family. She no longer attended the weekly bridge game at Suzanne’s home and she had left the reading group she started with Maureen and Josephine. She had stopped visiting her best friend from school, Charlotte Tanner (who, after her wedding, had moved to Buffalo, New York) and she had even stopped going to church on Sunday with her family (instead opting to go to the local church, with her hopefully soon to be fiancé). She had also distanced herself from the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the ladies she had made friends with; which annoyed and disappointed her father, and caused him to curse his daughter’s stupidity for falling for this lothario.

James had not asked Eleanor to give up her life for him, but Eleanor found that many of her friends and family disapproved of her choice of suitor. James was seen a pariah, who was pursuing Eleanor simply to gratify his own desires; the fact she was the heiress to a sizeable estate surely must also have been part of James’ attraction to her. Nobody was prepared to consider that perhaps James Hardy was simply head over heels in love with Eleanor, and wanted nothing other than to make her happy.

Her closest friends, Suzanne and Josephine, knew that Eleanor was completely in love with James, and would do anything for him; they also sadly knew that that included having sex before they were married. This was not something they had ever talked about before; after all, premarital sex was not exactly a topic of polite conversation to be had with afternoon tea. They knew what she and James had been up to, because Eleanor had just told them something; something that had shocked both young women to their core.

“You’re pregnant! Oh, Eleanor, how could you be so silly.” The disappointment in Suzanne’s voice was impossible to miss; yet Eleanor needed to ignore it, if she hoped ot have her friend’s help during this trying time.

“It just happened. We’d been so careful before-”

“Before!” Josephine interrupted. “You mean this wasn’t just a one time, heat of the moment thing! You mean that you had actually planned to have . . .” Josephine, still so pure and chaste, could hardly bring herself to say the next word, so she mouthed it; “sex”.

“I’m not here to seek your forgiveness or your approval of my actions. I’m nineteen years old and am quite capable of making my own decisions.”

“Eleanor, your father will kill you. Actually, he will kill James first, and then he will kill you.”

January, turned into February, and then into March. The Roxy Theatre in New York City had just opened, and the first armoured car robbery ever had just been committed by the Flatheads Gang, seven miles outside of Pittsburgh.

By now, Eleanor was three or four months pregnant and had just started to show. When she wore certain dresses, you could just make out the subtle hint of a bump; when she sat a certain way that hint of a bump was even more prominent, and she was still suffering with morning sickness. Now left with no choice, a distraught Eleanor sat down one evening with James after dinner.

“You’re pregnant? But we’ve always been careful. How far along are you my dear?”

“About four months,” Eleanor replied flatly.

On March 24^th, James asked Eleanor to accompany him on a midnight boat ride on Lake Wallenpaupack. The moon shone brightly in the night sky and the stars twinkled; the constellation Cassiopeia was shining as bright as the Pole Star. Eleanor easily picked it out, as it was not only her favourite constellation in the night sky, but it was also her favourite story from Greek mythology; in fact, if the child turned out to be a girl, then Eleanor planned to name her Cassie.

They climbed into James’ row boat, and Eleanor saw a picnic basket and a chilling bottle of champagne. She now knew that he was going to do the right thing; all this mystery and secrecy had been because he was about to ask for her hand in marriage.

James rowed the boat out to the middle of the lake. His biceps bulged as he worked the paddles, and Eleanor took so much pleasure in watching him getting a physical work out.

James set the oars down when they were at the halfway point, and allowed the boat to drift and bob on the gentle swells of the lake. He closed in on Eleanor, and her heart began beating faster as she anticipated her lover’s kiss. She felt his hands close around her arms, and instead of the kiss she had been waiting on all day, she found herself being thrown into the lake.

Her various layers of clothing became waterlogged very quickly and she was pulled down below the surface of the lake. Eleanor struggled ferociously with her dress and petticoats as she was being pulled closer and closer to the bottom of the lake. Her lungs started to burn from the lack of oxygen and she began panicking as the darkness pressed in on her from all sides. She no longer had any idea which way was up and began praying for deliverance from a watery grave.

Just as her urge to breath in some much needed oxygen was about to overcome her rational sense of knowing that that same initial intake of breath would kill her, she finally managed to get her clothes off by literally ripping the buttons from the material.

Now free of the clothing that was weighing her down, she managed to get her bearings and used what strength remained her to swim to the surface. As she broke the surface of the lake, she gasped down oxygen as fast as her burning lungs would allow.

She found the rowboat and just as she was dragging herself aboard out of desperation, she felt the sickening crack of one of the oars meeting her skull. As wood met bone, Eleanor’s lifeless body slumped back into the lake. She was dead, of that there was no doubt.

The water soaked into her garments and dragged her to the bottom of the lake, where her corpse remains to this day waiting to be discovered.

Oh sure, there have been sightings over the years of a ghostly lady in white, who has allegedly claimed the lives of many unsuspecting men on the lake; but those are just fairy stories told around a campfire, by overzealous scoutmasters, in order to give their troops a quick scare before the s’mores and bed.

Aren’t they?