A World Elsewhere (27 page)

Deacon nodded.

“Van is spreading the notion that I’ve spent years in a failed attempt to write a novel and am now merely pretending to write. Perhaps I am. But his ambition is born of a desire to succeed where I cannot. He’s chosen writing only because it was
my
choice. He’d have chosen to be a sculptor if I had tried and failed to be one.”

Van, who liked to spend time in the library before he went to bed, began to summon Landish and Deacon to join him there, he and Landish drinking glasses of cognac and staring into the massive fireplace, “ruminating,” Van said. He said there was a little room, a hidden one, just off the library, which he used as his writing room. “You should call it the Rume,” Landish said. Van looked at him blankly. “R-U-M-E. In fact, this whole library is a Rume.”

Deacon lay curled up in a chair, sleeping or watching the two men who stared into the fire and spoke of things he guessed they knew he couldn’t understand. He liked to listen to them, though, and follow the play of their expressions. Above the mantelpiece there was a painting of some people wearing sheets and helmets. There was a woman carved in dark brown wood on each side of the painting. Van’s voice—“I brought the ceiling over in one piece from a palace in Venice. The owners of the palace could no longer afford to maintain it. There are parts of it all over Vanderland. The ceiling is a fresco by Pellegrini.”

The three of them craned their heads back to look up.

“Godwin says you’re writing a book?”

“Yes. I don’t burn what I write.”

“Perhaps you should try it.”

“Imagine coming here, to Carolina I mean, and facing as your first task building a house before it gets so cold you freeze to death. Imagine your main ambition being not to perish any sooner than you have to.”

“I’m from Newfoundland,” Landish said, “but I’ll
try
to imagine it.”

Sometimes, just as the butler was ushering them into the library, Landish and Deacon heard him talking to someone conversationally, though there seemed to be no other voice.

“Whom are you talking to, Van?” Landish asked.

“The chimney witch,” he said.

“I don’t believe in witches,” Deacon said.

“She only comes out when there’s no one here but me. You two scared her away.”

“What does she look like?”

“At first she looks like smoke. She comes out from the fireplace and hangs there in mid-air. Then the smoke becomes a woman, an ugly old woman who sits right there in the chair that you’re in now, Deacon. When she heard you, she went back up the chimney.”

Deacon looked into the cavernous fireplace. It was large enough for someone to hide in behind the half-burned stumps of wood still left over from the clearing of the land that years ago made way for Vanderland. He half dreaded and half hoped that some smoke would come wafting out and turn into the chimney witch.

“That’s enough about chimney witches,” Landish said.

“The chimney witch is worse than any creature in a dream because she comes out of the chimney when I’m still awake. And because she’s real.”

“I said that’s enough,” Landish said.

“You shouldn’t come here by yourself,” Deacon said in a low, fearful voice. “I wouldn’t come here by myself.”

“Even if you did, you wouldn’t see the witch. She only comes out when there’s no one here but me.”

“Then we’ll always come here when you do,” Deacon said. “And then you’ll never see her either. We’ll protect you from her.”

“I don’t think Landish is concerned with protecting me.”

It got so that Deacon couldn’t sleep in his own room for fear that Mr. Vanderluyden was in the library talking to the witch. Sometimes he fell asleep in the library on Landish’s lap or in the witch’s chair, which he thought smelled more like smoke than the others did. He began to have what Landish thought were chimney witch–inspired dreams about his parents.

The sentence Landish always used to describe what happened to Deacon’s father was “He was lost at the seal hunt.” Deacon began to think of him as still being “lost,” forever trying to find his way home, taking wrong turn after wrong turn, confused, afraid, alone, but never giving up.

He dreamt of his father walking through the snow to what he thought was his house, only to find when he reached it that it wasn’t his but one lived in by strangers, a mother and a boy whom he could see through the window, some other man’s wife and son. He dreamt of him going endlessly from house to house. He would wake from these dreams drenched in sweat, shouting. The air itself seemed black and thick and wrapped like arms around him. Sobbing, eyes closed against the darkness, he sometimes got up and, mistaking the location of the door, started pounding on the walls with his fists. Landish would pick him up and walk him round the room until he fell asleep.

Deacon had no idea what “the ice floes” looked like. He heard the phrase, whenever Landish said it, as a complete sentence. The ice flows. It never stops. He thought of bits of ice he had seen bobbing along in a cold, dark brook in winter like the ones that fed Lake Loom. He dreamt of his parents, unable to find each other, forever apart, each of them “lost,” his father lost at sea, his mother having “lost” her mind as if she had misplaced it, lost from each other as he was lost from them, and sometimes he dreamt that it was he who was lost at sea, he who lost
sight of the others and couldn’t find his way back to the
Gilbert
. And then he would find himself back at the brook, kneeling, staring at the water, his face just inches from it and what he thought was his reflection until he saw the man lying on his back at the bottom of the brook, open-eyed, staring up through the water at the sky. Whenever Landish said “the sea,” it was Lake Loom that Deacon pictured. “Lake Gloom” was how he heard it, how he said it. “A body of water,” Landish called it. And so it seemed to Deacon that his father’s body was “of water.”

My father is a body of water, he told Landish.

Landish told Deacon that Vanderluyden engineers had made Lake Loom, but he couldn’t think how a lake could be made. And his father was of a body of water much larger than Lake Loom. He was “of” all bodies of water. One morning in late spring, Deacon looked down from the rear court at the frozen, snow-covered surface of Lake Loom and pictured the
Gilbert
hemmed in by ice. His father jumped over the gunnels first, followed by his watch of men, all of them trudging round the point until they passed from sight. And then he pictured the watch returning to the ship without his father, the last of the leaderless, slump-shouldered men pausing to look back, trudging on. Landish would lie awake or lightly asleep, waiting to hear the boy struggle to wake from one of his dreams, talking to himself in the other bed. When he screamed, Landish would hurry to wake him. Often, by the time he got there, Deacon had thrown himself on the floor, where he lay tangled in blankets.

If Landish had had a lot to drink, Gough got to Deacon first. He would lift Deacon under the arms and take him out to the hall, where the light was always on. “There you go,” Gough would say as Stavely, wearing his dressing gown, his long white hair in tangles, tried to assure him that “it” had only been a dream. Sometimes Gough would sit on the floor beside Deacon’s bed, take him in his arms, press his small head against his chest and rock him slowly back and forth as Stavely, in the doorway, his white hair adrift, stood and watched as Landish went on sleeping.

If Landish woke, he would take Deacon from Gough, who would give him a look that made him wince.

“I’ve never known a child to have such dreams,” Gough said.

“You should know better than to say some things out loud in front of him,” Landish said.

“There is much that I could say out loud in front of him,” Gough said, “but I don’t think you’d like it if I did.”

“Such as?”

“You have another work-in-progress in your life,” Gough said. “Your book may still be a tabula rasa, but what’s written now on that other slate can never be erased. Ten years from now, you won’t be able to revise his past to make it better.”

“So you’re saying I should give up on the book?” Landish demanded.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Gough said. “Better you merely cut back on some other things. He models himself after you.”

“And I’m an unsuitable model?”

“Yes. As are we all. As will be everyone he ever meets.”

“You and Palmer—you fill notebook after notebook with a shorthand language you invented and I can’t even fill one page with English. Sunday after Sunday goes by and I write nothing worthwhile. I see them stretching out in front of me, an endless succession of afternoons of Sabbatical futility.”

“Don’t worry,” Deacon said.

“I’m sorry,” Landish said. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake up when I should have, Deacon.”

One night as they lay in their beds, Landish told him they could leave Vanderland if they wanted to.

“Where would we go?”

Landish said he wasn’t sure. He felt sure of almost nothing. He wasn’t sure that Vanderland was causing Deacon’s dreams. The boy might have such dreams no matter where he lived. Or it might be that one year could make that much difference in the working of a boy’s
mind. He wondered if Deacon was having bad dreams because he doubted that Landish would be there to comfort him when he woke from them.

“We’ll stay a while longer, all right?” Landish said. “We’ll see how things go. They might get better.”

“We can’t leave without the hat,” Deacon said. “We can’t leave before the hat gets here. If we’re gone when it gets here—”

“Let’s forget about the hat.”

“I think the wealth inspector hasn’t sent it yet,” Deacon said.

“What’s he waiting for? He hasn’t answered even one of my letters.”

“Maybe if we had the hat, I wouldn’t have bad dreams.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. I never had bad dreams before.”

“If anyone should have bad dreams about that thing, it should be me. But I’ve never dreamt about it. Not even when I had the fever in the attic.”

“Maybe you did but don’t remember.”

The school days were done till the fall. Summer lay ahead. Gertrude had come to the Academy to collect Goddie. Deacon had gone back to The Blokes. There were just the two of them, Landish and the governess who was called Miss Esse, who taught the drawing class.

She had been encouraging Goddie to paint a portrait of herself using her reflection in a free-standing mirror as her model.

“You can’t stay still
and
paint your reflection,” Goddie had said repeatedly. “And I don’t like staring at myself. I’ll stay still and
you
paint
me.”

As Goddie and Deacon left, Miss Esse sat side on to one of the tables and rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “It’s meant to be an exercise in self-awareness,” she said, sighing and laughing. “Perhaps you should have her
write
about herself, Mr. Druken.”

Except to say hello or goodbye, they had never really spoken to each other.

Landish gathered his lesson books from another table. “That would be unfair,” he said. “I can’t write about myself. Why should she have to?”

“You burn it all,” Esse said. “As a person, at the end of a day, might burn the memory of that day. No clemency as yet for a single moment or a single word. You sentence your sentences to death the instant they’re born.”

“I’m more of a startist than an artist. I was once a starving artist but am now a raving startist.”

Esse smiled. “Why do you burn your book?”

“Because it all too closely resembles me,” Landish said.

“By that reasoning,” Esse said, “you should set
yourself
on fire.”

Landish drew a chair to the side of her table, laid down his books and sat facing her, their knees a foot apart. Her eyes were dark blue, her face pale and faintly freckled.

“Who’s been telling you about my writing?” he asked.

“Everyone knows about it. Why do you do it? Given the brief lives of your mistakes, you’ll never learn from them.”

“I have to forget what I’ve written. If I didn’t, I’d be too discouraged to continue.”

“So many burned beginnings. It seems sad. I can’t help picturing whole books, never read, going up in flames. If you’re not generally compelled to destroy what you create, why not try something else?”

Landish stood and picked up his books.

“I’m sorry,” Esse said. “I spoke out of nervousness. Please, sit down.”

Landish sat, hoping he didn’t look as sulky as he felt.

“Why Esse?” he said. “What does it stand for?”

“Siobhan.” She spelled it for him before he could tell her that he knew the name, so familiar in Newfoundland, its origin and meaning.

“It’s often mispronounced and misspelled, especially by children. Mrs. Vanderluyden suggested that Godwin call me Miss Esse. It caught
on. Even informally. All my friends here call me Esse. The governesses, the Blokes. I’ve been here since Godwin was born. I can see myself doddering round Vanderland when I’m eighty. A family fixture. Good old Esse.” She smiled, averted her eyes from his and wound a lock of her hair around her finger. “Regarded as if I predate Creation.”

Esse removed her bonnet. Hair of a shade of red Landish had seen before, but not in Newfoundland.

He saw that she was wearing a hairnet.

She began to remove the net slowly from the front, peeling it back and wincing when it became caught in her hair.

“I only wear it out of necessity,” she said, her words broken by little sighs of pain.

As if she had freed it from the last obstacle, the net snapped back and Landish was startled to see a mass of near-shoulder-length hair come tumbling out.

Her eyes looked as if, though she had taken his measure in a second and already knew him better than he ever would, she might forever keep that knowledge to herself.

“I would like to have met your father,” she said.

“No one who met him ever said afterwards that they were glad they did.”

“And your mother.”

Her collarbone was so prominent yet fragile-looking that he fancied if he pressed her shoulders together, it would fold perfectly in half.