The Hundred-Year House (12 page)

Chad, sullen under his cap: “I’m sure that dude’s an alum.”

—

Zee had no fondness for Case Breen, but she wanted to cry when she saw him. He lay on the downstairs couch, covered in ice packs, his neck swollen so his chin had nearly vanished. Miriam knelt by his side, and when Zee asked what had happened she lifted the ice packs to show how his face had swallowed his eyes, reduced them to slits.

“He was out walking,” Miriam said. “Which he shouldn’t have been. You know that bear statue, back in the woods?” Apparently Case, in an effort to avoid the trucks out front, the florists and caterers setting up for tonight’s fund-raiser, had circled the rear of the property and taken a rest on the pedestal of the statue. (Zee, in her childhood, had named the bear Theo. She hadn’t been back there in ages.) Bees began swarming out from under the thing, and Case, leaving his crutches behind, didn’t get far enough fast enough. “He isn’t allergic at least, but they took out forty-three stingers. And of course he hurt his ankle again.”

“Good God. Really? Bees in November?”

Case made a noise from the couch, low and guttural. His arms were covered with white cream. Zee wondered if he could still talk, but then he said, “Leave me alone. Both of you. Go away.”

33

T
here were two complications at the beginning of the fund-raiser, even after Miriam managed to prop the puffed-up shell of Case in the corner, a scotch in his hand, and leave him to his own devices. The first was that Gracie had recognized Leland, despite his Clark Kent act (shaved face, glasses). But Doug and Miriam had been standing far away, after sneaking him in through the garage, and Leland had preempted her question by saying, “I hope you remember me. I’m Jack Spence, whose life you so kindly saved by letting me photograph your attic. And I’m also a big Gore supporter. When I learned the event would be at your house, I couldn’t resist!” Gracie had smiled warmly and introduced him to the lanky state senator holding court by the cheese table. Zee recognized Leland too, but only vaguely. “We’ve met before,” he said, and before he could give her the second speech he’d practiced, she nodded and wandered away.

The second snag was when Zee pulled Doug into the closed-off hallway to Bruce’s study, pushed him up against the wall, and unzipped his pants. In seconds he was growing full in her hand, and his brain had turned almost completely off. It was seven fifty-five, and he was supposed to meet Leland and Miriam outside the kitchen at eight o’clock, in the moments right before the speeches started. With every reserve of physical willpower, he peeled his mouth from hers and slid down the wall and zipped back up. “Not here,” he said.

By the time he turned back, she’d been replaced by a blade of ice. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and glared so deeply into him that it seemed a serious accusation, an indictment. But he didn’t have mental space left to decipher the look. She walked away, and he sat on the couch to wait out his erection.

At a minute past eight, Doug scooted past a scurrying caterer and planted a hand on Leland’s shoulder. Bruce was clanking a glass already in the library. The quartet had stopped playing.

Miriam grinned up at Doug, all teeth. This was the happiest he’d seen her since before Hidalgo tore up her work. She had chosen a silver cocktail dress so she could be the one to handle anything dusty, afraid streaks would show on the men’s black dress pants. She’d straightened her hair and pulled it back. Leland, meanwhile, was bouncing out of his skin. His pockets were full of the needles and keys he’d cadged from the same friend who’d been tutoring him all week on picking old locks. The three passed through the kitchen to climb the back stairs. The caterers paid no attention. No one was there as they made their way down the silent hall to the attic door. And no one heard as Miriam said, “We’re like the Bloodhound Gang!”

And really, that was exactly what it felt like to Doug—that for the first time since maybe college, he had a cohort, and a pack mentality. Earlier, as the room had filled, Doug felt connected to them both by invisible strings. Their eye contact was loaded with a thousand reminders and encouragements.

Doug stood guard at the top of the stairs, and Leland told Miriam she should try the lock first. “I’m sure you have the steadiest hands,” he said. There was no time for such gallantry, and Doug saw from the way Leland was rocking on his heels that he couldn’t wait to take over, to show off his new skills. “Give me some light,” Miriam said, and Leland produced his little pocket flashlight and held it right over her ear. Doug wondered if his heart might actually stop, if the sustained thumping he hadn’t
endured since his last real soccer game (twelve years ago? thirteen?) might simply kill him, if he might become the next ghost of Laurelfield:
The man who died for no reason in the middle of a party. They found his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs.

But then he heard a click and a gasp, and he turned to find them both staring at the door, an inch-thick crack of darkness at its open edge. “Jesus!” Leland said. “God, that was impressive! I think I’m in love!”

Doug pulled out his own flashlight, and they passed the switch on the wall without flipping it. They closed the door, careful to test that it would reopen on the way out. “Oh, wow,” Miriam said, climbing first, “don’t you guys feel that? On the stairs? Don’t you feel that presence?”

Leland said, “I can’t believe that worked. I can’t fucking believe it.”

Doug climbed behind the other two, overcome by the unhelpful realization that he wanted out, that it was too much, that he’d rather be down on Bruce’s couch getting screwed by his wife, or at the party listening to fund-raising news, or, better yet, in bed with a magazine and a beer. But no: The new Doug
did
things. For instance, the new Doug held the flashlight steady even when Miriam announced brightly, “Hey, there are micies! Don’t worry, little guy! Oh, he ran away.” And the new Doug was the one who navigated the maze of bed frames and dressers until he came, with awe and recognition, to the four file cabinets forming a crooked little quad by one of the moonlit dormers.

“Okay,” Leland said, “say a prayer.” And he pulled the top drawer of one cabinet. With a musical creak, it opened. He said, “Give me the light. Okay. Okay. Tisdale, Robin. Tollman, Harold. Tower, Rosamund.”

Miriam squealed and threw her arms around Doug’s neck, then hugged Leland from behind and tried to peer over his
shoulder. They shushed one another and opened more drawers, announced the contents and shushed again. Two entire cabinets held the alphabetized colonist files, and the other two were a jumble of year-by-year records and correspondence. Miriam dove into those, instructed to search specifically through the twenties and thirties, and the men focused on the drawer that would contain both
M
and
P
. Because
M
came first, Leland dug through first. Doug restrained himself from shouting that the Parfitt research was the reason they were up here to begin with. He held the flashlight for Leland. Miriam pulled out files to read their labels by the moonlight.

“Moor, no
E
,” Leland said. “Another Moor, no
E
. Christ. Oh, Christ. Marlon Moore?
Marlon Moore?
This is what they’re going by?” He hefted an enormous file from the cabinet and sat with it on the floor. “Some douchebag named Marlon Moore. There’s half a book here. No, literally. There’s half a novel. And some idiot thought this was Marianne Fucking Moore.”

“Can you scoot over?” Doug said. “We don’t have time.” He stepped across Leland and pulled the drawer as far as it would go. There it was: Parfitt, Edwin, a hanging file with a white label. It was alarmingly thin, though, and as he pulled it out he feared there would be a single piece of paper inside, an unpaid fifty-cent phone bill.

When he did open the folder there was, indeed, a single sheet, but that sheet was so bizarre he didn’t have time to gape at its thinness, its singularity. He didn’t say anything at all as he shone his flashlight around the edges. It was a photograph, taken outside. The more he looked at the background, the more he became convinced this was the back corner of the big house, the largest koi pond off to the right, and a bench. But the background was hard to focus on, because the subject of the photo was two men, both stark naked, both dripping wet. One was laughing, head
lolled back. The other stared straight at the camera, his grin urgent and almost malevolent. Each man had a hand around the other’s penis. And neither man was Edwin Parfitt.

Doug struggled for something to announce, but his brain had short-circuited entirely, and Leland was reading aloud from Marlon Moore’s manuscript. “
Rose was mad with grief,
” he said. “Yeah,
I’m
mad with grief. Listen to this:
One who has not wandered under those titanic pines will scarce comprehend the weight of time that settles on the solitary philosopher seeking shelter ’neath their dripping arms.
The pages are out of order, too. Not that it matters.”

“It’s eight thirty,” Doug said. “We need to load up.”

“Did you find Parfitt stuff?” Miriam turned to him, eyes alarmingly bright in the moonlight.

“I’ll show you later.”

“I’ve got 1920 through ’39, but each year is three inches of stuff. You have to pick.”

“Pick for me. No, 1933.”

She pulled two files from the drawer. Leland handed Miriam his suit jacket, then loosened the belt of his too-large slacks, and Doug and Miriam worked together to tuck the two thick 1933 folders and the flat Parfitt one into the waistband. Miriam secured the last and tightened the belt, and Leland wiggled his brows over her head at Doug. When he was retucked, jacket covering the bulges, he took a few trial steps.

“What about this, though?” Miriam grabbed a small green lockbox off the top of one cabinet. “This has to be interesting, right?”

Doug had noticed it in Leland’s photographs, but he’d been so focused on the promise of Parfitt files he hadn’t thought much of it. Now, though, he was willing to try anything.

“Just carry it out,” Doug said. It looked natural in Leland’s hand, like something he was supposed to be taking from a political fund-raiser. “Walk with authority.”

The music started far below. Leland swore and Doug scooped
the Marlon Moore file back into its drawer. Miriam used the dust cloth from Doug’s pocket to wipe any sign of activity from the cabinet tops.

Back at the party, with Leland gone right out the front door, Doug and Miriam filtered into the living room, each grabbing coffee and then talking loudly to each other about Bill Bradley. There stood Case, alone next to the grandfather clock. He’d been meant to find Clarence Mahoney, Bruce’s friend with all the connections—he’d been banking on it, in fact, on schmoozing his way into a job tonight—but his drained glass and the fact that he didn’t seem to have moved were not auspicious. Doug wondered if he could even see the room, with his eyes swollen like that. There was Bruce, cheeks and nose bright red, throwing his arm around someone. There was Zee, keeping a narrow balance as she crossed the room. She put her hand on Doug’s tie and slid it down to his navel. Her voice was flat, her face centimeters from his own. “Where were you?”

“I stepped outside for a breather,” he said, as planned. But it was freezing out, he realized, and he was drenched with sweat.

Zee just smiled, and slowly turned to Miriam. “Miriam, what did you think of the state senator? The one from the South Side?”

“Oh, the—wasn’t he? He was great.”

“And the one after him. What was his name again?”

“Oh, you’re asking the wrong person!”

Zee said, “Yes. I am.”

34

Z
ee was composing her final exam when Cole knocked on her office door. “Zelda, my one true friend!” he said. “I had to see for myself!” Every wall of her office was covered with pictures of nude men, which she’d had color printed at Kinko’s. Some lounged on motorcycles, some touched themselves, some coyly pulled their jeans down to their knees. Cole stood in the middle of the room, turned a slow circle, emitted a long whistle. “They’re not for the ladies, are they?” he said. “These pictures are for the fancy boys.” Zee had taped them up on Monday, and by Tuesday Jerry Keaton had gone as far as he dared, sticking a postcard of a lingerie-clad Betty Paige on his office door. Ida Hayes, playing it safe but perhaps saying something more profound about the principles at stake, had copied Adrienne Rich’s explicit “floating sonnet” for her classes. Golda Blum had come by to advise Zee that if she was being more flagrant than Cole she might expect starker consequences as well. But Golda was only exasperated and stressed. Zee knew when Golda was furious, and this wasn’t it.

What Zee had realized, the day she snapped at Fran, was that her support of Cole had shifted from ironic and undermining to genuine. The first letters she wrote on his behalf were designed to make things worse. (“His jokes about wishing to date certain students have been largely misconstrued.”) But around the time she realized what Doug was really writing, around the time he began
mooning over Miriam, disappearing with her at the fund-raiser, she’d lost all interest in getting him Cole’s job. The thought of Doug, undeserving, unambitious, sitting lovestruck in an office he didn’t deserve—in Cole’s office, the good little corner one, where that man had written real articles, had graded and conferred for twenty years—made her sick. And without Doug to root for, she found it harder and harder to root against Cole, especially when she saw the tenacity with which he fought his case, never once, never
once
, claiming the pornography wasn’t his. She regretted, now, what she’d done, but it was a strange brand of remorse—more tactical than moral.

“And why, pray tell, do you possess a pistol cylinder?”

She tried hard to understand, and finally realized Cole was looking down at her desk. The metal flower, from the woods.

She picked it up and looked through the six perfect holes. She felt stupid—hadn’t she seen them in a thousand movies?—but Cole didn’t need to know that. “Souvenir,” she said. “From my last shootout.”