The Hundred-Year House (17 page)

Down on Miriam’s sunporch, she found red acrylic paint and a firm, narrow brush. She took them back through the TV room—there were mountains of file folders there, probably something to do with Miriam’s next ridiculous series—and up to the bedroom, and covered the wall with words.

Doug, you idiot.

You left a trail.

But I already knew, and I took a job in NY.

I never saw how ugly I was till you reflected it back at me.

If Case comes home, tell him I’m sorry.

Tell him to run far away.

Tell Miriam that thing in the kitchen is the only pretty thing she ever made.

She stood in the woods behind the big house, and she looked at it, at all the windows. She closed her eyes, but when she opened them the house was still there.

—

She stuck a brief resignation in Golda’s box, ignoring Chantal. She might have said in the letter that the porn was her fault, but Cole wouldn’t even have wanted that. He’d adopted this battle wholeheartedly.

—

She’d brought with her the photo of herself reading
Green Eggs and Ham
, the one where she looked so much like her listening father. She had another copy in her album, and she wanted to leave this part of herself, this sharp and innocent part of herself, here. But more importantly, she didn’t want to keep the frame that Doug had fixed so long ago. She leaned it against Cole’s closed office door, with a note.
Dear old bastard
, it said.
For you to remember me. Portrait of the Communist Heretic Zilla Devohr Grant, circa 1970. You’re laughing at “Devohr,” aren’t you? That’s my real gift to you.
Back in her office, she filled boxes with books and syllabi and handouts. Her diplomas, journals with her articles. She saved everything from the computer to disk. She wouldn’t teach many of the same courses in New York—the school was so nontraditional that the intros and surveys didn’t even exist—but she wanted all her files nonetheless. Gretchen, her roommate for one year of college, was hard-skulled and ironic, as perfect a department head as Zee could imagine, and her phone call had been a sudden shaft of light. Yes, Zee had said, she was very much interested in a job like that. Zee had told both Gretchen and the hiring dean the story of Cole (the official one, minus her interferences) over dinner, and—she knew it would be all right after the dean told about hanging Robert Bork in effigy on the Oberlin quad—she also told them what she was planning to do. It wouldn’t affect her new contract, they assured her.

She’d been thinking a lot lately about the myths her father used to read her at night: Daphne, Philomela, Actaeon. She realized years later they were all stories of metamorphosis, and she wondered how much he needed these myths to affirm his own reinvention from alcoholic slouch to responsible father and art critic. She’d tried so hard to transform herself—Zee the earnest academic was not the same person as Zilla the privileged child—but she’d slipped. She’d ended up living at home, and sure enough her entire adult life had crumbled away.

She would do it properly this time, in a town where she knew exactly one person. As her father had done, leaving Toronto with his new wife, remaking himself in the grandest American fashion. Some things she could not escape: that gene for mental illness. The sharp and unattractive edges of her own personality. But in New York she’d be away from Doug, and from the self who’d been played for a fool. She’d be away from that house.

She marveled at the lucidity of her thoughts, then realized this was not a good sign. When did people do that, except when they were drunk? And she wasn’t, she was fairly sure.

She took the boxes to her car, and she bought, for the last time, a grilled cheese sandwich from the co-op. It was the only thing they did well, and they did it exquisitely. It was half butter, and the toasted bread broke in your mouth and then melted like the thinnest sheet of ice. In an hour she’d be free. She needed to finish just this one thing first—to undo her damage, outscandal the scandal.

—

At two fifteen, as a class period ended, she stood in the middle of her office and took off her clothes, all of them, and folded them into her purse. Her flesh was pale from the winter, her arms and legs unrecognizably thin. She stuck another muscle relaxer on her tongue. She walked, with just her purse, into the hallway and down the stairs, past students she knew and ones she didn’t, past
Chad Crosley, past Fran Leffler. If sound came from their open mouths, she couldn’t hear. She walked past Jerry Keaton, who tried to grab her arm and then thought better of it. She heard Chantal calling out: “Zee! Dr. Grant! Can you—Oh, someone get her a—Zee, come
in
here!” Out onto the lawn, the icy lawn, her feet in the slush. She didn’t care if she fell, but she didn’t fall. Past the administrative building, through parting clusters of students in parkas. She heard one say, “Where’s my camera?” And another, “Oh, dude, it’s about Cole! I get it, it’s about Cole.” And another, “Hey it’s that math prof! Shane, wasn’t that your math prof?”

Past the library, past the co-op.

All the way to her car. She couldn’t feel her feet.

She drove off campus with the conviction, the finality, of someone driving off the entire planet.

42

D
oug had started to see the world as reticulated. The way the colored pieces of any view fit together: windowsill, wall, sky, driveway, tree, roof. Shoe, carpet, book. If you looked long enough, the three-dimensional world flattened to a plane where every block of color was a tile, so tightly clicked together that no mortar showed at the cracks.

He stared at the Happensack for hours a day, whether Miriam was in front of it smoothing mortar over the top and scrubbing it off with a hard sponge, or whether he was alone at two a.m. as Miriam, similarly insomniac, worked downstairs on other things. They continued to sleep in the kitchen. The first night, he hadn’t gone to bed at all. He’d been at the police station, and then slumped at Gracie’s table. (“What did you
do
?” Gracie kept saying, until Doug worried the officers would think he’d strangled his wife.) The police traipsed through the coach house. “Talk about the writing on the wall,” one said, unhelpfully, and even his partner didn’t laugh. The second night, he’d been downtown meeting a private detective, and afterward he made it only back up to Leland’s place, where he lay on the couch for five hours but didn’t sleep. The third night, Miriam told him he needed to lie down. She zipped him in and brought him a pill and put a washcloth on his forehead, and then it was morning. And for fifty nights since then, he’d crawled in four feet away from her.

He worried the hard kitchen floor would ruin his back, but it
didn’t. Dr. Morsi agreed: Regardless of the disintegration of his heart and brain, his back had never been better.

—

Gracie had accused him, in those first weeks, of telling Zee what he knew. She said, “It would have pushed her over the edge. She
worshipped
her father.” Doug might have asked
which
father, and who Zee’s father even was, if her father was a chauffeur named Max, if her father had perhaps posed nude by the koi ponds. But his jaw was full of lead, and Gracie was in a dull and constant rage. He only encountered her now on the driveway, roaring past in the Mercedes. It was a miracle of good timing that Doug had gotten the files out of the attic the day before Zee left, or Gracie might never have handed over the key at all.

Although the Parfitt file was still conspicuously missing—he and Miriam wondered if it was actually
Zee
who’d replaced it with the photo, falling apart long before he knew it but one step ahead as always—the rest was a treasure trove. If he could have crawled into the files to live, and never had to worry about food or detectives or showering, he’d have done it. There were sheaths of correspondence between the longtime director, Samantha Mays, and the artists and writers and composers who saw her as their guardian angel. There were slides of paintings. Miriam pored over the Demuth ones, comparing them to prints in library books and calling a friend at the School of the Art Institute who drove up to borrow them, along with the Grant Wood slides and the files of artists Doug hadn’t heard of. There were project proposals and sample work. There were letters of recommendation.

Miriam was most excited about the files of two female sculptors, Fannie Cadfael and Josephine Lizer. “I
knew
it,” she said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! The bear statue, in the woods! I
knew
that was a Lizer. I should’ve said so! White rabbits!” Even Doug registered, through his haze, that this made no sense. Miriam explained, her hands flying, that the White Rabbits were the
women who had assisted the sculptor Lorado Taft before the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Taft begged special permission to use women, until the man in charge snapped that he could use white rabbits if they’d get the job done. Those women proudly clung to the name as they launched their own careers as some of the first successful female sculptors. A Josephine Lizer piece, even one covered with moss, was a big enough deal that it sent Miriam running for the phone.

Less valuable but more personally intriguing were the references, in the forties and fifties, to a colony caretaker named Maxwell Perry. “That has to be Max!” Doug said. “And he stayed after they kicked the artists out.”

Miriam said, “Well, sure, that was probably really the driver’s name, and he’d probably really been the caretaker. When people lie, they don’t make up
all
the details.”

Leland just said, “Any caretakers named Marianne Moore?”

Parfitt, it seemed, had stayed at least six times, and as late as 1941, just four years before his suicide. Some rosters listed his apartment on Rush Street in Chicago, and the earliest—in 1929—had a Philadelphia address that was news to Doug. The most useful detail was the fact that for every stay but the last, his lover, the artist Armand Cox, had been there at the same time. (“
Armand
Cox
?” Miriam said. “That’s his real name?”) It meant their relationship started earlier than was thought. Doug imagined Parfitt writing at a Laurelfield desk, his partner down in a studio designing stage sets and drawing his magazine covers, his fadeaway girls. The two reuniting at the dinner table, discussing the day’s work.

Even so, it wasn’t enough. Doug tried his best, in the blur of weeks after Zee left, to imagine what a project centered around these scraps of information might look like. And then, the punch in the gut: In late March, a professor from Yale published a long article on Parfitt in
The
New Yorker
, a rediscovery piece. The professor, said his bio, was about to publish a book on the lost
modernists. It wasn’t that his work entirely supplanted Doug’s. It was that ten other people were now going to get the same idea, and do it better, and do it faster, and be more qualified to tell the story.

But Doug imagined he might write a nonacademic article about Laurelfield itself, or about artists’ residencies in the 1920s. He could drive to other colonies, the places that still kept their records in dusty attics. He had a hell of a story for the introduction, at least: the first-person narrative of recovering the lost Laurelfield archive.

He spoke to the historical society about taking the files off his hands once he’d copied the parts he wanted.

These papers were the trails of the artists—and, in the cases of the most obscure visitors, these might have been the only remnants of their art. But what trail he himself had left, what had prompted Zee to choose that word,
trail
, for the wall, he still wasn’t sure. Something told him it wasn’t a trail up the attic stairs, but something that had led her to Melissa Hopper and her soccer tryouts, her babysitting gigs, her crushes—yet the trailhead was missing. He’d hidden every scrap of paper, scoured his desk every day before Zee came home. He felt stupid, or at least outsmarted. He had a thousand imaginary conversations with her. The speech evolved and mutated. It went through angry cycles, conciliatory ones, and there was a pleading phase. It grew shorter and more concise. Eventually it became a single and blanketing word, a one-breath mantra: “
No
.” With every step around the fish ponds, every thrash in his sleep. No to it all. No, this didn’t happen. No, you couldn’t have been in your right mind. No, I’m not the pathetic slug you think I am. No, I didn’t want this. No, I don’t take it back. No. No. No. No. No.

A package arrived in the mail:
Melissa Calls the Shots
,
Melissa Takes a Bow
,
Cece Makes the Grade
. He dumped them in a desk drawer. He spent the day wishing he could call Zee and tell her that the changes she’d made just weren’t working for him. “You
altered the universe,” he’d say. “We’re going to ask you to start over.”

—

In April, a call from the detective: Zee was in rural New York. Here was her address. Here was her number. “Look, man,” the guy said, “you could try and get her committed, but I haven’t seen that work out so well. Seemed fine to me.”

This was the afternoon of the same day Miriam filed for divorce from Case. Doug might have driven straight to New York that very night, but he couldn’t leave Miriam alone right then. And moreover: If he was still sure of anything about Zee, it was that contacting her against her will would make things worse. He wanted to believe this was all that kept him back, that fear wasn’t part of it. That a modicum of relief wasn’t part of it.

Miriam wanted sushi, so they went out and Doug let her order for him. She told him, only after he’d swallowed and liked it, that unagi was eel. She told him that when she met Case she’d been so young that she’d taken the regular trappings of his adult life—his job, his car, his drawer full of polo shirts—as signs of maturity and stability. Here was someone who could support her while she made art, a steady rock on which to build her life. Really he’d been anything but. Every year had been worse, every day had been worse—and then they came here, and things got unbearable.