The Hundred-Year House (2 page)

There was a morning in May—notable only for Zee storming around in full academic regalia, late for commencement—when Doug, still in bed, nearly blurted it all out. Wasn’t it a tenet of a good marriage that you kept no secrets beyond the gastrointestinal? Hundreds of movies and one drunken stranger in a bar had told him as much. And so he almost spilled it, casual-like, as she tossed shoes from the closet. “Hey,” he might have said, “I have this project on the side.” But he knew the look Zee would give: concern just stopping her dark eyes from rolling to the ceiling. A long silence before she kissed his forehead. He didn’t blame her. She’d married the guy with the fellowship and bright future and trail of heartbroken exes, not this schlub who needed sympathy and prodding. When she dumped her entire purse out on the bed and refilled it with just her keys and wallet, he took it as a convenient sign:
Shut the hell up, Doug.
He might have that tattooed on his arm one day.

Zee’s mother, Gracie, would sometimes include the two of them in her parties, where she’d steer Doug around by the elbow: “My son-in-law Douglas Herriot, who’s a fantastic
poet
,
and you know, I think it’s
wonderful
. They’re in the coach house till he’s all done writing. It’s my own little NEA grant!” Doug would mutter that he wasn’t a poet at all, that he was a “freelance PhD” writing
about
a poet, but no one seemed to hear.

The monograph was an attempt to turn his anemic doctoral dissertation on Edwin Parfitt into something publishable. Parfitt was coming back into style, to the extent that dead, marginal modernists can, and if Doug finished this thing soon he could get in on the first wave of what he planned, in job interviews, to call “the Parfitt renaissance.” The dissertation had been straight analysis, and Doug wanted to incorporate some archival research, to be the first to assemble a timeline of the poet’s turbulent life. In her less patient moments, Zee accused him of trying to write a biography—academically uncouth and unhelpful career-wise—but Doug didn’t see what harm it would do to set some context. And the man’s life story was intriguing: Eddie Parfitt (Doug couldn’t help but use his nickname, mentally—after nine years of research he felt he knew the guy) was wealthy, ironic, gay, and unhappy, a prodigy who struggled to fulfill his own early promise. He committed suicide at thirty-seven after his lover died in the Second World War. Parfitt had left few personal records, though. Nor had he flitted about the Algonquin Round Table and cracked wise for posterity. Entire periods—the publication gap between 1929 and late 1930, for instance, after which his work became astonishingly flat—lacked any documentation whatsoever.

Not that it mattered now.

Each morning, as Doug switched off his soul and settled in to write (“
Twelve-year-old Melissa Hopper didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer
,” the thing began), he imagined little Parfitt stuffed in the bottom desk drawer on those diskettes, biding his time between the staplers, choking with thirst. The ladybugs hurled their bodies against his desk lamp, and it sounded like knocking—like the ghost of Parfitt, frantically pounding against the wood.

—

In the brief window between commencement and the start of Zee’s summer teaching, Gracie invited them to the big house for brunch. They ate on the back terrace overlooking the grounds—the paths, the fountain, the fish ponds. It was like the garden behind a museum, a place where art students might take picnic lunches. Bruce, Gracie’s second husband, had conveniently excused himself to make his tee time when Gracie announced that she had invited Bruce’s son and daughter-in-law to move into the coach house too.

“It’s really a two-family house,” she said, “and what was done, way back, was to keep the gardener’s family there as well as the driver’s, and they all shared the kitchen. Can you believe, so many servants? I couldn’t manage.”

Zee didn’t put the butter dish down. “Mom, I’ve met Case
twice
. We’re strangers.” Bruce’s children had always lived in Texas.

“Yes,” Gracie said, “and it’s a shame. Didn’t you dance with him at our wedding, Zilla? You’d have been in college, the both of you. He’s quite athletic.”

“No.”

“Well he’s out of work. He lost five million dollars and they fired him. Miriam’s a wonderful artist, but it doesn’t support them, you know how
that
is, so they need the space as much as you.”

Doug managed to nod, and hoped Zee wouldn’t hold it against him.

“So they’ll both hang around the house all day,” Zee said.

“Well yes, but it shouldn’t bother you, as you’ll be at work. It only concerns Douglas. He could even write about them!” Gracie rubbed the coral lipstick off her mug and smoothed her hair—still blonde, still perfect. “And something will open up at the college for Douglas, I’m sure of it. Are you asking for him?”

“Really,” Doug said, “I don’t mind. I can get used to anything.”

—

That afternoon, Doug watched his wife from the window above his desk. She stood on the lawn between the big house and the coach house. Anyone else might have paced. For Zee, stillness was the surest sign of stress. She stared at the coach house as if she might burn it down. As if it might burn
her
down.

She wouldn’t let herself pitch a fit. At some point she and Gracie had come to the tacit agreement that no actual money or property would pass between them. It was the apotheosis of that old-money creed that money should never be discussed: In this family, it couldn’t even be
used
. Doug had doubts whether Zee would even accept her eventual inheritance, or just give it directly to some charity Gracie wouldn’t approve of. She was a Marxist literary scholar—this was how she actually introduced herself at wine and cheese receptions, leaving Doug to explain to the confused physics professor or music department secretary that this was more a theoretical distinction than a political one—and having money would not help her credibility. But she had accepted the house.

And now this.

—

The Texans were just
there
one Tuesday in June when Doug returned from the gym. He picked a box off the U-Haul lip and carried it up to the kitchen, which sat between the two second-floor apartments. Doug loved the feel of an upstairs kitchen, of looking out over the driveway as he flipped pancakes.

A woman with curly brown hair stood on the counter in cutoffs and a tank top, arranging plates in a high cupboard. He put the box down softly, worried that if he startled her, she’d fall. He waited, watching, which seemed somehow inappropriate, and he was about to clear his throat when she turned.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re—Hey!” He offered a hand, but she shook it first, then realized what it was for and held on tight as
she hopped to the floor. She was a bit younger than Doug and Zee, maybe twenty-eight. And tiny. She came to his armpit. “Miriam, obviously. I hope we’re not in your way. I had to scoot some glasses over.”

“Doug Herriot,” he said, and wondered at his own formality. “I can clear out the lower cupboards. You’ll never reach that.”

“I’m not so tall, am I! But Case is. We’ll be fine.” She opened the box on the table, saw it contained clothes, and closed it again. “This is a hell of a place.”

He looked out the window and laughed. “Yeah, it’s not subtle.”

“Oh, I meant
this
place!” She tapped the open cabinet door. “This is quarter sawn oak!”

Doug had no idea what she meant, but he nodded. He wasn’t surprised that the kitchen should be well built; the same architect had designed both houses, and presumably the same carpenters and brick layers had constructed them. The stone wall that bordered the estate also formed the eastern wall of the coach house, or at least its ground floor. The second story rose above that, making the structure look from the road like a child’s playhouse perched atop the wall. Really it was quite large. The ground floor had at first been open garage space, with two arched entrances for cars. Gracie and her first husband, Zee’s father, had the arches filled in with glass panels, and stuck a sunporch on the back. Why they bothered was unclear, except that in the post-chauffeur sixties they’d wanted an attached garage on the big house and felt they ought to transform the old one into something useful and rentable.

The estate had belonged to Gracie’s family all along—the Devohrs, though Gracie never used her maiden name. The Devohrs sat firmly in the second tier of the great families of the last century, not with the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of the world but certainly shoulder-to-shoulder with the Astors, the Fricks, and were lesser known in these parts only by virtue of their Canadian roots. Toronto was hardly Tuxedo Park. Of those families, though,
only the Devohrs were so continually subject to scandal and tragedy and rumor. An unkind tabloid paper of the 1920s had run a headline about the “Devohrcing Devohrs,” and the name had stuck. So had the behavior that prompted it.

Before that infamy, back in 1900, Augustus Devohr (unfocused son of the self-made patriarch), wanting to oversee his grain investments more closely, had built this castle near Lake Michigan, thirty miles straight north of Chicago. By 1906, after his wife killed herself in the house—the suicide that had so bothered an adolescent Zee—he wanted nothing more to do with the Midwest or its crops. In either a fit of charity or a deft tax dodge, Augustus allowed the home to be used for many years as an artists’ colony. Writers and painters and musicians would stay, expenses paid, for one to six months. And—a knife in Doug’s heart—Edwin Parfitt himself had visited the colony, had worked and lived right behind one of those windows, though Doug would never know which one. It was the real reason Doug had even agreed to move into the coach house: as if the proximity would, through some magical osmosis, help his research.

Miriam climbed back on the counter, her small legs folding and then unfolding like a nimble insect’s. She redid her ponytail. She wasn’t exactly attractive, Doug decided (he’d been deliberating, against his will), but she had an interesting face with a jutting chin, eyes bright like a little dog’s. And as soon as he thought it, he recognized it. It was the beginning of a thousand love stories. (“She wasn’t beautiful, but she had an interesting face, the kind artists asked to paint.”) And uninvited, the next thought bore down: He was supposed to fall in love. It wasn’t true, and it wouldn’t happen, but there it was, and it stuck. Anyone watching him in a movie would
expect
him to fall in love, would wait patiently through the whole bag of popcorn. He tried to push the thought away before she turned again, before she saw it on his face. He excused himself and left the room.

3

D
oug was reading in bed when Zee got home. She closed the door. “Did you see them?”

“I met her—Miriam—and she’s okay. She’s small. But then I stayed in here working. I’m sure we don’t have to whisper.”

It was probably true—the two bedrooms were at opposite ends of the second floor. Each apartment had a large entry room, which would once have been the sitting area but which Doug and Zee used as a study, desks under both windows. Before the Texans came, they would use the other apartment for laundry folding or exercise or sex.

“You just hid in here? Did you meet Case?”

“I didn’t want to make them feel they were invading. You know, like if I sat and watched them unpack. Right?”

She was disappointed. She’d wanted the whole story, the gruesome details. Something concrete at which to direct her anger.

She had managed to stay calm and pleasant all day. She had forced herself to smile when Sid Cole had called to her across the lawn—in front of students—that “Marxists don’t drink cappuccino!” She’d even raised her coffee cup into the air. She had laughed out loud: Ha!

The irony was not lost on her that she, willfully mistaken for a Communist by her most obnoxious colleagues, should be allergic to communal living.

“Does she have a Texas accent?”

“No, actually. I don’t think so. Not really, more like—I don’t know.”

What was wrong with him?

She said, “Did she take Case’s last name?”

“I have no idea.”

“That would have a horrible sound. Miriam Breen. It’s too ugly.”

“Yes, it’s ugly.”

Zee changed and found her glasses and lay on top of the covers, underlining an article in
The New York Review of Books
.

“It should give you some impetus to write,” she said. “The more annoying these people are, the better.”

“I’m writing every day.”

She hoped it was true. The worst part of her wanted to stand over his shoulder as he wrote, to suggest commas. Once, early in grad school, she’d tidied up a paper of his when he was out for the night. He’d never noticed.

Doug flipped himself around on the bed and started rubbing her feet.

“Doug,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“I have stuff to do.”

“I’m sorry, I’m way down here by your feet, and I can’t hear you.”

He peeked over the crest of her knees like a groundhog, then ducked down. He did it till she laughed. She put the journal down, and he worked his way up.

4

C
ase and Miriam and Zee were at the table when Doug came out the next morning, fortunately having remembered to put on pants. Case was tall, as Miriam had said, and deeply tan with big, straight teeth. Polo shirt and flip-flops. In a movie, Doug thought, he’d be the guy who beats up John Cusack. The men shook hands, and Doug found himself giving Miriam a ridiculous little salute. He began making eggs, just so he had something to do.

Zee was dressed for teaching her summer session class, silk blouse tucked into her skirt in such a tidy way that if he hadn’t known better, Doug would have imagined her morning routine involved duct tape. “So,” she said, “I hear you’re searching for a job, Case.”

Case looked up from his cereal, leaned back, and regarded Zee as if she’d ruined his beach vacation by asking where he planned to be five years from next Thursday. “I’m in no rush,” he said. And then he laughed, releasing them all abruptly from whatever contempt he’d held them in. Doug decided, in that moment, that he despised Case Breen.