The Hundred-Year House (3 page)

“He needs a few weeks to recoup,” Miriam said. “We’re aiming for September.”

“Gonna get some exercise. Might shop for a new car.”

Zee said, “What’s wrong with your old one?”

Miriam put her hand on Case’s shoulder and said, “I hope we
won’t be in the way. I know you’re making a sacrifice. I was going to set up on the sunporch to work, but only if it’s okay with you.”

Doug gestured to the constellation of ladybugs on the ceiling. “You won’t be more trouble than our other houseguests.” No one laughed.

“Or the ghost,” Zee added, and smiled as if she’d just played some kind of trump card, as if Case and Miriam would now spring up and flee. “Violet mostly sticks to the big house, but you’ll hear her knocking on the windows some nights. You’ll get used to it.”

Miriam said, “Oh, I
love
ghost stories. I do.”

Zee picked up her keys. “I’m kidding, of course.”

She left, and Doug ate his eggs standing up. Case asked if Doug wanted to join him for a run, and he managed to bow out, blaming his bad knees.

“Suit yourself,” Case said, and (Doug could have sworn) glanced at Doug’s paunch before leaving the room.

Doug started scrubbing dishes, and a minute later Case appeared down on the drive, changed and stretching his calves. Miriam came over to rinse and dry, and they talked above the sound of the water. He learned that Miriam’s art was mixed-media mosaics.

“Most people would call it detritus collage,” she said. “But I use classical mosaic techniques. Just using found pieces. I’m always cutting up Case’s clothes.” She pushed her curls from her face with a wet hand. “Tell me about your poetry.”

“
No
,” he said, which she didn’t deserve. “Sorry. I’m not a poet. I’m writing
about
a poet. Gracie’s mixed up. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

She smiled, as if it were regular and amusing for people to make idiots of themselves in front of her. “What poet?”

“Oh. Edwin Parfitt? He was a modernist.”

“Sure, right, that one poem! From high school! I mean, not—”

“‘Apollo on the Mississippi.’”

“Yes! ‘Whose eyes’ bright embers gleam.’ That one!”

“He was a one-hit wonder. It’s his worst poem, but it’s all anyone knows. That and his suicide note. He drowned himself in a lake, and the note had instructions for his friends to burn his body on the beach just like the poet Shelley. And they
did
it.” He let the soapy water out and sprayed down the basin. All because of that inane thought yesterday, he was aware of the distance between their bodies.

“I’d love to read it,” she said. “Your book, not the suicide note.” She dried her little red hands. “Well, both.”

5

Z
ee took two aspirin, forgetting they’d just make her sicker to her stomach. The cramps might have been from dehydration, or from the hell of teaching summer school English to the seventeen-year-olds who were supposed to be experiencing college-level academics but were more interested in college-level drinking. But the headache was definitely from having her home invaded.

She gave up on grading (“Most people,” began one essay on
Heart of Darkness
, “will encounter water at some point in their lives”) and stacked the papers neatly on the corner of the desk, so it would look like a planned installation rather than an abandonment. On top she put the strange metal thing she’d found in the woods behind the big house that spring. It was probably some sort of machine part, but she loved the design of it, the waffled roundness, and she loved its thick and ancient rust. She thought of it as a metal daisy top: six hollow petals around a hollow center. She stuck a pencil in one of the holes, and now the stack looked complete.

She checked mail and got coffee in the English office. Chantal, the department secretary, was on the phone, so Zee lingered over a sabbatical notice on the board.

Zee was obsessive about the bulletin board, and about the campus papers and the department calendar. She figured her job had two parts: the work part and the career part. The work part
right now was teaching, publishing, flying to petty conferences in depressing university towns. The career part was showing up at concerts and sitting behind the college president, keeping in touch with everyone from grad school. If she could, she’d have hosted dinner parties. It was easy enough to tell her colleagues she and Doug were renting a coach house in town, but it would be far too risky to bring them so close to the Devohr family history. She couldn’t imagine the jokes Sid Cole would make if he knew she’d been to the manor born.

Thank God the “Devohr” was buried under her father’s name, Grant. She’d been tempted to take Doug’s name just to inter the Devohrs one layer further, but she refused to part with that last scrap of her father. She told colleagues, if they asked, that her mother had stayed home, and her father had been a journalist and a recovering alcoholic, all of which was true. Really, she felt she could say “recovered” alcoholic now, in defiance of all the careful AA jargon, because he’d never have the chance to fall off the wagon again, and never had in the twelve years she knew him, not even on the night Nixon was reelected and he was the only man in town hurling books at the TV. He had a lifelong habit of sucking coins—popping a nickel in his mouth and flipping it with his tongue while he wrote or thought—that she figured must have been some kind of crutch. A reminder not to drink, maybe.

Chantal hung up and crossed her eyes at Zee. “Are we working out?” she said.

“I need to punch someone. But working out will suffice.”

Chantal had a thousand little braids, and not one was ever askew. She was the most competent person Zee knew—a filing system to rival the FBI’s—and Zee liked her better than any actual department member. They did the ellipticals side by side, and Zee told Chantal about the Texans moving in. “I never get along with southern women,” she said. “I’m always offending them.
What I see as debate, they see as assault. The worst part is, Doug will fall in love with her.” She was whispering. There were students all around.

“Is she pretty?”

“The point is she’s
there
.”

Chantal was cheating, taking her hands off the grips. “But he’s not like that, is he? Your husband?”

“He’s so desperate not to work on the Parfitt thing, he’d fall in love with a zebra. He might not
do
anything about it, but he’ll fall in love.” A woman like Miriam, with the wild eyes and chewed-off fingernails, would fall for anyone who listened to her emote—especially Doug, whose half smile was a sort of magical charm. It had disarmed even Zee. But Doug wouldn’t recognize the difference between love and a diversion, would think that just because he hadn’t been distracted like this before, there was destiny involved. “You know what his nickname was, in school? Dough. Because he was Doug H., but also because he’s just—he’s malleable. He’s suggestible.”

Chantal pushed the button to up her speed. “Keep him on his toes. Not to tell you what to do. But a bored man is—I don’t know, isn’t there an expression for that?” She laughed. “A bored man is not a good thing.”

6

D
oug walked to the library, even though he was more inclined to watch morning TV and do half-hearted yoga downstairs. The Texans might not irritate him into working harder, but they would embarrass him out of doing anything else. He even stayed up in the adult section, something he hadn’t done since he’d started the
Friends
book.

“I wondered if you had anything on Laurelfield,” he said to the reference librarian. “The old artists’ colony.” He’d asked just a few months ago, but there was always the chance something new had appeared.

Laurelfield was still, technically, the name of the house. Those olden-day Devohrs had named their homes like pets. When Zee and Doug were first dating, Gracie had sent out Christmas cards with an artist’s rendering of the estate on the front, the word
Laurelfield
in script beneath. “It looks like the logo of a ham company,” Zee had said. “Thank you for buying Laurelfield smoked sausages.” It was the first time Doug had fully stopped to think what it meant that his girlfriend’s family had spawned five Canadian MPs, that they had namesake buildings and foundations all over Ontario.

The librarian led him to the glass-front cabinet and pulled out four books on local history. The only helpful one was the photo book of local estates he’d seen before, but he sat anyway in a computer chair staring again at the grainy photo dated 1929.

Designed in the English country style by Adler Ross in 1900 for the Devohrs of Toronto, Laurelfield was home to the Laurelfield Arts Colony from 1912 to 1954. Notable residents included the artists Charles Demuth, Grant Wood, and Emil Armin; composer Charles Ives; and poets Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, and Edwin Parfitt. The home is now again a private residence.

These seven guests, while impressive, were the only seven he’d ever seen listed—and were, in other words, the only ones of note. Perhaps this was why there were no archives, no coffee table books of photographs and reminiscences.

The picture was taken from high up. It showed the north end of the big house, plus the space between the two buildings, filled by a massive, long-gone oak. Doug squinted at the windows, hoping to see lord knows what. Parfitt making out with Charles Demuth, maybe. There, in the bottom right corner, sat the coach house, two cars on the gravel drive in front, the ground floor still open to motor traffic. A man in knickers leaned against the eastern wall near the cars, his hand raised to his mouth. Smoking. By his feet, a blur of a dog. Doug knew the man wasn’t Parfitt, though he couldn’t say exactly why. The prosaic hat, perhaps, or some intangibly heterosexual angle to the hips, or the fact that here he stood by the cars when Parfitt would be upstairs on his bed, ankles crossed, gin in his left hand, black fountain pen in his right.

Doug had no idea when Parfitt was actually in residence at Laurelfield. He visited both Laurelfield and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire throughout the twenties and thirties, but the Parfitt archive at Princeton mentioned Laurelfield only once, in a letter from 1942: “I haven’t been as sick since one summer at Laurelfield,” he wrote to his niece, “and this time it’s worse because I’m getting old, Annette, I am.” When Doug had found that reference, he was already dating Zee, had already seen the
Laurelfield Christmas card. He double-checked with her, as casually as he could (“Didn’t you say your house was an artists’ colony? At some point?”) and when Zee confirmed, it wasn’t that Doug saw her as a ticket to Laurelfield but that he took the connection for a sign. Here was this woman whose childhood bedroom might have been the very room in which Parfitt had written! The stars were aligned, and he should marry her. Zee, no Parfitt fan, was less impressed by the coincidence. “Lots of people stayed there,” she said. “He was probably in Grand Central Station at some point, too. That doesn’t make it hallowed ground.”

Doug xeroxed the picture and started home. It was blazing hot, the time of day when more reasonable nations took a siesta. He felt productive, for a moment, the xerox folded in his pocket, until it hit him that
this
was his way of “getting to work” on what should have been hard-nosed textual analysis: copying a picture of a house that he could see out his bedroom window anyway.

Halfway back, Case passed him running, on the opposite side of the street. Shining in the sun. Looking like he belonged in this town, in a way Doug never would.

7

Z
ee decided not to drink at the lunch.

The eight department members still in town were squeezed into the back room of Pasquali’s with spouses. Zee did not invite Doug to these events, preferring to talk him up in his absence. She’d created, over the past year, a mythical Doug whose earth-shattering book would soon be completed, whose thesis adviser wanted him to return to teach in Madison.

The celebration of Sid Cole’s twentieth year at the college (his thirty-fifth year teaching overall) had been put off for a few weeks by Sid’s gall bladder surgery. But now here he was, with his caterpillar eyebrows and obsessive lip-licking, as sprightly and malevolent as ever. Old age turns the most horrible people into “characters,” their misanthropy masquerading as crustiness. Sid was known to offer students a five-minute break in the middle of long afternoon classes, then mock anyone with the nerve to leave. The adoring faithful stayed and gleefully jotted “Coleisms” in their notebooks.

Cole was to blame, in Zee’s mind, for Doug’s joblessness. Two years ago, right after the college hired her, they offered Sid Cole’s job to Doug. Cole had announced his retirement, and Doug was the perfect fit. Then, the day before Doug was to meet with the dean and talk salary, twelve of Cole’s students showed up at the old man’s house with a bag of letters. They quoted Milton and Frost and Thoreau. They convinced him to stay. Zee’s contract
was already signed, and Doug’s only other leads were on the east coast. Now, even if Cole retired, Doug—two years and zero publications later—was significantly less qualified for the job than he’d been back then.

Two things were necessary: a vaguely Doug-shaped hole, and a Doug who could account, impressively, for the past two years. The latter she had some control over; he’d finish the book this summer, even if she had to write the damn thing for him. The former was harder, but there were two small colleges in this town alone and a dozen more in Chicago, any one of which might become an option. It seemed even the adjuncts had sunk in their teeth, though, and weren’t budging.

And Cole announced, regularly, that now he was in for life. “They’ll have to carry me out on my desk chair,” he said, “exams clutched to my chest with rigor mortis.”

Zee sat between Ida Hayes and Jerry Keaton, grateful at least for her free pasta. Golda Blum, the acting chair, made a toast to “Sid’s illustrious decades of terrorizing students and baffling his colleagues.” It was an unspoken rule that to toast Cole was to roast him, and that he in turn would grunt and curse like the village drunk. Hoffman and Grasso stood to read a poem they’d written in a fit of Chianti-induced cleverness: “Old King Cole was a Derrida soul, and a Derrida soul was he—and he called for his Yeats and he called for his Poe and he called for his lady-friends three!”