The Hundred-Year House (30 page)

“Scandal, you know.”

“He figured she’d come out eventually. Every day he knocked, three times a day, and she told him to go away. And then he realized—”

“No, you forgot to say, it was five days! Five days she was up there. She had taken in the key. Did you say that part?”

“Yes, five days. And only then did he realize that she had no food or water.”

“And so he broke down the door. Or he called a locksmith, I’m not sure. But it was too late. She wasn’t dead yet, but she couldn’t survive.”

Zilla rejoined them in time to hear the end. “Are you trying to make her
leave
? She’ll run off in the night!” But her voice was so soft and rolling that it was only a joke.

“Anyway,” Fanny said, “that was Gamby’s mother. Gamby is Gamaliel, the one who’s coming to get us all in trouble. The poor dear, he was just two years old. It’s no wonder he’s always begrudged Laurelfield.”

Over at the piano, Ludo had started one of his new songs, a
bouncy thing with a chorus designed to be joined by the flappers who, under more urban circumstances, would no doubt surround his piano. It had become a great joke to all of them in the past weeks that Ludo’s English could be so tortured in conversation but so smooth in lyric. He sang with tremendous verve:

Columbus spied the ocean shore

He counted natives by the score

He cried, “Exploring’s such a bore

When all of it’s been found before!”

Ohhhh—I tell you, gentle philosophers,

In these modernest of times

That history doesn’t repeat . . .

It merely rhymes!

There were so many layers of insulation to this one room. The leather-bound books, and then their shelves, and the walls themselves, and the outer bricks, and then the blanket of ivy that could swallow your whole hand, up to your wrist. And then the thick summer air, and the groves of mismatched trees—the legacy, apparently, of Violet Devohr’s insistence on horticultural diversity—and then the stone wall, and then the woods. It should have felt safe, but instead it was smothering and cold at once.

Marlon leaned against a standing Eddie and settled his rear on the back of the davenport, just inches from Marceline’s head. He wore, as usual, his smoking jacket, tied at the waist. He smelled of pomade. He said, “Do you believe in fate?”

“Sure.”

“The moment I saw you, I felt certain I’d seen you before.”

“I’m not sure that’s fate so much as déjà vu.”

“Ah. The French have no imagination.”

Eddie found himself smiling back but ignoring whatever else
Marlon said. He watched Armand take a drink to Marceline. Armand dressed like a college boy, argyle sweater and bright argyle socks, knickers. The rumor of the afternoon had it that Marceline had been demoted from a lead actress at MGM, and sent here at the mercy of Mr. Mayer to try her hand at writing, to rework two old silent scripts into talkies. Her exquisite looks were fading, the sharp bob doing nothing for her nose, and that accent, it was true, would not go over now. Everyone was dying to ask about films, to ask if she knew Gary Cooper. Eddie heard her say to Armand, “You should go right now to Berlin. There are in Berlin the most vonderful pansy clubs.”

In the corner, Zilla and Viktor, ignoring each other.

Samantha in tweed knickers and green broadcloth blouse, rubbing Ludo’s shoulders, singing along.

Everyone coupling and recoupling around the room in laughter, like a formal dance.

Armand, hands on the White Rabbits’ shoulders, swaying by the piano. His sleeves rolled up, his arms covered in dark golden hairs. The White Rabbits sang the chorus of a new song:

Give me back my kiss,

It wasn’t for you to keep.

Eddie had languished in confusion for a full week before finally asking Zilla why the women were called White Rabbits. But he couldn’t get it out of his head yet that there was some connection to their noses, both small and pink, or to their silvering hair, or to plump Josephine’s buck teeth or wiry Fannie’s quick little eyes.

He realized that behind him, below him, on the davenport, Samantha Mays was crying quietly, and Zilla was comforting her. He had thought of Samantha as the type of woman who didn’t cry. There was something about her that was like a fourteen-year-old boy, all elbows and knees and a broad chin, and he’d always
imagined she could fall off a horse and bounce. She said, softly, “But I didn’t imagine he’d written to the
board
. Oh, I just don’t know. He’s been looking for the slightest justification.”

Zilla’s voice, low: “But we have a room here full of tremendously creative people. I’m sure we can think of something.”

Marlon must have heard it too. He said, “Tell him we have a film star here! That’ll grab his attention!”

Samantha looked up and laughed. “Oh. Oh, Marlon, don’t listen to me. I’ll just worry you. But no, it wouldn’t help. If anything, he’ll use it as proof we’re a bunch of hedonists. We’ll have to clean up. We’ll have to hide Ludo. If anyone asks, Ludo’s been gone two years.”

—

At midnight, it was just Marceline and Armand and Zilla and Eddie. Eddie wanted to be in bed, asleep, but he didn’t want to be alone yet in his little room at the top of the stairs.

Marceline was explaining that Los Angeles was a city without attics. “Vhy vould you need them? Nothing is old there, not a single antique, except the vons brought in for display. And I am myself an antique, of course.”

A clamor of protest.

Eddie had worried she’d be haughty, but he found he enjoyed this woman, the tenacity with which she was determined to move on past the end of her particular, silent art.

“How is the life in Chicago?” she said to Armand. Another thing to admire: the instinct to steer the conversation away from herself.

Though Marceline had asked the question, Armand seemed to address his answer to Eddie. “It’s swell. I’m in Towertown, and really I think it’s better than New York. Everyone interesting in New York is actually in Paris, anyway. But Chicago’s copacetic. And there’s a lot doing for artists. Poets, too. Eddie, do you know Harriet Monroe? I could introduce you. If you were ever in the
city. And you ought to be! What does Philadelphia have? You’re out of the loop there. And what life is there, even? For people like us? You ought to be in Towertown or on a boat to Florence.”

Zilla said, “Oh Armie, you made him blush!”

It was true. He was blushing at how easily Armand had read him. At Armand’s ready implications.
People like us
. But the heat in his face had started before that, at Armand remembering Philadelphia—at his remembering Eddie’s name at all. Eddie had grown used to assuming he was the only one in the room taking note of everything, of everyone’s habits and gestures, squirreling away the details they let fall about their lives. He’d learned long ago to reintroduce himself at least three times to people whose names and drinks and life stories he’d long since memorized. He wondered if the rest of the Chicago crowd was like Armand, like himself—not in the way Armand had meant, but wide-eyed, absorbent.

Eddie struggled for something quick to say, but just then the lamp on the piano crackled, and the room was dunked in blackness. Marceline screamed, and Zilla laughed. “There,” Zilla said. “I don’t know why the Rabbits had to go frightening you about the attic. When clearly the ghost is right here.”

FRIDAY, 10:16 A.M.

Marlon stands on the wall by the road and aims his Leica at the director’s house, what used to be the coach house back when this was poor, doomed Violet’s estate. Armand Cox leans there, smoking. Alfie sniffs in quick circles nearby. The wall is narrower than Marlon expected, and it takes great effort to balance. He can’t quite focus the lens on Armand, and so he trains it on the giant oak between the houses instead. After the photo but before he can hop down, a voice from out on the sidewalk: “What
is
that place, anyhow?”

Marlon looks down at the speaker, a young boy with a stick. He says, “It’s an asylum for people who think they’re artists.”

—

Uncaptured by the lens:

Samantha staring from her bedroom window, listening to the calming clatter of Beatrice’s typewriter. Behind her, the smell of something burning. She wonders what on earth could be burning.

Ludo in the composer’s cottage, hitting his head on the piano keys in frustration.

Fannie and Josephine, lying like quotation marks in bed, the afternoon sun on their feet. Fannie tracing the lines of the room from one corner all around to Josephine’s shoulder, thinking about shape as sound, about silence as negative space.

Viktor in the hallway, picking Zilla’s blue earring off the rug and clipping it back to her ear, letting his wrist touch her neck, watching her eyes close. Zilla scrambling like an egg.

The bootlegger, driving slowly up the road, knowing he’ll recognize Laurelfield by the number of autos out front.

Eddie Parfitt, on the second floor, trying to remember what he’s writing and why he’s writing it, wondering what cold and congealed substance his blood has become.

John and Ralph, the two brothers who work the grounds, oiling the old wheelbarrow.

Marceline, settled now in the yellow room, swearing in German at a script never meant for words.

Gamby on the train, his daughter curled against his lap, her yellow hair spilling down his leg, her whole body expanding with every breath.

SAMANTHA IN HER ROOMS

Eddie, not knowing to let himself in, had knocked patiently at the downstairs door till Alfie barked and found Samantha. She led him up through the kitchen, and into her own rooms rather than the office, so they’d have privacy from Beatrice. She gave him the Morris chair and took the rocker herself. Poor thing, so awkward and formal. He was particularly nervous now, sucking in the lips on his little face until he resembled a gargoyle. He looked around the room, at her desk, her file cabinets, the Chinese lantern, the row of green apples ripening on the windowsill.

He took a great breath and said, “I wasn’t leaving till the end of September. But I think I might go tomorrow morning.” His palms flat on the arms of the chair. It dwarfed him.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh dear.” But she wasn’t surprised at all. He’d stayed in bed so much, was so silent at breakfast, and talked at dinner only in a rushed, anxious way. (Zilla, who noticed everything, had told Samantha to keep an eye on him. “He’s twenty-one,” she said. “Can you imagine, coming here right from school and expecting yourself to be brilliant?” “He’s already brilliant,” Samantha had protested. “He published two collections at Princeton, and everyone’s talking about him.” “Well, regardless, he’s raw. And he’s afraid of the house.”)

Samantha looked at him now, the way his face had thinned
in the two weeks he’d been here. She said, “You can leave whenever you need. But I hope there’s nothing wrong.”

“I’ve been doing good work here,” he said. “Really good work. I’ve finished twelve poems, and they’re different from anything I’ve made before. They’re darker, actually. I
never
work this fast. No one does! But that gets at the problem. I’m not—something’s wrong with me. I feel this place is going to swallow me whole.”

“The house can have an effect.”

“It’s nothing at all about the way things are run.”

“Eddie, why don’t you see how you feel in the morning? Just enjoy yourself tonight, relax a bit, and let me know tomorrow.”

He dropped his shoulders and smiled. “I will.”

“You’ll be getting out just in time, too. Mr. Devohr arrives tonight. Lord knows what’ll happen to us all in the morning. We’ll be walking the plank, I fear.” She said it lightly, but really she’d spent the past day calculating frantically: the new artists due next Tuesday, the impossibility of sending Ludo back to Mussolini, the number of trustees who might eventually support a reconfigured Laurelfield, maybe on a farm up in Wisconsin. The finished canvases she was still storing in the basement for a painter who’d left in June. The prospect of having no home. Gamby might give her a month to clear out. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was panicking over nothing.

They stood and walked back through the kitchen.

“May I inquire what happened to your wall?” he said.

She’d already forgotten the ugly black hole beside the icebox, the size of a large fist. And around it a larger circle of blackened wall, a foot in diameter. “I’ll have to cover it before Mr. Devohr arrives. I had a lamp with no shade, and it fell against the wall this morning. When I smelled it, I thought I must have burned my lunch—and then I remembered I wasn’t cooking anything.”

Beatrice’s voice, from the office: “We ought to dig all the way through and install the world’s shortest pneumatic tube!”

Eddie laughed. “The ghost has been at the lamps lately. She snuffed ours out in the library last night.”

“That lets me off the hook, doesn’t it?”

THE DISH ON MARCELINE

She gets up early to work. Some of us saw her notes on the first script, when she left them by the coffee pot.
The Aspern Papers
, from a Henry James story, a failure in its first filming and sure to fail as a talkie. Because the only real characters are the old woman, her plain spinster niece, and the man obsessed with obtaining the old woman’s love letters. No part here for Clara Bow, no room for a WAMPAS Baby Star. Only, if Marceline is smart, and we think she is, she’ll show the audience some scenes from the past, when old Juliana was young and in love with the writer Aspern. But no, some of us argue: The whole point is the burning of the papers at the end, the fact that our man will
never
know the truth about the love affair. It would ruin it all, to show the past!

The other script, the one Marceline hasn’t yet begun, is
Bluebeard
. She told us at breakfast. No, not the pirate. His beard was black. Bluebeard was the killer. The one with all the wives. Remember, the key she can’t get the blood off? That one has potential.