The Hundred-Year House (35 page)

Oh, stupid Eddie with his stupid pen. And stupid Zilla, too, and stupid Viktor. She sits on the floor and stretches her legs. Lemuel is waiting for her, back in Madison. She can feel him, lying in bed awake, waiting. A different kind of magnet.

(Samantha turns a cartwheel, a full cartwheel, into the hall. The skirt of her yellow dress falls over her head like a parachute.)

After a while, the rain lets up.

And a while after that, the negatives are dry.

Dear Miss Mays,

Please, if it isn’t too late, disregard my premature attempt to leave Laurelfield.

(And do pardon my slipping this under the door. It’s early, and I’d hate to wake you.)

Everything felt wrong before, but now I know this is exactly where I ought to be, of anywhere in the world. I think I had hold of the place by the wrong end. Or it had hold of the wrong end of me. The point is, it’s all changed now. It’s right.

The batch of poems I finished—they were too dark. I’m not going to write that kind of thing again. They were haunted. I thought I was haunted, or the house was, but it was only the work. I’m going to start over.

Do you ever think of it, how as artists we can just start over? I don’t suppose a businessman could throw out his business and start fresh. But we can begin again. And that’s what I hope to do, if you haven’t given away my spot.

Sheepishly, thankfully,

Eddie

THE GHOSTS

Samantha walked the grounds. She wanted to kiss everything. The grass was soaked.

She’d stayed hidden in her rooms when Gamby stomped out of her house at dawn. So it wasn’t till noon, when she found Marlon smoking his pipe on the terrace, that she learned about the scene in the big house. Gamby had stalked in and dropped his little daughter off at the breakfast table, asking Josephine to tend to her. Josephine had told riddles, and Fannie went running around the house looking for things that might pass as toys: a pencil and paper, Armand’s little jade monkey, a hair clip.

Gamby went through the house opening doors, startling Marceline half dressed. Marlon was heading back to his room for more sleep when he heard a noise above him on the attic stairs. A thundering, a crashing. He thought of the ghost. But no, it was Gamby, descending like an avalanche. Gamby braced himself in the doorway, panting. He said, “The attic may
not
be used for a studio.”

“I’m a writer,” Marlon said.

“Who the hell’s been painting up there?” When Marlon didn’t speak—he would have, if he’d known the answer—Gamby exploded. “The attic is a FAMILY space! It has not been offered to you!”

“I don’t think it’s a studio.”

Gamby slammed the door and turned the key in the lock. He
regarded the key with a horror normally reserved for bloody knives. He slipped it in his pocket.

“I’m just a writer.”

But by the time Marlon told this all to Samantha, Gamby was long gone. Beatrice, arriving for work, had been so cowed encountering him angry outside the director’s house that she’d fetched him both the other copies of the attic key.

—

In the library that night, Zilla was disconsolate.

Samantha said, “We can pick the lock, I’m sure.”

But this wasn’t the problem. The problem was the acorns pelting her, the words fading on her hand, the sense that Viktor—look at him in the corner, folded up like an umbrella—was a fate she’d circumvented. And that she wasn’t sure if this would be her salvation or her undoing.

Though, yes, the unfinished painting bothered her as well. She hadn’t been able to work all day. She’d sat on the fountain, nearly overflowing from all the rain, and stared at the attic dormers, and considered that part of her soul was locked up there, as surely as Violet Devohr had been locked up there. Violet, Violet, dragged here against her will. Was
that
the magnetic force behind her haunting? She was pulled, and so she pulled others. Toward ruin, toward redemption, toward love, away from it. Why? Because she could.

Fannie: “Doesn’t he recognize the irony? In
locking
the
attic
!”

Josephine: “I think he’s truly that dense.”

Outside, the storm was back—violently this time, lightning at all the windows. Marlon said, “In the English department, this is what we would call the objective correlative. Storms of all kinds, outdoors and in.”

And on cue there came a shattering thunder unlike any they’d heard before. The glasses clattered on the table.

When the rain finally thinned, when they could count ten seconds between the lightning strikes and their crashes, a
delegation ventured out front: Zilla and Armand and Fannie—and Alfie, who needed to relieve himself. At first they saw nothing. Then Armand realized. “The oak,” he said. And he pointed to where the giant oak, the oldest oak, had stood, west of the director’s house, taller than any building at Laurelfield, older than the oldest living turtle. It was utterly gone. A ragged stump stood maybe four feet high, and a thick mulch of branches and bark and leaves had formed a carpet for yards and yards around. But there was no piece thicker than an arm bone, no piece longer than a leg. Alfie sniffed through it, barking and whimpering.

Fannie said, “Holy mother of God.”

Zilla leaned forward at the waist as if she were retching, though she wasn’t. The rain hit her back.

—

Very late that night, when they were all asleep, she left Laurelfield without saying anything. Since she hadn’t worked in the Longhouse for days, those paintings were dry enough to roll. In the morning they would find her studio empty, but for a little pile on the table: rocks, a feather, a dead bee inside a Mason jar.

—

The attic would not, in fact, be reopened until August of 1954, when, in those last, calamitous days of the colony, someone called a willing locksmith and the able-bodied hefted the desks and office machines and cabinets with forty-two years’ worth of files up the stairs. A few files were expunged at that time. Ludo’s, for one. Eddie’s, for another.

Zilla came the next year, to visit Laurelfield’s grave. She got up in the attic when Grace and George were out, but her oak leaf painting—the one held prisoner all those years—was neatly tacked beneath a window. Its absence would be noticed, and there was no telling who’d be blamed. And so she decided it ought to stay. If she couldn’t return to Laurelfield, at least part of her could always remain.

—

Out on the terrace at midnight, Marlon, terribly soused, his head finally clear: “Only oaks will do that. They always split or explode. And they draw it, they actually draw the lightning to them.
Beware the oak! It draws the stroke!
”

Josephine told him, fondly, to shut his mouth and write a book about it.

Viktor refused to speak.

—

In 1933, Zilla would watch him dance Albrecht in
Giselle
, his last performance before he vanished. She would sit in the second-to-last row and dart out at intermission.

—

From 1929 to 1954, forty novels, seven symphonies, fifteen dances, around three hundred stories, and over five thousand poems were completed at Laurelfield. Six times as many of each were begun or continued. Which isn’t to mention the concertos and memoirs, the photographs and charcoal sketches. Seventy love affairs were begun, and forty-two were ended. One woman died in the bathtub. A poet hanged herself in the woods. A violin was hurled from the roof. Eight children were conceived. Between 1938 and 1945, seven Jewish artists from western Europe were allowed indefinite stays.

Some of this is a matter of record, the Laurelfield archives having been made public in the fall of the year 2000. Other stories, other sequences of events, are known only to Edwin Parfitt’s Olympian gods (if they have survived our neglect) or to the fates, or to the ghosts who keep watch. Count it as the universe’s cruelest irony that the ghosts, who alone could piece a whole story together, are uniquely unable to tell it.

One such tale: On October 18, 1944, Lieutenant Armand Cox, a photographer with the Army Signal Corps, climbed onto a barricade in the street outside the Hotel Quellenhof, in the bloody heart of the Battle of Aachen. His interest in the shot was
journalistic, not tactical: just a German soldier up in the window. The frame, never developed, captured the soldier’s arm mid-motion. The grenade killed Lieutenant Cox, not the eighteen-year-olds below him on the street. His camera landed near his right leg and was, in any event, crushed soon after. In the window boxes of the hotel, there were still geraniums.

A year later, sorting through Armand’s things in their Rush Street apartment, Eddie found, in a box in the closet, a photograph of the love of his life, naked, laughing, on the night he first fell in love with him. One of the five copies Samantha had spread throughout the world to prevent Gamaliel Devohr from simply burning Laurelfield to the ground. That night Eddie made his way up Route 41 to Laurelfield, where he stood out back, at the edge of the woods, with a pistol to the flesh behind his chinbone.

He stood there an hour, until he couldn’t feel his legs, until he’d become part of the earth, until he thought he might grow leaves. The upstairs lights came on, one by one, as the artists finished their drinks and returned to their work or their trysts. Someone staggered back to the Longhouse. It was a revelation to him, those lights, the shadows behind the curtains: There were artists still up in those rooms, making art. There was good in the world. And the world was worth living in, it truly was. It just wasn’t worth being Edwin Parfitt. He had nothing left to write, and he had no one left to love, and he had nowhere left to go. His editor at Holt, himself just returned from the Pacific, had telegraphed that the public awaited his next work, his response to the war. The only thing that could make his grief even less bearable was feeling stared at, waited for. When all he’d ever wanted was to hide inside of something, to crawl inside a piece of furniture and become a mouse.

He wondered if he could move his finger on the trigger.

But look at those lights.

He lay on the ground and put the gun in the leaves. He slept,
and as he woke at dawn he remembered a woman he’d met on his last stay, in ’41. Armand was already off at training, and it was Eddie’s first visit to Laurelfield without him. Her name was Alma Nellis. Hair like grapevine tendrils. This woman would shatter plates against the fountain lip, then mortar them back together in completely illogical ways. The final plate would be vaguely round, but jagged and jumbled. She destroyed and reconstructed an entire tea set this way. Cups no one would dare drink from. “Is it always china?” he asked, and she said, “Next will be a chair.”

He wondered if a man, a broken man, could be reconfigured in the same way.

When the sun was up, he knocked at Samantha’s door. She held his face in her hands as if he were returning from the dead, as if his had been the dog tags and left arm sent back from Aachen.

Her hair was longer now, wispy. She was softer somehow. She made him toast, and they sat at her table, and they talked about, of all things, the White Rabbits, and Josephine’s new solo work, and how she’d taken over the same seventh floor studio in the Fine Arts Building where Armand had once camped out. “She’s a worthy inheritor,” Eddie said.

Samantha said, “Eddie, I’m dying. I have cancer in my breast.”

He had nothing left—the night had drained him—but she understood. She didn’t expect anything. After breakfast they walked the grounds. Eddie said, “You’ll have to move the fish in soon.”

“Eddie, it should be you. The board would hire someone awful. Why can’t it be you instead?”

Eddie thought again of the smashed-up plate. He thought of Proteus, shifting shape and evading capture.

“Wouldn’t you want to? Wouldn’t you want to live here?”

When they finally stopped, at the bench by the pond, he said,
“We’ve pulled two tremendous stunts here. The Chippeway raid, and the trapping of Gamby Devohr. Let’s do one more great and ridiculous thing.”

“I doubt I have the energy.”

“It’s called The Death of the Poet Edwin Parfitt.”

—

On October 29, a small circle of poets and artists and writers—some in residence at Laurelfield at that very time, some farther flung—gave testimony to the police about a drowning by suicide in Lake Glinow, Wisconsin, and the perverse funeral that followed. The artist Zilla Silverman and the composer Charles Ives together paid the hefty fine to the town hall that was all the police could come up with by way of penalty, after their fruitless inquest.

“Proteus Wept,” published posthumously in
The American Mercury
, drew quite a bit of attention, as did the man’s extraordinary suicide note.

Before her death the following spring, Samantha wrote a letter to Gamby reminding him of the poet Max Perry, “whose acquaintance you made in the summer of 1929. He was the one who took such fine care of your daughter Grace when you were incapacitated. I’m afraid he hasn’t made much of himself as a poet since that stay,” Samantha wrote, “but he is devoted to the arts, and would be an exceptional steward for Laurelfield. He also has possession of a file of particular interest to you. I expect his guaranteed employment and lodging as caretaker through at least the end of our agreement on September 1 of ’54.”

As for the artists who stayed there over the next ten years—a very few were friends who recognized him, but most were not. One writer, having been acquainted with Parfitt in Chicago and having mourned his death, wasn’t sure if his heart would recover till halfway through his stay. No one left talking about him,
though—they all understood the charge of silence, and admission was, after all, selective—and so to everywhere that was not Laurelfield, Edwin Parfitt remained dead.