A World Elsewhere (18 page)

He knew he might spoil it even worse if he got sick. He felt better when he burped, which he couldn’t help doing in the all-at-once way that he knew was not polite. Landish moved his hand in circles on his back to coax up any more that might be there, to assure him he was undeserving of the looks he was getting from the others in the waiting room, men who were not accustomed to the presence among them of a child of seven or a man who was dressed like Landish.

“Where is the boy’s mother?” asked the man beneath the clock. Landish said she was in a place where no one was so rude as to inquire where the mother of a belching boy might be.

“I should have said ‘excuse me,’ ” Deacon said, but Landish said it was the man who should have said it before interrupting the boy’s post-guzzle contemplation of the rug.

Now all the men were looking at them as if, having thought that to object to their presence wasn’t worth their bother, they had changed their minds.

“You should be waiting for the train with others like yourselves,” a young man said, though his tone was more instructive than otherwise. Perhaps he thought them guilty of nothing more than making a mistake.

“We have first-class tickets,” Landish said. He spoke about the ship. “The clothes that I was given do not fit me, and the clothes the boy was given do not suit him.” Then he said the name of the place where they were going and that of the man who wrote the letter that was in his pocket. He didn’t roar the name as he had when they were on the ship, but calmly said it would have been unkind of them to refuse an invitation from a man like Padgett Vanderluyden, who had been his friend at Princeton.

“If you are going to Vanderland, Vanderluyden must be starting up a circus,” said the man beneath the clock.

“May I have your name,” said Landish, “so that I may tell Van that you said so?”

Deacon felt again what he had felt on board the ship when the roar that Landish let out shook the chandeliers until they made a sound like distant chimes. There was the same silence.

He drained the glass until the ice cubes rattled on the bottom and the straw made a shrieking sound. There was nothing coming up the straw but water now, the frost was gone, the straw was soggy and the outside of the glass was almost dry. Landish gave him the sugar-dusted cherries. He ate them straight from his palm, pushing them into his mouth. The man beneath the clock drew on his just-lit cigar, blew smoke in their direction, then looked away.

Deacon dozed off and dreamt that he was riding in a subsea train among whose passengers was Landish, who was sitting rows ahead of him, an unapproachable stranger.

That night, on the train, the lights of houses that Landish and the boy would never see again went flashing past. He read in the paper of an all-purpose elixir called “remedaid,” and of one that would help you tell the future, called “premonaid.” Obliterature. Americal. Chimerica. He knew the boy had never imagined there could be this much of anything, that anywhere could take up so much space that it could not be crossed by a man with a boy astride his shoulders, not by anything except a train whose rampage must continue unresisted to the end.

On and on they went when the sun came up, past things for which he didn’t know the words or was too slow to think of. He saw it all come rushing at him, as if the earth were moving and the train were standing still, saw it sometimes from miles away, seeming to grow larger and move faster as the train approached, all things stretching out from him in descending size but at the same time drawing closer, getting larger, until they reared up at his window and were gone.

He thought of the steaming mass of the locomotive that had pulled them such a distance without breaking down or getting stuck and went even faster when it was dark and late. It sounded as if the engineer was barely in control, putting through its nightly paces the one such vehicle in all the world.

They climbed a ridge flanked by valleys that looked like once-great harbours that had shrivelled up to river-parted plains. They saw a succession of such valleys on the far sides of which were other mountains whose ridges were like wrinkled blankets overhung by haze into which the most distant of them blended with the sky.

For most of those who lived in cities, America did not exist except as they imagined it from how it was described in books or looked in photographs, as wondrous to them as to their ancestors who had never crossed the sea or even left the towns where they were born.

But then, he had never seen
his
country, and it seemed likely that he never would.

It was Deacon’s first time on a train, his second boarding of a manner of conveyance that wasn’t Landish.

The train went through a narrow cut and it looked on either side as if they were bearing head-on through an avalanche of rock.

Landish had marked out on the map for Deacon the route the train would take, one the boy fancied would be downslope all the way. A southward plunge on which the locomotive would slide like a wheel-borne anvil, plowing through the air, a hull on wheels, hauling a hundred cars through the vacuum that it made, funnelling in front of it a wall of wind that would be felt trackside long before those who were keeping watch could even hear the train.

Landish talked about the Mason-Dixon Line and Deacon pictured a line of Mason jars. He talked a bit about the Civil War, a state named after a pencil and one named Maryland but not after Holy Mary Mother of God but after a queen, which made Deacon think of the golden one in New York. There was Virginia and West Virginia,
and Virginia came from “virgin,” but again, not Holy Mary but yet another queen.

“Van’s family owns this train,” Landish said. “They own the waiting room and all but own the men who waited there. They own the ship, and other ships and other trains, and the tracks and all the land that you can see on either side.”

Vanderland

LANDISH HAD HEARD
on the train that the approach road to Vanderland was designed so that the house came into view all at once, winding through a dense but landscaped forest in which grew trees and plants not native to the continent, let alone the South.

In the back seat of a horseless carriage that met them at the Vanderluyden private railway station, Landish waited for it to loom up in front of him, the Carolina mirage that his one-time friend had said he first conceived of in a dream. Late afternoon sun slanted through the trees beside the road that alternated between light and shade in what he had no doubt were precisely calculated intervals. There was no telling what the original terrain had been. Now the road wound up and down an obviously man-made hill, then turned almost directly around as if to circle an obstacle though there was only a gully of many-coloured shrubs that could easily have been removed. The hill became so steep that Landish, who held the sleeping boy in his arms, was flattened back against the seat and saw nothing through the windshield but the sky. The car turned sharply right as the grade of the road decreased, and as it tipped forward his angle of vision increased until he saw, obscured by blue haze, what he guessed was the westernmost ridge of the Appalachians.

About three miles after it passed beneath the arch of the main gate lodge, the car turned sharply again on to a cinder driveway. The great house appeared as suddenly as if it had erupted from the earth.

Landish shook his head and tried to focus on the wrought iron–tipped spire of Vanderland’s principal tower. But he could make out no single detail in the full facade of Vanderland, which, though still a mile away, towered so high it blocked the sun, casting the entire forecourt into shadow. As more of the house came into view, he saw it had the look of a French château, such as he’d seen depicted in paintings—a frieze-like jumble of triangle-topped towers, chimneys, parapets, arched doorways and dormer windows.

The car pulled up at the entrance, whose drawbridge-sized doors opened inward. Deacon in his arms, Landish stepped down from the car towards an elderly man who introduced himself as Mr. Henley. He followed the elderly butler across the marble floor of a giant vestibule in which their footsteps echoed as they had in the concourse of the station in New York.

“We can take the lift, sir,” the butler said.

“He’s never been in a lift,” Landish said. “Nor have I. It might scare him to wake up in one.”

On a wide and winding set of stone stairs, they climbed three flights. In the well of each flight hung one of the many wheels of an iron chandelier that hung from a single column fastened to the central concave of the tower, each wheel seeming to be all that held up the ones beneath it, each decorated with dozens of electric candles whose unlit “flames” were made of crystal, their “wicks” of wire filament.

Even in the as-yet-unlit tower, everything shone and gleamed, as if the great house had just that day been deemed ready to be occupied. On the third landing, the butler went right and opened for Landish the interlocking doors. He looked into what might have been a tapestry museum. Banks of wide fireplaces blazed along the walls to his right and left, all of them piled high with cedar logs, and on the walls
between the fireplaces hung floor-to-ceiling tapestries that depicted scenes, some of which he recognized from Shakespeare, Goethe, Wagner and others. In front of the fireplaces were scattered large sofas and chairs upholstered in green velvet.

“Mr. Druken, sir,” the butler said, pulling the doors shut as he backed out of the room.

He was just able to see the familiar top of Van’s head above the back of the nearest sofa, the hair swept sleekly back towards the nape of his neck.

“Welcome to Vanderland,” Van said. He didn’t stand or even turn around.

Landish, the boy still in his arms, walked around the sofa. Van had a pencil-thin moustache. He was staring into the fire, his elbow on the arm of the sofa, face cupped in the palm of his hand, as if lacking all interest in their arrival, a pose deliberately chosen, Landish thought, as the best one to present on the occasion of their first meeting after many years.

“I had no idea,” Landish said, standing in front of him and looking about.

Van surveyed the room as well. “No one has
‘any idea’
until they come here. The house was designed by Richard Hunt, the grounds by Frederick Olmsted, whom we have to thank for Central Park, the only part of Manhattan that I can bear to visit.”

At last he looked at Landish, looked him up and down, then turned his head and smiled as if at someone on the sofa beside him.

Deacon stirred but did not wake up.

“So this is the boy you rescued from the orphanage only to find that you were yourself in need of rescuing.”

Landish put Deacon gently down on one of the chairs. “He’s not been well on the journey and the heat inside the car made him drowsy. Why are all these fireplaces blazing on such a warm evening?”

“The spring air cools quickly at night. Anyway, the heat won’t be a problem for the boy indoors. By a process I can’t understand no
matter how often Hunt’s son explains it to me, we keep the air in many parts of Vanderland at sixty-eight degrees all year long—even cooler in rooms like this one, where I like to keep the fireplaces lit. There are no windows in the gallery. Sunlight fades the tapestries. Sit down.”

Landish sat in the upholstered chair nearest Van’s sofa.

“You’re a sight, Landish. Good Lord. Those are the clothes you wore at Princeton. What’s left of them.”

“I must be one of those rare people with whom penury does not agree.”

“Landish, having some marred version of you at Vanderland seemed preferable to having none at all, but that could change if I grow tired of you. It won’t be like it was at Princeton. Or like I promised you it would be at Vanderland if you had come here with me years ago.”

“I’m relieved to hear it. The latter part at least.”

“You may not leave Vanderland for any reason without my permission, Landish. That rule applies to all the tutors, governesses, staff and servants. And to the boy. I don’t want you going into Ashton and then returning to Vanderland still reeking of the place. I devised the rule for my daughter’s sake. She has lived all her life at Vanderland and will not leave it, not even for a minute, until she is twenty-one, when she will go out into the world wearing Vanderland as a shield. That is my proposed arrangement. You may decline it and leave if you wish.”

“I’m in no position to object to any terms.”

There was no sign of the flinching, wincing expression that Van had often worn at Princeton. His hands did not shake as he lit a cigarette.

“So what about the book? Do you still immolate every word you write?”

“I have written and burned many unsatisfactory beginnings.”

“So you were wrong. You
didn’t
need to live among the people that you write about. You could just as easily have burned your book here. Or maybe you’d have finished it by now.”

Deacon opened his eyes. He saw a picture of a woman on the wall, but it wasn’t Gen of Eve. There were rugs on the floor. And bigger ones on the walls. Maybe they were wet and someone hung them up to dry. A lot of people could live in this place, but here you wouldn’t just hear your neighbours, like at home, you would see them all the time.

“Where?” he said. “Are we in Second Class?”

“Vanderland,” Landish said.

A man he hadn’t noticed who was sitting on one of the green sofas laughed. He got up. He was tall and very thin. He stood with one hand in his pocket, his body bent out like a bow as, with his other hand, he held a cigarette. He tipped his head back and blew smoke towards the ceiling.

“This is the tapestry gallery,” he said.

Now it all makes sense to him, Landish thought better of saying out loud: we have many fond memories of hours spent admiring our tapestries at home.

Landish sat beside Deacon on the edge of the sofa and brushed his hair back from his forehead with his hand. “This is Mr. Vanderluyden,” he said.

“Hello, Deacon,” Van said.

“Hello,” Deacon said.

“Too tired to sit up?”