A World Elsewhere (20 page)

“It’s nice to have a child living at The Blokes, Deacon.” Gough smiled over at him.

“Landish says you’re lucky,” Deacon said, “because most old people end up in the poorhouse and no one ever picks them. He says it’s better to pick a baby than to have one. He says if you have a mediocre baby you’re stuck with it. He says even a baby that exudes excellence might turn out to be a flop.”

“Do you remember every word Landish says?” Stavely asked in his lisping fashion.

“Do you believe in Heaven?” Sedgewick asked him, leaning forward ponderously.

“The Tomb of Time,” Deacon said. Sedgewick looked severely at Landish.

“You should be teaching Deacon about Heaven. He should be praying every night for the souls of his parents. He should be praying for you and for himself. A time when death won’t seem so funny is coming for all of us. Don’t fool yourselves. Purgatory waits. Or worse.”

“Sedgewick,” Gough said, “I’ve seen you run screaming from a bumblebee, yet the certainty of burning for millions of years doesn’t even spoil your appetite. Any person who really believed in Purgatory would spend every second of his life running screaming through the streets.”

“We’d all know where we were going,” Landish said, “if Christ had brought back to life someone with a better memory than Lazarus.”

“That’s blasphemous,” Sedgewick said. “You’re mocking a miracle.”

“Lazarus the beggar,” Landish said. “His family and friends were overjoyed when he came back to life. I’m sure they threw a party for him. People gave him cards: ‘Congratulations on your resurrection,
dear Lazarus: you’re only as dead as you feel.’ ‘Welcome back. The people who said you were nothing but a beggar are eating crow today.’ ‘You’re a shoo-in for a parable.’ But eventually, someone must have got round to asking him questions:

“ ‘So tell us, Lazarus, what’s it like? What happens when you die?’

“ ‘I don’t remember.’

“ ‘You don’t remember? Four days dead, you come back to life and you remember nothing? Lazarus, listen. No one has ever come back from the dead. You know what no one else knows. What no one else has ever known. The answer to the ultimate question, so you really need to concentrate.’

“ ‘I don’t remember. It might come back to me, but who knows? I was only there for four days.’

“ ‘ “It might come back to me but who knows?” That’s all you have to say? If Jesus was only going to raise one person from the dead, couldn’t he have asked around before he did it? But no, of all the people who ever died, he picks you. He picks Lazarus the beggar instead of Aristotle. He gives Lazarus four days but overlooks Aristotle who died three hundred years ago. Can you imagine how much knowledge about the afterlife the greatest mind of all time could soak up in three hundred years? Would Aristotle ever say “it might come back to me”? Or what about Moses, who, instead of trying to remember the Ten Commandments,
wrote them down?
Well, at least you’ll have the most unique headstone of all time:
Here Lies Lazarus. Again!’ ”

“Absolute
blasphemy,”
Sedgewick said.

“You may have noticed, Sedgewick, that Jesus didn’t bring Lazarus back a second time. Jesus was no genius, but I bet you didn’t have to spend a lot of time with Lazarus to know that resurrecting him was a big mistake.”

“Sedgewick says I’ll meet my parents when I die,” Deacon said to Landish. “Do you think that’s true?”

“I don’t know, Deacon.”

But when Landish was next alone with Sedgewick, he told him to leave the boy alone. “If you get to Heaven and I’m not there, give Shakespeare my regards and tell him that
Macbeth
could have used another draft.”

The next evening, they went out for a walk and he put Deacon up on his shoulders. It was the kind of night that for some reason always brought back memories of his childhood. On this occasion, he felt a kind of nostalgia or melancholy for a time beyond remembrance, an elusive, possibly illusory time. And it brought up in him a sense of having lost or wasted something whose absence he hadn’t noticed until now.

They went past the cemetery and Deacon talked about the Crosses in Mount Carmel and the Druken mausoleum. When Vanderland was first constructed, Gough had told Landish, a plot of land was set aside for a cemetery. But no one had yet died at Vanderland—the cemetery’s iron gates had been opened only by landscapers since Vanderland was completed. They tended the trees, shrubbery and grass and swept the stone pathways. It might as well have been a purposeless garden in which visitors were not allowed.

Landish couldn’t help thinking of the first grave, the oblong hole, the dark mound of dirt beside it. It would comprise an incongruous violation of the unmarred expanse of bright green grass.

He thought of the resting place of his parents, and of the two crosses for Deacon’s parents in Mount Carmel, the one over an empty grave. With the boy on his shoulders he went back to the Bachelors’ Wing.

Landish wished that Carolina was not so remindful to him of Newfoundland. Even on sunny days the wind was high. It seemed that in the mountains of North Carolina, the wind blew ceaselessly from
September to April, and Vanderland, being so elevated, took the brunt of it. It funnelled between the Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains and slammed against the windows of Vanderland, driving before it flakes of snow that pattered against the glass like the first large raindrops of a thunderstorm.

He frequently saw, from the height of their bedroom window, the front edge of a snowstorm make its way across the mountains and then—even in these last lengthening days of spring—the woods and fields of Vanderland until finally it encroached upon the rear court, where it rose up like a torrent of white water at the window and engulfed the mansion, ice pellets clicking on the other side of the glass to which his face was pressed.

Once, when a snowstorm had reached Vanderland, Landish, through sheer luck, and by way of a maze of staircases and hallways, found the Winter Garden. He knew it was off limits to him but there was no one about. In the warm, damp air, among all the fronds and flowers and shoots of bamboo, he sat in a chair and looked up through the glass dome at the sky until the dome itself was white with snow and the Winter Garden became so dark that the hanging lamps came on and the room looked like he guessed it did at midnight.

Van sent word to The Blokes that Landish and Deacon should meet him at the stables.

“Was New York as awful as you expected?” Landish said.

“It seems worse every time I go there,” Van said. “But let’s not talk about New York. I’m promoting you.”

They were “promoted,” allowed the use of a horse that Van said was suited to non-riders because she never went faster than a walk. They rode together on the horse whose name was Pageant, Deacon with his arms wrapped around Landish’s belly, his face pressed against his back. Pageant was Deacon’s fourth manner of conveyance, Landish
said, unless you counted the cart they rode briefly in on the way to Mount Carmel cemetery, in which case she was the fifth.

Van went riding with them one day. He said he did not join the many hunting parties that set out from Vanderland. He told Landish that his father had taken him hunting deer when he was Deacon’s age but that he could never bring himself to pull the trigger.

“Never had the stomach for it,” he said. Whereas once his father had a gun in his hands, he seemed to see every object in creation, living or otherwise, as a challenge to his marksmanship. He shot at everything. He was affronted by anything that didn’t bear the mark of a bullet from his gun.

Upon first greeting them at Vanderland, Van had given the impression that they would see little of him. But they were, inexplicably to Landish, “promoted” again. Van invited Landish and Deacon on what Landish called “firewood safaris.” He said Mrs. Vanderluyden didn’t want him spending time with them, but if he felt he must then better he do it outdoors than in the house where she might happen onto them.

Deacon knew there were eighty-seven fireplaces at Vanderland. Mr. Vanderluyden chose the wood for the ones that he and his family used, about thirty of them, including some that were bigger than the Druken mausoleum. When he found a tree he liked the look of, he marked an X on it with chalk, and the men following behind him, driving wooden carts, dismounted and set off from the trail with their axes and saws.

“I choose the ones that I think will burn the best,” he said. “You can tell from looking at trees which ones will smell the sweetest. Poplar, beech, oak and hickory—they all smell different at different times of year.”

Deacon would come to know Van’s daughter as Goddie, but Gough introduced him to her as Godwin. She was named Godwin Meredith Vanderluyden and was known to almost everyone as Goddie, a
nickname spoken with a mixture of irony and fondness that flourished the more her mother tried to discourage its use.

“Godwin is girl for Godfrey,” Goddie told Deacon when they met in Gough’s history class on their first day of school together. She was chubby with long, thick, brown, curly hair that was almost always adorned with bows of white ribbon. “Godfrey is one of my father’s names. And his father’s, too.”

The large room in which she and Deacon were tutored was known as the Academy. It was windowless, with a bank of blackboards along one wall, and furnished with laurel wreath–crowned busts of Socrates and Aristotle and other severe-looking old men and medieval maps and globes of the world, and long, gleaming, book-littered tables, each of which was the domain of one of the tutors. Landish was to teach them writing and reading. At first Goddie was terrified of him and the volume of his normal speaking voice, which he learned to modulate while in her company.

Deacon had been at Vanderland a month but had never set eyes on her before, never so much as heard her voice.

“Mother says you take your lessons with me instead of with the servants’ boys and girls because Father feels sorry for you. Because of Landish. Father used to be his friend. They went to school together. But now Landish has no money and no … something that begins with P.”

“Prospects?”

She nodded. “And Sedgewick says he drinks too much. Mother doesn’t like him. She says he failed writing so they threw him out of school, and he isn’t fit to teach me. And no one else will have you. She says Landish’s father, who was a filthy savage, murdered your father, who was a filthy savage too. She says it’s wrong, a Vanderluyden rubbing the shoulders of the likes of you. I said I never rubbed your shoulders but she said never mind. But Father says he’ll be the judge and hear no more about it. Mother says I’m to tell her everything that you and Landish do or say.”

Deacon reported this to Landish.

“Be careful not to upset her, Deacon,” Landish said. “Don’t argue with her. Don’t make fun of her. Try to ignore her when she talks like that. It’s very important.”

“Because Mr. Vanderluyden might get upset and give us the sack?”

“Maybe.”

“Did your father murder mine?”

Landish said no, but his father took chances that he shouldn’t have. He risked other men’s lives. And sometimes those men died. “He
caused
your father’s death and the deaths of other men. He sent him out in search of seals though he knew a storm was coming. And when the watch came back to the ship without your father, he steamed on in search of seals instead of waiting for the storm to stop, instead of searching. He told the crew that one man in a storm like that, even one who knew the ice as well as Francis Carson, didn’t have a chance.

“It’s called mutiny if you disobey a captain. You could be whipped or hanged. So the crew of the
Gilbert
did what they were told. But when they got back, they said they were ashamed for not defying the captain—my father.”

“Were our fathers filthy savages?”

“No. Mrs. Vanderluyden values ancestry even more than Mr. Vanderluyden does. Her family name was Jandemere, and she’s directly descended from the founder of the colony of New Netherland, who was also one of the founders of New York. The society magazines call her an ‘American aristocrat’—something like a duchess or a baroness, or even a princess. She married beneath her, socially speaking, married a lesser name for money, thus making Van’s name a better one.”

“Which name is better, Druken or Carson?”

“I don’t concern myself with names. But never speak in front of Mrs. Vanderluyden unless she asks you a question. Keep your answer short. Call her ma’am or Mrs. Vanderluyden. She’s like Nun One, or the nobleman, or even the wealth inspector. Our fate is in her hands.”

“Landish says you take after your grandfather,” Deacon said to Goddie, as they waited for Sedgewick to begin geography class. “What does ‘take after’ mean?”

“It means you’re a lot like him.”

“Grandpa was old.”

“Not always.”

“Father never says I take after him. Mother doesn’t either.”

“Landish says you look like him. He says you’ve your grandfather’s eyes and your grandfather’s forehead.”

Goddie stared blankly at Deacon for several seconds, then suddenly burst into tears and ran off shouting for her mother.

“You must mind what you say to her, Deacon,” Landish said when Deacon told him what had happened. “Strange forces come to play on even the most literal, unambiguous pieces of information that enter that child’s mind. You and I can have our little jokes, but let’s keep them to ourselves. For instance, don’t mention Gen of Eve to her. I don’t want her to misunderstand
that
figure of speech. And don’t mention Captain Druken’s hat or Princeton to her either.”

“What did Goddie, I mean Godwin, tell you today?” Landish said, shaking his head when Deacon repeated a story Goddie had told in Stavely’s music class called “Jack and Beans Talk” and said that in old Gough’s history class she had asked how long the “Victorious Error” lasted.

“How long did the Victorious Error last, Gough?” Landish asked in the Smoker.

“The Victorious Error has lasted sixty-four years,” Gough said. “A prize has been offered to anyone who corrects it.”