A World Elsewhere (22 page)

In the morning, when they woke, he got up and sat on the edge of his bed, facing Deacon. He said he thought he knew what had happened to the hat. The wealth inspector
had
sent it—it had arrived in a crate at Vanderland, delivered to that part of the house where freight from the train was received. And in spite of its having been addressed to Landish Druken, Van had opened the crate and taken the hat, which was now hidden somewhere in one of the hundreds of rooms at Vanderland.

“How would Mr. Vanderluyden know the hat was in the crate?”

Landish said he wouldn’t have known anything about the hat, he had probably just opened the crate out of curiosity—who would tell him not to?—and found it and decided he must have it for no reason but that it belonged to Landish.

“Because of Princeton?” Deacon asked.

Landish said he wasn’t sure, but he was certain he was right that Van had the hat even though he had no proof.

“But he picked us,” Deacon said. “To help us. He didn’t know about the hat.”

Landish said he picked them because he felt guilty for what he did at Princeton, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t hurt his friend again if he got the chance.

Deacon wasn’t sure Mr. Vanderluyden had done what Landish said. You couldn’t find a hat in such a house. “What will you do?” he asked. “Vanderland’s so big. You can’t sneak about from room to room, people will see you.” Landish said they had to pretend they didn’t know Van had stolen the hat—after all they couldn’t afford to accuse him, couldn’t demand he give them back the hat. They had to pretend they didn’t know he’d stolen the hat. “At least I know it’s here,” he added. “At least I know it’s nearby. That’s something, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” Deacon said.

But Deacon knew Landish would think about the hat almost all the time until it was found or arrived from Newfoundland or until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He wasn’t sure what would happen then. But he was glad Landish was happy about one thing: at Landish’s request, one of Vanderland’s carpenters had framed Gen of Eve in black wood and covered her in glass. Landish considered hanging it in his and Deacon’s room, on the wall opposite their beds, but Deacon said he wouldn’t want someone, not even Gen of Eve, looking at him all night long. So he hung it in the Smoker, and the Blokes—all but Sedgewick—complimented his mother on both her draftsmanship and her attractiveness.

“She’s almost smiling,” Gough said. “But she looks tired or careworn or something. Perhaps she sensed that her time was short.”

“It’s not the
Mona Lisa,”
Sedgewick said. “It’s merely a crude pencil sketch. Who knows what effect she was aiming for?”

At noon, Goddie would go off for lunch in the Lesser Banquet Hall and Deacon would go back to The Blokes to have lunch with Landish and the others. Mrs. Vanderluyden did not eat lunch, declaring it to be a “vulgar, rustic custom,” but Mr. Vanderluyden insisted that it made sense to eat when the body most had need of nourishment. It was, he said, part of the “new way” at Vanderland. Goddie would come back from lunch and her post-lunch nap with a glazed, sated, drowsy look about her. It was for some reason always after lunch that she was especially resentful of being paired with Deacon in the Academy.

“Did you enjoy your lunch, Deacon?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“What did you have?”

“A slice of sausage and a piece of bread. And an apple. A five-point apple.”

She smiled. “I didn’t ask you what you fed your horse. What did you really have?”

Deacon didn’t answer.

“I had the most delightful lunch. Veal chops and roasted potatoes. And strawberries and chocolate ice cream for dessert.”

Deacon pictured a large plate bearing two veal chops encircled by large, fat-basted roasted potatoes, all of it covered in gravy.

Goddie slumped in her chair, lazily kicking her feet, which didn’t reach the floor, staring at Deacon, her hands clasped on her blue-velvet-dress-covered belly that rose and fell as if she was slightly out of breath.

“You’re not my brother, you know. You’re not even my eleventh cousin times three. You’re only here because Father likes Landish. He doesn’t like you.”

Often she would fall asleep shortly after the first lesson of the afternoon began. As they were on orders from Mrs. Vanderluyden that Goddie must never be touched, the Blokes woke her by loudly clapping their hands or stamping their feet. Goddie would wake in such alarm that she would gasp or scream or cry out for her mother. Once, she slid straight off the chair and onto the floor and, beginning to cry, would not budge from where she sat until her mother was brought to help her up.

“She has a much fuller day than the boy does,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said. “That’s why she doesn’t do as well in some things. The poor thing is exhausted. You men should focus less attention on the boy and more on Godwin. I don’t care how clever you think the boy is. I know he’s your pet, but you’re being paid to educate
my
child, not someone else’s.”

Landish said that Goddie would set records. Before she left Vanderland, she would be the richest person never to have set foot on a ship or train. Never to have seen a town, let alone a city. Never to have seen a thing her father didn’t own. Never to have set foot in or on something she wouldn’t own someday.

Goddie was also instructed daily by a number of governesses who taught her posture, comportment, etiquette, manners, costume. Mrs. Vanderluyden said that their collective task was to stifle her Vanderluyden half and cultivate her Jandemere half, to rid her of
whatever “coarseness of nature and ill-refinement she may have inherited from my husband’s side of the family.”

It was in the after-lunch periods that Goddie would look at Deacon with an expression of intense concentration before holding forth:

“Landish is a Druken, so there’s no telling what he might do to you someday. He might murder you. Finish the job. Finish the Carson family. You’re just a bother to him anyway. Landish has a woman in Ashton. But she won’t marry him as long as he has you. He would have finished his book long ago, but he has to spend his time and money taking care of you. You can’t get into Heaven unless you have a grave. God can’t take your father’s soul until he finds his body. Your mother’s in Heaven all by herself. So even in Heaven she’s unhappy. Mother says your mother lost her mind when she heard about your father. She didn’t get her mind back when she went to Heaven.
If
she went to Heaven, because Mother says that if an apple like you fell from her, who knows what kind of tree she was.”

But the next time she saw Deacon, she would be penitent to the point of bursting into tears, hiding her face in her hands. “I’m sorry I said those things, Deacon. None of them are true. Sometimes I’m so hateful and so mean. I don’t know why. It comes into my head and I say it. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. You don’t say bad things to me. You don’t say
anything
to me. Maybe I wouldn’t say things if I was smart like you. I know I’m not smart. I heard Father say to Mother I can’t hold a candle. That’s a smilie. He hurts my feelings sometimes. If you tell me you hate me, I’ll be very sad, but I won’t tell Mother.”

“I don’t hate you, Goddie.”

“I hope I never say bad things to you again. You’re very nice. I’d be so lonely and unhappy if you went away. Like I was before you came here.”

Deacon tried without success to imagine what it meant that his mother had “lost” her mind, so he told Landish what Goddie had said.

“There’s no
woman
in Ashton, Deacon. I’ve never been to Ashton. As you know, I’m not allowed to leave Vanderland. The book—I may
never start it, let alone finish it, but it won’t be your fault either way. My book is in Just Mist and might just stay there forever.”

Deacon told him that one second Goddie was nice and the next she was mean. Landish said that was called “turning” on someone. Deacon said that eating food, even just talking about food, made her turn on him. “Gustatory nastiness,” Landish said, but didn’t tell him what it meant. Deacon said she made fun of his lunch.

“Tell her you had prime rib for lunch.” Then he said he was joking and Deacon mustn’t joke with Goddie. Landish said Goddie and her mother were “Daughter Fickle and Mrs. Snide.”

Deacon felt sorry for Goddie when Goddie was sad. And when Goddie felt sorry for him. And for Mrs. Vanderluyden who didn’t
sound
mean when she said mean things. She said “son of a savage” but then she fixed his collar and said, “Off you go, out of my sight.”

Deacon thought Goddie smelled nice. She was the first girl he had ever met unless he had met one in the Murk. She looked soft. And she was always pink like Deacon was after tub time. Everything she wore looked new. She wore one dress in the morning and another after lunch. She was bigger than him, but her hands were smaller. She told Deacon after lunch one day that her mother said that Deacon would never grow. He would always “be the runt of the little.” But her father said he would grow when he was good and ready.

“If they must be tutored together,” Mrs. Vanderluyden said to Landish, “then I want him properly dressed. I don’t want Godwin spending her days in the company of a boy who looks and smells like the child of a scullery maid.”

Landish asked Mrs. Vanderluyden if she meant to model Deacon on the boys his age who came to visit Goddie from New York. “I don’t want to look like them,” Deacon told Landish. Landish agreed with him that they looked like girls, their long hair done up in curls and flounces and in some cases even ribbons. They wore sailor suits and hats, short pants or skirts, gleaming, black-buckled shoes and white
knee-high socks. They wore Buster Brown suits with large floppy silk bows at the neck. They looked like the boys on the ship.

“I will dress him as I see fit,” said Mrs. Vanderluyden. “Don’t worry. There’s no point in trying to make him look like his betters. The result would be absurd. There’s no disguising what he
is
. Near presentability is the most I’m hoping for, for Godwin’s sake.”

Overseeing a tailor, a barber and a governess, from whom she said she was not expecting miracles, Mrs. Vanderluyden had Deacon made over into something that she said would have to do. His hair was cut short and slicked back and flat with sweet pomade. He was measured for clothes of which three identical sets were made: a brown jacket with near-shoulder-width lapels that narrowed to nothing at the waist; a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar; a brown bow tie; a paisley-patterned velvet vest; brown shorts that came down to his knees; brown, silver-buckled shoes; and white mid-shin-length stockings.

“Ma’am says you should give him a good scrubbing every morning,” one of the maids told Landish. “Scrub out his ears and clean beneath his fingernails and between his toes.”

After lessons, Deacon changed back into his white shirt and trousers with suspenders as quickly as he could.

“There you go—Goddie-ready, Goddie-worthy,” Landish would say every morning as he applied the final flourish of pomade.

Deacon was glad to have been spared the indignity of some sort of indoor, beribboned hat such as Goddie’s New York friends were made to wear, but otherwise felt as absurd and uncomfortable as, judging by the expressions of the Blokes, they thought he looked.

“Well, well, aren’t you something now, all dressed up like that?” Gough said, unable to keep from smiling the way he did when he was pretending not to notice something.

“Goddie seems oblivious to his being a less onerous affront to her than he was before,” Landish told the Blokes.

But one day, at the end of the last lesson, she said, “You look nice.”

Deacon smiled.

Bursting into tears, she ran off as if she had never been so hurtfully insulted.

They were “promoted” again. Van said that he was going to give them a full tour of Vanderland no matter how long it took. They should start early.

In the vestibule, through the stained glass windows of which the sun shone on the marble floor, he told them about the early days when they were building Vanderland, and showed them photographs. You couldn’t tell from the grounds of Vanderland what Carolina was like, he said—every tree and plant and grain of sand came from somewhere else. Landish asked him if he would have taken the marsh from Dark Marsh Road if Frederick Olmsted, the landscape architect, had told him he needed it for Vanderland. Of course, said Van.

Deacon listened as Van told them how Vanderland began.

No one could remember what things were like before. They dammed streams, they made some run in different ways. They used up a lot of horses and mules ripping trees out by their roots. If there was a hill where they didn’t want one, they got rid of it and put it where they did want one. They blew up rocks they didn’t like and brought in nicer ones from Mexico. It took thousands of men eight years to get the place just right. They made Lake Loom where no lake used to be, and for the house they dug a hole deeper than a dried-up lake. They took a picture from the bottom, of two men looking down into the hole.

The walls were made of stone that masons cut up into blocks that looked like squares of fudge. A good granite block was thrown away unless it fit just right. The wood for the floors and walls came from places that were famous for trees. They plowed with something called a tractor instead of an ox because you didn’t have to shoot a tractor that had broken down. Some men gave their lives. They were hit by
lightning. Or dynamite went off too soon. Things fell and not all of them got out. The roof was slick on rainy days. Some men who worked when no one knew how sick they were gave up the ghost on summer days when it was hot. They sacrificed themselves for something that wasn’t finished yet. He wished they could have seen it—but there might be a monument someday.

Landish began to sing:

Good King Vanderland looked out
On the Feast of Stephen,
When the poor lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even.

“The same old Landish. Half-baked satire. You wouldn’t know what to do with money if you had any,” Van told him.