A World Elsewhere (23 page)

Van showed them the guest wing, long corridors like those in hotels, rooms on both sides. Men strolled arm in arm with women, nodding or saying hello to Van, then moving on. Sometimes a butler walked beside a wheelchair, pointing out to its stupefied-looking occupant the main features of the house.

“You see how lucky you are, Deacon?” Van said. “Not everyone gets a guided tour from me.”

Deacon was too short to see over most things. Take your time, Van told him. Look first, then walk. Landish said the house was an obstacle course of the priceless and the precious. Everything you thought was glass was crystal. Nothing had a hole in it. Nothing was dirty or wrinkled. There were no hobnail marks or other kinds of scuffs on the wooden floor. There were little white statues on small tables with bent and skinny legs. Walk slowly, Landish said, because you never knew when something priceless might be just around the corner or behind a chair. Every room was full of paintings you could spoil just by touching them. One of a boy with a big orange. He looked
as if he didn’t know what it was for or that you had to peel it first.

Landish said there was one painting you could spoil just by looking at it. You could only admire the box that it was in. Even Mr. Vanderluyden had never seen it. He took the word of the person he bought it from that it was in the box. Landish said that the older something was, the more it was worth. You couldn’t put a price on something that was so old it would fall to pieces if you sneezed. If something was made and no one could be bothered making another one of it, it was worth more than almost anything. The only existing copy of the most boring book of all time was a bargain at any price. Things that belonged to famous people were priceless no matter how mean the people had been. The bidding would be fierce for an authenticated pair of Herod’s socks.

Van said Landish was a philistine.

He showed them the small, gravity-driven master clock, inconspicuously located above the entrance to the stables, which drove, by an electrical connection, all the other clocks in the house, the “slave clocks” as they were called, some of which were fifty times the size of the master clock, which looked like a dinner plate. He said he was like the master clock. If not for him, Vanderland would wind down to nothing. Everything would stop. The generators, boilers, refrigerators. The lights would all go out, the fires. Everyone would leave and the rooms would lie empty. The people of Ashton would scale the wall, smash the windows. He asked them to imagine Vanderland open to the wind and rain, lived in by animals, scavenger birds gliding about among the chandeliers.

“The point of living is to be remembered, Deacon. Remembered for
doing
something. There is no afterlife but that one. One instant you’re alive and the next—nothing. As suddenly as if your head had been chopped off.”

“Surely a tour of Vanderland is possible that includes no mention of decapitation,” Landish said.

“The world was not made. God did not make Vanderland. I did. I did not once consult with or meet by chance with God.”

“What about the Tomb of Time?” Deacon said. “Landish says no one knows what it’s like because no one’s ever been there and come back. Except Lazarus and Jesus and—”

“The gibberish he’s filled your mind with,” Van said, glancing at Landish.

“Van thinks God resigned,” Landish said. “Because of declining health and a desire to spend more time with his family.”

On day three of the tour, as they were partway through the middle floors with their massive living halls, Landish remarked that Deacon was looking especially tired. “Would you like to ride in a wheelchair, Deacon?” Van asked. “We’ll be walking a long way. I’m afraid those little legs of yours may not be up to it. I’ll push you and Landish can walk beside us.”

“There’s no need for that,” Landish said, but Deacon nodded. The chairs were parked in a large closet just inside the main vestibule for those guests who, though able to walk, were elderly or infirm.

Van had a servant bring them a wheelchair. The servant pushed it across the marble foyer. It was enormous, its handles a foot above Deacon’s head. The wheelchair had an upholstered back, four wooden wheels with spokes, two large wheels on the side and two smaller ones in front, flanking a cushioned footrest. The armrests of the chair were too high for Deacon to use, so he sat with his hands in his lap as if he lacked even the use of his arms. Landish lifted him into it and Van wrapped a tartan blanket around him, tucking it in behind his shoulders and his feet so that nothing but his head showed.

They resumed their tour. People Deacon didn’t know looked at him, then at the chair and smiled. He wondered if they thought he couldn’t walk or was so sick he might die soon. When he smiled back, they smiled even more and nodded to him. The chair glided along soundlessly on the smooth floor. When he arched his head it looked as if the ceiling was moving backwards.

Landish appraised him. He looked like a spoiled but sickly child monarch being wheeled about a palace that no one expected him to live long enough to inherit.

They encountered Mrs. Vanderluyden in one of the living halls. “A most unusual entourage today, Van,” she said, as she came towards them, her long, blue dress swishing with each step. “This is ridiculous. You look like the boy’s attendant, pushing him about while Mr. Druken walks unoccupied beside you with his hands behind his back. If only you paid as much attention to our guests.” She spoke while walking and did not stop to wait for a reply from Van, but made for the nearest door and slammed it behind her.

Van said, “We have so many guests—people come and go like hotel guests. Many leave without ever having met me, without my ever having set eyes on them. That’s fine with me. Gertrude manages the guest list. I leave it to her to make sure that no one feels snubbed.”

“I can think of no one better suited for the task,” Landish said.

“Well, I’m not one of the sights of Vanderland, I won’t be gawked at by guests and visitors as if I’m a feature of a Hunt and Olmsted house. I built Vanderland. I am its creator. I’ll show myself to whomever I please.”

Van took them to the Greater Banquet Hall, which reminded Deacon of the churches he and Landish had gone to on winter Sunday mornings to get warm. Dust motes swarmed like mosquitoes in a shaft of sunlight that brightened half the floor. He liked churches best when they were almost empty, just a few people in the pews, nobody saying a word or looking around, only statues on the altar, the ruby-red and light blue votive candles lit, but that was all.

Looking down from the walls were the mounted heads of moose, caribou, deer and elk. “You have a lot of trophies for someone who hunts nothing but firewood,” Landish said.

“They’re in keeping with the frieze above the fireplaces,” Van said. “It’s a scene from Wagner. Above each of the mounted heads is hung
the flag of one of America’s original thirteen colonies. That one—with the single star surrounded by the golden scroll—is North Carolina.”

On the floor opposite each other, on either side of the Greater Banquet Hall, were two Grizzly bear skins, flattened to their maximum length and width as if by a steamroller, arms and legs outstretched, open-mouthed. Between the almost horizontally stretched hind legs of each bear was the tuft of a tail.

The snapping of logs in all three of the massive fireplaces echoed in the hall.

“The dining table seats eighty,” Van said. “The room is very different during formal occasions.”

“Cozier, no doubt,” Landish said.

“Deacon, when you see a room with deep reds and dark wood, you’ll know that it is one of my favourite rooms.”

They went slowly round the great table, starting from the bank of fireplaces, proceeding clockwise towards the organ loft and another bank of fireplaces at the far end. Two rows of forty upholstered scarlet-red chairs faced each other across the table, as if assembled for a ceremonial inspection, each chair staring unswervingly at its fellow across the way. “Throne” chairs, one for Van, one for Gertrude, stood at the head and foot of the table. The table was not set nor covered with a cloth. Reflected in the gleaming expanse of wood were two golden candlesticks, which stood on either side of two golden water jugs, as well as two wheel-shaped chandeliers that hung high above, like those in the well shaft of the principal tower. Landish could just make out, far above the chandeliers, the curved beams of the ceiling, arching wooden buttresses that formed a perfect dome above the room.

“What do you think, Deacon?” Van said.

“It’s nice,” Deacon replied. “Really nice,” he said when he saw that Van looked disappointd.

Deacon bore the same colossalized look as when he first set eyes on the Golden Queen guarding the access to New York.

“Deacon is getting tired.” Landish watched the boy, who was trying to tilt his head back far enough to see the ceiling.

“Nearly done,” Van said.

He brought them to the library, which he said was the centrepiece of the house, even more so than the Greater Banquet Hall. He said that the library’s frescoed ceiling was brought over from Italy in one piece and laid atop the library as one might put the lid on a teapot. The library contained twenty-five thousand leather-bound books.

“A lot of unburned words,” Van said, smiling at Landish, then at Deacon.

A circular wrought-iron staircase led to a catwalk that ran all round the library, interrupted only by the chimney of an enormous fireplace. Behind the fireplace was a hidden elevator by which guests who forswore the staircase could rise up to the second floor, or go up further still to the observatory from which, through a telescope, Gertrude and her guests peered up at the stars.

Van took them to the largest of the living halls. It looked to Deacon like the waiting room at the station in New York.

There was a gaming table and chess set that, Van said, once belonged to Napoleon.

“The motto of Vanderland is ‘There is a world elsewhere.’ It’s taken from Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus.”

“It seems an ironic motto,” Landish said, “given that it’s the complaint of everyone at Vanderland that the entire world
is
elsewhere.”

“As much of the world as anyone needs lies within the walls of this estate,” Van said.

He showed them the tapestry gallery where they had first met. “I go to Europe every summer to find treasures like these.”

“Does Gertrude travel with you?” Landish asked.

“No. She goes to New York when I go to Europe. Or else she stays at Vanderland.”

“Too tired to go on, Deacon?” Landish asked. Deacon shook his head.

They went from floor to floor by the stairs instead of the elevators, whose walls were ornately decorated and carved and might, Van said he feared, be scratched by the wheelchair. Servants carried the wheelchair up and down the stairs. Deacon walked between them, holding hands with both of them, and climbed back into the chair whenever they reached the next floor.

Van said that many newspaper and magazine articles had lavished praise on Vanderland, but none of them had shown a true understanding of the place. So he wrote a piece himself under the byline of a famous columnist whose silence he bought by threatening to have him fired and make sure he never worked again.

“It must have made for a nice change,” Landish said. “Fixing someone else’s name to something you wrote.”

Van ignored him. “ ‘Vanderland is American in the sense that it belongs to all Americans.’ That’s part of what I wrote. What I wanted to say. I didn’t silence all of Vanderland’s critics. The simpleton barbarians. Come. I’ll show you.”

In his study, the only room with a lived-in appearance that he’d shown them, he took a leather folder from a writing desk, opened it and read aloud:
“Imagine coming upon a sixteenth-century French château while on safari through the jungles of the Amazon and you will get a sense of how laughable a sight is this Carolina Castle of the Vanderluydens
. This—this thing was one of a series of pieces in the
New York Herald
called ‘Such Are the Rich.’ ” He continued reading, his voice rising in volume: “He
thinks so little of the world in which the rest of us must live that he has built an alternative one, a counter-world called Vanderland. Vanderland should be called Wonderland. Just when one thinks one has witnessed the absolute height of extravagance, there is still more of it to come.’ ”

He threw the folder up in the air, scattering above their heads pieces of newsprint that fluttered to the floor. “The fools!” He shouted so loudly that Landish put his hands on Deacon’s shoulders from behind. “Vanderland is
not
a country estate. It is where we
live
. Not in
New York. We
live
at Vanderland. That is what is new. I neither follow fashion nor seek to create it. I do not hope for imitators, do not hope to set a trend or have it said of me that I began a fad.”

“I think Vanderland is unlikely to start a fad,” Landish said.

Van smoothed back his hair with both hands and loudly exhaled.

“So that’s what
I’ve
done since Princeton,” he said. “I think it measures up quite well against the accomplishments of others.”

“Hear, hear,” Landish said.

“So ends your tour.” Van clasped his hands behind his back. “Perhaps I should have confined it to the swimming pool and bowling alley in the basement.”

Van called for the butler, who escorted Landish and Deacon back to The Blokes.

Deacon asked Landish to tell him a bedtime story about Vanderland.

Deacon lived in the Fortress of the Forest. If he left, even for one hour, his punishment would be banishment. He could not come back and he had nowhere else to go.

The Fortress wasn’t his. It belonged to Good King Padgett. Deacon lived in the chicken wing, for men who were afraid of women. It was better than his former lodgings, an attic with a ceiling two feet high where it peaked in the middle.

Until he left the attic, Deacon had never stood up indoors. That was why he was so much shorter than Princess Godwin.