A World Elsewhere (26 page)

“Mother says Father pushed you round the house in the wheelchair,” Goddie said when Deacon was seated. “She says you’re so lazy you find it too much of a bother to lift a knife and fork.”

Deacon decided that the faster he ate, the less time he would have to spend with Goddie and the sooner he could go back to The Blokes. It also occurred to him that the faster he gained weight, the sooner he’d be back having dinner with the Blokes. He ate three of every
course and was still ready for the next course when Goddie was. He was able to speak only between courses, his mouth otherwise so stuffed with food, his cheeks bulging so that it looked like he was holding his breath.

“Don’t choke yourself, Deacon,” Miss Esse said.

But though he ate each course as quickly as he could, he realized that the length of dinnertime would depend on how fast Goddie ate, which was very slowly. She deliberated over every forkful, staring at it as she paused with it raised halfway to her mouth as if she thought there was something in it that shouldn’t be there. And when she noticed his stuffed cheeks she laughed so much at the sight that she left her food untouched.

“Eat something, Godwin,” Miss Esse said.

Goddie rolled her eyes. “If only you could see yourself,” she said. “You look like a giant chipmunk!” But soon she seemed sad. She looked at him, tears in her eyes, biting her lower lip.

“You don’t like having dinner with me, do you?” she said.

“Yes, I do,” Deacon tried to say, his mouth stuffed with roasted potatoes that scorched his tongue.

“I wish you really did,” she said. “I don’t have any friends. Those New York boys and girls are not my friends.”

By the time Deacon left for The Blokes with the butler, he felt that if he opened his mouth while looking in the mirror he would see at the back of his throat the last few bites of his third helping of peaches, vanilla cake and cream. He followed the butler through the house, feeling light-headed, his stomach painfully distended, so much sweat running down his forehead that his eyes stung and he could barely stand to keep them open. He stared at the butler’s back. The butler never turned his back on Mr. Vanderluyden. That was why he walked out backwards through the doors. When he spoke to Mr. Vanderluyden or listened to instructions from him, he looked up as if Mr. Vanderluyden were on the ceiling.

Deacon was determined not to faint or be sick on one of Mr. Vanderluyden’s rugs. If he got sick, the Vanderluydens would think he didn’t like their food, or didn’t like Goddie. Mr. Vanderluyden would think that no amount of good food could make Deacon grow or fix what was wrong with him. So he would give him and Landish the sack. He wondered if he was going to die in his boyhood no matter who did what for him.

Hearing a knock, Landish opened the door of The Blokes. The butler bowed slightly and waved Deacon inside with an exaggerated and, Landish thought, faintly ironic flourish of his hand. He might have been regretfully and gravely commending to his doom some recently deposed monarch.

“Good God, Deacon,” he said. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

As the butler closed the door, Deacon looked up at Landish and the room began to spin. He was dimly aware of falling forward.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on the floor, all the Blokes on their knees around him, even Sedgewick. It reminded him of his dream in which all the Blokes had gathered round his bed. They unbuttoned his collar and trousers, removed his shoes. He felt Landish’s hand on his forehead.

“I think I ate too much,” Deacon said.

“Maybe you should make yourself be sick,” Landish said, but Deacon shook his head. He believed he had made progress towards his goal of being reunited with the Blokes and was determined not to put back on to his sentence one minute of the time that he had served in exile, or to rid his body of one ounce of the food that, in everyone’s opinion, he so badly needed.

“Let’s put him on the sofa in the Smoker where we can keep an eye on him,” Gough said.

“If I get sick, will we be sacked?” Deacon asked.

Landish shook his head. “I just hope that you can digest as much as you can ingest. You can’t go from puny to robust in just one meal, you know.”

The Blokes laid Deacon on the sofa and folded his hands on his stomach. “The flatter the better,” Gough said, removing all the pillows so that Deacon’s head and feet were on the same level. Deacon was soon drowsing, almost asleep but able to hear himself snoring slightly.

The Blokes returned to their brandy.

“Methinks the urge to purge has passed,” Landish said.

“As has, alas, a gust of wind,” said Gough.

“Another urge may soon emerge,” said Stavely.

“It’s shameful,” Sedgewick said. “The boy made a pig of himself.”

“Yes,” Gough said. “And then he ate it.”

“To eat with such relish and yet feel so hellish,” Stavely lisped happily.

“To start with gestation and end with prostration,” said Landish.

“For he on runny stew hath fed/And drunk the swill of Vanderland,” added Gough.

“I’m surprised he left the butler uneaten,” Stavely said. “I wonder if what will prove to be a fruitless search for Goddie might not even now be under way.”

Deacon drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams and half dreams in which the only voices were those of the Blokes.

“The Kid is Fed. Long Live the Kid.”

Landish: “The Vanderland pantries empty lie/While he whom they were emptied by/But half-full lies and—you may laugh—thinks only of his empty half.”

“Dining with the Vanderluydens,” Sedgewick said. “And to think we shared our meals with him.”

“We?” Gough said. “I don’t recall you parting with so much as a pea.”

From then on, each evening, Mr. Henley would arrive at The Blokes to escort Deacon to the Lesser Banquet Hall. “I believe your man has arrived,” Landish would say when, at precisely six-thirty, there was a knock on the door of The Blokes. Deacon soon knew the way, but the butler still escorted him to ensure that he didn’t stray from the hallways into any of the rooms and didn’t touch or knock into anything.
The butler, standing exaggeratedly erect and staring unswervingly forward in a trancelike way that, after the first few times, Deacon couldn’t help but mimic, walked a few yards in front of him, his arms never moving. They walked in solemn silence as though, Landish told him, he was being led to a formal “installation,” as if the butler should have been bearing the Royal Mace on his shoulder as they made their way to Deacon’s throne.

Deacon followed the butler down the stone staircase of the Bachelors’ Wing, through the breezeway that led to the main house, along dimly lit, portrait-hung hallways that emerged into a succession of brightly lit, enormous rooms, empty living halls, the long, narrow tapestry gallery, past the entrance to the library and across the Winter Garden’s marble floor, encountering servants who seemed not to see them, nor even to hear their footsteps. When they encountered a closed door, the butler opened it, preceded Deacon through and held it open for him with his left hand without turning to see where he was. Deacon decided he didn’t need to look at anything to “see” it. And each evening after dinner the ceremonial march of butler and boy was repeated through the labyrinth of Vanderland back to The Blokes.

“Thank you, Henley old chap,” Goddie said to the butler when Deacon arrived. She looked at Deacon and laughed.

Goddie said it was much more fun to have dinner with Deacon than with a governess who never spoke to her except to correct her posture or criticize her table manners. “I like Miss Esse,” she said, smiling at Miss Esse, “but not the others, so I do things wrong on purpose just to get them to speak to me and to make sure they don’t fall asleep. It’s dreadful when the one person you’re having dinner with falls asleep.”

But then Goddie the Bad would start, staring at Deacon as if she had caught him stealing from the Vanderluydens.

“Mother says it’s proper while dining to speak in low tones to the servants, so she thinks it would be appropriate if you did not speak to
them at all. Mother says that you’re like a pig that we’re preparing for the slaughter, except that no amount of food can fatten you up. She says that, in spite of all that you consume, you will
be
consumed. By CONSUMPTION!”

Moments later, Goddie the Good’s lip would tremble and she would cover her face and begin to cry.

“Father says that most of the time I am Goddie the Good. He says I must try to always be Goddie the Good. But sometimes, he says, I am God-awful, ungodly Goddie, and then look out. He says I must not let Goddie the Bad get the best of me or else I’ll always be unhappy and unloved. I couldn’t bear to be unhappy and unloved. You love me, don’t you, Deacon? I love you. Really. You should just pretend that you can’t hear God-awful Goddie. She’s not me. I don’t mean what she says, all right? Pretend. Promise?”

But he discovered that to ignore God-awful Goddie was not so easy as to promise to ignore her, especially when her New York friends joined them for dinner.

“Deacon has no parents, you know. He came here with a dreadful man named Landish who bought him in some place where they sell boys. You can’t even buy a darky anymore, but you can buy a Deacon. Can you imagine being bought instead of born? He lives with the tutors. The Blokes, they’re called, because they’re English and they’re old. Lowborn highbrows, Mother calls them. Landish is one of my tutors. He went to Princeton with my father. Even the best schools make mistakes, Mother says. Deacon dines with me because he’s not long for this world, Father says, and it would be a pity if even his
last
days were a misery. No, better he make a misery of my daughter’s days, says Mother. They’re ever so funny when they talk about Deacon.”

Goddie fell silent. Deacon looked at her and saw that her lower lip was quivering, which meant that Goddie the Good was back. He knew she didn’t want to burst out crying in front of what Landish called her Cronies, so he burped loudly and everyone, including Goddie, laughed.

She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Deacon can be so funny,” she said. “He’s not so bad, really. No one else can tease him, only me. That’s the rule, agreed?”

The Cronies nodded.

Goddie had different visiting “friends” every weekend. Most of them went a year or more between visits. Some came with their parents, some with governesses. She told Deacon she couldn’t remember most of them from one visit to the next. They showed up at Vanderland and she took her mother’s word for it that they had visited before and that she had enjoyed their company.

“But I don’t know who they are mostly,” she confided in Deacon one mealtime. “I heard Mother tell Father many children visit once and never come back because their parents can’t coax them. She says staying at Vanderland is worse than visiting the seven neighbours of Hercules.”

Gough told Landish that her parents more or less recruited visitors for her—conscripted boys and girls whose parents dared not decline an invitation from the Vanderluydens.

“The Patterson girl is coming this weekend—you remember her, don’t you?” Mrs. Vanderluyden would say to Goddie, who would tell Deacon that she’d pretended to her mother that she remembered the Patterson girl. Sometimes, when there were five or six visiting at once, Deacon heard her call them by the wrong names, even when Mrs. Vanderluyden would tell her the names in advance and have Goddie say them back to her. She might quiz her at any time. “Who’s coming to visit this weekend, Godwin?” she’d say, and Goddie would struggle to remember, sometimes succeeding but more often saying the name of someone who had visited the week before, or even the name of a character from one of the reading books assigned by Landish. “There are so many names, Deacon!” she said one day, lying miserably face down on the large velvet sofa in their clasroom.

“You tell me the names and I’ll remember them for you,” Deacon said.

So that weekend, Goddie told him all the names as soon as her
mother told her and he repeated them back to her. “Tell me the names again,” she said, and Deacon told her and she nodded and smiled at him.

“The poor girl,” Gough said. “What an odd childhood. She will grow up in this oddball, misplaced mansion. She will feel as though she spent her childhood in a barricaded village of three hundred people.”

“They say
their
friends are scared they’ll be next,” Goddie said. “Isn’t that so mean? They say it’s not their fault Father makes me live in Darkyland. They talk about you too, Deacon, though nobody remembers your name either. They say Father treats a savage better than he treats his only child. They say people call me Oddie Goddie. They make jokes about how Father keeps me locked up all the time because I’m crazy. ‘Now your daughter is the laughingstock of New York,’ Mother says. ‘Well, that should tell you all you need to know about New York,’ he says. ‘Oddie Goddie,’ Mother says, ‘and she’s only seven years old. She’ll have such a reputation by the time she’s twenty-one there’ll be no point in her ever leaving Vanderland.’ ”

One weekend, a batch of Goddie’s Cronies came to visit from New York and among them was a boy a few years older than Deacon. At dinner the first night, Deacon boasted, “My father’s writing a book.”

“Idiot,” Goddie said. “He isn’t writing a book, he’s just pretending. And he’s not your father.” She looked severely at the boy Deacon had been trying to impress. “You mustn’t listen to anything Deacon says. He’s not a Vanderluyden. He mixes everything up. He doesn’t know how anything at Vanderland works. Father is writing a book. He says that Deacon’s father who isn’t his father is only writing
in
a book. Then he burns it.”

“What kind of book is your father writing?” Deacon asked Goddie.

“One with pages that are blank until he fills them in. Father says your father wants to write the Great American Novel but he failed and Father says that if not for him, you and Landish would be living in the
Great American Hovel. He says anyone can write
in
a book but not just anyone can write a book.”

“She said Van is writing a book?” Landish said that evening. “She said ‘a book’?”