The Hundred-Year House (15 page)

—

The ball came down, and the world did not end.

President Clinton addressed the nation. Bands played, proposals abounded, and after a soothing update about the absence of nuclear meltdowns, the station switched over to the Chicago team and the depressingly anticlimactic forty minutes they had to fill until midnight Central from the floor of a balloon-filled ballroom.

Case said, “We’re still here.” Something odd about his voice, as if he wasn’t entirely sure of the fact. Or as if he was disappointed to find himself still alive, still on the couch, the lights still on.

Bruce turned down the volume and spoke for the first time. “Well, you never know,” he said. There was phlegm in his voice. “You never know what could still happen. But it looks like a lot of bullshit, doesn’t it? It looks like a great deal of human folly here this evening.”

“It never hurts to be prepared,” Gracie said.

“And the things we bought—the car, the food, the water—they’re not useless. I’d always wanted that Chevy, all my life.”

They nodded. Doug was afraid Bruce would start weeping. He couldn’t handle any more of that tonight.

“You know what else? We’ve lost sight of something, with all this millennium bullshit, with all the computer nightmare. We’re forgetting that this is the end of a
century
. The worst century, I believe, in all of human history. Hitler, Stalin, genocide, the worst warfare in what, a million years of human life on this planet.”

“But a lot of good, too,” Miriam said.

Zee turned to face her. “Oh? Like what?”

“Penicillin? And all the art. Think of, you know, Georgia O’Keeffe. And jazz, and movies! And airplanes. All of it.”

Gracie said, “It’s the house’s birthday. Did you know that? This house is a hundred years old now.”

“I don’t think they built it on New Year’s, Mom.”

“They started building in nineteen hundred!”

“What do you think, Doug?” Bruce’s voice was a little off, a little too loud. He put down his rum with a clatter and undid his collar. “You’re the writer here. Was the twentieth century a comedy, or a tragedy?”

“Or a tragicomedy,” said Zee.

Doug said, “I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Gracie, and didn’t trust himself to form a coherent sentence.

“Well, I think it was a tragedy,” Bruce said. “An absolute and gruesome tragedy. The whole damn century would’ve made more sense backward. Where we’ve ended is worse than where we began.”

Miriam said, “Maybe it was a love story.”

Doug was so busy watching Zee sneer at Miriam that he didn’t see Bruce collapse on the floor beside him. He heard Gracie scream, and there was Bruce, his right arm flapping, his face pale and wet.

Case ran to the phone, and for the five minutes it took the ambulance to get there, Gracie kept shrieking that someone should do CPR, and Zee kept calmly explaining that you could only perform CPR on a dead person and Bruce wasn’t dead.

Doug monitored Bruce’s pulse, which was weak but consistent, and tried to remember what other medical skills he’d been taught in his 1985 training for YMCA camp counselor. Hidalgo ran in circles and barked.

Miriam managed to let the paramedics in through the triple-locked doors, and as they carried the stretcher through the house Hidalgo lunged at it again and again with his front paws, until one of the men sent him flying with a knee to the sternum. Bruce
was stable as they carried him out, conscious and wheezing and trying to lift his head.

Gracie rode in the ambulance. Once she was out the door, Doug suggested that Zee drive with Case in Gracie’s car, and he and Miriam follow in the Subaru. “Someone needs to put Hidalgo in his cage,” he said. The job would take twenty minutes of bribery and wrestling, and required at least two people. “We’ll come right behind.” Zee shot him a withering look he couldn’t quite interpret, but she grabbed Case’s elbow and steered him out the door.

Miriam held up her hand to show it shaking. If she’d been closer to her father-in-law he would have waited, but he couldn’t hold it in. “You won’t believe this,” he said.

As they turned off the TV (seven minutes to midnight) and the lights, and constructed a trail of Milkbones to Hidalgo’s kennel in the mudroom, he repeated what he could. He knew he was leaving things out, and he told her at least three times about the man named Max and the way he turned the newspaper pages.

“I was totally drawn in,” he said. “I couldn’t think straight. You’d have done a better job. Anyone would’ve.”

Miriam spun in circles, trying to catch Hidalgo’s red leather collar. “So basically her story is she can’t be seventy-four because she’s really some other person?”

“I believe that was the gist of it. She kept talking about ‘Grace’ like that wasn’t her. So allegedly Grace
died
, I think? In the car crash. And someone else died too. I don’t know if she said it was George, but that was what I got. She said 1955.”

“Hmm. Those are the principles of a good lie. Tell a big one, and throw in details. Hidalgo! Sit! Hidalgo!”

“Right. So you—you think she was lying.”

“She gave you one excuse for the papers, and when you didn’t believe it she gave you another, complete with tears and melodrama. She told you
nothing
about the files?”

Doug felt like an utter idiot. He’d become a dimwitted television viewer, sucked into a soap opera and too distracted by the amnesia and stolen identity and ghosts to realize he’d just watched five ads for laundry detergent. Gracie had warned him, hadn’t she? That she was smarter than she looked. But no, it had been real. It had
felt
real.

“She was crying,” he said. “I can’t explain—it wasn’t like she was making something up. She was letting something out.” He got Hidalgo straddled for one second, but in the next Doug was falling into the wall and Hidalgo was again circling frantically.

“It’s insane. I mean, for many reasons. Not one person in the whole town saw they weren’t the real Grants? Not one family member suspected something funny?”

“I didn’t tell that part right. The woman, Grace, she always had a black eye, because the husband hit her, and he was always out drinking. So they didn’t go into town. And the family didn’t visit.” He wasn’t sure if he was defending Gracie’s story, or only his own credulity, however fragile.

“I’m not buying it. Hidalgo! Biscuit!”

If Miriam didn’t believe it,
Miriam
, who believed houses had souls, who wouldn’t write anyone a letter when Mercury was retrograde, then was he the most gullible man in the world? But his narration was flawed. Nothing new there. He had made uninvited changes to the world of the story.

In one ninja-fast move, Miriam wrapped her fingers through Hidalgo’s collar and pushed his backside until he stood, stunned and whimpering, in his kennel.

“Impressive,” Doug said. He checked his watch. “In fact, that was officially the best dog-wrangling of the twenty-first century.”

“Of the millennium!” Miriam said. “Happy New Year.”

—

They sat with Zee a long time in the ER waiting room, watching Ricky Martin gyrate soundlessly on the overhead TV. Case came
out at two-thirty to lead them to the ICU, where chairs lined the end of the hallway. Places for people to get bad news. Gracie was in one, her legs crossed at the ankle, her pocketbook clutched on her lap.

“He’s still stable,” she said. “It was a massive coronary. Doesn’t that sound dramatic? But they’ve got the best doctors in there. Bruce and I are big supporters of this hospital, and not for nothing. Douglas is going to help me get some coffee now, because in my nervous state I can’t pour a thing.”

She held his arm all the way down the corridor and around the corner. She stopped and clenched both his shoulders in her hands. She was sharply sober. “It should go without saying,” she said, “that what passed between us was privileged information.” He feared for a moment that she’d guessed what he told Miriam. But no, it was just a warning. “You do know which side your bread is buttered on. If this information were to get out at all—
at all
—there would be Devohr cousins descending on us in an instant. Like locusts.
You
’d be homeless, among other things. Not to mention, it would kill Zilla.”

He said, “I wouldn’t dream of repeating—”

“Good. And I want you to know that while I wouldn’t cheapen our relationship by paying you off, I do guarantee that if you hold your tongue, I’ll make it worth your while in the long run.”

He wanted to ask if there was some medication she’d been neglecting, and he wanted to ask if she thought he was a moron, and at the same time he wanted to tell her he believed every word. But here was his opportunity. “All I need is the colony files in the attic. Just the key to the attic, really.” Doug saw dimly, through the fog, that he was demanding things from a woman whose husband was in Intensive Care. He was a bad person.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course. Run and get me coffee, though. Cream and sugar.”

Doug practically floated to the cafeteria, and although he told
himself several times that he should be worried about Bruce, all he could think of was that key, and those files, and of how he’d relate Gracie’s vehemence to Miriam later.

He returned with a thin cup of scalding coffee. Back in the ICU corridor, they were all standing: Zee with her hands on her hips; Miriam clinging to Case; Case pale and thin; Gracie with her hand to her forehead; two doctors, one tall, one short. As Doug approached the group, Zee turned and glared. “He’s dead,” she said. As if it were Doug’s fault. As if Doug, in those five minutes, had betrayed them all.

39

T
hat ridiculous cup of coffee, that flimsy prop. When it was obvious to everyone—humiliatingly, glaringly—that even in the midst of her crisis, her husband
dying
, Gracie had felt the need to drag Doug aside and upbraid him for his brazenness, for staying behind with Miriam to wait for midnight, to kiss her at midnight, to be with her alone in case the world ended, to leave Zee an abandoned fool at the end of the world. When Zee and Case had met her in the ER, Gracie had grabbed her arm so frantically, asking where was Doug, and Zee saw that she
knew
. No one could hide anything from her mother.

They went into the room, first Gracie and then Case and then all of them, and there was Bruce, still so pink, so sweaty, the hairs in his nostrils still wet, his fat hands resting so lightly on the sheet, that he couldn’t possibly be dead. They should have waited an hour, till he was bluer and smaller.

The nurse said, “There’s been a whole lot of heart attacks, the last few days. A lot of stress right now.” As if it were all the rage.

Case, behind Zee, said quietly: “This is my fault.” Zee turned and saw that Miriam was over near Doug—of course—and he must have been saying it just to her, to Zee.

She whispered back: “That’s not true, Case.”

“You know it is. I’m a lightning rod. I
told
you.”

She pulled him away from the bed. The others were talking to the nurse. She said, “Case, I used to hate you, I really did, with
your little car and your haircut, but—you didn’t do it. It’s not your fault.” She should have stopped there. She didn’t. “You just need to get away from that house. I mean, especially now. Why stay?”

Zee was asking herself as much as she was asking him, but he was the one who turned and crutched his way out of the room. She didn’t follow.

Gracie leaned over the bedrail, gazed at Bruce’s face with her blue eyes huge and dull, but she didn’t make any noise. When Zee’s father died, Gracie had folded up like a clever piece of origami, right in a hallway of this same hospital, and Zee stood there, twelve years old, stroking her mother’s hair and waiting to feel something more violent, more physical, herself.

She marveled at the difference in Gracie’s reactions, at her stolidity now, her asking the nurses what she needed to sign and how soon the body would be moved. But of course Zee’s father had been her first love, and they’d been so
deeply
in love. And his illness had been drawn out—
protracted
was the word—and he’d been in pain for months, his body weakened by those early years of heavy drinking, his liver and spleen finally both giving way.

Her father was a good man, maybe the only good man she ever knew. He was gentle and quiet, and in third grade when her friend Ellen said he was just like Mr. Rogers, only smaller, Zee said, “You’re totally right!” and wasn’t offended at all.

He took her to the Art Institute and showed her the hidden woman behind Picasso’s blue guitarist. He taught her to handle books like precious objects, never to dog-ear. He told her long, fantastic stories, and if she sat in his lap she could sometimes hear a coin clinking against his teeth.

What would he make of her life? He’d be proud of her work, she was certain, proud of her commitment to dissecting power structures and money and class. He who had vetoed the Chippeway Club. The grounds crew and maids he hired (of necessity, or the house would fall apart) were always starving artists who did
a terrible job for which he overpaid them. He’d be sad at the spiral she was in. And he’d be disappointed that she’d abandoned her name. By twelve, the burden of the nickname Godzilla became too much, and so after his death she reduced herself to the sound of a single letter. He had named her, and she had lost her name, and for some reason this made her sadder than anything else. He had loved that house, and she had tried to come home, but it was destroying her. She began sobbing. She went for a walk through the halls.

When she came back, there were Doug and Miriam and Case in a little triangle. Miriam was saying, “You need to lie down. Why don’t I drive you home?”

“Just dizzy,” Case said. “I’m not tired.” He looked up and saw Zee. His eyes were flat little plates that reflected no light at all.

Doug said, “Case, sit down. You’re going to pass out.”

He didn’t move.

“You look terrible,” Doug said.

Case didn’t even look at him, just kept staring at Zee. She ought to have said something reassuring about the laws of the universe, about cause and effect. (The things she wasn’t sure she believed in anymore.) But Doug kept talking.