The Hundred-Year House (18 page)

“I think I feel happy tonight,” Miriam said. “Is that awful to say?”

Doug looked at the sushi on his plate. It, too, was tessellated: the wet pink rhombus of salmon, the grains of the rice, the thin edge of seaweed. He thought,
I am a different person now. I am someone who eats eel, and this small artist is my best friend. I am someone who has turned the TV room into a file-sorting station, someone who believes fantastical tales of identity theft
.

If everything else were still the same, he’d have felt Zee’s absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure
his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been. He thought of Parfitt’s last published poem, “Proteus Wept.” In Greek mythology, the sea god Proteus changed shape to avoid telling mortals the future. Parfitt had twisted it, though: Parfitt’s Proteus changed to avoid remembering the past. It ended with a litany of the forms he took:
A lark, a crow, a spoonbill! / This sea-foam, rank and green.
Yet Parfitt himself ultimately chose death over reinvention. It was as if he wrote the poem to convince himself of future possibility, and failed. But Doug could do better.

—

He didn’t drive to New York the next day, or the day after. He didn’t call, and then he continued not calling.

What he did instead was ask Sofia to make him an appointment with Gracie. She had written Zee a letter once they had her address, and Zee had written a short note back that, by not expressing anger over car crashes and wheelbarrows, had put Gracie’s mind at ease.

Hidalgo greeted him at the door, relatively sedate. Doug scratched him, just to steal a moment to fortify himself. It had occurred to him that the reason Gracie let him continue to stay in the coach house was that she thought he had far more information than he did. He had to choose his questions well, lest they betray his ignorance. He wasn’t sure how to begin.

But, at the kitchen table, Gracie spoke first.

“Douglas, I’ve come to a place of peace,” she said. “Either my daughter is crazy, or I raised her wrong, but I don’t believe this was your fault.”

He said, “I really didn’t do anything, Gracie. Honest to God, I didn’t.”

They talked about the detective, and about leaving Zee alone awhile.

Then Doug said, “I hope you can help with something.” He showed her the photograph, careful to keep a hand over the men’s
naked torsos. “Because I’ve appreciated your honesty. What I still need to know are these men’s full names.”

She put on her reading glasses and squinted down. “I haven’t a clue. Is there a correct answer?”

“Theoretically.”

“That’s out back of the house, isn’t it? It’s the kind of thing Zilla’s father would have known. Every few years, someone would call up asking about the colony. He’d rattle off who stayed here.”

“But you don’t know these men?”

“I’ve never seen them in my life. What are you hiding under there?”

He slid the photo back in its envelope and asked her blessing to transfer the files to the historical society. “They should be preserved,” he said. “With acid-free folders. And there’s nothing in there that would, you know, incriminate you. I’ve been through every inch.”

Gracie folded her glasses. “Douglas, I’ve been a bit of a fool. When you cornered me on New Year’s Eve—that’s really what you did, you
cornered
me—I was in quite a state. Bruce had me convinced of the end of the world, for one thing. I can’t quite remember all I told you. But I realize I might have said more than I needed.”

Doug said, “I’d already been in the attic, remember. There were a lot of papers up there.”

“I see.” It didn’t seem to bother her particularly, though. “The papers you want to donate—it’s
just
the colony papers, correct?”

“I have no desire to get you in trouble.”

She was quiet, and he worried he’d said the wrong thing. Finally she said, “There’s actually something I need from you. I’ve made a decision, Douglas. With Zilla away, with Bruce gone, I think the time has come for me to move on. Did you know I have a sister? A half sister named Elizabeth, and I never stopped writing to her. She doesn’t know quite where I am, just that I’ve had
a good life. She writes me back at the post office. We got together in Colorado a few times, after Zilla’s father passed, and before I met Bruce. She’s moved to Sedona. It’s beautiful out there. You know, it was the saddest part of leaving Florida, not knowing what would happen to my sister. She was only four, and leaving her was the worst thing I ever did, the worst thing in my life. But she got out too, and she was a teacher, and now she’s divorced. I’ve been sending her money every month since she was old enough to cash a check. And I think it’s time to be Amy Hall again, to go out and join her. Grace can’t live much longer, and there’s the matter of the Internet. The last thing I want is to become famous for being the oldest living person. Where would I be then? Max made sure from the start that we kept paying ourselves salaries. Every month I’d write a check from Grace Grant to Amy Hall, and I’d cash it at the bank in Libertyville. And Max did the same. I have quite a bit saved up, and that’s all I need.”

Doug tried to look skeptical, but found himself nodding instead. “Sedona is beautiful.”

“Douglas.” She put her hand on his. Veins like mountain ranges. “I want you and Miriam to take care of everything here. I’ve talked to my lawyers, and there can be a transfer of property and funds. To the two of you. Lord knows Zilla doesn’t want it. Maybe she’ll come back, and maybe she won’t. But the house will be yours. We’ll keep Grace alive a few years, and then she’ll die. These things can be arranged, with money to grease the wheels. It’ll be my worry.”

“You want us to take the
house
?” The squeak of his voice woke Hidalgo, who stood and hit his head on the table.

“I want you to reopen the colony.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what his face was doing. It was the most outrageous thing anyone had ever said to him.

“Don’t answer yet. It’s the right thing. The colony was shut
down for bad reasons, for greed and spite. Max would tell me stories—artists by the ponds, writers under the trees. When I first showed up there were still cabins, you know, artist’s studios, with skylights and sinks. I know I always spoke poorly of it, but that was—I felt I had to. He said it was quiet all day, everyone working, and then at night they all came together and made a racket and had dinner in the dining room. Can you imagine? And the work they made! We never could have reopened it ourselves, even though Max wanted to, he wanted to desperately. It would have brought too much attention. The Devohrs would have descended. But you and Miriam, you’re so many layers removed. It would set the universe right.”

“Wouldn’t the right thing, technically, be to give it back to the Devohrs?”

“The Devohrs left Grace out here with an alcoholic husband, and they never once came to see her. Never once.” She pointed a finger right at him, as if he were trying to argue otherwise. “We had a plan in case they did, a whole elaborate plan. But it never happened. They made it easy for me. It was easy because they never showed up, and it was easy because I never felt bad. And they don’t need it, do they? Zilla’s the one always talking about Marxism, and look! Here I am, little old me, redistributing the wealth!”

“Oh. God.” There was still the possibility this was all a bribe, Gracie’s chance to cover up something gruesome, to get out of town before Doug turned her in. That’s what Miriam would have said.

“There’s money to get it started. I know how much these things cost, I’m not naïve, and there’s plenty. Of course it’s mostly Bruce’s money at this point, so he’s the one to thank. I was nearly broke before he came along. And poor sweet Miriam can help you. She knows the art world. She’d know how to build a studio.
Why she married that pompous ass is beyond me, but otherwise she’s a smart girl.”

Doug realized that in the time she’d been talking, every color in the kitchen had grown brighter. His mind was listing reasons why this wasn’t a tenable plan, but it was thinking twice as fast of what would need to be done, planning where people would sleep, what grants could be applied for, what Leland could bring to the table. Doug would have a job. He’d have a life. He felt as if he’d stepped into the Happensack, into its vertiginous abundance.

Leland would tell him he was a sucker, and Miriam would worry Gracie was leaving them with a basement full of dead bodies or worse, but when you’re drowning in the ocean and someone throws you a rope, you don’t ask what it’s made of.

He said, “I have to talk to Miriam. I’d have to tell her—I mean, what could I tell her?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She smiled, and he knew it must have been painfully obvious that he’d already told Miriam everything. “Go talk to her now.”

And he got his things, and he walked back to the coach house.

No, look: He was running.

43

S
ummer and fall swept through with a cleansing, scorching heat, and when the students returned to campus, they eagerly told the few seniors returning from a year abroad the story of Professor Grant walking off campus nude.

There was Old King Cole. His Melville class applauded him the first day. For still being there, for still being Cole, for waggling those eyebrows and saying, “You don’t kill an old virus
that
easy.”

When students came to his office, he pointed to the little framed photo on the wall, the girl and her father. She was reading and she was happy. Each time he’d say, “That’s a picture of the bravest woman in the world.”

44

O
n June 10, 2001, a poet named Sara Calovelli pulled into the Laurelfield driveway in a dying Honda Civic with Ohio plates. Though eight more artists and writers and composers would arrive later that afternoon, she was officially the first resident of the Laurelfield Arts Colony in forty-seven years.

Doug and Miriam ran out from the office to meet her, and introduced her to Ben, who’d get her settled in the main house. Dinner was at six, they told her, and then there would be a bonfire out back. When Sara had disappeared through the front door with her suitcase, Miriam did a little jump and clapped her hands.

The chef had the grill going, Sofia and her crew were putting out soaps and towels, and Denise and Chantal worked frantically from the office that used to be the coach house TV room, dealing with all the last-minute things like medical forms.

Everything had fallen into place—money, staffing, town approval—with such ease and speed that Doug and Miriam kept waiting in vain for something to go terribly wrong. That winter, they’d received a donation from some Miss Abbaticchio, an elderly woman in town, that surpassed even the money Gracie had left. The desks from the attic were all still usable. The Illinois Arts Council came through nicely.

The buzz they’d built in the year of frantic work created a deep applicant pool, and Miriam and Leland knew the right people to rope into admissions panels and a board. An article in the
Tribune
,
“Refounding a Haven,” came out the same day Doug learned that Zee was living with a sixty-year-old physics professor.

And it was the strangest thing: That night, as he lay in bed, he had to remind himself to feel sad.

His bed was downtown now, in an apartment above the bagel shop. Miriam stayed in the coach house, and Doug and Zee’s old quarters had become a guest room and studio.

Gracie had sent them congratulatory flowers, delivered that morning. She wrote them occasional notes from Sedona, which Doug took to be some kind of proof. (“Her going where she said she’d go proves exactly nothing,” Miriam said.)

They sat next to the driveway, and Miriam picked up a handful of its smooth gravel: white and tan and black. She arranged the stones in a trail down her shin.

Doug said, “Are you tessellating yourself?”

She said, “I’ve had a funny thought all day. It seems like this is the only way things could have turned out. You know? Like all the bizarre and horrible things that happened, they pushed us both here. The colony was taken away, the house went back to the Devohrs, and after everything here we are, two people who aren’t even Devohrs, opening it back up.”

Doug laughed and said, “You think the house just really wanted to be a colony again? It missed all the artists, so it smashed that car and waited half a century?”

“I wasn’t going to say the house,” Miriam said. “I was going to say ghosts.”

At some point they’d agreed that if he could believe Gracie’s story, she could believe in her ghosts, and he wasn’t allowed to laugh.

Doug said, “Last chance to dig up the greenhouse. Before that writer gets here.”

“Ha.”

“Just to prove I’m not a gullible ass.”

“We’ll never do it. It’s such a great studio. If I were a writer, it’s the studio I’d want.” She cleared the gravel from her leg and it fell on the driveway with a sound like rain. “Even if we did,” she said, “even if we found bones. What would it prove? You’ll never know the whole story. You realize that, right? That you’ll never know.”

Doug looked at her, speechless. She was right. Like so much she said, it was a revelation. It was also an absolution.

—

Before dinner, there were cocktails in the library. The travel-weary artists revived, chattering and checking out the displays. Doug had filled the shelves with copies of all the books and musical scores he could find by the earlier generation of residents, and books of art prints as well. He’d even hunted down Marlon Moore’s only published work, which seemed to have predated the attic manuscript. Moore turned out to have been a local writer, a professor in Zee’s old department in the late twenties. The novel,
Jack of the Woods
, was truly awful, but Moore’s spot on the shelf was one of Doug’s favorites.

Doug had finally convinced Miriam that what would make the room complete was to put the Happensack above the fireplace, where Gracie’s farmhouse painting had once hung. They’d wanted to install it before the guests arrived, but they ran out of time. There were so many little crises in those final days of preparation. For now, the spot was empty.