The Hundred-Year House (23 page)

Max handed her a small, red book.
Edwin Parfitt: His Selected Verse
. He said, “I’ve marked the right poem with a paper.”

She turned back, halfway to the door. “I meant to ask about the fish,” she said. “What are we to do with them in winter? Do they just freeze solid?”

“I bring them in,” Max said. His voice stayed as quiet as ever, though she was all the way across the garage. “They’ll outlive us both.” She was nearly out the door when he said, “Do you know what they like better than anything?”

“No.”

“A root beer float.”

“I don’t understand.” She thought over the words. It was like a riddle, but it made no sense.

“You don’t?” He looked almost sad.

“Oh, don’t worry, dear,” Miss Silverman said. “I’ve never understood him myself!”

Grace stuck both the book and photo in the attic so George wouldn’t come across them. Miss Silverman walked the grounds when Max took off to retrieve George, and Ludo raked leaves. Nothing else of note happened the rest of the day.

—

She was quite taken with the poem, which was about Proteus, and she was pleased that her recall of mythology and meter and rhyme were finally being tested. She appreciated certain lines, the “thickening, quickening night,” and “Daphne’s branches, sleeved in moss.” She also understood the inversion Parfitt had accomplished: In his telling, everyone wanted to pin Proteus down to make him remember the past, not to tell the future. Though what he was so loath to remember she couldn’t quite glean. Something
about a lightning crash, and the bit about “paying to Charon his tongue-lidded coin,” which she took to mean a death.

Most fascinating, though, was the short introduction written in 1950 by Edna
St. Vincent Millay
. “Edwin Parfitt was not so much a giant of the poetic world,”
it read,
“as one of its forest elves, whose song lures us deeper into the wood—though we may neither recognize the tune nor ever find the piper.”
It went on to claim that his classicism of theme and form had been horribly misread by the critics. At the end came an astonishing paragraph:

It has been five years now since Eddie Parfitt, after an insurmountable personal loss, took his own life at Lake Glinow, Wisconsin. In accordance with his wishes, he was not buried but wrapped in white cloth and burned, his ashes set loose to the wind. Those of us in attendance took some small delight in knowing those ashes would find rest on far and unsuspecting plots of earth, that they would bless and fertilize their landing places. As, too, will these poems.

Grace wondered if this paragraph was the true reason Max had given her the book: if, after her outburst, he assumed she knew more than she did, and wanted her to learn what had become of her father’s partner in sodomy. That didn’t seem right, though. She scanned it again, wishing she’d find the words
fish
or
root beer
, wishing the paragraph would tell her where Amy had come from or when Zilla Silverman would leave. Perhaps this book could read her tarot.

Really she supposed Max had only given it to her because she’d spoken of starting over, and he had recalled the poem about Proteus shifting shape. But he must have misunderstood her, then. What Grace wanted to run from wasn’t the past, or even
the future as the original Proteus had, but rather the present. Here she was, crystallized in time, in a place where nothing ever really happened, at least not to her, while the world marched on without her back in Toronto. It wasn’t so much the house that she wanted to escape, or George, even as his charm faded like a suntan, but the feel of every moment being precisely
now
, with no cause and no consequence. She supposed a Buddhist might appreciate it. But it wasn’t for her.

On Friday morning (nothing around but sunlight and some distant sounds traveling out the kitchen windows and back in through the dormers), she sat in the attic in her robe and slippers and read the introduction for the fifth time. It struck her only then that Millay referred to Parfitt’s “small dark eyes, and dark hair, slickly parted
.
” She crossed the floor and pulled out the file she’d sworn she’d never open again. The grinning man on the left had pale, wavy hair. Golden or light brown. No one would call his eyes small. It couldn’t be Parfitt. But neither could the man on the right, who, she was more certain than ever, was her father. His uneven shoulders, his chin. She turned it over, to see if some perverse and helpful archivist had recorded their names for posterity, but there was nothing. Well. She’d do it herself, then. She snatched up the pencil from her greenhouse sketch and, holding the photo up to the window so she could see the image through its paper, wrote “
Father”
right across his backside. It felt like nailing him down, accusing him. On the reverse of the other man’s buttocks, she drew a question mark. Then she stuffed it back in the folder, and the folder back in the cabinet.

Miss Silverman was gone, had been gone since yesterday, and Grace was unduly bereft. A spectator with no spectacle. George had disappeared for a day and then returned. The leaves were gone, except on a few stubborn oaks, and the catalpa was all pods. They made music in the wind, like maracas. It was freezing now in the attic, and so she walked its perimeter, closing each of the
twelve dormers, and came to the northeast one last, the one closest to the coach house. Sometimes she thought this was where her grandmother had done it. Her father would never talk about Violet, so most of the very little that Grace knew she’d learned from her mother. Violet had killed herself at Laurelfield in 1906, when Grace’s father was only two. For this, she was never to be forgiven by anyone in the family. Her name was never used for babies, her grave (they’d taken the body by train all the way back to Toronto) wasn’t visited. When Grace and George first arrived, back in May, Grace had asked Mrs. Carmichael which part of the house was supposed to be the haunted bit. “Oh, the attic!” Mrs. Carmichael had said, and then Grace had to endure fifteen minutes of ridiculous stories about flickering lights and doors that shut themselves. “So that’s where she did it, then?” Grace had asked. “Violet, I mean. It was the attic?” Mrs. Carmichael had laughed. “I wasn’t here myself, ma’am. I couldn’t tell you beyond what I’ve heard. But the artists used to say so.”

“And did she hang herself?”

Mrs. Carmichael put down her silver polish and looked puzzled. “It’s funny. I don’t know why, but I always assumed she jumped.”

Grace watched George take the Darrin out of the garage. Max waved after him, and George backed out toward the big house, then took off like a French racer through the gate. When he drove like that, when he took the Darrin, it was a sure sign he wouldn’t be home the same day. Maybe he was headed to Chicago. To a whorehouse. She wondered what it would be like to start life over as a whore, to show up on the step of a
house of ill repute
, to live there entertaining the men, the handsome ones only, until, one day, George would stumble in. And either recognize her, or not.

Max closed the garage door and disappeared inside, and then there was absolutely no one left in the world but Grace. She
wasn’t serious about it in the slightest, but before she closed this last window for the winter, she wanted to see what it felt like, if it was even possible. She stepped out of her slippers and up onto the sill, bracing her feet against the outer edges, clinging with both hands to the bottom of the glass. She had to crouch to fit inside the small, open square, and the wind rushed straight through her dressing gown. It didn’t look far enough, really. You’d land on the grass, if you didn’t hit the pine tree on your way down. You’d at least end up in a wheelchair, but you might or might not die, and someone wanting to do herself in would undoubtedly choose something more certain. Maybe she’d poisoned herself, after all.

Below, Max came out of the coach house, out the mechanical room door right next to the stone wall. It wasn’t his usual way out, and there was something odd about the way he walked too: slowly at first, as if he were scoping things out, then very quickly, all the way along the wall to the gate. He had a leather satchel over his shoulder.

Perhaps this was the third strange thing, the one she’d been waiting for after the rabbits and the witch.

She ought to follow him. It was better than hanging out a window, and better than sitting here waiting for some five-act drama to unfold right on the lawn. She hopped inside and dressed quickly and retrieved her bicycle from the tree it had been leaning against, untouched, since July. She assumed Max must have walked toward town, and she was right: After a few blocks she saw him hurrying along the opposite sidewalk. He turned left, toward the college, and she hung back and followed as obliquely as possible.

He walked past the main gates, across a quadrangle, and through the side door of a Gothic building. Grace parked at a stand of student bikes and walked toward the same door, trying to look purposeful and collegiate. Inside, students milled and sat
on hallway benches, and in all directions the classrooms were filling. The signs on the bulletin boards seemed history related. Max had vanished. She peeked tentatively through an open door, then another, and finally she spied the back of his head in a lecture hall. He took a notebook from his satchel, just as his neighbors were doing, and set it on the table in front of him. He turned and whispered something to the thin-shouldered blond boy on his right. A few more students brushed past Grace, and finally a professor strode to the front, with a ripped shopping bag instead of a briefcase.

“Have we spent every waking moment reading about the Bolsheviks?” he asked, and a laughing groan rose from the room. “Fantastic.”

She shouldn’t hang around, even though she might have liked to audit a class herself. An art class, perhaps. She’d adore a good course on the Dutch masters. She knew what would happen, though. George would find out, and then one day he’d storm in and drag her out of the class by the arm. And she couldn’t abide the looks, the gawking undergraduates, and she’d never be able to return. So that was the end of that particular fantasy. She walked out of the building, smiling at the students: the girls in their sweater sets, the boys leaning and smoking and glancing with curiosity at Grace.

Back through town. She aimed her bicycle wheels at individual dead leaves, loving the crunch. She didn’t particularly want to go home just yet. There was a beauty parlor with a bicycle stand in front, Matilda’s House of Style, and she might as well follow her impulse inside. She had put ten dollars in her pocket, and this would at least be a place to sit down. The cycling had tired her quite a bit.

The woman at the desk told her there was a spot open in twenty minutes, and asked her name. “Amy Hall,” Grace said.
And she smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat to read a copy of
Vogue
.

When they called Amy, she was ready—she’d prepared herself to respond to the name—and she had a shampoo and then sat in the chair while Matilda cleaned her scissors.

“I want it just below the ears,” she said. “I need a new look.” Matilda began combing, and told her she had lovely hair, just like Grace Kelly. “Oh, you’re too sweet.” She was trying out just a bit of southern accent, not a harsh one like Amy’s but a refined version. “You know, I’ve just moved here from Florida. My husband Max and I. I thought I’d like a new cut to go with the new house.”

“Oh, congratulations!”

“It’s just a little one. You know, a starter home. It used to be the coach house of an old estate, but they’ve converted it. I’ll tell you, though, I’m not used to this cold. And to think, it’s only October! I don’t know what I’ll do with myself this winter.”

“Long underwear!” Matilda said. “That’s my advice.” She raked Grace’s hair out in a straight line and chopped an inch from the end. “And maybe you’ll start a family. Some meat on the bones will keep you warm.”

To her surprise, Grace actually blushed. She’d sooner give herself a lobotomy than have a baby with George right now, but the newlywed Amy and her husband Max might indeed love to have a daughter, a little girl with soft cheeks and smocked dresses. She marveled at how readily she could feel the emotions of this invented self.

—

She was on her way through the front door when she saw rabbits. Just three this time, moving quickly along the front of the house. Not so much fleeing her footsteps as running toward a secret party. Grace wondered why on earth God or nature would put that puff of white on their rear ends, when everything else about
the rabbit seemed designed for maximum camouflage. Their silence, their speed, their fur like dried grass. But then, at the back, this white target, this flash of light. And they’d never know, would they? Had any rabbit ever seen its own backside, seen the way it was trailed by its own demise?

She followed them around the house.

Outside the solarium, Ludo had marked the lines for the greenhouse with little flags. He’d made arrangements for a crew to come dig out the foundation before the ground got hard. He’d ordered the glass and cement, too, and was working with a friend who’d built greenhouses up and down the North Shore.

She couldn’t see where the rabbits had gone. The ivy on the house had shrunk back a bit for fall, as slowly as a balding man’s hair. Beneath, the bricks showed through. She found their regularity troubling, their strict overlapping. Something about the lockstep rigidity sickened her, and she thought she’d rather have the tangles of ivy back.

Back inside, she walked through the living room—she wasn’t at all sure what to do with it, but maybe paint it over in coral—and the dining room, which, when empty, was so overwhelmed by her grandmother’s portrait as to seem a shrine. Violet always looked a little surprised, as if Grace had caught her in the middle of some wildly inappropriate thought and she’d just managed to compose herself.

Grace heard someone across in the library, but when she got there it was empty. She loved this room best if only because there were still small relics of the artists who’d gathered every night for predinner drinks just a year before. Scribbled in the endpapers of an old copy of
Dombey and Son
, she’d found a ridiculous “List of Demands,” added to over the years in different hands: head massages, a bugle corps, Chinese footmen, better weather, lullabies, resident astrologer. She’d hidden that book deep in the shelf to protect it, and she checked now that it was safe. The jade monkey
was gone from the bar, though, and she wondered where it could have gone. She checked all the shelves, and she checked under the leather couches. She’d have thought George took it, but he hated the library even more than he hated the portrait of Violet—he’d seen strange shadows there the week they moved in, and hadn’t set foot in it since. At first he had Mrs. Carmichael bring him out his drinks, but then he just began stocking his bureau as a bar. Grace would have, as a result, spent all her time in this room for the privacy, were it not for the windows between each set of shelves, on three sides of the room. It was an observation tank, and anyone walking from the driveway to the kitchen door would see right in. And perhaps that was what happened. Amy had looked in, on her walks from the coach house, envying the little monkey till she had to have it. But to make sure, Grace went first to Mrs. Carmichael, watering in the solarium, and to Rosamund in the kitchen, and even to Ludo and Beatrice, and none of them even knew what she was talking about, except Mrs. Carmichael, who was sure she had dusted it Friday.