My Dearest Friend:
I know that your motives for doing what you did at Princeton were not malignant. I knew it then, but was so confused and hurt, so angry and hateful-hearted that I could think of nothing but revenge, which I had but one means of exacting from a Vanderluyden. Your actions were wrong-headed, meddlesome—and treacherous, I thought, but I no longer think so
.
We were both naive in our different ways. Given your upbringing, how could you have understood how much harm your hoax would do to me? The reversal of a fortune like yours is inconceivable, impossible—and therefore, such a profound reversal of fortune and fate as I have suffered may have been inconceivable to you—as may the possibility that, even when the alternative to it was all but nothing, I would turn my back on the life my father sought to impose on me
.
I am sorry for having said what I hope will not be the last words I ever speak to you, for disowning you as if consigning you to non-existence, an act of greater hubris than any you committed
.
I feel better from just having written this letter. I want you to know that, even should you not change your mind about my request, even if I should never hear from you again, I will remember you fondly and cherish the time we spent at Lotus Land. I wish you well
.
Yours truly
,
Landish Druken
Three months later, a letter from Van arrived:
… It is unlike you to have burdened yourself with a beggar boy, especially as, by doing so, you’ve made a beggar of yourself, all out of stubbornness, pride and spite. You’re doing penance for a crime you had no hand in. You cut off your nose to spite your face—renounced your inheritance to spite your father because he wanted you to be what all fathers want their sons to be, his successor
.
Much has changed since the moment you vowed that I would never hear from you again. I moved into Vanderland on Christmas Day, 1895
.
At Princeton, when you and I lived at Lotus Land, I more or less offered you co-proprietorship of Vanderland. I spoke of us raising our families at Vanderland. I have begun my family, and you, in the oddest manner imaginable, have begun yours. I have a wife, and a daughter who is about the age of the boy you bought as if from a shop his mother pawned him to
.
You are in desperate circumstances, a state for which I am sorry but not responsible. It has taken me a long time to reconcile myself to the fact that you, my long-hoped-for, long-yearned-for life mate, are gone for good
.
Hours, days, weeks that I should have spent with my team of architects and engineers I spent instead walking the barely begun roads and paths of the estate, wondering if there remained any point to Vanderland, if I might not just as well abandon what was now the dream of many
.
Leave it, I told myself, leave the razed landscape, the heaping piles of stones and timber, mounds of stumps and miles of tangled roots, leave it as a monument to failed conviction and the bafflement of imagination
.
I eventually reacquired my belief in Vanderland, reminding myself that I was wholly alone when I first decided to give over my life to the raising up of my utopia, the most distinguished private residence on earth, far from the hurried, frenzied, riotous advance of Manhattan and the other cities of the North
.
So then, to answer your request: I have become accustomed to your absence from my life. Neither of us are who we were when I proposed that you follow me to Vanderland. Your presence now would upset my peace of mind, my hard-won equanimity. I would fret about what might have been, what would have been, but which now can never be
.
I could simply give you some money, enough to allow you to start afresh elsewhere. But I doubt that you could start afresh even were you not weighted down by that millstone of a child. You would ask for more money. You would never stop asking. And your letters alone would remind me of you and might cause me to fret in the very manner that you being here in person would do
.
We have hurt each other too deeply ever to reconcile. It is too late, Landish. You made a vow and must keep it from now on. You must make good on your promise that I would never hear from you again …
Landish began another letter to Van:
… Your letter finds us ensconced at Whileaway, which, as you may know, is modelled after the famous Attic on the Seine, perhaps the most architecturally distinctive one-room dwelling in the world, though worthy of at least a tip of the hat are Mudd Hutt Haus on the Rhine and Hovelhaven of East Anglia
.
You once wrote, “What man can claim to be civilized who doesn’t have a second residence?” How right you were we didn’t know until we began to winter in one room and summer in the other, our beloved Idlehours, which each September we must take our leave of to return to the irksome minutiae, the hustle bustle and congestion of “real life” in the adjoining room
.
You need not have gone to the trouble of writing in such detail of your safari and “the most magnificent beasts” whose heads you now have mounted on your wall to one as accustomed as I am to the thrill of bringing down a rabbit
.
As for hobbies, yes, of course, a man must have them, all work and no pay, etc. My avocation is the acquisition of knowledge. I have read that horses are your avocation. To tell you the truth, I read so much about horses that I have no time to ride, race, breed, hunt with or avoid being trampled by them, or run over in the street by the conveyances they pull. In truth, I have yet to pull myself away from reading about horses long enough to look into the purchasing of one, or to consider the question of how to get it up the stairs or decide which of our two rooms would best double as a stable
.
But how few they must be who, from reading about them, know horses as I do, know, for instance, that to horses the avocado is fatally toxic. When they were all but conquered, the Aztecs walked out against the conquistadors with nothing in their hands but avocados …
“I don’t expect we’ll hear from Van again,” Landish told Deacon.
Landish drank and began to sing.
“Shhhh,” Deacon said. “Hogan will tell. The ’Stab will soon be here. They’ll take me back to Cluding Deacon. They’ll take you off to jail.”
Landish nodded. He could hear Hogan down below, walking about as though ransacking his rooms in search of something that would make the singing stop. But then Landish stamped his feet and began to sing again, banging his fists on the table.
Deacon threw his arms around his leg.
“My dear old friend from my dear old days at Princeton. My pal. He said no. I’m glad.”
“You don’t sound glad,” Deacon said.
“Well, I am.”
“You hate your father. I hate mine too.”
“No, no,” Landish said. “Never say that you hate your father, Deacon. Never. He was a great man. Remember the story of Carson of the
Gilbert
. Never forget it.”
“Because it’s true?”
“That’s right.”
Carson, long gone before he slid into the sea. Warm and peaceful at the frozen end. Alone but not lonely. Unafraid. Untroubled. No reason to doubt that he would soon see her again. And soon after that their child. A boy perhaps. Perhaps a girl. He would have felt for certain that everyone at home and all the men of his watch were safe and warm like him. No one to look out for now. No reason not to close his eyes. Dark. A pale of light around the rim.
Zodiacal
. Light from a sun long set, now shining elsewhere. He would not have known the word.
“My next crossing of the Gulf will be the final one for me. The first for you. But the ninth and last for me.”
“Why?”
“I’m not coming back. If I ever get away from here, I’m never coming back.”
“I’m not either.”
“The first and last crossing for you then.”
“What will where we go be like?”
“I don’t know. Nicer than here.”
But they didn’t go, because they couldn’t.
The nuns came by more often. They took Deacon aside and asked him if he liked Landish and did Landish treat him well. They took Landish aside and said that he and Deacon could not go on like this forever. Anyway, he had to go to school. If their situation didn’t soon improve, measures would be taken.
Landish called the two nuns Nun One and Nun Too Soon: Landish said she’d become a nun when someone told her to and she was too young to know she could say no. He said that Nun One was in charge. The other nun was nice. Her face and hands were always red. Landish said she had an after-bath complexion and could have been Deacon’s not-much-older sister. She never piped up except when Nun One told her to. She smiled at the floor.
Nun Too Soon brought him clothes that were donated to the Church. She carried a bag of them over her shoulder up the stairs and sorted through it while Nun One was talking to Landish. She found him shirts and trousers that fit. Nun One said they were from boys who were younger, but bigger, than him. Hand-me-ups, Landish called them. Nun Too Soon smiled at Deacon as he tried on the shirts and trousers.
He knew that he must somehow keep the boy away from school. He told the nuns who were nurses too of his Princeton education,
going along with their pretence that they never knew he had been to Princeton and didn’t know it was his father who had given to their Church the money that was buying food for them instead of for the boy whose circumstances so concerned them.
Landish told them he could go on teaching the boy at home, being better educated than anyone in any school who taught the lower forms. Just for a few more years at least, he said, knowing that Nun One would not abide the dragging on forever of this or any other manner of defiance.
He told them without invoking his last name that the boy would not survive a month, let alone a year, at school. He told them he was far too small, small in a way that no amount of food would fix, helpless in a way that other boys could smell, in a way that would have drawn them to pick on him even if he were twice their size.
“It’s true,” Nun One said. “I wouldn’t give him a fighting chance against a girl half his age.”
Nun One allowed that overcrowding was a problem, there being too few schools, so they would let him teach the boy at home until a place for him became available—a place for him to sit or stand, she might as well have said. Landish thought of Deacon cast adrift in such a place, the parentless, adopted son of a Druken who no longer had immunity, a powerless Druken who had no wealth to wield against the fathers of his classmates, the last of a line whose legendary wrath they could now avenge without fear of being blacklisted by the Drukens, and so turned away from every door.
The nuns who were nurses too began to give them a small amount of money each time they came to visit. They told Landish they would hear about it if he spent it on anything but food. Just before they gave Landish the money envelope, Nun One recited a prayer:
For every Bane there is a Blessing
For every Wound a Dressing
For every Malady and Misery a Cure.
On one occasion, Landish replied:
But I think it, Sister, worth confessing—
For it’s us you are assessing—
That it’s you we find the hardest to endure.
“I’m sure, Mr. Druken,” she said, “that you would find it no burden to do without your stipend for a month. But I think the boy would find it burdensome. Tell me, were you thinking of the boy or only of yourself when you made up that hurtful verse? Here is your stipend. I hope you’ll be more cordial the next time we stop by. You’re very clever, Mr. Druken, and you’re only in your twenties, but unless you turn it to some better use, your cleverness may outlive this little boy. You haven’t been poor long enough to truly understand what it means to be poor. But this child has lived in poverty since he was born.”
Landish knew she was right, knew that he’d not only been hurtful but selfish and reckless to mock Nun One who held Deacon’s fate in her hands.
A man they nicknamed the “wealth inspector,” of whom Hogan often spoke and who Landish thought meant well, began, at the behest of the nuns, to come by once a month to give them food vouchers and to see if the contents of the attic matched the list of their possessions, which he held in front of him on a clipboard as he walked about, ticking off each item with a pencil. He enumerated every object in the attic as if preparing for an auction. The table and two chairs. The bed. A few dishes and some cutlery. A few books. Gen of Eve and Captain Druken’s hat. Two washtubs.
His job was to make sure that those to whom he gave vouchers that could be redeemed for food at certain stores had no secret sources of income. Landish told Deacon that some wealth inspectors would quibble over the smallest gift. They would count the number of trout
you caught and dock you accordingly. Or the number of blueberries you still had strength enough to pick.
But
their
wealth inspector never quibbled. He always made the same joke, pretending that Deacon was an item on his list, opposite whose name there was a box in which he put an X.