A World Elsewhere (36 page)

“I know now whom I’m dealing with.”

“I am very fond of Deacon, even more so than I am of Goddie who, as you know, is not my daughter.”

“Deacon is not your son.”

“Nor yours. He will soon get over you. Sooner than I did. If you do the sensible thing. We’ll go back to the house by the vineyard and inside by the cellar door.” He tipped his hat to Mr. Trull. “Keep your eye on him. He looks like he has a mind to make a fuss.”

In the Smoker, Deacon sat with the Blokes. At dinner, Goddie had been the same as always. She was Goddie the Bad for a while. She told him he’d be a Bloke when he grew up, but not at Vanderland because there’d be no need for Blokes when she was gone. All the Blokes would be turned out and wind up God knows where. They wouldn’t just stay in The Blokes until they died, like Palmer would. Then she started crying and said she felt sorry for the Blokes. Deacon wondered if Mr. Vanderluyden would let the Blokes stay in The Blokes when there was no one left for them to tutor. He might if Deacon was still there and asked him to.

The others had left the Smoker and gone to bed. Landish sat in a chair before the fire. He looked around. Three windowless rooms. He couldn’t hear a sound from outdoors, nor any from inside the house except those of Gough preparing for the night, whose shadow he could see beneath the door.

He was trapped, now, with no choice but to leave Vanderland without Deacon. He tried to convince himself that it was for the best. He thought about the attic and the privations that Deacon had assumed were commonplace. He thought of how it would be for Deacon if his having a roof over his head ever again depended on a man as small-souled as the nobleman, or someone even worse. He prayed that never again in his life would Deacon have to curry favour with or be polite to a man like Hogan.

At Vanderland, all that he couldn’t do for Deacon, or protect him
from, would fall away. What the boy had so far suffered and endured would sink into the Murk.

But it might take less than Landish going to prison to make Deacon fret himself to death. Whatever assurances Landish gave him, Deacon would think it was his fault. There would be no convincing him that Landish would not be poor and perish like a dog that no one could afford to feed, that he would not be lonely in the nighttime when the wind came up and it sounded as if the walls were caving in, that he would not be sad when he remembered Deacon. Unless he could give him a lifetime of reassurance in the few minutes or hours that Van might let them have to say goodbye, the boy would fret and mope and pine until the knobs of his backbone were poking through his belly.

Van had sent him two bottles of cognac. He swore to the Blokes that he would only have a taste. He drank both bottles.

“I’ve thought it all through,” Landish told Van the next night, after being summoned to the Rume. “You’re right. I’m leaving Vanderland without Deacon, so better that I do so in the way that least upsets him.”

“It’s for the best.” Van smiled. “You’ll think so, years from now.”

Van extended his hand but Landish ignored it.

“There is another matter, another person involved.”

“Another person without whom you’d hate to leave.”

“Yes.”

“Yes. And I thought Gertrude’s was the worst-kept secret at Vanderland. A governess. A governess of all things. Sedgewick and others have told me. You have apparently done a poor job of hiding your infatuation with this girl. You and your governess will soon leave in the Packard. A good thing I taught you how to drive it.”

“I’d like a few days. I want to say a proper goodbye, not just to Deacon but the Blokes and Goddie—and your wife.”

“You’ll leave three days from now.” Van handed him an envelope. “Money. A lot. Enough to take you and Godwin’s governess far from here. Be careful that it isn’t stolen from you.”

Landish nodded. “Take good care of Deacon.”

“I’ve changed, Landish. I’ve come to realize the true worth of the lofty sentiments of novelists and poets and artists of all kinds. Such sentiments are merely the means by which we fool ourselves into thinking that we’re as noble in life as we portray ourselves to be in books. But when that nobility is tested, it will not stand. You, a sealer’s son, must know that. You are hardly a Romantic.”

“Perhaps I’ve changed.”

“I think you’ll be glad to hear I’m divorcing Gertrude. On the grounds of adultery. I’ll never cease to be the laughingstock of Vanderland and New York until I do. Deacon’s becoming my son will mean the rebirth of Vanderland.

“So the main reason is that I don’t want her to have anything to do with Deacon’s upbringing. I’m sure you don’t, either. I don’t want her interfering or telling Goddie things that she’ll repeat to him.

“I won’t leave her destitute either. I won’t destroy her. I’ll find something modest for her in New York, support her in some fashion. I’d rather not be embarrassed by the ongoing spectacle of Gertrude Vanderluyden’s decline.

“Goddie will stay here, of course. She isn’t mine by blood, but she is in every other way. I hope it’s not too late to remove the mark of Gertrude from her.

“It is my hope that Goddie and Deacon will become brother and sister—and great friends. It will do each of them a world of good to have the other as a sibling. It will take some time for Goddie to get used to Gertrude being gone. But she and Deacon can learn much from each other. You know, Landish, I feel more hopeful than I have
since I first met you. I believe that most of us will look back fondly on the coming days, however difficult things may be at first.”

Landish lay down on the sofa in the Smoker and hoped for sleep to come until, certain that it never would, he got up and tried first to write and then to read, but could manage neither. He sat all night in a chair beside the window, staring out into the darkness until the blue of morning began to show above the Ridge. He went out and walked downslope to the shoreline of Lake Loom. He loved the volatility of the sky in North Carolina. Clouds were always racing in some direction, even on sunny days, as if they were in a panic, all clearing out to somewhere else while they still could.

He looked up at the house.
The premises of my nemesis
.

When the sun was fully up, he went back to the house.

Mr. Vanderluyden told Deacon about bitterness and failure and strong young men who died of broken hearts when they were older because they never had a chance to live out their dreams. He said that Landish had agreed to leave, even though he would miss Deacon and Deacon would miss him, so Deacon could live out his dreams.

Deacon pictured Landish watching as the footman put his carpet bag and typewriter and Captain Druken’s hat into the boot of his new motor car—a present from Mr. Vanderluyden. He pictured Landish sitting with Esse in the front seat of the motor car as they drove away from Vanderland. They would go down the winding hill beneath the branches of the trees, between the bare stalks of flowers that grew higher than a man, past the gatepost, through the archway of the main gate lodge, then down the last hill to the bumpy road that led to Ashton.

Landish read, yet again, the letter that Deacon had left on his pillow.

Dear Landish:

You picked me. I didnt pick you. A baby cant decide who picks it. You picked me because my mother made you pick me. But now Im old enough so Im picking Mr. Vanderluyden. He picked me too. He says Ill never want anything. Id rather be the ear of Vanderland than perish of neglect. Youre funnier than him but youre not too funny when your decks awash. Thats why Gough gets mad with you. You dont care if someone gets the sack because of you. Peple are afraid of you because youre big your voice is loud and you get mad a lot. Youre ten times as big as Goddie and you made her cry. So I think you should go away and write your book and take care of Esse and Gen of Eve and your fathers hat. Be on your merry way. Im glad you told me about the murk and the Womb of Time
.

Thats all

Yours truly

Deacon

Alone in the Smoker, Landish stood in front of the portrait of Gen of Eve. Gen of Eve and Landish. He looked at his mother’s hint of a smile, her dark eyes.

His mother had left him when he was about the same age as Deacon. Except that Gen of Eve was not to blame, whereas he would not now be leaving Deacon if he hadn’t stolen Captain Druken’s hat, if he had found some alternative to writing to Van, asking him to help them.

Landish had been left with a man who might well have been deranged. Now he had no choice but to do the same with Deacon. Even if he, Deacon and Esse somehow managed to escape from the estate,
they would be indigent fugitives trying to outrun a Vanderluyden. What a futile, harrowing interval of freedom they would have. One from which Deacon might never recover and that might end with Esse standing trial as the accomplice of a thief.

He wondered what Gen of Eve would do, what advice she would give him.

He remembered when there had been just him and his mother in his father’s house. Gough had said that she looked tired or something in the portrait. She was pregnant so that might be it. She might have been feeling apprehensive about the sort of life her child would have with Captain Druken as its father—boy or girl, it would have been born a Druken and a Druken forever be. Gen of Eve, she had called herself, a child of Eve, as, in a sense, all men and women were, a child of the first woman who had had no last name, just as her husband, Adam, had none. But she had signed the portrait “Gen of Eve Marcot”—not her married name. “Landish” she had called him. It was an unusual name. More of a last name than a first name. She said she didn’t want him to have to share his name with anyone. She could have made up any name but yet she made up that one. Perhaps the woman who coined “Gen of Eve” had had a reason?

He sat at one of the end tables, took a pen and a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote “Landish” on the paper. He tried its anagrams. His land. Island if not for the “H.” Maybe she thought “Landish” would incline him to do Landish things and stay away from the sea. He made up anagrams of “Landish Druken” and came up with nothing that made sense. He tried “Landish” with his mother’s maiden name, “Marcot.” His mother had signed “Gen of Eve Marcot.” He had never been certain for what reason. In defiance of the infamous Captain Druken who left her alone so many days and nights, spurned their house and their bed in favour of the
Gilbert?

Landish Marcot. Then he remembered that she had given him a middle initial. ‘B.’ Landish B. Marcot.

In no time he unscrambled the letters. He didn’t even need to write them down.

“Not Abram’s Child,” he said out loud, looking at the sketch of Gen of Eve. “It’s been in my name all along, waiting to be found.”

His father had known. Captain Druken, the man who “brought back” a million seals, had known that he could not bring forward from his wife a single child. He had known that another man had fathered Landish, the boy whom others had taken to be his son and whom he raised as if he
was
his son. Though the last part might not be true. He might not have sent to Princeton a young man he knew to be a Druken, might not have allowed him to renounce the
Gilbert
and refuse to follow in his father’s footsteps. He might have forced him to captain the
Gilbert
, or tried to. But knowing that Landish was not his son, he knew what no one else still living knew, that the Druken line had ended, that the apparent line of succession was a sham. And so he had renounced Landish in spirit, perhaps, long before he had done so in practice … And had given to Landish a token whose ironic meaning he assumed he would never know, never decipher, the bitterly jestful last vestige of the Drukens, the cuckold’s hat, emblem of a dynasty defunct and of the marriage of two who remained “unmarried” and alone until the end.

He walked around the room, went back to the portrait. His very name was a refutation of the Drukens, of the man in whose footsteps it was assumed by all that he would follow, the man whose nature, whose family’s nature, he feared he had inherited. He wondered if his mother would have told him when he was old enough to understand.

Gen of Eve. The meaning of the sketch and of her signing it Gen of Eve was that Landish was not Captain Druken’s or the other man’s son but hers and hers alone. Wholly hers. As if he had no father. Gen of Eve’s.
Mother, I have lost him. I have been a vain and vengeful fool. Abram’s blood may as well be mine, though yours runs in my veins. The blood of a woman who would have been a fitting wife for Carson of the
Gilbert. You
are in me, as I was in you when you drew this likeness of yourself. In my circumstances, what would you do? Not even the half of me that is composed of you can find an answer. I have lost him, the little boy whose life has so changed mine, a life I accepted into my care just as you brought me into yours
.