“You can’t imagine what life in that house was like from then on. I suffered a breakdown. My mother was never able to convince my father that Vivvie’s death was an accident, but she pleaded with him not to leave to me less than my fair share of the estate. But there was much talk and speculation about what I might have done. The rumours persist to this day. I’ve no doubt they were rampant at Princeton.”
“I never heard a word of them,” Landish said. He shook his head in bewilderment. “Will you never be truthful with me? One way or another, we will likely never meet again. Are you going to leave me forever wondering what I mean or meant to you or what you might or might not have done?”
“Everything that I told you I felt for Vivvie I did feel. But I was terrified that my father would make good on his threats to disown me. I was still a child but I had heard of young men far better equipped than me to make their own way in the world come to misery and ruin when their fathers cut them loose—one who took his life and another who went insane and was committed to some dreadful place and there forgotten.
“I went to the nursery without having decided I would do it, let alone how. It had to seem to be an accident. I couldn’t be suspected. But I loved her, so I couldn’t bear to touch her, place a pillow on her face, fight her, subdue her perhaps. I knew I could never see that through.
“It occurred to me that the odds of survival would be in her favour if I simply put a button in her mouth. And the idea of letting someone or something else, some other agency, decide my sister’s fate appealed to me. I fancied I would not wholly be to blame if she died. If the button did her no harm, if she simply swallowed it, no one would know. If she began to choke and was saved, revived, and the button
was found and discovered to be mine, I would at most be accused of carelessness. As I would be if she died.
“So I removed the thread that attached the button to my shirt. I took the button between my thumb and forefinger, held it over her mouth and, when she yawned, simply dropped it in. I didn’t have to force it in, didn’t have to touch her. She closed her mouth but didn’t cough. She never made a sound. She merely looked at me as she always did. I kissed her on the forehead and hurried to my room. I lay, fully clothed, on my bed. I waited, not favouring one outcome over the others. I didn’t think or feel afraid. My mind was blank until I heard Nurse screaming.”
“Poor Vivvie,” Deacon said. He began to cry. “Oh God,” Esse whispered and Deacon took her hand.
“There is nothing at my core but guilt. There is otherwise no
being
at the innermost of me. I have nightmares that I was, am, the origin of nothing. Nothing began when I was born and the world will in no way be diminished by my death. I thought I would exist forever, in the minds of those who will one day admire this house and wonder about the man who built it. But I know that other greater men deserve that honour. I only bought their minds. And for me, it is ruined now. All of it. But I once thought that if nothing else you, Landish, were the kind of man who would remain my friend no matter what, no matter if you knew the truth.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
“I would have if you’d come to Vanderland when I first asked you to. I fancied that if I told you of my secret crime, my guilt would be halved, and that we would share a bond of friendship that no force on earth could break.”
He stood up and brushed the dust from the knees of his trousers.
“There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that can settle on you in a place like this at night. Perhaps you’ve felt it. The darkness. The silence. Or its opposite, the roaring of that awful mountain wind. This is not the sort of place where it pays to live alone.”
“Van, I do know what you speak of, that darkness. I left you to die at the hands of your wife. If not for Trull, you would be dead now, and I would be as guilty as your wife.”
“My dear Landish. Goodbye. We’ll resume our own paths through Just Mist. I’ll often wonder what became of you, but I’ll never seek you out again. Go. You can read about me and mine and Vanderland in the papers. Take Deacon and Miss Esse with you. And Captain Druken’s hat. But give me back the ring box that my father gave me. I’ll store the button somewhere in the Rume.”
He gave them a carriage drawn by a pair of horses. Deacon and Miss Esse sat up front with Landish who held the reins. They found the road that went to Ashton but they turned the other way. Landish said they would go north all night if they could. He wasn’t sure if they were fugitives. They would shadow the train for a while. They would wind their way along the rivers, through the valleys, between the mountains you could never reach no matter if you drove for days. Mountains, he told Deacon, were the opposite of people. They came out of the Womb of Time as big as they would ever be. The mountains in the west were young and strong. They had snow that never melted. The mountains of the east were in Just Mist. They were little more than hills they were starting to forget.
The Blue Ridge and the Smokies. The Appalachians. And all the other names they never knew and never would because there was only one place where they knew the names of everything—and they were going back there now. They were headed home to Newfoundland and Landish thought for the first time that they might just make it.
Landish felt the past, the present, the history, the yearning of a nation that, like Newfoundland, would never have a heyday, passing by them in the dark.
Boswell had said that you should write a biography as if you were
taking revenge for a friend. Landish had been doing something like that in his novel, had been adding his voice to that of the many who had condemned the Drukens. Yet he understood the Drukens better than he did the people whose lives they had destroyed. This was what caused his distaste for his own words, drove him to rid himself of them as if he were scraping dirt from long-neglected fingernails. It was pointless for him to assay a depiction of the Drukens in a novel as if he were a literary vigilante. His writer’s voice, if it was but one more of accusation, was superfluous.
He thought of the pair of wooden crosses on the hill below Mount Carmel, the unattended grave of Deacon’s mother, the unattended plot of Deacon’s father. He thought of Carson who stayed behind so that the men and boys would think, long past the point of hopelessness, that there might still be hope. He thought about Captain Druken. He should have gone to see him, forced his way into the old man’s house, anything rather than let the oath of disownment be the final words that passed between them.
He wondered if, one day, unable to bear life at Vanderland, Gertrude would make good on her fantasy. He imagined the whole house and grounds ablaze, along with the Pleasure Gardens and the many-coloured grasses of the Ramble, the apple orchards and the forest from which Van chose the trees that would smell the best when he burned them in the Rume. The Rume, the twenty-five thousand books it held, the chess set by which Napoleon whiled away his exile, the survivor of the pair of Ming Dynasty bowls, the gallery of tapestries, the paintings by Renoir and Manet, the sculpture-cluttered living halls, the hanging lanterns and the buttressed dome of the Winter Garden, the principal tower and its stairwell-spanning series of iron chandeliers, the dormers and the windows as high as schooner sails, the colonnades festooned with gargoyles and figureheads, the many terraces, the main conservatory, the master clock above the entrance to the stables, the Greater Banquet Hall, the yellow bedroom and the red one next door
that Van forsook in favour of the Rume, the never-seen-by-Landish kitchens, the bachelors’ wing, The Blokes—the fall of Vanderland would be reflected upside down in the surface of Lake Loom.
Landish hoped that it would never come to that, hoped that, as Van had said, something could be salvaged. Long after Van had left it, long after his reasons for building it had been forgotten, the great house and its treasury of art would still endure, a commemoration of a dream that would live on oblivious to the circumstances of its birth, to such temptations as those by which Van had been overthrown. It sorrowed Landish to think that, in that parallel, unlived life of Just Mist, the day that Van had sought him out when they were students was, would always be, the first day of a friendship that neither he nor Van would ever spoil, the very meeting of two souls which Van, at least, had guessed was the way to his salvation.
As they made their way home, Landish wrote the first of many words that he left unburned. After reading them aloud to Esse as Deacon slept, he stored them in the box with Gen of Eve and Captain Druken’s hat.
Author’s Endnote
G
EORGE
V
ANDERBILT
died unexpectedly while recuperating from an appendectomy in March of 1914 at the age of fifty-two, his personal fortune exhausted but for Biltmore. Cornelia was married in 1924 at Biltmore, the near-exclusive home of her first twenty-one years. She was divorced in 1934 at the age of thirty-four and did not remarry. After George’s death, Edith married Peter Goelet Gerry, senator of Rhode Island.
Acknowledgements
D
IANE
M
ARTIN
, erstwhile and much-missed publisher at Knopf Canada, saw me through the writing of much of this book, and most of my other books. She has been a true friend these past twenty years. She often said she had the best job in the world, and she would still have it if not for an unforgiving illness. Canadian literature has lost a great champion. Diane and her husband, David, now live in their most loved place on earth: Woody Point, Newfoundland. They are Newfoundlanders. Louise Dennys, executive publisher at Random House of Canada, is now my editor. Her graceful and gracious brilliance has helped sustain me over the past year. My book and I owe her a debt that cannot be expressed. Many thanks and much affection to assistant editor Amanda Lewis, whose keen eye and wonderful sense of humour were such a boon to me. Sharon Klein, my publicist—what can I say but that you somehow keep on getting both better and younger. Hats off and a cigar to my agent Robert Lescher. Love and thanks to my brothers and sisters, Ken, Craig, Brian, Cynthia and Stephanie. We saw Mom and Dad and each other through it. The six of us together saw them home. A final word of love to Rose, Rose of all my days.
Wayne Johnston was born and raised in the St. John’s area of Newfoundland. His nationally bestselling novels include
The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York
and
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
, which was an international bestseller and will be made into a film. Johnston is also the author of an award-winning and bestselling memoir,
Baltimore’s Mansion
. He lives in Toronto.