The Hundred-Year House (9 page)

Fran shook her head in horror, but her eyes were lit with gossip. “Is he in trouble?”

“He’ll be in trouble if he
needs
to be. Who knows if it’s even true. But, as a senior—if you heard anything from younger women, anyone in your sorority—I hope you’d let someone know. At this point they’re just gathering information. And you didn’t hear it from me, please.”

As Fran left, Zee took her shoes off and stretched her feet. Later that same day, she watched Golda Blum and some man she’d never seen before, a dumpy guy in a communist-green polo shirt who could only work for IT, go into Cole’s office without him.

—

“It’s marvelous,” Gracie said. They were at the breakfast table in the big house late that afternoon. Zee had just told her she could stop worrying about Doug, that there
would
be openings by the fall, as long as he could finish his book in an unshared house. (The debate would take months, of course, and they’d let Cole finish the year. But they’d start the head hunt soon to replace him.) Hidalgo, under the table, breathed hot air on Zee’s legs. “Do you think the school will really remain open, though, after this whole computer thing?” It took Zee a few terrifying seconds to realize she meant the Y2K bug. “Bruce reads absolutely all the news, and the smartest people are saying it’s just the end of everything.”

Sofia was cleaning out the refrigerator, tossing old containers
of deli salads Gracie and Bruce had never gotten around to eating. Zee wanted to ask her more about that dress, that yellow dress that had no reason to be on the floor, but now was not the time. It had been bothering her for weeks now, and the more she thought about it, the more she felt that somehow she’d seen it very recently, and remembered touching it. She’d started to consider that she might have done something in her sleep, walked to the big house and found the dress, crumpled it and hidden it from Miriam.

But this was ridiculous, and she’d long ago trained herself not to second-guess things to the point where she lost the reality of them. She used to worry all the time about losing her mind. In the library at boarding school she’d found a book,
The New World Barons
, published in the 1960s, with sections on the Palmers and Carnegies and Devohrs, among others. “The Devohr history is not one of summer estates and long lineage held taut by familial love; it is one of scandal, Diaspora, insanity.” She spent hours on the floor between shelves, reading about the Devohrs who killed themselves, the ones who vanished into Mexico, the one they found buried under old newspapers. She returned to the book many times, to trace the lines of the small, gray jaws with her pinky. Great-aunts and distant cousins. Her grandfather, Gamaliel, as a long-haired boy in a dress. (His mother, Violet, not a Devohr by birth and not a Devohr for long, merited mention only as “another suicide.”) Zee had never met any of them. Gracie’s parents died before Zee was born, and Gracie’s brothers were all “degenerates” to whom she no longer spoke. No cousins ever visited, no aunts. The Devohrs weren’t people so much as sea turtles that laid their eggs and then crawled back to the ocean, not particularly invested in meeting their progeny ever again. That she and Gracie were relatively close was a miracle.

Gracie said, “Do you think the college might find a job for Case as well? Something in the business office?”

Zee was still contemplating what kind of response this merited when Gracie’s phone rang. She answered it and handed it to Zee. It was Doug.

“Hey!” he said. “You’re at your mom’s!” He was a terrible actor.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, no, I just wondered. So you won’t be back for a while?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Okay. Like, a whole hour? Okay!”

She hung up and told her mother she needed to get going right away.

“It’s just as well. Some poor fellow’s coming over to take pictures. The architects are sending him. I don’t know what on earth he wants.”

Zee put her teacup in the sink, kissed her mother’s cheek, and ran out the side door. A car was pulling up to the front, the beat-up black Saturn of the architectural lackey, who had no idea what Gracie would put him through.

In the coach house, it seemed eerily like a normal Thursday afternoon. Miriam on the sunporch, fully clothed, working on her unloved dress collages. Case sulking at the kitchen table. Doug sprawled on the bed with
Sports Illustrated
, smiling, as if he’d been expecting her.

25

O
n the phone, Leland had said the pictures turned out but he wasn’t sure what the hell he was looking for. Doug didn’t know why this was disappointing. He hadn’t really believed Leland would find a cardboard box labeled “Parfitt’s Memoirs.” But somewhere between getting Leland into the attic, and getting Zee out of the house in time, and arranging this meeting down at the beach, Doug had come to assume there would be a major payoff. He’d stopped considering the possibility that Bruce was wrong about the file cabinets. That there might be nothing there but a pile of dusty bed frames. He’d forgotten that even if there
were
colony files, they might have just been heating bills.

It was a cool, sunny day, and Lake Michigan was Caribbean blue. Doug found Leland and Miriam at separate picnic benches on the grass between the sand and the cars. He introduced them, and Leland poured out an envelope of snapshots: windows, bureaus with missing drawers, piles of headboards and desk chairs, and yes, four black metal file cabinets, each two drawers high, with no visible locks.

“They were old enough. You see the script on the logo?” He’d managed to sneak a close-up of the manufacturer’s plaque on one cabinet. “Looks like what, forties? Fifties? That fits, right?” Leland attempted to lay the photos into the general shape of the attic. “It wasn’t easy,” he said. He was taking up one whole bench, his legs
spread wide, looking at Miriam in her yellow shirt in a way that implied Doug had sold her short. “I didn’t tell her it was the attic I wanted till I’d thanked her a million times, told her what a jackass my boss was, how I was afraid I’d get fired. So by the time I said ‘attic,’ she’d feel bad saying no. Oh, and I told her my girlfriend was from Toronto. That helped. I don’t have a girlfriend, but hey. So she
did
say no, she told me there were bats and she hadn’t been up there in years. So I go, ‘Oh, well if it’s hard for you to climb, I can go by myself.’”

“Oooh, brilliant!” Gurgle of southern laughter, toss of curls.

“So twenty seconds later she’s marching up the stairs. And here.” He shuffled through the photos and found two of the attic door—one from outside, one from inside. “It’s a simple old lock. The key was just two prongs.”

“But she had the key
on
her?”

“No. I mean, I was exaggerating about the twenty seconds. Really she disappeared for five minutes and came back with the key. So sue me. I’m a poet. I’m prone to exaggeration.” He grinned at Miriam, who was too absorbed in the photos to notice.

“Here’s what I think,” she said. “I doubt there’s anything valuable there. No one would put a rolled up painting in a file cabinet.”

“But a poem!” Leland said. “A poem that was part of someone’s application!”

“Slides,” Doug said. “Letters of recommendation. Project proposals. Listen: Just this summer? The New York Public Library bought the archives from the Yaddo colony for some huge amount, and they’re saying there’s unpublished Carson McCullers in there. We’re not in the same league, but still.”

“So how do we convince her to let us look?”

Doug sighed and watched the joggers going past. He wasn’t sure if Gracie’s persistent and decisive evasion of Laurelfield history had to do with her guilt at having displaced the colony, or
her shame at being associated with so many unwashed artists, but she hadn’t budged. At Bruce’s birthday dinner last week, when Doug had asked if historians had ever shown interest in documenting Laurelfield, Gracie had said, “Douglas, isn’t there something more productive you ought to focus on? Perhaps you could publish a novel.” (“What is her
problem
?” Miriam had whispered later. “Her energy is so off.”)

“What if we talk her into donating it to a library?” Leland said. “Or the college?”

Doug said, “I think she’d sooner donate her kidneys.”

“It doesn’t seem that Gracie’s the right person to make the judgment call,” Miriam said. “She’s not a writer, she’s not an artist, she’s not a historian. And didn’t you say”—she turned to Leland—“it’s an easy lock to pick?”

When a man sat down at the next bench with his laptop they began whispering, but what they came up with over the next hour was a hypothetical scenario so risky that Doug knew he’d never pull the trigger on it. They were having fun though, and so he let Leland and Miriam plot.

They agreed that the best time to break into the attic would
not
be on one of the rare occasions when both Gracie and Bruce were gone. Sofia was usually around, as were Bruce’s personal secretary and the guy who came to walk Hidalgo. If someone met them on their way out, they’d have a hard time explaining the armloads of files. Miriam was the one who remembered the Democratic fund-raiser Gracie and Bruce were hosting in early December, which Doug and Zee and the younger Breens would be expected to attend. They could easily smuggle Leland in. Sofia would be working downstairs with the caterers. It would be loud. No one would hear if they had to bust down the attic door.

“It’ll be like
Notorious
!” Miriam said. “Only we won’t get caught like Ingrid Bergman.” Seeing how her hands flew around
her hair and her nose flared out, how her whole face was pink and bright, Doug wondered if she’d actually been depressed all summer. Those other times she’d seemed happy, like standing on the counter that first day with those plates, it must have been something fake. It was nothing like this.

Doug finally shook his head. “Zee would never forgive me,” he said. “Not for going after the files, but—I mean, Gracie would kick us out.” He could imagine his mother-in-law smiling thinly, saying that now that he’d found a new career in espionage, he could surely afford his own home.

“It’s five weeks away,” Miriam said. “You have time to decide. Don’t say no just yet.”

When they finally disbanded, Doug felt they should all put their hands in a heap and chant something, like a field hockey team. But he let it end with Miriam heading down the beach for pebbles and he and Leland trudging all the way back to town for coffee.

“You jackass,” Leland said as they crossed the train tracks. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

“What?”

He shook his head in a rueful way that he must have stood in front of the mirror and practiced, a poet’s astonishment at the varied and exasperating world. “You rate a woman a six point five and go off about how crazy she is.”

“Oh, she has her moments. I probably didn’t do her justice.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re in love with her.”

Doug almost ran into the guardrail. So they were starting, the inevitable assumptions. He decided to wait long enough that his answer wouldn’t seem defensive, because it wasn’t, and he needed Leland to understand that.

They were all the way across the street by the time he said, “I am sincerely not.”

“I’m just saying, the only reason I can think to sell a lovely person like that so short is that maybe you’re fighting something.”

“Or maybe she’s really crazy. You walk in when she’s working, and she looks like a homeless person. She’s got pencils behind both ears, and pins sticking from her mouth, hair frizzed out. Her pupils are fully dilated.”

“Okay, sure. Sure. But let me ask you this: Why do you keep walking in when she’s working?”

Doug considered punching Leland in the face, but decided against it.

26

A
s Zee sorted handouts before class, the talk grew shrill in the corner. “It was right there on the screen,” Meghan Dwyer said. A smart, sweet girl who could actually write. Everyone was turned toward her. “And I wouldn’t say it was underage stuff. But it was graphic. I know some people are picturing just, like, a topless woman leaning on a car. But this was, like—” she looked around, saw Zee immersed in her papers, and mouthed the words “—
butt-fucking
.”

Zee wondered, in brief amazement, if it
had
all
been true, if she’d simply set things in motion. But no, this was her own creation, her own monster. She had willed this into being.

—

Near the end of class, Dev Kapoor raised his hand, a look on his face like he was trying to fend off a headache. He said, “How come ghosts are always from the past? I mean, why are they never from the future?” The class snickered. Zee suspected his peers had a different impression of Dev than she’d gotten from his workmanlike papers.

“Go on,” she said.

“A ghost from the future would have a lot more at stake. Ghosts from the past are always in the Hamlet model, right? Like, remember me and avenge my death. But a ghost from the future is going to be desperate. If things don’t go right he won’t be born.”

“Time doesn’t work that way,” Fran Leffler said, and then they all started in, telling him he’d watched too many movies.

“Maybe I don’t mean a ghost. More like a spirit or a force. But anyway, my point is, a ghost from the future
wouldn’t
be scary, right?”

Zee said, “So we’re afraid of the undead, but not the unborn.”

Sarah Bonheur thrust her hand definitively into the air and didn’t wait to be called on. “
A Christmas Carol
,” she said. “By Charles Dickens. The ghost of Christmas Future is the scariest of all.”

Dev said, “Oh. Right,” and collapsed back in his chair.

But Antwon Haynes picked up the ball. “That’s an exception. Maybe it’s like what we’re afraid of isn’t death, but the
past
. No one walks by a crime scene the very next day and feels a ghost. It takes twenty years, right?”

They were on to something, Zee thought. We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we’d be to them.