A Ship Made of Paper (38 page)

Daniel suddenly notices that Phil Russell is looking oddly at him, and

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Daniel quickly says, “It’ll be great to see this old place brought back to its former glory.”

“It’s really something,” Russell says. He has been taking in his surroundings and his eyes are registering some alarm. Eight Chimneys’

derelict state unnerves him, it seems to suggest a kind of madness. “What do you think the square footage is in this place?”

“I don’t think houses like this
have
square footage.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” He smooths his shirt over his cinder-block stomach. “It’s going to take a lot more than state historic money to put this puppy back on its hindquarters again. We’re going to have to think about the Fed, and private donations.” He smiles his high school hero smile. “But that’s okay, we’re going to make it happen because it’s the right thing to do.”

Daniel sees Kate across the room, talking with noticeable animation to a man in his fifties, a writer from the city named Barry Braithwaite. Braithwaite, a small, sickly man with bloodshot eyes and yellowed fingers, has written several articles about O. J. Simpson, mostly concentrating on the sociopathology of the coddled athlete. Kate has her hand on his shoulder and whispers something in Braithwaite’s ear. Braithwaite tucks his chin in and looks at her with considerable amazement, as if she has just made the most transgressive remark he has ever heard, and then he laughs.

Just then, Derek Pabst comes in, dressed in a dark-brown suit, a yellow shirt, and brown tie. He looks uneasy as he sways in the entrance to the ballroom, squeezing his large hands together, rolling his broad shoulders, and casting his eyes around for a familiar face. It is not that Derek is a stranger to the people here, but most of them are too wealthy and too grand to be a part of his social life. He has issued them speeding tickets, brought them sad news about missing dogs and cats, shot rabid raccoons on their porches, been in their homes after break-ins, and even responded to a couple of domestic abuse calls, but drinking wine and chatting with this collection of doctors, lawyers, academics, writers, and the idle well-to-do on a Sunday afternoon in a mansion by the river is outside his usual experience. When he sees Daniel across the room, his face lights up with relief.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“Hello, good buddy,” he says, grabbing Daniel’s elbow.

“Hello, Derek,” Daniel says. He is about to ask,
What are you doing
here?
but he stops himself.

Derek looks around, taking in his surroundings. “You hear all these rumors about what this place is like on the inside, but it’s not so bad, not like I thought.”

“Derek Pabst,” Daniel says. “This is Phil Russell.”

Russell puts his hand out and Derek shakes it, but he is clearly distracted.

“Is Kate here?” he asks.

“She’s over there. What about Stephanie?”

“She’s home with Chelsea.” Derek peers around the room. “Where’s Kate. I actually need to talk to her.” He senses the confusion in Daniel’s eyes. “I’ve got a little more information about those runaway kids from Star of Bethlehem, I know she’s concerned.” He suddenly sees her.

“There she is.” He smooths his tie against his shirt. “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as Derek is gone, Russell looks at his watch. “Point Mary Thorne out for me, will you?” he asks Daniel. “She’s the one who sent us the invitation.”

“Marie. She’s right over there, come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Russell repeats the name softly to himself, committing it to memory.

As they make their way to the other side of the ballroom, Daniel looks for Ruby, who is suddenly not in sight. By now, most of the guests have arrived. The talk is loud and excited; people are still telling their storm stories. Ferguson is in front of the fireplace, heaving a four-foot birch log in, and Susan is at his side, with her finger hooked through his empty belt loop, and looks to be speaking to him with extreme displeasure. Marie, holding a plastic cup of white wine, is talking with Ethan Greenblatt, Marlowe College’s young president. Marie’s attention is rapt, though she seems not to realize how unusually tall Greenblatt is and her eyes are fixed not on his face but his chest. If Greenblatt finds this unnerving, he is nevertheless unde-terred from going on at some length about oddities in the history of Eight

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Chimneys—though born in Montreal and raised in Palo Alto, Greenblatt knows as much as any of the river aristocracy about the town’s grand past.

“Do you know,” he says, in a voice that is at once declamatory and ironic, “Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hem-ingway all have spent the night in this house, and there is no other structure on record in which all four of these luminaries have stayed.” When Greenblatt sees Daniel and Russell approaching, he rests his hand on Marie’s shoulder, as if to prevent them from stealing her away. “And its political past is actually more extensive and, well, paradoxical than its cultural past. Dorothy Day, Frederick Douglass,Winston Churchill, Oc-tavio Paz, all the Roosevelts, of course, Woodrow Wilson—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Daniel says.

“I’m just finishing, Daniel,” Greenblatt says. “I’m making a plea.” He raises both hands as if to hold Daniel off, and then petitions for Marie’s attentions again by touching her lightly. “I would like Marlowe College to be somehow involved in the Eight Chimneys Project, in either curat-ing or administrating the museum, if it so happens that it comes to pass.

Obviously, we can’t help in terms of finances, but we could bring a lot of expertise and legitimacy to the project, and it would be a real boon to our history department, which, by the way, already rivals the best history departments in the country.”

“We’re okay on legitimacy, Ethan,” Marie says. “What we’re looking for is money.”

Just then, Daniel hears Ruby’s voice rising high above the wall-to-wall murmur of the party. At first, the sound alarms him, but then he hears it for what it is: a long trill of joy, and he knows there is only one person who can make Ruby quite that happy. Nelson’s here.

Daniel hurries to the entrance hall. Ruby holds Nelson’s hand and jumps up and down, trying to incite him to her level of frenzied joy, but Nelson is having none of it. He is glancing over his shoulder at his parents, who are taking their coats off and looking around, trying to figure out where to put them.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“Ruby, Ruby, calm down,” Daniel says, making his presence known.

He would like to think he is smiling casually, though he can’t be sure.

“You were right!” Ruby says. “They’re here!” She pushes her doll onto Daniel. “Hold this,” she says, and then turns to Nelson. “You want chips?”

“Hey, you two,” Daniel says to Iris and Hampton. In his desire to sound chipper, his voice comes out far too strongly. “Coats are in there, in the conservatory.” A rush of dizziness. It seems he has forgotten how to distribute his weight when standing. He tries to look only at Hampton but is unable to keep his gaze off Iris. She is wearing a black sweater and jeans; she has a little Band-Aid on her right thumb and he resists the impulse to ask her how she hurt herself, and further resists the more absurd but equally powerful impulse to take her hand and kiss it. Iris has Hampton’s coat and she carries it off with her own, leaving the two men alone for a moment. A wild stab of disappointment goes through Daniel—if Iris had given the coats to Hampton, she and Daniel could have had ten seconds of privacy.

“Nelson, come back here,” Hampton commands. Nelson stops as if on the end of a leash and turns around to look at his father. Hampton crooks his finger and Nelson dutifully walks back to his side. Like Daniel—just like Daniel, in fact—he wears khaki trousers and a blue blazer, though his are more expensively tailored.The ceiling fixtures cast a brilliant light on his hairless dome.

“Where are we?” Hampton asks Nelson.

“Sorry,” Nelson says.

“Question repeated. Where
are
we?”

Iris emerges from the coatroom. She is pushing up the sleeves of her sweater. Her face is expressionless.

“In a house,” Nelson says.

“Correct. So? Can we please have
inside
behavior? Which means no running, no loud voices. All right?”

How would it play if I slugged him? Daniel wonders.

Nelson nods yes, and backs out of the entrance hall without taking his eyes off Hampton, as if to never turn his back on the king.

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Then Daniel and Hampton, and Iris between them, walk into the ballroom, without looking at each other and without saying a word. Ferguson is standing on an old harp-backed chair in front of the fireplace, with his hands cupped over his mouth. “Attention, everybody,” he calls out. His voice is authoritative, but with something good-natured in it, too, something that recognizes the absurdity of shouting at a roomful of people in Windsor County on a warm Sunday afternoon in November.

“We’re going to take you all on a grand tour of this house, this wonderful house, which I speak of not with the pride of ownership but the humility of stewardship.” There is a smattering of applause; someone even says
hear hear
.

“What’s this about?” Hampton asks.

“We’re here to support the house,” Iris says. “So they want to show it to us. Why is that a problem?”

Hampton shakes his head. He is clearly here against his wishes. He sees Nelson and gestures for him to come, which the boy does, immediately, with Ruby following.

Ferguson jumps off the chair and tosses wine from his plastic cup into the fireplace, igniting a sudden whoosh of flame. “Everybody line up along the west wall, and we’ll exit the ballroom through the double doors, and go straight to the portrait gallery.”

The guests are good-natured and compliant, and a line immediately forms. “I’m going to find Kate,” Daniel announces, forcing himself away from Iris and Hampton.

He cranes his neck, trying to find her in the crowd.

“Ruby can come with us,” Iris says.

The suggestion seems intimate and kind. Daniel cannot even look at her for fear of giving everything away. There is still no sign of Kate, and Daniel is the last out of the ballroom as the tour begins.Then he sees her, coming out of a bathroom near the main stairway. She seems startled to see all the guests in a line, making their way up the stairs. The tip of her nose is red; it looks as if she might have been crying.

“Tour,” Daniel says.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“Let’s get out of here.” She looks at the doll in Daniel’s hand, furrows her brow.

“We just got here. Come on.They’ll show us around.You’ve never really seen this place.”

They can hear Ferguson’s voice from the landing of the second floor.

“On the way to the portrait gallery, you’ll notice quite a few first-rate paintings in the hallway. And you’ll also notice a few blank spots, where paintings have been taken down and brought to Sotheby’s.”

“Did you know she was going to be here?”

“Who?”

“Please, don’t insult me.”

He hadn’t meant to, it was just the first word out of his mouth. “No,”

he says. “How could I?”

“Don’t answer my question with a question. I’d actually rather be lied to than subjected to that. It’s how my father spoke to me, that demeaning, patriarchal bullshit.”

“I didn’t know she was going to be here.” He feels he could make things a little easier if he could only touch Kate right now, just put a hand on her shoulder, but he is somehow unable to manage the gesture. It is as if that hand, the hand that could bring comfort to Kate, has been am-putated, he has cut it off like Van Gogh’s ear.

Kate exhales as if she has been holding her breath for a long while.

“We should have brought two cars,” she says.

The tour passes directly over them, thunderously, shaking the ceiling.

Marie says in her high, ringing voice, “The rooms to your left will not be public space, but over here, to the right . . .”

“They’re being given a tour by a blind woman,” Kate says.

They are interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. It’s Susan Richmond, moving in a daze, holding on to the banister for support. She stops midway and peers down at Daniel and Kate, and then shakes her head and continues her descent, holding her chin up now, to affect a certain grandeur. “Intolerable,” she says, and then when she has reached the bottom of the stairs she walks up to Daniel and Kate,

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as if they were exactly the people she had hoped to find. “That little weasel is leading a tour of my house. If I stayed up there for one more second I was going to go insane.” She steps in front of the mirror hanging in the entrance hall, the glass wavy, the backing showing through, framed in plain wood and shaped like a large slice of bread. She peers at her reflection, frowns. “Hmm. Maybe I’ve already gone insane.” And then, turning toward Kate, she says, “I never told you how much I enjoyed
Peaches and Cream.
I just roared, that poor, ugly girl, and all the troubles she had. I gave it to Ferguson to read, but he never reads anything. Oh well, at least he doesn’t pretend to, he’ll actually come right out and say he hates reading. Either he disagrees with the author, in which case it annoys him, or he agrees, in which case it’s a waste of time.”

“I don’t see how he could agree or disagree with my book,” says Kate.

“It’s a novel, it would be like disagreeing with someone’s dream.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. That’s marvelous.” She turns to Daniel.

“We’re going to have to pull the plug on this, Daniel,” she says. “I don’t care what Fergie and his little friend say.This is intolerable. If we’re having money problems we’ll just have to find another way to solve them, even if it means that we go into the village every day and work at the hardware store. Anything would be better than this.”

As Susan announces this, the tour, with Marie at the head of it, begins down the stairs.The force of the collective footsteps is so great that a faint cloud of plaster fills the sunlight that pours into the entrance hall.