Landish couldn’t help but like Van who, minutes after they met, had confessed that he was widely regarded as a “dud.”
“My father thinks I’m one,” he said.
Who better than the richest man in the world to spy out a dud among his children?
But Van said he was going to surprise everyone by doing something “big” with his life.
Landish had doubted it. He guessed that not every graduate from Princeton would practise the modern form of alchemy. It was true of some that the more generations removed they were from the source of their wealth, the less able and inclined they became to increase or maintain that wealth. Landish called it the Law of Layabout Descendants.
Van said he was going to build, “cause to be built,” a great house in North Carolina.
Landish told him that, when he was nine, he had caused a campfire to be built and then caused it to be lit.
Van said, “I discovered the site of the house in 1887. The excavations are completed. I plan to live there, alone if I have to, far enough from Manhattan to forget the place. It may sound morbid, but I have to wait for my inheritance to begin the main work.”
It was 1893. Van was building Vanderland now. Landish had read about it in a week-old edition of the
New York Times
. The Carolina Castle, it was called in the article. There had been a picture of Van reclining on the forest floor at the feet of a team of famous architects and engineers. Van, his elder by several years, looking his age at last.
Landish bought drinks for those of his tavern mates who were not afraid to ask him to. They must have thought he was spending Druken money, that his father had relented.
By the time Landish’s story had made it back from Princeton to St. John’s, there were many versions of it, in all of which he had cheated, not to help a friend but to keep from flunking out.
The full four years at Princeton and he came away with nothing, people said. The Druken who imagined he was born to a better fate than captain of a sealing ship. After so many Drukens went scot-free for greater crimes, their name was ruined because it was proved that the family’s first intellectual, the would-be man of letters and refinement, had
cheated on a test
. The shame was that so many Drukens had
died of old age in warm beds before the boy that brought them down was even born.
“You have been played for a fool,” his father said. “Come back to the world in which you count for something. It doesn’t bother
me
that you didn’t graduate. It doesn’t bother me
why
you didn’t. If cheating at school is the worst thing you ever do, you’ll be the first saint in the family. I gave you your four years. You said that you would give me the balance of your life.”
But Landish told him he would never set foot on a sealing ship again.
“So it doesn’t matter that you cheated your own father. It only matters that some rich man cheated you. Because I deserve to be cheated and you don’t?” His father was right. That was how Landish had squared it with his conscience. A necessary transgression by a son against his ignoble father to achieve a noble end—which might never be achieved. But he could make amends only by relenting to a life that would destroy him.
Even had he been inclined to look for one, he could not have found a job aboard a ship or on the waterfront. Neither his father’s associates nor his enemies would have anything to do with him. His father was the last Druken who could afford not to care what people thought of him.
He applied to every newspaper in the city for a job. He sent in samples of his writing and they sent them back.
He found employment in a beggars-can’t-be-choosers kind of school. One day he went there drunk and fell asleep. He woke up to find that all his students had left, his classroom was dark and empty, and a note of dismissal was pinned to the pocket of his coat.
Van had told him of the rhyme which other boys used to chant when they saw him: “Padgy Porgie, pudding and pie/Killed the girl who made him cry/When the boys came out to play/Padgy Porgie ran away.”
“Killed?”
Landish said.
“One of the rumours is that I so hated my infant sister for supplanting me as the baby of the family that I did away with her and that it was all hushed up by my father. It’s absurd, but there you are.”
There you are. The under-built, slender-built Vanderluyden who his father said could not look their lowest servant in the eye, the dud with the long, pale, slender fingers that bent back to touch his wrists, was said to have killed his sister out of spite.
When Van’s father died, he left Van six million dollars, as well as stocks and properties worth about four million. Each of his three older brothers got ten times as much.
Ten million. Henry Vanderluyden’s notion of disownment.
“I get it after I graduate. I will sink all of it into Vanderland if I have to.”
“I should marry for money,” Landish said. “No worries then about making a living as a writer. Matrimoney.”
“My mother married for it.”
“Your grandfather made a name for himself. Your father bought one.”
“As I suppose I shall have to someday.”
In the attic on Dark Marsh Road, Landish calculated that had
he
been thus disowned, he could have given his landlord a seven-hundred-and-fifty-trillion-year advancement on the rent.
Though Van had all his life been mocked and hectored by his father, his death left Van so dejected that Landish thought he might fall ill. One day, as they passed a haberdashery, he pointed and said:
“Full fathom five thy father lies/those are pants that were his size.” He was ridiculously pleased when Van, finally, could not suppress a smile.
In the middle of his junior year in the spring of 1890, Landish moved out of his dorm room and into Van’s house in town. They were inspired by Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus Eaters” to call the hilltop house and its spacious grounds Lotus Land. Van insisted on paying all the rent for a house that was bigger than the Drukens’.
“You could fit this house into one room at Vanderland,” Van said.
“Is the idea of building this Vanderland all that keeps you going?”
“Isn’t that enough? The greatest house in the world?”
They each had a storey of the three-storey house, Van the upper one, Landish the middle. Mr. Trull lived in three rooms on the ground floor. He had his own entrance and there was no connecting passage between his rooms and theirs. “He keeps an eye and ear out in case I leave, I suppose,” Van said. “I doubt he ever really sleeps.”
Van chose as his bedroom the one at the opposite end of the house from Landish’s so that, he said, he wouldn’t be kept awake all night by the footsteps of “a stomping insomniac who can’t compose a word without roaring it out loud.”
“And then I burn the words,” Landish said. “So far, I haven’t left a single word of my book unburned.”
“You really are writing a book? I thought you were kidding and just reading your assignments out loud. What’s the book about?”
“I can tell you it will be a novel. I know little more than that about it myself.”
“You speak so often of Newfoundland, I’m maddened by your infatuation with the place. It’s just your childhood you miss, not Newfoundland,” he’d say. “Your childhood when everyone was nice to you, when you had no enemies and there was no one who was out to bring you down.”
“Perhaps,” he’d say, and then start in about Newfoundland again.
He told Van that he remembered the smell of ripening crab-apples borne up by the wind from the street below his house in late September.
The shadow of a cloud moving over the patchwork colours of the mown fields in the fall. The white-capped waves on the harbour before a storm, the water all racing one way like that of a river as if the whole wind-driven harbour were moving on to somewhere else. The stream whose water was so cold and clear that, in defiance of his mother who warned him that he’d catch his death, he took off his clothes and lay in it on his back, all of his face immersed but for his nose as he looked up through the water at the sky. He remembered how good his skin felt when he put his clothes back on. How the air smelled of rain long before the rain began. Lightning so far away it seemed to make no thunder lit up from within the clouds above the Petty Harbour hills.
On Dark Marsh Road, as at Princeton, Landish wrote every night, and every night burned what he wrote because it wasn’t good enough.
In the attic, he composed his sentences out loud, drummed out their rhythm on the floor with his boot heels while his neighbours shouted protests from below. At the end of the evening he reread each page before he fed it to the fire. He remembered Van watching him do so, shaking his head in wonderment.
Landish watched as, from the top windows of Lotus Land, Van trained his binoculars on Princeton, a general scanning from a carefully chosen vantage the movements and new developments in the enemy’s encampment.
“We have the tactical advantage of high ground,” Landish said, “and even though we are greatly outnumbered, we will bring down a great many before they overtake the house.” Van ignored him, looking down the slope of Prospect Avenue for hours, sighing loudly with—Landish wasn’t sure—exasperation, impatience, disapproval.
“What are you hoping to see, Van?” Landish said, but Van ignored him. He looked like a child who was pretending to disdain a group that had arbitrarily excluded him, turned him away with derisive taunts and mockery.
“You can be part of it all any time you like,” Landish said, “whereas I came here
expecting
to be shunned.”
Van smiled. “I like to watch it from afar,” he said. “The laughable vanity fair of the world. All that frantic toing-and-froing on the quad.”
Van hadn’t liked it when Landish brought back to the house women whom he referred to as “fair ladies.” He required Landish to give him advance notice of his intentions to bring them home and vacated the house, staying away hours longer than he needed to and afterwards brooding in silence for days. There was also a middle-aged wealthy woman known among the students as the “trolling trollop” whose carriage with its tinted windows made the rounds of Princeton once a week. Landish was one of many sheepish-looking undergraduates who hastily climbed into it. “Methinks she doth divest too much,” he said to Van.
Van said that, as a Vanderluyden, he could not take the chance of “availing” himself and thereby bringing upon America’s most famous family who knew what sort of infamy.
They took English literature together, and upon going to class one day their professor told them he was glad to see that “the infamous twosome had come out from the cozy confines of their tryst.”
His words were much quoted, their meaning lost on no one.
It came to seem that the real purpose of their coming to Princeton was to establish Lotus Land, to live there and entice visitors from the university. They made it known that there would be salons at Lotus Land on Thursday nights.
The president of Princeton had just declared that alcohol was the prime evil of the day. At the first Thursday salon, Landish raised a glass of cognac to the room at Lotus Land and said: “Leave us not without libation, and de-liver us, prime evil.”
Looking about his two-room, marsh-overlooking attic, Landish could not help but long for the days when, once a week, four discreetly armed men who rode in the backs of coaches that drove up to Lotus Land wordlessly delivered cases of wine, cognac, cheese, grapes, smoked meats, bread, caviar, cigarettes, cigars—the Bare Excessities, he called them.
The men and the goods arrived by a Vanderluyden train from Manhattan. The men were Norwegian—the Four Norsemen of the Metropolis. The most exclusive eating club at Princeton was The Ivy, referred to simply as “Ivy.” Landish called it “Scurvy.”
“Not my best,” he said, “but I just can’t stop myself.”
Now, in the darkness of his attic, he could not credit that there were such things as “eating clubs” anywhere on earth. Eighteen months and two thousand miles away from Princeton, “Hunger Clubs” seemed less far-fetched.
He had called Lotus Land the Gobble and Guzzle Club. If someone had admonished him not to take it all for granted because, unlike those of his fellow students, his days of ease were numbered, he would not have listened. He’d known he had to think of the future and told himself he would, he
would
, but not just yet.
Even now, it suited him to leave unasked, “What next?”
When they heard of the board that was being served nightly at Lotus Land, ever more students came by, some of them deserters from the eating clubs. They were fledgling writers who proved, Landish said, that “the art of drivelry” was not dead. Landish asked that a vote be taken as to which of two names the new group should go by: The Knights of the Round Table; or The Knights Who, in Full Armour, Jostling Noisily for Room, Sit Side by Side on a Very Long Sofa. He named one student Sir Mountable, another one Sir Osis and another one Sir Vile.
Van didn’t drink at the salons. He ate very little. He had no work to read aloud, not having written anything in his life but school assignments. He merely watched and smiled while Landish held court, and
he only drank with Landish. No one said they minded that Van didn’t drink with them, even as they refused to abstain.
“I’m a plodder,” he had often said. “I envy you. The words come pouring out just when you need them.”
“You’re fair to middling,” Landish told him. “But you could be middling if you applied yourself.”
“I’m so damn mediocre. I have no talent, Landish. None. I inherited a lot of money from my father but not much in the way of a mind.”
“Imagine,” Landish said, “if you could acquire the minds of geniuses and leave them to your sons. You would still have been shortchanged. ‘To my oldest son, I leave the mind of Shakespeare. To my second oldest, I leave the mind of Milton. To my third, the mind of Tennyson. To my youngest son, I leave the mind of Sir John Suckling.”
After the others left, Landish and Van would sit side by side, slumped in their chairs in the living hall at Lotus Land, puffing on cigars, blowing plumes of smoke towards the ceiling, glasses of cognac warming in their hands, while Landish made anagrams of their last names.