A World Elsewhere (3 page)

So it had been for Landish not so long ago—cognac sipped in front of roaring fires, nightly engorgement on the finest of foods, wit-appreciating dinner guests, the unstinting friendship and generosity of a wealthy young man who worshipped him.

In St. John’s, he glanced at his reflection in windows, his moss-like mass of hair, what was left of the clothes that had been made by Van’s tailor who came to Princeton from Manhattan and pronounced Landish “unimprovable” but, at Van’s insistence, did his best.

Whenever Landish saw a woman pushing an infant in a pram along the streets of St. John’s, he thought of Van’s sister, Vivvie, who had drowned at the Vanderluyden country estate when she was eighteen months old.

Her nurse had been walking on the dock with Vivvie in her arms. Van happened to be the only other person there. Nurse stumbled.
When Vivvie fell into the water, Nurse was still holding the blanket that she had been wrapped in. The child went under very fast. Van dove in to save her, but the water was so dark that he mistook a sunken piece of wood for his sister and was clutching it against his chest when he shot up to the surface.

His family, his father especially, blamed him for her death.

After telling him of Vivvie, Van stood, his face in his hands. Landish stood as well, uncertain what to say or do. Van threw his arms around Landish and pressed his head against his chest. He held on to him as if to keep
himself
from drowning, his fingers clawing Landish’s back. Landish hugged him, patted him. He tried to ease himself away, but Van clung tightly to him, sobbing, his fingers digging into his back. Their embrace lasted until the tears stopped and Van, his breathing back to normal, clapped Landish on both shoulders, stepped away, and turned to face the fire.

“I’m sorry,” said Landish. “But
you’ve
nothing to be sorry for. Absolutely nothing.”

“Now you will think that I’m—that way. Others think I am.”

“I don’t,” Landish said, unable to summon up a less perfunctory denial.

“Really,” Van said. “I’m not. It’s Vivvie that makes me seem to be many things I’m not. Don’t put any store by what other people say about me. When you belong to a certain kind of family, people like to think the worst about you. You of all people should understand. The only difference between the Vanderluydens and the Drukens is one of scale.”

“Perhaps.”

“You, with all your women—you’re an exoneration of what many people think to be my nature.”

There were nights, still, when Landish lay sleepless on his bunk in the silent house on Dark Marsh Road, picturing Vivvie sinking, drifting slowly down, her dress buoyed up around her face, her arms above her head. Nothing so made him wish that he and Van had never parted
as the image of that little girl in the mud-darkened water, her brother just inches away, flailing about in panic.

They
had
been friends. How their friendship ended did not change that. Thick and Thin, Landish had called them. Prince Ton and Prince Ounce.

“I would never do such things,” his father told him when Landish repeated to him what he had overheard boys say at school. “Never mind what people say. They need someone of a lesser rank than God to blame. Nothing short of my death could satisfy them that I did everything I could to save my crew. I won’t die just to keep up appearances. All survivors are suspected of surviving at the expense of the dead, of forever keeping to themselves some awful secret.”

He believed his father until he acquired enough knowledge from him to see for himself the truth behind his father’s reputation. He challenged his father then, who acted as if Landish hadn’t spoken, as if each “mishap” at sea or on the ice had been unforeseeable, inscrutably caused, the doings of some whimsy of the elements, against which Landish was too green to know it was pointless to bemoan or rail.

Eventually he realized one day, by his father’s manner, his expression and his tone of voice, that he was waiting for it to dawn on him that things would remain the same with or without the blessing of Landish Druken. Later that night, he looked at his father, at his face that, even as he slept, seemed to register every second of the life that he had led, every accusation, spoken or unspoken, made against him, every spit or slur that had followed the mention of his name.

He would not be the first idealist to learn the knack of squaring his conscience with a way of life that in his youth he thought could be reformed. There was an intricate set of necessarily imperfect rules that were followed the world over except by fools who, in the course of their foredoomed and lonely insurrections, were destroyed.

His father was the first sealing skipper in the world to bring back one million seals from the hunt.
Million
. The word was everywhere in Newfoundland. The Board of Trade threw a dinner for Captain Abram Druken. One thousand flipper pies were served.

“Million Abram” received the award of the Blue Ensign from the Governor. A gold medal from a prominent merchant. The OBE—the Order of the British Empire from Buckingham Palace. A “white-coat hat,” which his father called “the laurel wreath of sealers.”

As a child, crouching down by his parents’ bed, Landish had reached underneath, taken hold of the small wooden trunk, and as gingerly as if it held explosives, eased it out.

“The lock is just for decoration,” his father had said. He held the sides of the top of the chest with his fingers and slowly, ceremoniously, much as the Governor must have done at the official presentation, raised the lid.

The first thing he noticed was the red velvet lining the inside of the chest, then the hat that was supposedly made from the very fur of the millionth seal. A baby seal. The purest white that he had ever seen.

The first to bring home one million seals.
Bring home
. It made it sound as if the seals were dead when his father found them and all he did was bring them back.

Every night, even if there was not so much as a breeze by day, the wind came up like something brought on by the darkness. It blew in through one side of the attic on Dark Marsh Road and out the other with a screeching whistle. Landish heard what he called the droning in the wires several streets away.

He stood at the attic’s porthole, its only window, and looked out past the marsh, across the rooftops and chimneys of the city, to the Narrows. It was mid-October. He thought about the words “the fall.” No others would do for how things seemed, for the tantalizing
transformation that was taking place, the slow, sad fall of all things into winter. It seemed to him that “the fall” was shot through
with
the fall and in part made it what it was and caused him to feel about it as he did.

Everything was falling, failing. Night was falling faster, the light fading faster from the fields. Time by day passed faster and by night seemed not to pass at all. He turned the attic lights on sooner, but not before something like a dusky silence filled the two rooms. It was as if some old regime of time was falling and a new regime was near.

It had been this “feeling” of the fall that first made him want to write.

He wrote more than he ever had at Princeton.

It was so bad he wished that he could burn it twice.

In his and Van’s final year at Princeton, more and more students began to vie for an invitation to the Lotus Land literary salons. Van was the gatekeeper. He chose not only outcasts, the previously unpopular, the “unaffiliates,” but also young men whose fathers were almost as rich as his, some of them deserters from the usual eating clubs, The Ivy as well as The Cottage and The Cap and Gown.

Landish assigned more nicknames:

There were three brothers who were known as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Tiny. There were the Duke of Unwellington, Le Marquis de Malarkey, the Duke of Buxomberg and Sorethumberland.

Landish’s authority was sometimes challenged, most often by way of allusions to his having no “name.” He would pretend to take it in good humour. When he felt most wounded, he deferred the taking of revenge, storing up witticisms until he was able to give far worse than he’d got, so destroying his would-be rival that the fellow either dropped out of the Druken circle or hung on as a sullen, silent member, a chastising sight to others with a mind to challenge Landish. And he sang
along when they started up “What shall we do with a Druken sealer?” which they usually did late at night when all were drunk.

Landish defended Van when the others mocked him for writing “Vanderbilge.” Landish called him “VanPun” and wrote puns for him which Van passed off at the salons as his own. He continued to do his best to be seen as something of an
enfant terrible
and Van managed to look as though he wrote the lines that Landish merely delivered, standing at his shoulder, not smiling, impassively savouring what his mouthpiece said. They put many a nose out of joint, Landish noting that Van could do so without much regard for the consequences.

One night, even as he was laughing at his own cleverness, Landish was told that he and Van were being called sodomites by their professors.

Landish sometimes took out of his attic closet his box of Princeton compositions, the only writing of his he had not burned. They—mainly Landish—wrote a
roman à clef
musical under the pseudonyms Filbert and Mulligan, which they called
Nutstewyou
. It was a great hit among those who were not the models for their characters. Among the ragged sheets and scrolls of paper, he found the main creation of the Umbrage Players, which had been called
Who Consumed Keats?

It began with a corpulent character named Stilton who was at work on an “epicurean poem” called “Parodies Lost.” Stilton, around whom everyone holds their nose, tells the audience that his purpose is to justify “the weight of man to God.” The characters were all major English poets and were all portrayed as corpulent with enormous bellies and backsides. Alfred Lord Tennyson became Well-fed Lard Venison. Coleridge and Wordsworth were the hybrid Cramyouwell Curdsworth. Shelley, groaning and clutching his belly, spent the entire play writing “Ode to the Worst Wind.” A rotund, burstingly buxom Mary Shelley was carried onstage by Frankenstein. A caricature of
Rudyard Kipling, Rhubarb Nibbling, nibbled on shoots of rhubarb and every so often roared, “My gun comes up like thunder/On the bed where ’Manda lays.” Ne’er Hard Unmanly Hopkins danced about, lisp/singing “It seems I’ve sprung rhythm.”

The play stirred most of the audience to protest, especially the professors who shouted “ENOUGH” and “TOO MUCH.”

Soon nailed to trees on the quad were copies of an unsigned rhyme called “The Ballad of Lotus Land.”

Van can’t well
Or moderately well.
In the Vanderluyden Bordello
They say the poor fellow
Can’t even manage at all.
Can it be that poor Van
Is in need of a man?
They conferred in the hall:
“I’ve seen this quite oft,
We’ll get him aloft.”
“Just wait till it rises
They come in all sizes,
Though not many come when they’re soft.”
“Begging your pardon
They’re bringing the Bard in.
He’s saying, ‘This time he won’t fail.’
He’s in the Garden
Trying to harden
And make of Van’s Moby a whale.”

“It seems that I’ve started rumours by trying not to,” Van said. “It seems that one is presumed to be that way unless one consorts with prostitutes.”

“Never mind,” Landish said. “I’ll write and plaster all over Princeton a rhyme called ‘The Enormous Endowments of the Vanderluydens.’ ”

“It would only make things worse,” Van said, “no matter how clever it was. I should never have come to Princeton. I should have kept on with my tutors in New York, where I was dogged by so many rumours I hardly took notice when a new one came along.” Van paused. “Do you think it odd to grieve for one’s sister, Landish, even if one’s grief goes on for years?”

“No,” Landish said. “But Vanderland will not bring your sister back.”

“It is not in the lunatic hope of resurrecting the dead—”

“I’m sorry,” Landish said, “but it seems to me that you are suffering more from guilt than grief, guilt due to the unwarranted accusations of your family.”

“You don’t understand. And it will be years before Vanderland is completed in Carolina. I shall have to live in New York until then. At least in the winter. I despise New York.”

Van put his hands on Landish’s shoulders.

“Don’t go home, Landish. Come to New York and then to Vanderland with me. I won’t be able to measure up without you. I will fail just as all the people in my life expect me to.”

There had been tears in his eyes. It was Landish’s turn to feel guilty. His wit had merely emboldened their enemies to attack the one of them who was defenceless. But, unsure of how to answer, he told Van that he would think about his invitation.

He began to think about graduating from Princeton, the end of the reign of the Umbrage Players, the end of Druken and his Circle, his leadership of both, the dismantlement, abandonment of Lotus Land. He wondered if he might somehow be able to linger on in the town of Princeton, perhaps convince other members of the Players and the Circle to do so and cull the most interesting of the new students for their Thursday salons. But without Lotus Land, without Van’s seemingly self-replenishing board of food and drink and cognac
and cigars and the settees and sofas on which they lounged about—without all of this, none of it would work.

Yet, though Van many times repeated his entreaty that Landish come to Vanderland, Landish said no.

“I’ve been dreading the end of Lotus Land as much as you have,” Van said. “The two of us going our separate ways, you to as remote and wild a place as Newfoundland. At my invitation, famous writers and other artists will be staying at Vanderland for months, perhaps years. You could be the presiding wit of Vanderland. We could still have our salons.”