The Hundred-Year House (24 page)

It
must
be, then. Amy was a child, a greedy child. Grace had known this all along. She walked straight to the coach house, and up the stairs to the living quarters. The stairs came out in the small kitchen, and she had to orient herself to think which was Max’s apartment and which must be Amy’s. She knocked on Max’s door first, to be sure he wasn’t back, then walked into Amy’s side without knocking. The outer room had a sitting area. Well-thumbed fashion magazines on a little table. Fashion! All Amy ever wore were those three cotton dresses, in rotation.

She moved silently to the next doorway. Amy lay on her bed, on her stomach. Grace said, “Amy, I do hope you plan to return everything you’ve borrowed.”

The girl bolted up and straightened her blanket. “I’m—hello. Mrs. Grant.”

“I expect my things returned before dinner.”

“Only, I—which things?”

“Anything borrowed from the estate, including the jade monkey from the library. I don’t think you’ll be staying much longer, but you might yet salvage a letter of reference from me if you’re forthcoming.”

Amy stood and looked around the room frantically, as if checking that she’d hidden everything properly. “Ma’am, I truly don’t understand. If I’ve done something wrong it was a pure mistake.”

“Amy,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, except that you are not Max’s niece. Maybe you’re his lover, only I don’t think so. That’s not it, is it? You’re a child, but you sit in judgment and you think you know how you’d act if you were me. You think George wouldn’t hit you, that you’d tame him. Well, you couldn’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re mistaken.” There were fat tears collecting on her chin. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

Grace felt Amy’s pain in her own stomach, she did. It was a convulsion, like holding back a sob. But all she could think to do was make it worse, as if that would solve everything. She imagined this was how a killer felt, halfway through the job. Finish stabbing the fellow, so there was no one left to feel it. She said, “Here’s what you don’t know yet: So often in life, you get exactly what you look for. If you want a George, you’ll get a George. The worst thing I could wish you is everything you want.”

She meant to leave Amy standing there silenced and shamed, but as she turned Amy said, quietly, “Speak for yourself.”

And Grace might have slapped her, she really might have, if she hadn’t heard Max come up to the kitchen just then. She walked out and told Max she’d been wondering where he was.

“A quick trip to the doctor,” he said, and smiled. “My old knee problem from the war. Can I drive you somewhere?”

“Oh!” she said. “No, but—what time did George take the Darrin out?”

“Around ten.”

Grace glanced around the kitchen, and tried to find something to say. “We should get that fixed,” she said, pointing at the big board patching up the wall. It was the wall shared with Amy’s bathroom and closet, and it was painted yellow, like the rest of the kitchen. “What is it?”

“It’s—I believe there was an electrical problem once. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

“But you shouldn’t have to live someplace all stitched together.”

He set his satchel on the table. It looked so soft.

“I know there to be at least five layers of paint over that thing. Another five, and it will all come even. Really, it’s not worth the disruption.”

His ears were round, like little handles. Grace liked that about him, and she liked the way he sometimes looked almost in love with her. Perhaps he was. She felt wonderfully visible just then, as if something might happen
to
her, and not just in front of her.

She said, “All right, Max,” and smiled in a way she normally wouldn’t have, a way her mother never would have smiled at a servant. She trotted downstairs and waved to Ludo, who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of sticks back to the fire pile.

—

George was shaking her by the hip. He was saying, “What’s that smell? What is it?”

Grace rolled over and tried to feel where the blanket had gone. “Is something burning?”

“No, it’s you.” He turned the light on, and when Grace managed to open her eyes she saw that he hadn’t shaved all day, that the cleft in his chin was filled in with black stubble. He had a
long red string tied around his neck, like an opera-length necklace, and she couldn’t think why that would be. “Why do you smell that way?” He came back to the bed, though it took him a few tries to propel himself in the right direction. Grace sat up, and George stood over her and put his fingers in her hair. “Why did you cut your hair off?”

“The hairdresser did. I needed a trim.”

“You think I want you looking like a boy?”

“George, I want to sleep.” She slid down under the blanket. “What time is it?”

He pulled the covers completely off the bed and stood over her. “You smell like sex.”

“That’s ridiculous. I smell like the outdoors. I went for a bike ride.”

He yanked her nightgown up to her stomach, and stuck his face between her legs and sniffed loudly. “You smell like you were fucking some fungus-covered hustler.”

“
George
.”

She meant to pull him on top of her and turn it into sex before things got worse, but he had rolled her, with one push, to the edge of the bed, and he rolled her again till she fell. Her forehead hit something on the way down. It was hard and sharp, and it must have been the corner of the nightstand. Her whole head and neck throbbed, but especially above her left eyebrow, and when she put her hand there it came away covered in blood.

“George,
look
!”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, Grace, come on. Don’t—I’ll get a towel.”

And he did, one of the GGG monogrammed set from her Saville cousins, and it turned from powder blue to reddish brown in seconds.

“Please ring Max,” she said. “I want to go for stitches.”

His mouth was open, and he looked like a fish. He said, “I’ll take you.”

“The hell you will. Either ring Max or bring me the phone.”

“What will you say?”

“That I fell off the bed.”

“Grace, I love you.”

“I know that.”

“And you love me.”

“Yes. Yes.”

He sat on the ground and put his head between his knees, and started rocking like a little boy. Grace stood gingerly and went for the telephone herself.

Max took her in the Capri. There was Amy, owl-eyed at the coach house window as they crunched down the drive.

—

A hat with a little veil, combined with the sunglasses, hid the stitches and bandage quite well when she ventured out, even if she did look like an escapee from Hollywood. George disappeared for five straight days after that—he was gone by the time Grace and Max returned in the morning—and Grace passed the time by following Max on her bicycle. Now that she knew where he was headed she could hang behind quite a bit, and after he left the property he never seemed to look back.

Might she be in love with him? It was one explanation for this compulsion to follow his every move, but she doubted that was it. He wasn’t the type she’d enjoy making love to—he’d be too polite, too quiet, which had been the problem with all the boys back in Toronto. She thought of Lionel, who had kissed her wrist and wouldn’t stop asking what she wanted. “Do you like this? Tell me what to do. What do you want me to do?” The problem with George was that she could never be happy with a man who
wasn’t
George. She searched herself to see if she held any sort of physical
longing for Max, and really she didn’t think so. But he was a nut she wanted to crack.

He was taking two classes: the one with the Bolsheviks (Grace thought for a while that it was Russian history, but one day as she listened at the door the professor talked about the Balkans, and she became less sure) and one on the novels of Thackeray and Dickens. She heard enough of that one that she became curious about
Vanity Fair
, which she’d never read, and scared up a copy from the Laurelfield library. Becky Sharp was a wicked heroine, and Grace loved her immediately. Becky was doomed, that was clear. No vice went unpunished in the nineteenth-century novel.

She never stayed more than ten minutes outside the classroom doors, afraid Max might one day head out to use the restroom and discover her. She found, though, that when she biked directly home, Max often didn’t return for two or three hours. Certainly the classes weren’t that long. In the English building was a smaller hallway off the main one, and she realized she could stand by the corner examining the framed map of Literary England without arousing much suspicion. She did that one Tuesday as the class let out. She was ready to run, but Max lingered by the door with the same blond boy he’d whispered to that first day in the history lecture. They walked together, shoulder to shoulder, down the stairs. Grace stayed and looked down from the window, and saw which way they walked: to the large building with ivy, talking together the whole time. After they’d passed through the double doors, she followed.

It was the library. She picked a direction and walked briskly past the front desk, only to find herself in a reference room with no one in it. She found a larger room with card catalogues, and a study area where the students sat smoking, but she didn’t see Max. Upstairs were study carrels and shelves packed thickly together. She supposed if Max saw her she could always pretend
she’d been looking for some book. It wasn’t any odder for her to be here, after all, than for him to be.

A girl raced past and nearly knocked Grace over with her poodle skirt. Peering down a long aisle, Grace saw, on the far end, the blond boy, walking alone now. She went as far down the aisle as she dared, and managed to watch him through the last bit of shelf. He walked through a door and shut it. There were several such doors along the far wall, and through the open ones she could see very small rooms with desks. Her own college library had offered similar setups: for the girls who wanted no distractions, the ones with ambitious senior projects.

Not two feet in front of her, Max passed by, eyes down. He didn’t notice her. She watched as he entered the same room, and as the door once again clicked shut.

If it hadn’t been for that photograph, so fresh in her mind, it might have taken her quite a bit longer to figure it all out.

She stood there at the end of the aisle, just stood there, a long time, feeling like an all-around nitwit. She was humiliated that she’d been so fascinated by Max, that she’d liked how he looked at her. She wondered if the world were full of degenerates, Max and this boy and her father and the other man in the photograph, and who knew how many others, all around her, and she in the middle of it, blind and oblivious. Or maybe there was something connecting it all. Her father had told her that Max wasn’t to be dismissed under any circumstance. And maybe it was only because Max and her father frequented the same dark bars, the same alleys and closets. Max and her father, her father and Max. Yet they didn’t seem to care for each other a bit. Perhaps that wasn’t a requisite, in these types of relations. Or maybe he was simply afraid of what Max knew about him.

She knew she ought to leave. If Max found her there
now
, her face would betray her. She thought about that boy, no more than
twenty, and how maybe she oughtn’t leave him alone there with a man twice his age, how the boy’s mother would have preferred Grace to break down the door and send him home at once, his luggage following after.

She went back to the ground floor and sat on one of the smoking couches where she could see the stairs. She held the
Tribune
open in front of her face. Max came down alone, twenty minutes later, and though she expected the boy would follow a few casual paces behind, he didn’t. Grace waited another twenty minutes, and then she walked upstairs and back through the aisles. She found the boy at a regular small study carrel, hunched over a textbook. There were other students, but not terribly near. She walked around the carrel, pretending to look for something, and she glanced at his face, at his prodigious eyebrows. He didn’t seem distressed, or even guilty—just wholly immersed in his studies.

“Excuse me,” she said, and he looked up. “I’m afraid I’m lost.”

He gave a sly smile and gestured around the room. “It’s the library,” he whispered.

“Yes.” She laughed. “And I—My husband is a trustee of the college, and he’s left me to fend for myself while he meets the dean. I got here, and I don’t even know what floor this is. All I’m looking for is the powder room.”

The boy stood and nodded. “Pleased to help a damsel in distress.” If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was flirting.

She followed as slowly as she could, so she’d have time to think what to ask. “You look like a senior,” she said.

“Sophomore.” He stopped and extended his hand. “Sidney Cole of Indianapolis. Sid.”

“Amy Hall,” she said. “Of New York.” They continued walking. “And do you like it here?”

“Oh yes.” But she doubted he did at all. How could he, the poor thing? Boys like that never lasted anywhere long.

“People are friendly?”

“Enough are.”

She wanted to say something useful, but what? She had nothing to tell this boy about how to live his life. Besides, they had reached the ladies’ room door. “Well,” was all she could think of. “Thank you. Do take care of yourself, Sid.”

—

The Darrin was back, parked in the middle of the driveway and waiting for Max to store it. Grace picked up the mail and went directly to the attic, and hoped George at least wasn’t drunk enough to destroy things down below.

A letter from her college friend Harriet, tentative, curious if Grace would come home soon. Harriet had been one of the very few at the wedding, and—of those—one of the only ones not to pull Grace aside, to ask if she was
sure
.

She wouldn’t write back. What was there to say?

By dinnertime, the Darrin was gone again, and a hard knot that she hadn’t realized was in her stomach melted away. She’d have dinner alone, and she was getting rather used to it. She brought down
Vanity Fair
—Captain Osborne had just asked Becky to run away with him—and sat at the table.