The Hundred-Year House (4 page)

Cole stood to give a brief speech about how he planned, in his twenty-first year at the college, to scare each and every student out of his classes, until he was left with “exactly one attractive and intelligent specimen that will grade its own papers and massage my neck.” When even Golda laughed, Zee pretended to as well. Cole must have felt his age protected him against rumors of impropriety, though Zee understood there were plenty of whispers about the man back in the eighties. She’d heard a senior boy claim he knew “for a fact” that the policy of leaving office doors
cracked during student conferences could be traced to Cole’s misbehavior some fifteen years earlier. He had been married once, briefly, but by the time he came to campus he’d long been a swinging bachelor—attractive, back then, too—so rumors were bound to follow him. The fact that the rumors
stuck
, though, spoke to his behavior, not his erstwhile good looks. Jerry Keaton, for instance, with his kind eyes and soft voice and pictures of his toddler son all over his office, would never attract such talk.

Zee got through lunch by pretending it was Cole’s retirement party. And when that fantasy failed, she imagined relaying one of her own less amusing Cole anecdotes. She might tell about his sophomore advisee who came to Zee crying, after she’d shown Cole a course list including Stage Makeup for her double major in theater. “So you’re learning to put on makeup?” he’d asked. The girl had shrugged and said, “Basically.” He took her face in his hand, turned her head to the side, and said, “Well, it’s about damn time.” But even if Zee had worked up the nerve to tell this story, to say “Let’s raise a glass to the most insensitive man in Illinois,” the others would have chuckled, waiting with bated breath for the old man’s reply.

Cole, she realized, was talking to her from down the table, pointing his empty fork at her chest. “Comrade Grant is uncharacteristically withdrawn today,” he called. “I suspect she’s planning her Marxist revolution!” Before the laughter died down, he continued. “This is why I’ll never leave. She’ll replace me with her minions and all the seniors will take ‘Why Dickens Was a Stalinist.’”

She felt, as she often did around Cole, like a child outwitted by a clever uncle for the amusement of other adults. Mercifully, the conversation swelled again, and the waiter brought coffee. Zee wished he would sweep her up with the empty wine glasses and carry her back to the kitchen and plunge her into the sink, where she could remain till the lunch was over.

The other day, her mother had called her office number. “I was thinking,” she said. “Why couldn’t Douglas work in Admissions? Because that doesn’t require you to publish, does it?”

“Admissions is bubbly twenty-four-year-olds with diverse backgrounds.”

“Well he’s diverse. He certainly didn’t grow up here.” Zee had said she had to go, and her mother said, “It’s not going to fall in his lap, dear. To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what good that biography will do. There are so many books nowadays! But we’ll think of something.”

Sitting there sober with her drunken department, Zee
did
think of something. Doug was a man who needed a job. Cole was a man who did not deserve the job he had. And here she was, passively wishing. And leaving Doug home alone all day with that woman. When Chantal had said to keep him on his toes, she’d probably meant something along the lines of meeting him at the door in lingerie. But Zee had more at her disposal than underwear. And she knew how to do more than grade papers and wait.

She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.

8

T
hey were all due at the big house at six, for cocktails and dinner to welcome the Texans “officially.” The Breens, Doug tried calling them in his head, but to him Bruce and Gracie were the Breens, so Texans it was. Maybe if he started calling Case “Tex,” he’d like him better.

In the two weeks they’d shared the house, the couples had fallen into a routine of cooking separate dinners, perhaps overlapping in the kitchen for five or ten awkwardly sociable minutes. Doug and Zee found themselves eating takeout downstairs more and more.

Zee came into the bathroom when Doug was brushing his teeth. She said, “I have some motivation for you. I think something might be happening with Cole. This might be his last year.”

Doug made a mouth-full-of-toothbrush noise. Zee wasn’t often prone to wishful thinking, but Doug knew enough about Cole not to get his hopes up.

They all four walked up the drive together, Doug carrying a bottle of wine too cheap for Gracie and Bruce to drink. They passed Case’s new car: a black 2000 BMW 3 Series convertible, liquid-shiny, parked beside their own weathered Subaru. Doug had gladly joined in Zee’s eye rolling, wondering how Case thought he could blow through his savings, how weirdly sure he was of landing a new job the moment he started looking. How a
convertible would get him through a Chicago winter. But privately, all Doug wanted to do was lick the hubcaps.

He marveled anew at the way the thick ivy turned the big house into an organic entity. The house turned brown every fall, it died every winter, and by late spring it was in full foliage.

The front door was locked, and so they stood waiting as Hidalgo, Gracie’s standard poodle (“Is there something bigger than standard?” Doug had asked Zee several times now. “Because he’s really not normal”) flung himself at the window again and again, claws scraping the glass.

“Oh God,” Miriam said, “I
hate
poodles.”

“Just wait,” Doug said.

Bruce answered the door himself, tossing Hidalgo peanuts to keep him at bay. “Welcome!” He gave each woman a long kiss on the wrist like a lecherous Austrian prince, pumped Doug’s hand, and slapped his arm around Case. “My boy!” he shouted, as if he’d never talked to his son before in his life.

Bruce was red-faced, with big cheeks and a ring of white hair and a belly of hardened fat. Later, he would bully Doug into smoking a cigar with him out back. But he was a good man, and Doug hadn’t really had a father, so the handshakes, the cigar, the talk about bumping into the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard—he found them weirdly thrilling.

Doug saw Hidalgo advancing and kneed him in the chest before the claws could make contact with his shoulders, before the beast could leave welts down his arms again. Hidalgo was not one of those poodles with the haircuts. He was shaggy, fur the color of a rotten peach, breath like hot compost. Bruce threw another peanut.

Gracie stood waiting in the library, in a long, gauzy green thing that Doug’s mother would have called a Hostess Dress. Zee kissed her cheek. “So you’re locking us out now?”

“Bruce,” Gracie said, “did you lock the door? The ghost must’ve done it.”

“The ghost only ever does three things,” Doug whispered to Miriam. “Closes doors, knocks on things, and flushes toilets.”

Miriam whispered back: “Maybe it died from getting locked out of the bathroom.”

Bruce mixed everyone gin and tonics without asking, and poured himself his standard glass of Mount Gay rum. “Let me tell you something, though,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t at all asking permission to let it tell you something. “We’re going to need new locks anyway. Y2K, December thirty-one, these fancy security systems are worthless. Crime will shoot up, credit cards won’t work, and are you aware, even your
car
, your
car
has a computer. I’m buying a ’57 Chevy. No computer, and I’ve always wanted one anyway. But I’ll tell you, no one should be out celebrating that night.
Nuclear power plants
, think about that. Best we can do is hunker down with the canned goods and barricade the doors.”

“How festive,” Gracie said. Bruce had given the same speech at every opportunity for the past year, but this was the first time he’d mentioned the nuclear plants. “Let’s change the subject, shall we? Something less apocalyptic. Case, how’s your job search?”

Case, sprawling on the couch, stretched his legs out. “I got some fish in the water,” he said.

Zee said, “Some lines?”

“One could say that, Zee. One could say that.”

Bruce said, “I’m going to introduce him to Clarence Mahoney. Big guy in Chicago. Lots of projects, and none of this dot-com nonsense. Watch what happens to those dot-com folks, January one.”

Case turned to Doug. “Tell us what your poems are about,” he said. “Nature, or what?”

Doug tried to hide the ice cube under his tongue while he talked. “I’m actually writing a monograph. A book. On a poet named Edwin Parfitt. He stayed here a few times, at the arts colony.”

“Just imagine,” Gracie said, gesturing around the room. “This place filled with painters and musicians!”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Doug went on, willing himself not to look at Zee. “What about back in Toronto? There wouldn’t be anything from the colony up there, would there? Archives or photos? That got taken back?” He’d asked it before, but her answers were always so evasive that he held out hope she might blurt something different if she was in a good mood, if the weather was right, if she’d had enough to drink. (Once, after champagne, she’d volunteered the story of Zee’s birth in fairly graphic detail.) Plus she never seemed to remember that she’d already turned him down.

“Oh, dear God, no. The colony was such a burden to my father, he’d have shredded all that. The woman who ran the place, you know, turned out to be a Communist. And the drinking! It was always in the papers, someone driving into a fence. He was glad to be rid of the whole mess.”

Zee would bawl him out when they got home. Not just for bothering her mother, but for grasping at straws. Zee so often had to defend, to people like Sid Cole, her own interest in historicity and context, that she ought to have been sympathetic to Doug’s search for something archival. But she saw no similarity.

“So that’s when you moved here?” Miriam asked. “After it closed?”

“More or less.”

There had been profound resentment in the artistic community back in the fifties, when her father reclaimed the house and moved Gracie in here with her new husband, George, Zee’s father. When Doug was engaged to Zee, he had secretly ordered a history of the Devohr family through interlibrary loan. That was the only mention of Gracie at all—the strong implication that her father closed Laurelfield just to get the drinking, womanizing George Grant out of Canada.

“So your job is to write the story of this guy’s life?” Case seemed to find this hilarious.

“It’s really an analysis of the poems. How his life affected his work.”

“Like a term paper,” Gracie offered.

“Yes,” Doug said, after he drained his glass. “Like a really long high school English paper.”

Zee, to his relief, smiled sympathetically from the other couch. She was stunning in her blue sundress, and her collarbones were a work of art.

“Refills,” Bruce announced. “Would anyone care to climb Mount Gay with me?”

Doug had been prepared for the line, was always prepared for it, but it was still a struggle not to lose it. And it was a struggle not to look at the flaming, shaking, red spot next to him that was Miriam’s face.

—

Doug stayed quiet through dinner. Sofia, the housekeeper, shuttled back and forth with plates of swordfish and asparagus, lemon sorbet, pineapple cake.

Case was telling them all a story about sailing, something about his buddy getting lost in the Gulf, when he leaned the whole chair back and hit the sideboard behind him, sending a green china vase to the floor and into a million pieces. “I’ll—oh, God, I’ll—hey, I’ll pay for that,” Case said.

“With what?” Gracie muttered.

Miriam convinced Sofia to surrender the dustpan so she could sweep the shards herself.

“He gets his coordination from me!” Bruce shouted. “That’s why they kicked him off the football team!”

Case looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, or how to arrange his mouth.

Doug searched for a way to change the subject, but Zee beat him to it. “You do realize that’s the ghost behind you,” she said to Miriam. “The painting, I mean.”

Bruce gave the ancestor a look most men reserved for centerfolds. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? A
natural
beauty. Nothing fake back then.”

“Except the paint,” Zee said.

Doug didn’t know much about art, but he could recognize that it was a great picture. If he ran into this woman on the street in modern dress, he’d recognize her instantly. Gorgeous, it was true, by any standards. Black hair and dark eyes, like Zee, balanced by the shoulders of a black gown. But somehow profoundly evasive. Some paintings seemed to follow you with their eyes, but this one had the opposite effect: No matter where you stood, Violet woudn’t meet your gaze. He couldn’t figure out why—he just knew he didn’t want to be alone in this room at night.

“Do you mind my asking how she did it?” Miriam said. “How she died?” She was still down on the floor sweeping, a disembodied voice.

“I always imagined hanging,” Gracie said. “But my family never spoke of it.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m getting a vibe on the staircases! Maybe she did it from a railing.”

Doug hadn’t contemplated this before in detail. He’d always imagined her drinking poison quietly in bed. “She might have jumped from a window.”

“She’d make a better ghost if she wore white,” Case offered.

Miriam stood up with her dustpan and looked at the painting. “She’s got me fully convinced.”

9

T
hey were all back in the solarium with coffee, windows open, hot night air rolling through. Hidalgo slept on his back. Zee wanted to be home and asleep, but she forced herself to smile at Miriam. “I’ve peeked at your new project,” she said. “I hope you’ll hang some of your pieces around the coach house.”

“Anything that doesn’t sell.”

Zee wondered if Miriam had ever sold a piece in her life. The new one was an atrocious swirl of orange with blue and brown things sticking out.

“Tell me, what inspired that orange piece?”

“Oh, it’s a fractal! It’s basically math, so don’t ask me to explain! You can just
see
they’re amazing, the colors and symmetry.” Zee wanted to shake her. It was her greatest fear for her female students, that they’d end up giggling and apologizing at everything.