The Hundred-Year House (8 page)

“You pretend to be a photographer.”

Leland laughed and shook his head. “No, no, this is sounding like a sitcom.”

“Listen: Any Moore documents, any correspondence, you can have it. You can publish it, sell it, it’s yours.”

“Huh. Christ.”

“I just want the Parfitt stuff.”

What he asked Leland to do was call Gracie pretending to be with the Adler Ross Foundation. Adler Ross was the architect of the place, just famous enough for someone to care about his attics. Leland was going to be sad and sweet and claim this was the last attic he needed to photograph to complete the records. He’d take pictures of the windows, throw around some jargon, get out of there. “It’s reconnaissance,” Doug said. “You just see if there are file cabinets. And if everything’s going well, maybe ask if you can move one to get a better picture, then you say, ‘God, these are heavy, what’s in these things,’ right? And meanwhile you’re watching what key she uses on the attic door, where she puts it when she’s done.”

“This is insane, Doug. I’m not a good liar.”

“Marianne Moore. Marianne Moore’s undiscovered poem about her secret affair with Mickey Mantle.”

“Well, yeah. Okay. True.”

21

Z
ee had waited patiently through the whole summer session, through one sweltering reception on the president’s lawn, and the first two weeks of class. She finally let herself go to the science building computer lab to type up the letter. She sat with her back to the windows and typed in eight-point font, then blew it up only for proofreading.

Dear Dean Shaumber and Prof. Blum,

I write on behalf of myself and two other female students who feel disturbed by the photos on Dr. Cole’s computer. We are sure you are familiar with the photos, as they are common knowledge. Although he closes that file when we enter the office, it is unnerving to know he has been looking at the photos, and that he is in a state of mind to degrade women.

We simply wish him to consider the effect this behavior has on those women who visit his office. We are also upset about his continual use of the word “coed,” but this is old news and we understand nothing is going to be done about it, and furthermore we and the other students we have spoken to are far more disturbed about the pornography.

Respectfully submitted by three women who wish to remain anonymous.

Zee went back and forth on the spelling of
effect
, but figured the three imaginary girls would be imaginary English majors, and would get it right. She left two copies in the printer trays where they could be found by students, then stuck one copy in Shaumber’s mailbox and one in Blum’s.

This last she did right in front of Chantal, but there were plenty of other papers in there already. She turned calmly and asked Chantal to make some copies. Her mother had always maintained, back in the days when Zee and her father had played hide-and-seek around the house, her father as gleeful as any eight-year-old, that plain sight was the best place to hide. They’d talk Gracie into hiding, and when they found her she’d been sitting in the kitchen right where they’d left her, smoking a Virginia Slim. “But it took you five minutes!” she’d say when they complained. That was in the days before her mother put on airs, back when the estate was just a ramshackle shell for a regular, sloppy family, entire guest rooms given over to Zee’s Lego configurations. Friends from the art world—George’s reviews eventually went beyond the local scene, and the house became a pit stop for artists passing through Chicago—would play Mastermind with Zee at the table while Gracie cooked eggs. The only formality was her father’s predilection for folding the dinner napkins into sailboats on special occasions. Things hardened after his death. It was later that year—Zee was still twelve—when her mother saw her take a spoonful of chocolate frosting from the container and said, “That’s how girls get fat.” Her mother had gotten a manicure, had wallpapered the bathrooms, had joined the Presbyterian church, all new things Zee didn’t understand except to know that everything was different now, that without her father’s laugh dismissing the rest of the world, there were appearances to be maintained.

—

On her way out of the building she ran into Cole, who held the door open. Those eyebrows: long white hairs among the dark
short ones. Someone had planted them in the wrong garden. “Smile!” he shouted, and because her every interaction with the man was a charade anyway, she did just that. He didn’t let her past, though. He poked a bony finger into her sternum, right above her blouse. “Do you know why I like it when you smile?”

“I do not,” she said, still grinning, though her ears were hot now, and her neck.

“You resemble someone I used to know. It’s uncanny. The ears and chin.”

“Why, thank you,” Zee said, and leaned back so she could get around his finger without it grazing her breast.

“A man, mind you!” he called after her. “It was a man!”

22

D
oug had been much more confident about the soccer chapters in the previous book—he’d played varsity in high school, three lifetimes ago—than about the theater business here. He was flummoxed by the parts of Frieda’s outline where the Populars and the Friends shared a dressing room. In the back of an old notebook, he’d begun listing things he needed to research:

Would have bra?

Purse? Backpack?

Stage makeup?

Undress in front of each other or hide in stalls?

Chairs backstage? Benches?

They read like a pedophilic stalker’s notes, and he wanted them scratched out as soon as possible. He could maybe use the Internet for the theater parts, but he shuddered to think where an AltaVista search for “twelve-year-old, brassiere” would lead.

He started down to look for Miriam, but she was on the landing of the stairs, cross-legged, sorting through an ice cube tray of colored beads. She said “Oh!” and some of the glassy blue ones splashed out and rolled down the steps. Doug bounded down, picked them up with the sweat of his fingertips, then shook them into Miriam’s outstretched palm.

“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” she said, as Doug sat on the step above her. He regretted his choice of seat immediately. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see too far down her green tank top. He leaned back and looked instead at the ceiling. Miriam said, “I wasn’t sleeping well, so I thought I’d spend time in the ghostliest part of the coach house. Just to dare something to happen. If it does, I’ll know. And if it doesn’t, I’ll sleep better.”

“Why is this the ghostliest part?” He hoped she didn’t have a good answer.

“Oh, you know. Doorways, staircases, attics, windows. You never see a ghost in the middle of the room.”

“I’ve never seen a ghost at all.”

“Well, yes. That.”

“But Doug,” she said. “I found out. How she died.”

“What, Violet?” He sat back up despite himself.

“I went to the library and they got me set with microfiche. There was an obituary with no information at all—But did you know she was born in England? I love it! English ghosts are scarier, right?—so I was about to give up. But then there was this weird article a few days later that was like, ‘Husbands, pray for your wives!’ You know, very 1906. And then it talks about ‘to perish by starvation, in this land of plenty.’ And it was clearly about her.
Starvation
.”

“Seriously. Wow. Wait, I thought she killed herself.”

“Exactly. Something doesn’t add up.”

“Was anorexia a thing back then?”

Miriam tilted her head. “That’s the boring version. I think Augustus killed her. I think he starved her.”

Doug let out a low, slow whistle and laughed. “So I need your help on something less serious,” he said. “Since you’re already in on my secret.” He decided not to ask the bra question, in light of current circumstances. “Do twelve-year-olds carry purses?”

She put the bead tray down. “Oh, fun! Well, the Populars
would have
chic
purses. The Friends should have backpacks. Cece probably has an army surplus bag, something cool that she stenciled on.” Doug scribbled in the notebook as she talked, and twenty minutes later most of his problems were solved.

She said, “Just pay me back when you find that original Demuth painting.”

And then, before he could fathom why he was doing it, he told her about the plan with Leland, who had conceded to go undercover next week. Maybe it was for the same reason he hadn’t shared the news with Zee: One secret, whether shared or kept, begot more.

“I want to help!” she said. “I won’t get in the way. It’s just that nothing exciting has happened to me for such a long time.”

“You’d be handy for identifying art,” he said. “Not that my hopes are up. I’m skeptical. But just a list of who stayed here and when, if Parfitt were on the list—it would be huge. You know, who was with him, that kind of thing.”

Miriam rubbed her bare arms. “See, don’t you feel the ghosts around you when you say things like that? All those people, all that creative energy—it had to go
somewhere
. And Parfitt was another suicide. People like that are the most probable ghosts.”

He stretched his legs, which had fallen asleep.

“Oh!” Miriam said. “You have scars!” She was eye level with his knees and the thick white scars below each kneecap, and to Doug’s surprise she reached out her finger and traced down the length of the left one, as if it concerned her greatly.

Doug knew he ought to run for his life, but he did the next best thing. He said, pointedly, “How did you and Case meet?”

“Oh, he bought one of my pieces. And I thought he was so
old
, because he was twenty-eight! Can you believe that? I was still in college.”

“He’s had a rough go here.” He laughed in what he hoped was a friendly way.

She said, “I wonder about this house. This whole place. Gracie said it’s lucky and it’s unlucky. It’s been lucky for me. I’ve never done so much good work in my life.”

“Don’t take philosophical advice from Gracie.”

Miriam picked a red bead out of the container. “I’ve seen an astrologer do a birth chart for a house, just like a person.” She saw the look on his face. “I know,
stars
, but it’s no weirder than genetics or pheromones telling us what to do, right? It’s just the genome of a place.”

“But
you
like it here.”

“It’s like—did you ever play with magnets as a kid? You know how if you have them turned to the wrong pole it pushes away, but you flip the same magnet around and it clicks together? I feel like Case is the wrong pole, the one that gets pushed. And I’m the right one.”

It wasn’t till he was back in his room, silently mouthing her words just to feel their strangeness on his lips, that he felt they almost made a kind of sense.

One Twix and two beers later, he was on fire. He found the bra information in the
FFL Bible
. He was stupid not to have looked there first. Candy got a bra in book 60, apparently, then Molly, but not Melissa. He spun his chair to celebrate, and got back to work. With Violet’s unexplained starvation fresh on his mind, he decided (why the hell not? The books could use some edge) to give one of the Populars an eating disorder. He showed Amelia Wynn, the sixth-grade dictator, eating a glass of salted ice. He showed her counting her ribs in the dressing-room mirror. Her arms were as thin as tapers.

23

(I wrap my ankles around chair rungs

So I don’t spring out and bite your shoulder.

Your thumb and finger

On the edges of a CD

Your tongue

Makes its way between your teeth

In time with music

I want to be

That music

The hair just below

Your navel

Curls to the left.

Let me untwist it)

24

B
y October, there were rumors. Cole was rarely in his office, and one afternoon Zee saw Jerry Keaton pull Bob Grasso into the seminar room and close the door. She asked Chantal if she knew what was going on, and Chantal shook her head—but she did not ask what Zee was referring to. And that was confirmation enough.

Her seminar kids were already calling themselves The Ghostbusters and had written wonderful essays on
The Turn of the Screw
and
The Haunting of Hill House
. They’d been quick to point out that these stories weren’t so much about ghosts as madness, and our slippery hold on reality. Good kids. She was surprised to find she was having more fun with them than with her Fictions of Empire students.

After class, Fran Leffler followed Zee to her office to talk about grad school. Fran was a major, a sorority girl with dimples. Zee told her to sign up for Literary Theory, then leaned across her desk: “Listen, Fran, this is under wraps, but I’m sure you’ve heard about Professor Cole?”

Fran looked concerned, like Zee was about to tell her the man had cancer.

“I’m just asking because I believe this sort of thing is important to talk about, and you seem like someone who might hear if—Well, I just want to make sure people feel comfortable coming forward.”

“Coming
forward
? Did he, like—”

“Oh, no! No, not that. It’s just his computer. I guess—I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve probably said too much already, and I don’t want your imagination getting the best of you. Apparently some students, some female students, have been made uncomfortable by the images on his computer. They were, you know . . . explicit.”