The Hundred-Year House (21 page)

Grace said, “Who is she?”

Amy seemed relieved that the question was this easy. “Miss Silverman. From New York City.”

“
Silverman
. And she—Miss Silverman is a friend? Of your uncle’s?”

“I think so.”

“Jewish. A name like that.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”

“Had you met her before?”

“No, not before.”

“She seems quite odd. Don’t you think?” She leaned toward Amy and whispered, twelve-year-olds in the schoolyard. “She dresses like a witch.”

Amy let out a short giggle.

“Is she still here today?”

“She went down to the Art Institute,” Amy said. “On the train. I worried about her, going all alone, but I guess if she’s from New York City she can find her way around.”

“Certainly. And is she—
attached
to your uncle? In a romantic sense?” Even though the witch seemed older than Max. She was gray, and he was not.

“Oh, no! I mean, she hasn’t seen him in years. That’s what I gathered.”

“Amy,” she said, “one thing I admire about you is your power of observation. No one could have learned this place faster than you. I’m still learning it myself.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“I’m just trying to find out what I can, because I don’t want to make your uncle uncomfortable. The truth is that he never asked to invite a guest.”

“Oh, but he didn’t know she was coming!”

“Are you sure?”

“You’ve never seen anyone so surprised. He—well, I don’t know. He was upset that she’d come. It’s really not his fault, I think.”

Grace decided to be quiet until Amy said something else. This was one of her father’s negotiation tactics, and she rarely had reason to use it. Perhaps she was still improving her mind after all. She stared at Amy, and Amy kicked the leaves and looked generally terrified. It only took a few seconds.

“I’ll tell you what she said, though. It was after he got over his shock, and they’d sat down at the table, but I was still on the stairs. She said, ‘I had to see for myself. You have no idea what I went through to get away.’ And then they were quiet a long time, and I thought they were either laughing or crying.”

Grace was impressed, despite herself, with the old-fashioned Yankee accent Amy had put on for Miss Silverman’s voice. She
was a good mimic. Why, then, did she so doggedly keep her wretched twang when she was capable of speaking properly? Grace would like to write out the ways Amy might elevate herself.

“I imagine she was referring to the colony,” Grace said. “To the colony closing. Do you suppose it’s an artist rushing here to see the damage?”

“She said—she said no one in New York knew where she was. I left that out. She said she’d told them all she was visiting her brother in Wisconsin.”

“And where does she sleep?”

“Oh, not—not with—he asked if I wouldn’t mind sleeping down on the couch in the mechanical room. And I don’t. So she’s got my quarters, and I don’t mind at all.”

“You’re very helpful, Amy. You truly are.” She hated the sound of Amy’s name in her mouth. Such horrible vowels, such an egregious mangling of the French Aimée—
loved
, but who loved little Amy? Not her. Not George. Probably not Max.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Part of what bothered her about this girl was how much the two of them resembled each other. Both blonde, both with long eyebrows, strong chins. Though Amy was at least twelve years younger. And prettier, even discounting age. Grace, at eighteen, had not been as pretty as Amy at eighteen. It was only fair. Amy had been luckier in looks, and Grace had been far, far luckier in breeding. If she were Amy, though, she might find it odd that this woman, this sad and tired Mrs. Grace Grant, should be elevated so far above her, in defiance of the hierarchy biology itself had bestowed. In the court of femininity, looks trump all. The gorgeous lady-in-waiting can always smirk pityingly at the plain-faced princess. And
this
was what enraged Grace. She’d finally pinpointed it. That Amy pitied her. Their similarities invited comparison, and Amy must be measuring herself against Grace all the time. And pitying, and gloating, and letting George claw her by the tree.

Grace stood. She didn’t want to talk to Amy anymore, even if she had more information.

Amy stood too. “Ma’am, if I might ask something.”

“Certainly.”

“Your eye.” And she reddened as soon as she’d said it. She might have no manners, no sense of propriety, but she must have seen that Grace wanted to slap her.

Grace restrained herself, though, and touched her own cheekbone with two fingers. She was about to say that she’d slipped in the bathroom. But she felt like wounding Amy, and so she told the truth. She said, “George hit me with a large salt shaker. Thank you for your assistance, Amy.”

—

She needed her coat before she walked all the way to see Max. Her mother had sent her an alpaca coat, and this was the first day it was cold enough to wear it. She walked back in through the kitchen, and was nearly to the hall closet when George (a whole herd of Georges) thundered down the front stairs and saw her and said, “You’re coming with me. We’re playing golf.”

“Now?”

“We’ve been here five months. I want to get in one round before Christmas.”

He could have gone without her, but the membership at the Chippeway Club was in her father’s name, and she knew George was secretly terrified of being turned away at the door. Grace was his human shield. She’d been making excuses for weeks.

“I’m wearing slacks. I’m not sure of the dress code–”

“Well, change.”

“I’ll freeze.”

He didn’t answer, though. He was headed for the basement to scare up the golf bags.

In the end she kept her slacks on, half hoping it would get
them kicked out, though she could already imagine George screaming that she’d embarrassed him. She put on a cardigan and the alpaca coat, and she wore cat-eye sunglasses that didn’t quite cover the bruising. By the time she came down, George was already in the back of the Capri, which Max had pulled up to the front door for loading the golf bags.

“Why don’t we take the Darrin?” she said to both of them. “Max shouldn’t have to come. He has a guest, after all.”

Max looked startled, as if he’d hoped this fact had escaped her notice. He rested her bag on the lip of the trunk.

“I’m happy to drive,” he said.

“What are we paying this guy for, if he never drives us anywhere? Come on, hop in.”

Grace wanted to protest that this wasn’t done, that people didn’t need drivers to transport them one mile across town, that it wasn’t 1920, but George would think she was lecturing him on cultured behavior. And perhaps it was safer to have Max along.

She leaned her head on the window as they rode. So many pretty houses. The maple trees were still red.

George was worrying his trouser knee. Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan—the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress—he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster. He came from nothing, and nobody, and nowhere. His parents were middle class, but they died when he was three, and he was shuttled between orphanages and aunts, and everyone robbed him till he was grown and lethally charming with no money at all. He’d survived childhood only by ingratiating himself to women, and as an adult it remained his leading skill. He showed up in Windsor at the age of twenty, and his only lie was an
aristocratic British accent. Everything he said was technically true: orphan, penniless, et cetera. Once people heard that bit, they never pressed him on his background. He met a rich girl and seduced her and followed her to Toronto, where she introduced him to everyone and he dropped the accent. He went to a different party every night, spiraling up the social world, and he ended with everyone considering him a sort of relative, a crazy cousin to be endured. He’d pay a girl a lot of attention, get her father to give him a job, get her brother to loan him a bed, and then before they knew it he was on to another place. None of the girls loved him, though, so he didn’t break many hearts. To his credit, he was always careful to pick out the adventuresses. He told Grace all these things, tearful and drunk, a few nights after they met. She should have been horrified by his crying, but instead it did her in, and she put his head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.

A Negro in uniform nodded them through the gates of the Chippeway Club, and another opened Grace’s door at the front entrance.

She spoke before George could, before he could even get out of the car. “We’re guests of a member,” she said. “But he isn’t with us. Could you direct us, please?”

He led them to the golf office while Max gave the bags to a caddy. She watched him out the office window, standing there by the car, waiting to see if they’d be turned away, and she wanted to tell him to leave, to stop caring about them and go back home to his witch. The man in the office gave them a tee time and welcomed them cordially. He asked if they’d like a drink on the back porch. Grace nodded, figuring at least on a porch it wouldn’t be ridiculous to keep her sunglasses on. They followed the man. Max would have to figure out on his own that they were settled, that he was dismissed.

Everyone on the glassed-in porch was ancient, hunched over
bowls of soup and snifters of brandy. On the weekends it must be different, businessmen and their bouncy wives. In summer, it would be full of children. She knew there were women her age in town—she’d seen them at the pharmacy and the hairdresser, even if she did turn down the invitation from the Newcomers’ Society—but they all had children, and nothing in common with her. She’d counted on neighbors, but the house to the south was vacant and the older couple to the north spent all their time in Virginia. Grace had no idea how to insinuate herself into a new town, and no pressing desire to. She was unaccustomed. Toronto society had simply flowed through her parlor, and her friends and beaux had appeared as naturally as wildflowers. George knew how to do it, but now that he had the house and the wife and no need for a job, he had no motivation to meet and charm anyone but the regulars at the Highwood bars, the men with loose and shady business ventures who could use an investor like George. Besides which, he wasn’t interested now in social climbing so much as in having a good time. One Sunday, in an aborted effort to be sociable, Grace had gone to the Presbyterian Church, but she only wound up sitting alone in the back and trying to delineate the families, putting mental dividers in the pews. Four blond children, bookended by blond parents. Two teenage girls with pageboy cuts, and their graying mother. Grace hadn’t been back. The last thing she wanted was someone who knew her name, who looked for her every Sunday, and then worried when she showed up with a purple jaw.

She looked out across the eighteenth hole to where three teepees stood in a row. It was simultaneously 1955 and 1800 out there.

George ordered them both gin and tonics, and the waiter already knew his name: “Yes, sir, Mr. Grant.”

At the next table, an old man sliced into a cylinder of pinkish aspic.

She whispered to George: “We’ve checked into the geriatric ward.”

“Your father picked a hell of a club.”

“Oh, he hardly came. It was only a way to keep friendly with the locals when the colony was open. The artists were always making such a ruckus. He’d golf with the mayor, that sort of thing. I think his parents were members, way back.”

George laughed too loudly. “That’s why Madame Violet offed herself. Too boring at the old country club.”

Their drinks arrived, with small wedges of lime.

After the waiter had gone, Grace said, “We can’t very well charge these to my father.”

“Are you going to take those ridiculous glasses off?”

“It depends if you’d like people to call the police.”

“What you need is to be better with makeup. Makeup would cover that, if you did it right.”

“Miss Georgia, the cosmetician.”

George reached a finger across the table toward Grace’s stemmed glass of ice water. He touched it as if he were about to say something about it, something important, but then he kept pushing, and the whole glass tipped slowly toward Grace, until gravity sped it up and the ice cubes and water tumbled into her lap.

She made a noise but managed to keep her lips closed. She stood and shook the ice to the floor, and the aspic-slicing man handed her a napkin and his wife rushed around the table to see if she could help. George stayed calmly in his seat, and Grace refused to look at him.

She said, to the older couple, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she said it to the waiter, who had run over with a broom and dustpan to collect the ice: “I’m so sorry.” She ran through the dining room and toward what she thought was the front door, but it was an
empty banquet hall. She ran back around a corner and another corner, and yanked off her sunglasses to see better, and finally she found the door. She had no plan except to walk home, or maybe into town—but there, just a bit farther around the drive than where he’d dropped them, was Max, leaning against the Capri. He dropped his cigarette and squashed it with his toe. He opened the back door as if he’d expected her at precisely this moment.

“Mr. Grant won’t be joining us till later,” she said. Max put on his driving gloves and handed back a handkerchief.

He said, “I’ll return for him. I assume he’ll play the full eighteen?”

She couldn’t very well question him about the witch now, even though she had him alone. That could wait till she was breathing evenly, till she wasn’t riding in a vehicle he controlled.

When her father had made all the arrangements, he’d said Max would look after her. At first she worried he was meant to report back to Toronto about George’s behavior, but Max was far too tight-lipped for that, besides which he and her father didn’t seem fond of each other in the slightest. “I
can’t
fire the fellow,” is what her father had said, as if he wanted nothing more in the world. “He’s been there longer than the trees.” But Max seemed to be following some deeper imperative than just driving and overseeing the grounds. He acted, at times such as these, like Grace’s appointed protector. Perhaps he was fond of her. But that made little sense, seeing as she and George had usurped the estate. This wasn’t really the way it happened, but it was the narrative she knew the colony people had told one another: Old Gamby Devohr is shutting us down so he can hide his daughter and her drunken husband while her brother runs for Parliament. When really it was just a convenient confluence. The colony’s death knells had been sounding for years, and yes, they wanted George
far from Ontario, and they wanted Grace to live with her mistake, here in the suburban wilderness, till she recognized the error of her ways and came crying back, divorced and wiser. And her idiot brother had as much chance of winning that seat as he had of winning the Nobel Prize in physics.