The Hundred-Year House (26 page)

“They’re lying to you,” he said. “He’s not sick. They want to get you up there and lock you in a closet.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. Exactly.”

“That isn’t—George, what are you doing?”

Because now George was shredding the telegram, pouring the shreds into the ashtray on his bureau, and lighting them with a match. She thought of yelling or grabbing it, but then he might throw the whole thing, still on fire. So she waited till it had smoldered to nothing. Then she said, “That wasn’t necessary.”

“
Ha!
What do you do, all day long? You sit in that attic, mooning over your grandfather’s precious files, then you sit at dinner staring at your lunatic grandmother.”

“They aren’t my grandfather’s files.”

“And where the hell are we? We’re in a—we’re on an
altar
. This place is an altar to your family. How is this supposed to be my house when it’s the Devohr International Museum?”

She hooked her finger through his belt and pulled him toward the bed. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said.

But he pushed her onto the mattress and left her there, and then she listened for quite a long time as he stormed through the house opening and shutting doors, until it turned from storming to crashing. He must have drunk more in the meantime. And the sun was already going down.

She stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him come up the stairs, then stumble all the way down the hall to the open door of the attic steps. He disappeared, and came back a minute later with his arms full of file folders. The Parfitt book was balanced on top.

He saw her, but he didn’t stop except to call out “
Remember, remember the fifth of November!
” And then, from halfway down: “What do you say, Duck? Fall cleaning!”

Grace ran to the attic door and thought of locking it, but the key was all the way down in the kitchen. She might have gone in and locked it from the inside, only George would just kick the door in, and what would that accomplish? She went into the flowered bedroom and watched from the window as he strode across the lawn, papers flying from the files. He rolled up the folders and stuck each into a space between sticks. Ludo stood by the cottage, keeping quite a distance. Beatrice, she assumed, was in the kitchen helping Amy.

He was coming back, and she ran, while she still could, up the
stairs to think what she might hide. He hadn’t gotten to the middle of the alphabet yet, and so she scooped out the whole section that would contain the Edwin Parfitt file and its photographic contents and stuffed it all far back in the jungle of office furniture, between the mimeograph machine and the postage meter. She might have liked that photo burned, but she couldn’t run the risk of George seeing it. He would do something horrible, she was sure, something that would finish off her father. Besides which she hadn’t solved its mystery yet. She wasn’t
done
with it yet. George was back, before she could get more files. She considered hiding, but when he appeared she was just standing by the cabinets, unable to move.

He saw her and said, “
What
.”

“I was curious.”

She ducked before he could push her aside, and he snatched the oak leaf painting from under the window, the tacks flying from its corners and skittering across the floor. He said, “Whose vagina is this?”

“It’s—first of all it’s an oak leaf.”

He held it at arm’s length. “That is a vagina.”

“It might be valuable.”

“Sure. What you need, Grace Devohr, is more money. All your problems will be solved.” He rolled it and tucked it under his arm and scooped more files out. His hands were massive—it was the first thing she loved about him, that his hands were like bear paws—and he grabbed up six inches of folders in each hand. He stacked them against his chest, held them down with his chin, and Grace thought they might all fall, but only a few did.

She said, “Here, I’ll carry the painting.”

“The hell you will.”

He went past her, and down the stairs, and this time she followed him all the way out, watched him strip to his undershirt to
stuff things into the pile. Ludo, when he saw her, retreated into the cottage. Max stood on the path by the catalpa, watching, hands in his pockets. She wondered if he recognized what was being burned today, if he cared as much as she did about these last relics of the colony. There were two faces as well in the kitchen window: Beatrice, Amy. Three gas cans near the pile, but it didn’t smell like he’d used them yet.

She knew something right then. She saw George pushing those files into the sticks, saw him bent on destroying something. And not because he loved it but because he
didn’t
. Because he didn’t care at all. And she knew then that Amy had told the truth, that she hadn’t offered herself to him.

George said, “I’m not leaving you out here alone,” and he pulled her by the arm back to the house. They passed not five feet from Max, and she looked straight at him and tried to send him a message to rescue the painting, at least the painting, but he looked like a man trapped in stone.

In through the terrace to the living room, up the stairs, down the hall, letting go of her at last, and up the attic stairs.

And when he was halfway up, when she was still on the bottom step, he fell. He seemed to fall forward and then, mid-pitch, his body jackknifed and it turned to a headfirst backward dive. The stairs were steep. He landed above her and slid down and came to rest with his head, face up, at her feet.

Grace surprised herself by not screaming. She just stood there looking down, her heart a kettle drum, and a thousand different futures flashed in front of her.

But no: He was still breathing. Great, deep breaths, like a child asleep.

Even so. What if she just left him here? What would be the effect of staying at this downward angle after a blow to the head? What were the odds of his drowning in his own vomit?

All the tension had gone from his face, and all the anger. His forehead was smooth and unfurrowed. Grace crouched and ran a finger from his eyebrow to his hairline. It was an odd moment to think it, but what she found herself contemplating was how the forehead is one of the more sexual parts of the body, the texture of smooth skin over hard bone. She kissed his eye, his closed and upside-down eye. And then she ran to get Max.

—

Max, surprisingly strong for his size, got George splayed out on the bed in the flowered room. He asked if Grace wanted him to call an ambulance, but by now George was stirring, moaning a bit and reaching for his head. Max fetched an ice pack from the kitchen instead. Then he whispered, “What can we do?”

If she hadn’t guessed already that he was talking about the files, she’d have known by the way he faced the window, ready to dive right through it and reclaim everything.

“He’ll remember,” she said. “He rarely forgets what he was doing.”

“Can we restuff them? Can we put other things in the files?”

Grace scanned the room: the pretty old washbasin, the glass-shaded lamp. “There are the two phone books in the hall,” she said, “but it won’t be enough.” Then she remembered the unreadable novel, still hidden with its neighboring files upstairs. She told Max to wait, and she ran to get it. “This isn’t important, is it?”

Max looked at the name on the two files, and at the six hundred pages crammed inside. “Good lord. No, this is nothing. It’s perfect.”

Grace stayed with George, stroking his hand and making sure he stayed put, while Max ran to the burn pile. She craned to watch from the window as he worked first alone and then with Ludo, collecting the folders, yanking out the contents into one
huge stack, and systematically restuffing each with a few pages of phone book or failed novel.

He put the rescued papers into Ludo’s wheelbarrow, and Ludo wheeled it all into the gardener’s cottage. Max met her in the hallway with just the painting and a bit of the novel (“I couldn’t bear burning it
all
,” he said). He told her Ludo would shelter the other papers in the cottage till Max had time to sort it. He said, “I remember most of these people. It shouldn’t be hard to refile. He’ll miss the painting, though.”

Grace ran the novel remnants back to the attic, and stowed the painting behind a pile of colony mattresses. There was nothing to replace it. She looked at her poster board with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and laughed. It would never roll. And it was the wrong size.

George rested till dinner, groaning and stirring and eventually sitting up to ask for food. Grace intended for Amy to bring him his dinner on a tray while she ate in peace downstairs, but she stopped just short. She wouldn’t send the girl to be alone with him in that room. She wouldn’t send the lamb to the lion. So Grace brought him a tray herself, bread and butter, whiskey and water. Then she sat alone at the dining table. Amy smiled so kindly at Grace as she put the baked carrots and cheese in front of her that Grace wanted to scream. She wanted to gouge the girl’s eyes out for knowing what she knew, for seeing Grace dragged back to the house like a child. And at the same time she wanted to fold Amy up in her sweater, to rock her to sleep.

Soon after, George went out to the pile himself and came raging back to where Grace sat in the solarium. “Where did the painting go?” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He seemed to be summoning the strength to fly across the room at her, but Max and Ludo had followed him, and here they came through the terrace doors.

“The painting!” he said. “
Your
painting. You think I don’t know what you’re doing up there?”

“I didn’t paint it.”

“Mr. Grant,” Ludo said. “The painting is blown away. I am sorry. It—puff!—across the lawn while you sleep. I see it go.”

“Ha!”

“Let’s start the fire,” Max said. “While the night is young.”

Before he followed the men back out, George pointed at her. “If I see that painting again. If I find that you—I don’t like to be lied to.”

“I wouldn’t, George.”

“If I see that painting again, I’ll burn the whole place down. The whole house.”

She watched as Ludo poured gasoline on the pile. George threw the match, and everything went up in a glorious blaze.

—

The next morning, as soon as George took off, Max came into the dining room where Grace still sat at breakfast. The oak leaf painting was in his hands, rolled. “Can’t you give it to the college?” she said. “I’d put it in the bank vault, but George has a key.”

Without waiting for an invitation, Max sat in George’s seat. He unrolled the linen and touched his finger to the paint. “This ought to stay at Laurelfield,” he finally said.

“We can’t afford that.”

“The artist would want this to stay at Laurelfield. There are simply some things that you don’t remove from their natural habitats.” Amy opened the door from the kitchen, saw Max, and turned back. Now she’d be eavesdropping, but Grace didn’t have the energy to care.

“Even if we hid it in your personal effects—it’s just that George—”

Max said, “I know what George is capable of.”

“I imagine it’s valuable.”

“Yes. This is a very good artist.”

“I do love it. I love the edges of the leaves.”

“We could
reconfigure
it,” Max said. “It would be a great joke.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We could paint over it. And hide it in plain view.”

“I couldn’t destroy it!”

“You’d be preserving it, really.” The idea seemed to tickle him tremendously.

Really, the thought of George seeing it every day, walking past it, having no idea—it was appealing. It was a modicum of revenge. And when they were both seventy, and she needed to trump him in some battle, she’d point to the thing and say,
It’s been there the whole time. You’ve been taking your coffee beneath the vagina for forty years.

“Would oil paint work?”

“It’s all that would do.”

That afternoon, using an advertisement for another kit from the back of the Paint-by-Numbers box as a guide, Grace painted it over with a farmhouse scene. It ended up not terrible for a rank amateur, and there was quite enough paint in the combined pots of Paint-by-Number oils that it covered the canvas thoroughly. She and Max carried it from the big house to the coach house together, each holding two corners of canvas.

Max knew where to get it framed, as soon as it was dry enough. Six days later, it was hanging in the library.

—

In the next week, Grace found herself struggling to rise from bed. The room would spin, and she’d lie back to sleep for another half hour, and eventually her hunger would bring her downstairs, if the smell of Amy’s horrible coffee didn’t keep her from the dining room.

Then she’d walk down by the little hill of ash where the fire pile had stood. She’d follow the paths in the woods.

George was sweet for a few days, until he wasn’t.

She realized she ought to move the portrait of Violet, just to be safe. Max stored it in his own room. When George saw it was gone, he wasn’t happy at all. He asked if she sold it, and even though she said she hadn’t, he asked how much she’d gotten for it, and what she’d done with the money. He threw his glass past her head, and it shattered on the spot where the painting had hung, and for a moment water streamed in a thousand little rivers down the wallpaper. Beatrice served the rest of the meal, and said that Amy had gone to bed with a sudden bug.

—

She saw Max enter the Longhouse, and two minutes later Sid Cole of Indianapolis followed. They stayed in there an hour. It happened again the next day, and then three days after that.

—

She didn’t want to sit in the attic now that it had been defiled, and so she tried perching herself on the huge, decaying tree stump between the coach house and the big house, her legs crossed. But she felt so strange and dizzy there. It might turn to a sinkhole and swallow her. She thought of the studios, but she couldn’t go into the Longhouse. She walked to the little one behind that. It had been a darkroom, Max said. And indeed there were both blinds and shutters inside the windows, and when she closed them it was dark as death. She sat on the daybed and tried not to feel her limbs. She opened the shutters and stared at the floor. Five dead bees. A dead ladybug, its body bleached pink by the sun. A 1939 penny. Someone was happy here once. Someone sang to herself and made her prints and didn’t notice when she dropped a penny.