The Hundred-Year House, page 1
ALSO BY REBECCA MAKKAI
The Borrower
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Makkai Freeman
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Makkai, Rebecca.
The hundred-year house / Rebecca Makkai.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-16354-6
1. College teachers--Fiction. 2. Family secrets--Fiction. 3. Artist colonies--Fiction. 4. Eccentrics and eccentricities--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A36H85 2014
813’.6--dc23 2013047855
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
for
—but not about—
Ragdale and Yaddo
with boundless gratitude
Nothing of her was left, except her shining loveliness.
—Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “The Transformation of Daphne”
CONTENTS
Also By Rebecca Makkai
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART I
1999
PART II
1955
PART III
1929
PROLOGUE
1900
Acknowledgments
PART I
1999
1
For a ghost story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts.
In April, as they repainted the kitchen of the coach house, Zee told Doug more than she ever had about her years in the big house: how she’d spent her entire, ignorant youth there without feeling haunted in the slightest—until one summer, home from boarding school, when her mother had looked up from her shopping list to say, “You’re pale. You’re not depressed, are you? There’s no reason to succumb to that. You know your great-grandmother killed herself in this house. I understand she was quite self-absorbed.” After that, Zee would listen all night long, like the heroine of one of the gothic novels she loved, to the house creaking on its foundation, to the knocking she’d once been assured was tree branches hitting the windows.
Doug said, “I can’t imagine you superstitious.”
“People change.”
They were painting pale blue over the chipped yellow. They’d pulled the appliances from the wall, covered the floor in plastic. There was a defunct light switch, and there was a place near the refrigerator where the wall had been patched with a big square board years earlier. Both were thick with previous layers of paint, so Doug just painted right on top.
He said, “You realize we’re making the room smaller. Every layer just shrinks the room.” His hair was splattered with blue.
It was one of the moments when Zee remembered to be happy: looking at him, considering what she had. A job and a house and a broad-shouldered man. A glass of white wine in her left hand.
It was a borrowed house, but that was fine. When Zee and Doug first moved back to town two years ago, they’d found a cramped and mildewed apartment above a gourmet deli. On three separate occasions, Zee had received a mild electric shock when she plugged in her hair dryer. And then her mother offered them the coach house last summer and Zee surprised herself by accepting.
She’d only agreed to returned home because she was well beyond her irrational phase. She could measure her adulthood against the child she’d been when she lived here last. As Zee peeled the tape from the window above the sink and looked out at the lights of the big house, she could picture her mother and Bruce in there drinking rum in front of the news, and Sofia grabbing the recycling on her way out, and that horrible dog sprawled on his back. Fifteen years earlier, she’d have looked at those windows and imagined Violet Devohr jostling the curtains with a century of pent-up energy. When the oaks leaned toward the house and plastered their wet leaves to the windows, Zee used to imagine that it wasn’t the rain or wind but Violet, in there still, sucking everything toward her, caught forever in her final, desperate circuit of the hallways.
They finished painting at two in the morning, and they sat in the middle of the floor and ate pizza. Doug said, “Does it feel more like it’s ours now?” And Zee said, “Yes.”
—
At a department meeting later that same week, Zee reluctantly agreed to take the helm of a popular fall seminar. English 372 (The Spirit in the House: Ghosts in the British and American Traditions) consisted of ghost stories both oral and literary. It wasn’t Zee’s kind of course—she preferred to examine power structures and class struggles and imperialism, not things that go bump in the night—but she wasn’t in a position to say no. Doug would laugh when she told him.
On the bright side, it was the course she wished she could have taken herself, once upon a time. Because if there was a way to kill a ghost story, this was it. What the stake did to the heart of the vampire, literary analysis could surely accomplish for the legend of Violet Devohr.
2
Doug worked in secret whenever Zee left the house.
The folders on his desk were still optimistically full of xeroxed articles on the poet Edwin Parfitt. And he was still writing a book on Parfitt, in that its bones continued to exist, on forty printed pages and two separate diskettes. The wallpaper on his computer (Zee had set it up) was the famous photo of Parfitt kissing Edna St. Vincent Millay on the cheek.
But what Doug was actually sitting down to write, after a respectful silence for the death of both his career and the last shred of his manhood, was book number 118 in the Friends for Life series, Melissa Calls the Shots. He hid the document on his hard drive in a file called “Systems Operating Folder 30.” This book, unlike the Parfitt monograph, even had an actual editor, a woman named Frieda who called once a week to check his progress.
Doug’s stopover in the land of preteen literature was only the latest in a wretched chain of events—lack of money, paralysis on the monograph, failure to find employment, surreal indignity of moving into the coach house on Zee’s mother’s estate—but it would be the last. He would get this done and get paid, and then, because he’d be on a roll, he’d get other things done. He would publish the Parfitt book, he’d land a tenure-track post, and somehow along the way his hair would grow thicker.
He’d found Frieda through his friend Leland, a luckless poet who wrote wilderness adventures at the same press for “two grand a pop.” Leland talked like that, and he drank whiskey because Faulkner had. “They give you the entire plot,” he said, “and you just stick to the style. Really there is no style. It’s refreshing.” Leland claimed they took a week each, and Doug was enchanted with the idea of shooting out a fully formed book like some kind of owl pellet. He hadn’t written fiction since grad school, when he’d published a few experimental stories (talking trees, towns overcome with love) that now mortified him, even if Zee still adored them. But these publication credentials, plus Leland’s endorsement, landed him the gig. He knew nothing about wilderness adventure, but the press was suddenly short a writer for their middle-grade girls’ series—and desperate enough to hire a man. And so. Here he was.
The money would be nice. The coach house was free, but not the food, the car payments, the chiropractor. And that last wasn’t optional: If Dr. Morsi didn’t fix Doug’s back twice a week, he’d be unable to sit and work on anything at all. Frieda sent him four other books from the series, plus a green binder labeled “THE FFL BIBLE” with fact sheets on each character. “Melissa hates dark chocolate!” came several bullet points above “Melissa’s grandfather, Boppy, died of cancer in #103.”
“The first chapter,” Frieda told him on the phone, “introduces the conflict, which is the Populars on the team, will Melissa ever be goalie, et cetera.” He’d never met Frieda, but imagined she wore pastel blazers. “The second chapter is where you recap the founding of the club. Our return readers skip it, so you can plagiarize chunks from other volumes. The rest will be clear from the outline. Everything’s wrapped up at the end, but there’s that thread you leave hanging, ‘What’s wrong with Candy,’ which is where 119 picks up; 119 is being written already, so—as we tell all our writers—it’s impo
rtant you don’t make uninvited changes to the world of the series.” Doug took comfort in the fact that this was clearly a memorized speech, part of the formula.
He dumped the books at the thrift store, hid the “Bible” pages among some old tax forms, then went to the library every day for a week to skim the series.
And meanwhile, the little house was strangling him, tightening its screws and hinges. There was an infestation of ladybugs that spring, a plague straight out of Exodus. Not even real ladybugs but imposter Japanese beetles with dull copper shells, ugly black underwings jutting out below. Twice a day, Doug would suck them off the window screens with the vacuum attachment, listening as each hit the inner bag with a satisfying thwack. The living ones smelled like singed hair—whether from landing too close to lightbulbs or from some vile secretion, no one was sure. Sometimes Doug would take a sip of water and it would taste burnt, and he would know a bug had been in that glass, swimming for its life and winning.
There was a morning in May—notable only for Zee storming around in full academic regalia, late for commencement—when Doug, still in bed, nearly blurted it all out. Wasn’t it a tenet of a good marriage that you kept no secrets beyond the gastrointestinal? Hundreds of movies and one drunken stranger in a bar had told him as much. And so he almost spilled it, casual-like, as she tossed shoes from the closet. “Hey,” he might have said, “I have this project on the side.” But he knew the look Zee would give: concern just stopping her dark eyes from rolling to the ceiling. A long silence before she kissed his forehead. He didn’t blame her. She’d married the guy with the fellowship and bright future and trail of heartbroken exes, not this schlub who needed sympathy and prodding. When she dumped her entire purse out on the bed and refilled it with just her keys and wallet, he took it as a convenient sign: Shut the hell up, Doug. He might have that tattooed on his arm one day.
Zee’s mother, Gracie, would sometimes include the two of them in her parties, where she’d steer Doug around by the elbow: “My son-in-law Douglas Herriot, who’s a fantastic poet, and you know, I think it’s wonderful. They’re in the coach house till he’s all done writing. It’s my own little NEA grant!” Doug would mutter that he wasn’t a poet at all, that he was a “freelance PhD” writing about a poet, but no one seemed to hear.
The monograph was an attempt to turn his anemic doctoral dissertation on Edwin Parfitt into something publishable. Parfitt was coming back into style, to the extent that dead, marginal modernists can, and if Doug finished this thing soon he could get in on the first wave of what he planned, in job interviews, to call “the Parfitt renaissance.” The dissertation had been straight analysis, and Doug wanted to incorporate some archival research, to be the first to assemble a timeline of the poet’s turbulent life. In her less patient moments, Zee accused him of trying to write a biography—academically uncouth and unhelpful career-wise—but Doug didn’t see what harm it would do to set some context. And the man’s life story was intriguing: Eddie Parfitt (Doug couldn’t help but use his nickname, mentally—after nine years of research he felt he knew the guy) was wealthy, ironic, gay, and unhappy, a prodigy who struggled to fulfill his own early promise. He committed suicide at thirty-seven after his lover died in the Second World War. Parfitt had left few personal records, though. Nor had he flitted about the Algonquin Round Table and cracked wise for posterity. Entire periods—the publication gap between 1929 and late 1930, for instance, after which his work became astonishingly flat—lacked any documentation whatsoever.
Not that it mattered now.
Each morning, as Doug switched off his soul and settled in to write (“Twelve-year-old Melissa Hopper didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” the thing began), he imagined little Parfitt stuffed in the bottom desk drawer on those diskettes, biding his time between the staplers, choking with thirst. The ladybugs hurled their bodies against his desk lamp, and it sounded like knocking—like the ghost of Parfitt, frantically pounding against the wood.
—
In the brief window between commencement and the start of Zee’s summer teaching, Gracie invited them to the big house for brunch. They ate on the back terrace overlooking the grounds—the paths, the fountain, the fish ponds. It was like the garden behind a museum, a place where art students might take picnic lunches. Bruce, Gracie’s second husband, had conveniently excused himself to make his tee time when Gracie announced that she had invited Bruce’s son and daughter-in-law to move into the coach house too.
“It’s really a two-family house,” she said, “and what was done, way back, was to keep the gardener’s family there as well as the driver’s, and they all shared the kitchen. Can you believe, so many servants? I couldn’t manage.”
Zee didn’t put the butter dish down. “Mom, I’ve met Case twice. We’re strangers.” Bruce’s children had always lived in Texas.
“Yes,” Gracie said, “and it’s a shame. Didn’t you dance with him at our wedding, Zilla? You’d have been in college, the both of you. He’s quite athletic.”
“No.”
“Well he’s out of work. He lost five million dollars and they fired him. Miriam’s a wonderful artist, but it doesn’t support them, you know how that is, so they need the space as much as you.”
Doug managed to nod, and hoped Zee wouldn’t hold it against him.
“So they’ll both hang around the house all day,” Zee said.
“Well yes, but it shouldn’t bother you, as you’ll be at work. It only concerns Douglas. He could even write about them!” Gracie rubbed the coral lipstick off her mug and smoothed her hair—still blonde, still perfect. “And something will open up at the college for Douglas, I’m sure of it. Are you asking for him?”
“Really,” Doug said, “I don’t mind. I can get used to anything.”
—
That afternoon, Doug watched his wife from the window above his desk. She stood on the lawn between the big house and the coach house. Anyone else might have paced. For Zee, stillness was the surest sign of stress. She stared at the coach house as if she might burn it down. As if it might burn her down.
She wouldn’t let herself pitch a fit. At some point she and Gracie had come to the tacit agreement that no actual money or property would pass between them. It was the apotheosis of that old-money creed that money should never be discussed: In this family, it couldn’t even be used. Doug had doubts whether Zee would even accept her eventual inheritance, or just give it directly to some charity Gracie wouldn’t approve of. She was a Marxist literary scholar—this was how she actually introduced herself at wine and cheese receptions, leaving Doug to explain to the confused physics professor or music department secretary that this was more a theoretical distinction than a political one—and having money would not help her credibility. But she had accepted the house.
And now this.
—
The Texans were just there one Tuesday in June when Doug returned from the gym. He picked a box off the U-Haul lip and carried it up to the kitchen, which sat between the two second-floor apartments. Doug loved the feel of an upstairs kitchen, of looking out over the driveway as he flipped pancakes.
A woman with curly brown hair stood on the counter in cutoffs and a tank top, arranging plates in a high cupboard. He put the box down softly, worried that if he startled her, she’d fall. He waited, watching, which seemed somehow inappropriate, and he was about to clear his throat when she turned.
“Oh!” she said. “You’re—Hey!” He offered a hand, but she shook it first, then realized what it was for and held on tight as she hopped to the floor. She was a bit younger than Doug and Zee, maybe twenty-eight. And tiny. She came to his armpit. “Miriam, obviously. I hope we’re not in your way. I had to scoot some glasses over.”
“Doug Herriot,” he said, and wondered at his own formality. “I can clear out the lower cupboards. You’ll never reach that.”
“I’m not so tall, am I! But Case is. We’ll be fine.” She opened the box on the table, saw it contained clothes, and closed it again. “This is a hell of a place.”
