Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“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.

(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)

By 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.”

Fran shook her head in horror, but her eyes were lit with gossip. “Is he in trouble?”

“He’ll be in trouble if he needs to be. Who knows if it’s even true. But, as a senior — if you heard anything from younger women, anyone in your sorority — I hope you’d let someone know. At this point they’re just gathering information. And you didn’t hear it from me, please.”

As Fran left, Zee took her shoes off and stretched her feet. Later that same day, she watched Golda Blum and some man she’d never seen before, a dumpy guy in a communist-green polo shirt who could only work for IT, go into Cole’s office without him.

—

“It’s marvelous,” Gracie said. They were at the breakfast table in the big house late that afternoon. Zee had just told her she could stop worrying about Doug, that there would be openings by the fall, as long as he could finish his book in an unshared house. (The debate would take months, of course, and they’d let Cole finish the year. But they’d start the head hunt soon to replace him.) Hidalgo, under the table, breathed hot air on Zee’s legs. “Do you think the school will really remain open, though, after this whole computer thing?” It took Zee a few terrifying seconds to realize she meant the Y2K bug. “Bruce reads absolutely all the news, and the smartest people are saying it’s just the end of everything.”