Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

He said, idiotically, or perhaps brilliantly, “Max wouldn’t have let him. If he knew Gracie was in it. The car.”

“She was always Grace . Oh, she was a fool. No one got divorced in 1955, but still, I remember thinking there was something wrong with her that she didn’t leave him. He was terrible. A terrible person.”

Doug wished he had Leland on an earpiece, telling him what to say. He managed: “How so?”

“Oh, you know, a drunkard.” She was still crying, but there was a gossipy edge to her voice now, a mean one. She spoke quickly. “That’s why the family left them alone out here. They never came to check on her. Not once . They died not long after — the father, and then the mother a few years later — and the brothers didn’t care for her a fig. But Douglas, that family! They made it easy for us, by not caring. Half the time she was hiding a black eye. He tried me, but I could handle him. I knew about drunks. My father was in jail , Douglas. Can you believe that? George never dared mess with me.”

George was Zee’s father, the gentle man who had taken Zee on the train to the Art Institute once a month. Doug knew he’d once had a drinking problem, but he’d never heard of any violence. And Gracie’s father might indeed have been jailed once or twice — the Devohrs were never long out of the gossip columns in those days — but none of it, together, made sense. Hidalgo trotted in and stuck his nose in Doug’s crotch.

“And what would we have done, if we hadn’t stayed? The family would have come and covered the furniture with white sheets. They’d have been in no hurry to sell. We’d have been out on our ears. And Max would have died. It would have killed him to leave, I really believe that. He was a true gentleman. You should have seen how he turned the pages of the newspaper: He picked up the corner with his finger and thumb, and just lifted it over. Everyone I’d ever known turned pages with their whole palm, like something they were wiping away. It wasn’t a romantic relationship we had. But it was better than most, and Zilla is something. We wanted her so badly. She was born ten years later, exactly. I always took it for a sign. Ten years.”

Doug tried to think if he’d ever heard of someone named Max. He managed to push Hidalgo away and lock his knees against further attack. He said, “Who else knows all this?” As if he himself knew it, or understood it, or had any idea how much of it was a joke.

Gracie shook her head. She was looking at some spot near Doug’s face, but not at Doug. “Max, until he died. I suppose the gardener knew. I always guessed Max bribed him, but I said I wanted no part of it. The hole for the greenhouse was already dug, but the cement wasn’t poured yet. So it was all done the next day, just Max and the gardener. I hid upstairs, but I could hear the wheelbarrows crunching along the drive to the big house. Wheelbarrows .” She covered her nose and mouth with her hands and closed her eyes. The sound of wheelbarrows was apparently the worst part, to her. “And he fired the rest of the staff. Big tips, of course. More money than they’d ever seen. And hired new people.”

Miriam poked her head in the door just then. If she’d overheard anything, it was only that last sentence. “Ten fifty-five. Five minutes till doomsday, east.”

“We’re just finishing up,” Doug said, though he didn’t know if that was true.

Miriam raised an eyebrow — Doug’s face must have looked as ashen as it felt — and ducked out.

“I need you to know it hasn’t been easy , Douglas. Especially at first. The research we had to do, the places we had to avoid. It helped that she’d never shown her face in town, and they’d only been here a few months. Those ridiculous sunglasses. And he was always off in Highwood, drinking. They looked nothing alike. George and Max. But it didn’t matter a bit, in the end. People see what they expect to. And the rest can be handled with money. Still, if you think I haven’t had a thousand heart attacks along the way. And the close calls, the parties where someone was from Toronto and I’d have to get sick and leave. It’s stolen years from my life.”

Doug took a risk. “So it’s — under the greenhouse.” He wasn’t sure at all what he was referring to, but the remote possibility remained that it was something to do with Parfitt. Or else why the missing file? He looked over his shoulder, at the sliding glass doors that separated the solarium from the greenhouse. He could see a few geraniums out there, borrowing some of the indoor light.

“Yes. Both of them. Good lord. If you want the real ghosts of the house, it’s those two, not poor old Violet.”

“Those two, meaning—”

“They made that window shatter, you know. They’ve done it before.”

And there was Bruce at the door, waving urgently. “Come on!” he shouted. “This is the big one!”

As they hurried down the hall after him, Doug realized he hadn’t gotten a single answer about Parfitt. He didn’t understand what she was saying, but he believed her. He just had no idea what it was he was supposed to believe. What ingredients he’d just swallowed. He wanted to march Gracie back to the solarium and lock the door, to ask her fifty more questions, but first he needed to see if the world was ending. He was less certain of its survival than he’d been an hour ago.

Zee and Miriam and Case sat on the leather couch, staring at Dick Clark and the drunken masses in Times Square. No one on the screen seemed particularly panicked. They jumped around in the cold, kissing strangers.

Doug and Bruce and Gracie stood with their hands on the couch back, braced for some kind of impact.

—

The ball came down, and the world did not end.

President Clinton addressed the nation. Bands played, proposals abounded, and after a soothing update about the absence of nuclear meltdowns, the station switched over to the Chicago team and the depressingly anticlimactic forty minutes they had to fill until midnight Central from the floor of a balloon-filled ballroom.

Case said, “We’re still here.” Something odd about his voice, as if he wasn’t entirely sure of the fact. Or as if he was disappointed to find himself still alive, still on the couch, the lights still on.

Bruce turned down the volume and spoke for the first time. “Well, you never know,” he said. There was phlegm in his voice. “You never know what could still happen. But it looks like a lot of bullshit, doesn’t it? It looks like a great deal of human folly here this evening.”

“It never hurts to be prepared,” Gracie said.

“And the things we bought — the car, the food, the water — they’re not useless. I’d always wanted that Chevy, all my life.”

They nodded. Doug was afraid Bruce would start weeping. He couldn’t handle any more of that tonight.

“You know what else? We’ve lost sight of something, with all this millennium bullshit, with all the computer nightmare. We’re forgetting that this is the end of a century . The worst century, I believe, in all of human history. Hitler, Stalin, genocide, the worst warfare in what, a million years of human life on this planet.”

“But a lot of good, too,” Miriam said.

Zee turned to face her. “Oh? Like what?”

“Penicillin? And all the art. Think of, you know, Georgia O’Keeffe. And jazz, and movies! And airplanes. All of it.”

Gracie said, “It’s the house’s birthday. Did you know that? This house is a hundred years old now.”

“I don’t think they built it on New Year’s, Mom.”

“They started building in nineteen hundred!”

“What do you think, Doug?” Bruce’s voice was a little off, a little too loud. He put down his rum with a clatter and undid his collar. “You’re the writer here. Was the twentieth century a comedy, or a tragedy?”