Rebecca Makkai: The Hundred-Year House

“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.”

He looked out the window and laughed. “Yeah, it’s not subtle.”

“Oh, I meant this place!” She tapped the open cabinet door. “This is quarter sawn oak!”

Doug had no idea what she meant, but he nodded. He wasn’t surprised that the kitchen should be well built; the same architect had designed both houses, and presumably the same carpenters and brick layers had constructed them. The stone wall that bordered the estate also formed the eastern wall of the coach house, or at least its ground floor. The second story rose above that, making the structure look from the road like a child’s playhouse perched atop the wall. Really it was quite large. The ground floor had at first been open garage space, with two arched entrances for cars. Gracie and her first husband, Zee’s father, had the arches filled in with glass panels, and stuck a sunporch on the back. Why they bothered was unclear, except that in the post-chauffeur sixties they’d wanted an attached garage on the big house and felt they ought to transform the old one into something useful and rentable.

The estate had belonged to Gracie’s family all along — the Devohrs, though Gracie never used her maiden name. The Devohrs sat firmly in the second tier of the great families of the last century, not with the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts of the world but certainly shoulder-to-shoulder with the Astors, the Fricks, and were lesser known in these parts only by virtue of their Canadian roots. Toronto was hardly Tuxedo Park. Of those families, though, only the Devohrs were so continually subject to scandal and tragedy and rumor. An unkind tabloid paper of the 1920s had run a headline about the “Devohrcing Devohrs,” and the name had stuck. So had the behavior that prompted it.

Before that infamy, back in 1900, Augustus Devohr (unfocused son of the self-made patriarch), wanting to oversee his grain investments more closely, had built this castle near Lake Michigan, thirty miles straight north of Chicago. By 1906, after his wife killed herself in the house — the suicide that had so bothered an adolescent Zee — he wanted nothing more to do with the Midwest or its crops. In either a fit of charity or a deft tax dodge, Augustus allowed the home to be used for many years as an artists’ colony. Writers and painters and musicians would stay, expenses paid, for one to six months. And — a knife in Doug’s heart — Edwin Parfitt himself had visited the colony, had worked and lived right behind one of those windows, though Doug would never know which one. It was the real reason Doug had even agreed to move into the coach house: as if the proximity would, through some magical osmosis, help his research.

Miriam climbed back on the counter, her small legs folding and then unfolding like a nimble insect’s. She redid her ponytail. She wasn’t exactly attractive, Doug decided (he’d been deliberating, against his will), but she had an interesting face with a jutting chin, eyes bright like a little dog’s. And as soon as he thought it, he recognized it. It was the beginning of a thousand love stories. (“She wasn’t beautiful, but she had an interesting face, the kind artists asked to paint.”) And uninvited, the next thought bore down: He was supposed to fall in love. It wasn’t true, and it wouldn’t happen, but there it was, and it stuck. Anyone watching him in a movie would expect him to fall in love, would wait patiently through the whole bag of popcorn. He tried to push the thought away before she turned again, before she saw it on his face. He excused himself and left the room.

Doug was reading in bed when Zee got home. She closed the door. “Did you see them?”

“I met her — Miriam — and she’s okay. She’s small. But then I stayed in here working. I’m sure we don’t have to whisper.”

It was probably true — the two bedrooms were at opposite ends of the second floor. Each apartment had a large entry room, which would once have been the sitting area but which Doug and Zee used as a study, desks under both windows. Before the Texans came, they would use the other apartment for laundry folding or exercise or sex.

“You just hid in here? Did you meet Case?”

“I didn’t want to make them feel they were invading. You know, like if I sat and watched them unpack. Right?”

She was disappointed. She’d wanted the whole story, the gruesome details. Something concrete at which to direct her anger.

She had managed to stay calm and pleasant all day. She had forced herself to smile when Sid Cole had called to her across the lawn — in front of students — that “Marxists don’t drink cappuccino!” She’d even raised her coffee cup into the air. She had laughed out loud: Ha!

The irony was not lost on her that she, willfully mistaken for a Communist by her most obnoxious colleagues, should be allergic to communal living.

“Does she have a Texas accent?”

“No, actually. I don’t think so. Not really, more like — I don’t know.”

What was wrong with him?

She said, “Did she take Case’s last name?”

“I have no idea.”

“That would have a horrible sound. Miriam Breen. It’s too ugly.”

“Yes, it’s ugly.”

Zee changed and found her glasses and lay on top of the covers, underlining an article in The New York Review of Books .

“It should give you some impetus to write,” she said. “The more annoying these people are, the better.”

“I’m writing every day.”

She hoped it was true. The worst part of her wanted to stand over his shoulder as he wrote, to suggest commas. Once, early in grad school, she’d tidied up a paper of his when he was out for the night. He’d never noticed.

Doug flipped himself around on the bed and started rubbing her feet.

“Doug,” she said. “Stop it.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“I have stuff to do.”

“I’m sorry, I’m way down here by your feet, and I can’t hear you.”

He peeked over the crest of her knees like a groundhog, then ducked down. He did it till she laughed. She put the journal down, and he worked his way up.

Case and Miriam and Zee were at the table when Doug came out the next morning, fortunately having remembered to put on pants. Case was tall, as Miriam had said, and deeply tan with big, straight teeth. Polo shirt and flip-flops. In a movie, Doug thought, he’d be the guy who beats up John Cusack. The men shook hands, and Doug found himself giving Miriam a ridiculous little salute. He began making eggs, just so he had something to do.

Zee was dressed for teaching her summer session class, silk blouse tucked into her skirt in such a tidy way that if he hadn’t known better, Doug would have imagined her morning routine involved duct tape. “So,” she said, “I hear you’re searching for a job, Case.”

Case looked up from his cereal, leaned back, and regarded Zee as if she’d ruined his beach vacation by asking where he planned to be five years from next Thursday. “I’m in no rush,” he said. And then he laughed, releasing them all abruptly from whatever contempt he’d held them in. Doug decided, in that moment, that he despised Case Breen.

“He needs a few weeks to recoup,” Miriam said. “We’re aiming for September.”

“Gonna get some exercise. Might shop for a new car.”

Zee said, “What’s wrong with your old one?”

Miriam put her hand on Case’s shoulder and said, “I hope we won’t be in the way. I know you’re making a sacrifice. I was going to set up on the sunporch to work, but only if it’s okay with you.”