Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

Grace stood. She didn’t want to talk to Amy anymore, even if she had more information.

Amy stood too. “Ma’am, if I might ask something.”

“Certainly.”

“Your eye.” And she reddened as soon as she’d said it. She might have no manners, no sense of propriety, but she must have seen that Grace wanted to slap her.

Grace restrained herself, though, and touched her own cheekbone with two fingers. She was about to say that she’d slipped in the bathroom. But she felt like wounding Amy, and so she told the truth. She said, “George hit me with a large salt shaker. Thank you for your assistance, Amy.”

—

She needed her coat before she walked all the way to see Max. Her mother had sent her an alpaca coat, and this was the first day it was cold enough to wear it. She walked back in through the kitchen, and was nearly to the hall closet when George (a whole herd of Georges) thundered down the front stairs and saw her and said, “You’re coming with me. We’re playing golf.”

“Now?”

“We’ve been here five months. I want to get in one round before Christmas.”

He could have gone without her, but the membership at the Chippeway Club was in her father’s name, and she knew George was secretly terrified of being turned away at the door. Grace was his human shield. She’d been making excuses for weeks.

“I’m wearing slacks. I’m not sure of the dress code—”

“Well, change.”

“I’ll freeze.”

He didn’t answer, though. He was headed for the basement to scare up the golf bags.

In the end she kept her slacks on, half hoping it would get them kicked out, though she could already imagine George screaming that she’d embarrassed him. She put on a cardigan and the alpaca coat, and she wore cat-eye sunglasses that didn’t quite cover the bruising. By the time she came down, George was already in the back of the Capri, which Max had pulled up to the front door for loading the golf bags.

“Why don’t we take the Darrin?” she said to both of them. “Max shouldn’t have to come. He has a guest, after all.”

Max looked startled, as if he’d hoped this fact had escaped her notice. He rested her bag on the lip of the trunk.

“I’m happy to drive,” he said.

“What are we paying this guy for, if he never drives us anywhere? Come on, hop in.”

Grace wanted to protest that this wasn’t done, that people didn’t need drivers to transport them one mile across town, that it wasn’t 1920, but George would think she was lecturing him on cultured behavior. And perhaps it was safer to have Max along.

She leaned her head on the window as they rode. So many pretty houses. The maple trees were still red.

George was worrying his trouser knee. Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan — the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress — he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster. He came from nothing, and nobody, and nowhere. His parents were middle class, but they died when he was three, and he was shuttled between orphanages and aunts, and everyone robbed him till he was grown and lethally charming with no money at all. He’d survived childhood only by ingratiating himself to women, and as an adult it remained his leading skill. He showed up in Windsor at the age of twenty, and his only lie was an aristocratic British accent. Everything he said was technically true: orphan, penniless, et cetera. Once people heard that bit, they never pressed him on his background. He met a rich girl and seduced her and followed her to Toronto, where she introduced him to everyone and he dropped the accent. He went to a different party every night, spiraling up the social world, and he ended with everyone considering him a sort of relative, a crazy cousin to be endured. He’d pay a girl a lot of attention, get her father to give him a job, get her brother to loan him a bed, and then before they knew it he was on to another place. None of the girls loved him, though, so he didn’t break many hearts. To his credit, he was always careful to pick out the adventuresses. He told Grace all these things, tearful and drunk, a few nights after they met. She should have been horrified by his crying, but instead it did her in, and she put his head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.

A Negro in uniform nodded them through the gates of the Chippeway Club, and another opened Grace’s door at the front entrance.

She spoke before George could, before he could even get out of the car. “We’re guests of a member,” she said. “But he isn’t with us. Could you direct us, please?”

He led them to the golf office while Max gave the bags to a caddy. She watched him out the office window, standing there by the car, waiting to see if they’d be turned away, and she wanted to tell him to leave, to stop caring about them and go back home to his witch. The man in the office gave them a tee time and welcomed them cordially. He asked if they’d like a drink on the back porch. Grace nodded, figuring at least on a porch it wouldn’t be ridiculous to keep her sunglasses on. They followed the man. Max would have to figure out on his own that they were settled, that he was dismissed.

Everyone on the glassed-in porch was ancient, hunched over bowls of soup and snifters of brandy. On the weekends it must be different, businessmen and their bouncy wives. In summer, it would be full of children. She knew there were women her age in town — she’d seen them at the pharmacy and the hairdresser, even if she did turn down the invitation from the Newcomers’ Society — but they all had children, and nothing in common with her. She’d counted on neighbors, but the house to the south was vacant and the older couple to the north spent all their time in Virginia. Grace had no idea how to insinuate herself into a new town, and no pressing desire to. She was unaccustomed. Toronto society had simply flowed through her parlor, and her friends and beaux had appeared as naturally as wildflowers. George knew how to do it, but now that he had the house and the wife and no need for a job, he had no motivation to meet and charm anyone but the regulars at the Highwood bars, the men with loose and shady business ventures who could use an investor like George. Besides which, he wasn’t interested now in social climbing so much as in having a good time. One Sunday, in an aborted effort to be sociable, Grace had gone to the Presbyterian Church, but she only wound up sitting alone in the back and trying to delineate the families, putting mental dividers in the pews. Four blond children, bookended by blond parents. Two teenage girls with pageboy cuts, and their graying mother. Grace hadn’t been back. The last thing she wanted was someone who knew her name, who looked for her every Sunday, and then worried when she showed up with a purple jaw.

She looked out across the eighteenth hole to where three teepees stood in a row. It was simultaneously 1955 and 1800 out there.

George ordered them both gin and tonics, and the waiter already knew his name: “Yes, sir, Mr. Grant.”

At the next table, an old man sliced into a cylinder of pinkish aspic.

She whispered to George: “We’ve checked into the geriatric ward.”

“Your father picked a hell of a club.”

“Oh, he hardly came. It was only a way to keep friendly with the locals when the colony was open. The artists were always making such a ruckus. He’d golf with the mayor, that sort of thing. I think his parents were members, way back.”

George laughed too loudly. “That’s why Madame Violet offed herself. Too boring at the old country club.”