Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

Their drinks arrived, with small wedges of lime.

After the waiter had gone, Grace said, “We can’t very well charge these to my father.”

“Are you going to take those ridiculous glasses off?”

“It depends if you’d like people to call the police.”

“What you need is to be better with makeup. Makeup would cover that, if you did it right.”

“Miss Georgia, the cosmetician.”

George reached a finger across the table toward Grace’s stemmed glass of ice water. He touched it as if he were about to say something about it, something important, but then he kept pushing, and the whole glass tipped slowly toward Grace, until gravity sped it up and the ice cubes and water tumbled into her lap.

She made a noise but managed to keep her lips closed. She stood and shook the ice to the floor, and the aspic-slicing man handed her a napkin and his wife rushed around the table to see if she could help. George stayed calmly in his seat, and Grace refused to look at him.

She said, to the older couple, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she said it to the waiter, who had run over with a broom and dustpan to collect the ice: “I’m so sorry.” She ran through the dining room and toward what she thought was the front door, but it was an empty banquet hall. She ran back around a corner and another corner, and yanked off her sunglasses to see better, and finally she found the door. She had no plan except to walk home, or maybe into town — but there, just a bit farther around the drive than where he’d dropped them, was Max, leaning against the Capri. He dropped his cigarette and squashed it with his toe. He opened the back door as if he’d expected her at precisely this moment.

“Mr. Grant won’t be joining us till later,” she said. Max put on his driving gloves and handed back a handkerchief.

He said, “I’ll return for him. I assume he’ll play the full eighteen?”

She couldn’t very well question him about the witch now, even though she had him alone. That could wait till she was breathing evenly, till she wasn’t riding in a vehicle he controlled.

When her father had made all the arrangements, he’d said Max would look after her. At first she worried he was meant to report back to Toronto about George’s behavior, but Max was far too tight-lipped for that, besides which he and her father didn’t seem fond of each other in the slightest. “I can’t fire the fellow,” is what her father had said, as if he wanted nothing more in the world. “He’s been there longer than the trees.” But Max seemed to be following some deeper imperative than just driving and overseeing the grounds. He acted, at times such as these, like Grace’s appointed protector. Perhaps he was fond of her. But that made little sense, seeing as she and George had usurped the estate. This wasn’t really the way it happened, but it was the narrative she knew the colony people had told one another: Old Gamby Devohr is shutting us down so he can hide his daughter and her drunken husband while her brother runs for Parliament. When really it was just a convenient confluence. The colony’s death knells had been sounding for years, and yes, they wanted George far from Ontario, and they wanted Grace to live with her mistake, here in the suburban wilderness, till she recognized the error of her ways and came crying back, divorced and wiser. And her idiot brother had as much chance of winning that seat as he had of winning the Nobel Prize in physics.

Her mother’s parting words: “You’ll see, when you can’t run him around Toronto shocking everybody. You’ll see what he’s like to live with. And you’ll see how it is when no one cares that you’re Grace Devohr.”

That last bit was true: At both the beauty parlor and the florist, she’d slipped and given her maiden name, and there wasn’t the slightest recognition. Of course, that same hairdresser, when she learned Grace was Canadian, asked, “Do you have a president up there now, or do you still believe in the queen?” This town was a vacuum. Well, she’d live with it. She’d have to live with it. And perhaps invisibility could be her great adventure.

—

Max dropped her at the front door, and she took the mail off the hall table and climbed immediately to the attic. A letter, in her mother’s elegant hand: Father was a little better, but still coping with the gout, and short of breath with the autumn air. Wallace was growing discouraged in his infant run for Parliament, and it seemed the public saw him as a lazy gadabout (true, Grace thought), but he had a year and a half to change their minds. Uncle Linus had run off again, and no one was doing much about it. The maids dusted Grace’s bedroom every day, and she’d be welcomed home on a moment’s notice. Deer had eaten all the mums.

The rest of the mail was bills and a catalogue. It was odd that she never got mail intended for the colony, from far-flung artists who hadn’t heard of its demise. But she supposed Mrs. Carmichael must sift that out. She ought to ask.

And now, again, she was facing a blank day. She couldn’t plan the greenhouse much further without Ludo. Her brother Morton, or rather his personal secretary, had sent a Paint-by-Number kit for her birthday in July, and it seemed the most tedious and pointless exercise in the world — but then today was a tedious and pointless day. She laid out all the packaged supplies. Pots and pots of little oil paints, five brushes, turpentine, a cup. Three poster boards: Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She picked Pisa: Imminent gravitational tragedy suited her mood. There were several old easels with the colony furniture, crammed along with the beds and desks and bureaus into the two front wings, and she hauled one back to her northwest corner and set the little poster board up. The unpainted picture was fascinating, an unfathomable mess of pale blue lines, shapes that weren’t shapes, full abutment, no spaces between.

She opened a pot of alluring gray-blue, and painted, with the smallest brush, a wedge of sky, until the number 8 was covered and the edges looked crisp. It was tremendously satisfying. The oak leaf painting was still tacked under the window, and Grace resisted the urge to reach down and daub some paint in the corners, to finish the job. It was perfect as it was, though, even if clearly incomplete: the frilled, fleshy edges of the leaf blade, pinkish brown, as if it were blushing, as if the artist had discovered, deep in the forest, a fallen leaf that was more vibrant after death. It ought to make her sad, to paint something segmented and prescribed so close to this delicate blurring, this confident restraint, but really she felt lovely just to be painting near it.

She worked for quite a long time, then set the brushes to soak in the turpentine. The afternoon was getting on, and she hadn’t eaten lunch, but she wasn’t ready to go down yet. She stretched, then leafed a bit through the colony files. She loved the names, and the old penmanship, and she loved the woman who, to compensate for a broken typewriter hammer, had written in all her D s with purple ink. There was even a novel manuscript in there that she’d once tried to read, until she found it was unrewardingly dense. Today she pulled out the chunk behind that, N through P . Earl Napp would not attend for the summer of 1939 after all. Alma Nellis wondered if she had left her valise. Samantha Mays, the director, wrote back: No, she hadn’t, and they’d even checked at the train station for her, and they dearly hoped there was nothing of value inside.

A name she recognized, though she couldn’t place it: Viktor Osin, a “maître de ballet,” had stayed five times in the twenties and thirties. A recommendation glowed about his “kinetic vivacity.” Then it clicked in place like a jigsaw piece. That spring, right after they’d moved in, that strange article in the Tribune . A choreographer who’d gone missing and turned up in Grant Park, a common wino. One of his own male dancers had found him, had recognized him through the grime and the beard. The dancer had washed him off and sobered him up. There’d been a photo of him, Mr. Viktor Osin, on the front of the Arts section, attending a performance of his own work, a version of The Winter’s Tale he’d choreographed some twenty-five years earlier. But something was off about it all, and this is why Grace remembered, why she’d even read the accompanying article in the first place. Despite his suit, his shaved chin, his combed white hair, there was still something deeply wrong with the man and his hollow eyes — as if they’d reanimated his corpse just for the occasion. She remembered how she’d felt at her wedding. Everyone so falsely happy for her, congratulating her for — what? — for showing up, for existing. She wanted to climb into the newspaper, to tell Viktor Osin that she understood him, that she forgave him. And here in the letter: “kinetic vivacity”? She wondered what had gone wrong, what broke him.