Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

And then, because she wanted to change the subject, and because the scotch was getting to her, she said, “You have the loveliest teeth. Like pearls. It shows you were well raised. I’ve always said, if you want to know someone’s lot in life, look at his teeth.” In fact there was a small space between Miss Silverman’s incisors, one of which was chipped, but the effect was all the more charming.

“Well, that’s a new idea. Fortune-telling by the teeth. Dentomancy!”

“Orthomancy,” Max offered.

“Yes! I was just thinking it about poor Amy, the other day, looking at her teeth. They’re horrid, and you can tell she just hasn’t had a fair chance in life. I do wish she could get them fixed.” She’d forgotten about the ruse that Amy was Max’s niece — it was clumsy of her — but she could see now by the look on Max’s face that there was something far worse wrong than that. He was looking past her shoulder, back toward the door of the mechanical room. Grace just barely avoided turning to see if Amy was standing right there in the doorway. It was where Amy had said she was sleeping, and it was surely where she was right now. Well, now there was another reason for Amy to despise her, to glare. Grace was only glad she hadn’t brought up the photograph, with Amy hiding the whole time and listening like a little rabbit. “Well,” she said. “Hadn’t you better fetch George soon from the club?”

Max handed her a small, red book. Edwin Parfitt: His Selected Verse . He said, “I’ve marked the right poem with a paper.”

She turned back, halfway to the door. “I meant to ask about the fish,” she said. “What are we to do with them in winter? Do they just freeze solid?”

“I bring them in,” Max said. His voice stayed as quiet as ever, though she was all the way across the garage. “They’ll outlive us both.” She was nearly out the door when he said, “Do you know what they like better than anything?”

“No.”

“A root beer float.”

“I don’t understand.” She thought over the words. It was like a riddle, but it made no sense.

“You don’t?” He looked almost sad.

“Oh, don’t worry, dear,” Miss Silverman said. “I’ve never understood him myself!”

Grace stuck both the book and photo in the attic so George wouldn’t come across them. Miss Silverman walked the grounds when Max took off to retrieve George, and Ludo raked leaves. Nothing else of note happened the rest of the day.

—

She was quite taken with the poem, which was about Proteus, and she was pleased that her recall of mythology and meter and rhyme were finally being tested. She appreciated certain lines, the “thickening, quickening night,” and “Daphne’s branches, sleeved in moss.” She also understood the inversion Parfitt had accomplished: In his telling, everyone wanted to pin Proteus down to make him remember the past, not to tell the future. Though what he was so loath to remember she couldn’t quite glean. Something about a lightning crash, and the bit about “paying to Charon his tongue-lidded coin,” which she took to mean a death.

Most fascinating, though, was the short introduction written in 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay . “Edwin Parfitt was not so much a giant of the poetic world,” it read, “as one of its forest elves, whose song lures us deeper into the wood — though we may neither recognize the tune nor ever find the piper.” It went on to claim that his classicism of theme and form had been horribly misread by the critics. At the end came an astonishing paragraph:

It has been five years now since Eddie Parfitt, after an insurmountable personal loss, took his own life at Lake Glinow, Wisconsin. In accordance with his wishes, he was not buried but wrapped in white cloth and burned, his ashes set loose to the wind. Those of us in attendance took some small delight in knowing those ashes would find rest on far and unsuspecting plots of earth, that they would bless and fertilize their landing places. As, too, will these poems.

Grace wondered if this paragraph was the true reason Max had given her the book: if, after her outburst, he assumed she knew more than she did, and wanted her to learn what had become of her father’s partner in sodomy. That didn’t seem right, though. She scanned it again, wishing she’d find the words fish or root beer , wishing the paragraph would tell her where Amy had come from or when Zilla Silverman would leave. Perhaps this book could read her tarot.

Really she supposed Max had only given it to her because she’d spoken of starting over, and he had recalled the poem about Proteus shifting shape. But he must have misunderstood her, then. What Grace wanted to run from wasn’t the past, or even the future as the original Proteus had, but rather the present. Here she was, crystallized in time, in a place where nothing ever really happened, at least not to her, while the world marched on without her back in Toronto. It wasn’t so much the house that she wanted to escape, or George, even as his charm faded like a suntan, but the feel of every moment being precisely now , with no cause and no consequence. She supposed a Buddhist might appreciate it. But it wasn’t for her.

On Friday morning (nothing around but sunlight and some distant sounds traveling out the kitchen windows and back in through the dormers), she sat in the attic in her robe and slippers and read the introduction for the fifth time. It struck her only then that Millay referred to Parfitt’s “small dark eyes, and dark hair, slickly parted.” She crossed the floor and pulled out the file she’d sworn she’d never open again. The grinning man on the left had pale, wavy hair. Golden or light brown. No one would call his eyes small. It couldn’t be Parfitt. But neither could the man on the right, who, she was more certain than ever, was her father. His uneven shoulders, his chin. She turned it over, to see if some perverse and helpful archivist had recorded their names for posterity, but there was nothing. Well. She’d do it herself, then. She snatched up the pencil from her greenhouse sketch and, holding the photo up to the window so she could see the image through its paper, wrote “ Father” right across his backside. It felt like nailing him down, accusing him. On the reverse of the other man’s buttocks, she drew a question mark. Then she stuffed it back in the folder, and the folder back in the cabinet.

Miss Silverman was gone, had been gone since yesterday, and Grace was unduly bereft. A spectator with no spectacle. George had disappeared for a day and then returned. The leaves were gone, except on a few stubborn oaks, and the catalpa was all pods. They made music in the wind, like maracas. It was freezing now in the attic, and so she walked its perimeter, closing each of the twelve dormers, and came to the northeast one last, the one closest to the coach house. Sometimes she thought this was where her grandmother had done it. Her father would never talk about Violet, so most of the very little that Grace knew she’d learned from her mother. Violet had killed herself at Laurelfield in 1906, when Grace’s father was only two. For this, she was never to be forgiven by anyone in the family. Her name was never used for babies, her grave (they’d taken the body by train all the way back to Toronto) wasn’t visited. When Grace and George first arrived, back in May, Grace had asked Mrs. Carmichael which part of the house was supposed to be the haunted bit. “Oh, the attic!” Mrs. Carmichael had said, and then Grace had to endure fifteen minutes of ridiculous stories about flickering lights and doors that shut themselves. “So that’s where she did it, then?” Grace had asked. “Violet, I mean. It was the attic?” Mrs. Carmichael had laughed. “I wasn’t here myself, ma’am. I couldn’t tell you beyond what I’ve heard. But the artists used to say so.”