Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

Grace heard someone across in the library, but when she got there it was empty. She loved this room best if only because there were still small relics of the artists who’d gathered every night for predinner drinks just a year before. Scribbled in the endpapers of an old copy of Dombey and Son , she’d found a ridiculous “List of Demands,” added to over the years in different hands: head massages, a bugle corps, Chinese footmen, better weather, lullabies, resident astrologer. She’d hidden that book deep in the shelf to protect it, and she checked now that it was safe. The jade monkey was gone from the bar, though, and she wondered where it could have gone. She checked all the shelves, and she checked under the leather couches. She’d have thought George took it, but he hated the library even more than he hated the portrait of Violet — he’d seen strange shadows there the week they moved in, and hadn’t set foot in it since. At first he had Mrs. Carmichael bring him out his drinks, but then he just began stocking his bureau as a bar. Grace would have, as a result, spent all her time in this room for the privacy, were it not for the windows between each set of shelves, on three sides of the room. It was an observation tank, and anyone walking from the driveway to the kitchen door would see right in. And perhaps that was what happened. Amy had looked in, on her walks from the coach house, envying the little monkey till she had to have it. But to make sure, Grace went first to Mrs. Carmichael, watering in the solarium, and to Rosamund in the kitchen, and even to Ludo and Beatrice, and none of them even knew what she was talking about, except Mrs. Carmichael, who was sure she had dusted it Friday.

It must be, then. Amy was a child, a greedy child. Grace had known this all along. She walked straight to the coach house, and up the stairs to the living quarters. The stairs came out in the small kitchen, and she had to orient herself to think which was Max’s apartment and which must be Amy’s. She knocked on Max’s door first, to be sure he wasn’t back, then walked into Amy’s side without knocking. The outer room had a sitting area. Well-thumbed fashion magazines on a little table. Fashion! All Amy ever wore were those three cotton dresses, in rotation.

She moved silently to the next doorway. Amy lay on her bed, on her stomach. Grace said, “Amy, I do hope you plan to return everything you’ve borrowed.”

The girl bolted up and straightened her blanket. “I’m — hello. Mrs. Grant.”

“I expect my things returned before dinner.”

“Only, I — which things?”

“Anything borrowed from the estate, including the jade monkey from the library. I don’t think you’ll be staying much longer, but you might yet salvage a letter of reference from me if you’re forthcoming.”

Amy stood and looked around the room frantically, as if checking that she’d hidden everything properly. “Ma’am, I truly don’t understand. If I’ve done something wrong it was a pure mistake.”

“Amy,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, except that you are not Max’s niece. Maybe you’re his lover, only I don’t think so. That’s not it, is it? You’re a child, but you sit in judgment and you think you know how you’d act if you were me. You think George wouldn’t hit you, that you’d tame him. Well, you couldn’t.”

“Ma’am, you’re mistaken.” There were fat tears collecting on her chin. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

Grace felt Amy’s pain in her own stomach, she did. It was a convulsion, like holding back a sob. But all she could think to do was make it worse, as if that would solve everything. She imagined this was how a killer felt, halfway through the job. Finish stabbing the fellow, so there was no one left to feel it. She said, “Here’s what you don’t know yet: So often in life, you get exactly what you look for. If you want a George, you’ll get a George. The worst thing I could wish you is everything you want.”

She meant to leave Amy standing there silenced and shamed, but as she turned Amy said, quietly, “Speak for yourself.”

And Grace might have slapped her, she really might have, if she hadn’t heard Max come up to the kitchen just then. She walked out and told Max she’d been wondering where he was.

“A quick trip to the doctor,” he said, and smiled. “My old knee problem from the war. Can I drive you somewhere?”

“Oh!” she said. “No, but — what time did George take the Darrin out?”

“Around ten.”

Grace glanced around the kitchen, and tried to find something to say. “We should get that fixed,” she said, pointing at the big board patching up the wall. It was the wall shared with Amy’s bathroom and closet, and it was painted yellow, like the rest of the kitchen. “What is it?”

“It’s — I believe there was an electrical problem once. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

“But you shouldn’t have to live someplace all stitched together.”

He set his satchel on the table. It looked so soft.

“I know there to be at least five layers of paint over that thing. Another five, and it will all come even. Really, it’s not worth the disruption.”

His ears were round, like little handles. Grace liked that about him, and she liked the way he sometimes looked almost in love with her. Perhaps he was. She felt wonderfully visible just then, as if something might happen to her, and not just in front of her.

She said, “All right, Max,” and smiled in a way she normally wouldn’t have, a way her mother never would have smiled at a servant. She trotted downstairs and waved to Ludo, who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of sticks back to the fire pile.

—

George was shaking her by the hip. He was saying, “What’s that smell? What is it?”

Grace rolled over and tried to feel where the blanket had gone. “Is something burning?”

“No, it’s you.” He turned the light on, and when Grace managed to open her eyes she saw that he hadn’t shaved all day, that the cleft in his chin was filled in with black stubble. He had a long red string tied around his neck, like an opera-length necklace, and she couldn’t think why that would be. “Why do you smell that way?” He came back to the bed, though it took him a few tries to propel himself in the right direction. Grace sat up, and George stood over her and put his fingers in her hair. “Why did you cut your hair off?”

“The hairdresser did. I needed a trim.”

“You think I want you looking like a boy?”

“George, I want to sleep.” She slid down under the blanket. “What time is it?”

He pulled the covers completely off the bed and stood over her. “You smell like sex.”

“That’s ridiculous. I smell like the outdoors. I went for a bike ride.”

He yanked her nightgown up to her stomach, and stuck his face between her legs and sniffed loudly. “You smell like you were fucking some fungus-covered hustler.”

“ George .”

She meant to pull him on top of her and turn it into sex before things got worse, but he had rolled her, with one push, to the edge of the bed, and he rolled her again till she fell. Her forehead hit something on the way down. It was hard and sharp, and it must have been the corner of the nightstand. Her whole head and neck throbbed, but especially above her left eyebrow, and when she put her hand there it came away covered in blood.

“George, look !”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, Grace, come on. Don’t — I’ll get a towel.”

And he did, one of the GGG monogrammed set from her Saville cousins, and it turned from powder blue to reddish brown in seconds.

“Please ring Max,” she said. “I want to go for stitches.”