Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

She hooked her finger through his belt and pulled him toward the bed. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said.

But he pushed her onto the mattress and left her there, and then she listened for quite a long time as he stormed through the house opening and shutting doors, until it turned from storming to crashing. He must have drunk more in the meantime. And the sun was already going down.

She stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him come up the stairs, then stumble all the way down the hall to the open door of the attic steps. He disappeared, and came back a minute later with his arms full of file folders. The Parfitt book was balanced on top.

He saw her, but he didn’t stop except to call out “ Remember, remember the fifth of November! ” And then, from halfway down: “What do you say, Duck? Fall cleaning!”

Grace ran to the attic door and thought of locking it, but the key was all the way down in the kitchen. She might have gone in and locked it from the inside, only George would just kick the door in, and what would that accomplish? She went into the flowered bedroom and watched from the window as he strode across the lawn, papers flying from the files. He rolled up the folders and stuck each into a space between sticks. Ludo stood by the cottage, keeping quite a distance. Beatrice, she assumed, was in the kitchen helping Amy.

He was coming back, and she ran, while she still could, up the stairs to think what she might hide. He hadn’t gotten to the middle of the alphabet yet, and so she scooped out the whole section that would contain the Edwin Parfitt file and its photographic contents and stuffed it all far back in the jungle of office furniture, between the mimeograph machine and the postage meter. She might have liked that photo burned, but she couldn’t run the risk of George seeing it. He would do something horrible, she was sure, something that would finish off her father. Besides which she hadn’t solved its mystery yet. She wasn’t done with it yet. George was back, before she could get more files. She considered hiding, but when he appeared she was just standing by the cabinets, unable to move.

He saw her and said, “ What .”

“I was curious.”

She ducked before he could push her aside, and he snatched the oak leaf painting from under the window, the tacks flying from its corners and skittering across the floor. He said, “Whose vagina is this?”

“It’s — first of all it’s an oak leaf.”

He held it at arm’s length. “That is a vagina.”

“It might be valuable.”

“Sure. What you need, Grace Devohr, is more money. All your problems will be solved.” He rolled it and tucked it under his arm and scooped more files out. His hands were massive — it was the first thing she loved about him, that his hands were like bear paws — and he grabbed up six inches of folders in each hand. He stacked them against his chest, held them down with his chin, and Grace thought they might all fall, but only a few did.

She said, “Here, I’ll carry the painting.”

“The hell you will.”

He went past her, and down the stairs, and this time she followed him all the way out, watched him strip to his undershirt to stuff things into the pile. Ludo, when he saw her, retreated into the cottage. Max stood on the path by the catalpa, watching, hands in his pockets. She wondered if he recognized what was being burned today, if he cared as much as she did about these last relics of the colony. There were two faces as well in the kitchen window: Beatrice, Amy. Three gas cans near the pile, but it didn’t smell like he’d used them yet.

She knew something right then. She saw George pushing those files into the sticks, saw him bent on destroying something. And not because he loved it but because he didn’t . Because he didn’t care at all. And she knew then that Amy had told the truth, that she hadn’t offered herself to him.

George said, “I’m not leaving you out here alone,” and he pulled her by the arm back to the house. They passed not five feet from Max, and she looked straight at him and tried to send him a message to rescue the painting, at least the painting, but he looked like a man trapped in stone.

In through the terrace to the living room, up the stairs, down the hall, letting go of her at last, and up the attic stairs.

And when he was halfway up, when she was still on the bottom step, he fell. He seemed to fall forward and then, mid-pitch, his body jackknifed and it turned to a headfirst backward dive. The stairs were steep. He landed above her and slid down and came to rest with his head, face up, at her feet.

Grace surprised herself by not screaming. She just stood there looking down, her heart a kettle drum, and a thousand different futures flashed in front of her.

But no: He was still breathing. Great, deep breaths, like a child asleep.

Even so. What if she just left him here? What would be the effect of staying at this downward angle after a blow to the head? What were the odds of his drowning in his own vomit?

All the tension had gone from his face, and all the anger. His forehead was smooth and unfurrowed. Grace crouched and ran a finger from his eyebrow to his hairline. It was an odd moment to think it, but what she found herself contemplating was how the forehead is one of the more sexual parts of the body, the texture of smooth skin over hard bone. She kissed his eye, his closed and upside-down eye. And then she ran to get Max.

—

Max, surprisingly strong for his size, got George splayed out on the bed in the flowered room. He asked if Grace wanted him to call an ambulance, but by now George was stirring, moaning a bit and reaching for his head. Max fetched an ice pack from the kitchen instead. Then he whispered, “What can we do?”

If she hadn’t guessed already that he was talking about the files, she’d have known by the way he faced the window, ready to dive right through it and reclaim everything.

“He’ll remember,” she said. “He rarely forgets what he was doing.”

“Can we restuff them? Can we put other things in the files?”

Grace scanned the room: the pretty old washbasin, the glass-shaded lamp. “There are the two phone books in the hall,” she said, “but it won’t be enough.” Then she remembered the unreadable novel, still hidden with its neighboring files upstairs. She told Max to wait, and she ran to get it. “This isn’t important, is it?”

Max looked at the name on the two files, and at the six hundred pages crammed inside. “Good lord. No, this is nothing. It’s perfect.”

Grace stayed with George, stroking his hand and making sure he stayed put, while Max ran to the burn pile. She craned to watch from the window as he worked first alone and then with Ludo, collecting the folders, yanking out the contents into one huge stack, and systematically restuffing each with a few pages of phone book or failed novel.

He put the rescued papers into Ludo’s wheelbarrow, and Ludo wheeled it all into the gardener’s cottage. Max met her in the hallway with just the painting and a bit of the novel (“I couldn’t bear burning it all ,” he said). He told her Ludo would shelter the other papers in the cottage till Max had time to sort it. He said, “I remember most of these people. It shouldn’t be hard to refile. He’ll miss the painting, though.”

Grace ran the novel remnants back to the attic, and stowed the painting behind a pile of colony mattresses. There was nothing to replace it. She looked at her poster board with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and laughed. It would never roll. And it was the wrong size.

George rested till dinner, groaning and stirring and eventually sitting up to ask for food. Grace intended for Amy to bring him his dinner on a tray while she ate in peace downstairs, but she stopped just short. She wouldn’t send the girl to be alone with him in that room. She wouldn’t send the lamb to the lion. So Grace brought him a tray herself, bread and butter, whiskey and water. Then she sat alone at the dining table. Amy smiled so kindly at Grace as she put the baked carrots and cheese in front of her that Grace wanted to scream. She wanted to gouge the girl’s eyes out for knowing what she knew, for seeing Grace dragged back to the house like a child. And at the same time she wanted to fold Amy up in her sweater, to rock her to sleep.