T. Boyle - World's End

Depeyster Van Wart stood in the loam of his rose garden at the base of the great sloping manorial lawn and gazed up at the house with a rush of proprietary pride, secure in his heritage, in his position, and now, with the unhoped-for miracle of Joanna’s news, secure in his future too. No parvenu he — he was born here, in the master bedroom on the second floor, between the Chippendale chest-on-chest and the Duncan Phyfe wardrobe. His father had been born here too, in the shadow of that same wardrobe, and his father before him. For better than three hundred years, none but Van Warts had trod those peg-and-groove floors, none but Van Warts had mounted the groaning staircases or crouched in the ancestral dirt of the hoariest and bottommost cellar. And now, at long last, he knew in his heart that none of it would ever change, that Van Warts and Van Warts alone would walk those venerable corridors into the golden, limitless, insuperable future.

For Joanna was pregnant. Forty-three-year-old Joanna, bride of his youth, mother of his daughter, lover of unguents and creams and the cuisines of Naples, Languedoc and the Fiji Islands, champion of the dispossessed, stranger to his bed and purveyor of rags, Joanna was pregnant. After fifteen years of desperate longing, recrimination, rancor and despair, she’d come to him and he’d responded, simple as that. He’d risen to the occasion, impregnated her, knocked her up, got her with child. But not just a child, not just any child — a male child. What else could it be?

He remembered the cruel disappointment that had followed on the heels of that intoxicating, primal, woodsy tryst before the fireplace last fall— Honey, she’d said to him a scant month later, darling, I think I’m going to have a baby. A baby? He could barely speak for astonishment. Had his prayers been answered, his hopes exhumed? A baby? Was it true? Was he really going to have one more shot at it?

The answer was as unequivocal as the flow of blood: no, he wasn’t. It was a false alarm. She was late with her period, that was all, and he fell into a despair more profound than he’d ever known. But then, just after the New Year, she came to him again. And then again. She was frenzied, urgent, wild, her skin darkened with smears of some reddish pigment, a smell of swamps and cookfires and bitter uncultivated berries caught in the heavy braids of her hair, buckskin against naked flesh. He was John Smith and she was Pocahontas, untamed, feverish, coupling as if to preserve their very lives. Who was she, this stranger beneath him with the musky smell and the faraway look in her eyes? He didn’t care. He mounted her, penetrated her, spilled his seed deep within her. Blissfully. Gratefully. Thinking: this Indian business isn’t so bad after all.

Then there was the second alarum, the trip to the doctor, the test, the examination, the indubitability of the result: Joanna was pregnant. So what if she was mad as a hatter? So what if she shied away from him even more violently than before and redoubled her visits to the reservation? So what if she humiliated him at the market in her paints and leggings and all the rest? She was pregnant, and Van Wart Manor would have its heir.

And so it was that on this particular day — this day of days — as he clipped roses for the big cut-glass vases stationed strategically throughout the house for the delectation of the sightseers and history buffs who would any moment now begin to arrive with appropriately awed and respectful faces, Depeyster felt supreme, expansive, beyond hurt, felt like Solomon awaiting the morning’s petitioners. It was June, his wife was pregnant, the sun shone down on him in all its benedictory splendor, and the house — the ancient, peerless, stately, inestimable house — was open to the public and looking good.

“Did you hear about Peletiah Crane?”

Marguerite Mott, in a huddle with her sister Muriel, balanced a white bone china cup on its saucer and looked up expectantly at her host. It was late in the afternoon, and a small band of the historically curious, eyes glazed after an exhaustive three-hour tour of the house and grounds that left no shingle undefined or nook unplumbed, was gathered for refreshments in the front parlor. Lula, in white apron and cap, had just served tea and a very old but distinctly musty sherry, and set out a platter of stale soda crackers and tinned pâté, and the group, which consisted of two nuns, a legal secretary from Briarcliff, a self-educated auto mechanic and the withered octogenarian treasurer of the Hopewell Junction Historical Society, as well as young Walter Van Brunt, LeClerc and Ginny Outhouse and, not least, the redoubtable Mott sisters, fell upon these humble offerings like wanderers come in off the desert.

Marguerite’s question caught the twelfth heir in the middle of a complex architectural dissertation on how the present house had managed to grow up over the generations from the modest parlor in which they now stood. Buoyant, with the energy and animation of a man half his age, Depeyster had driven the octogenarian and the legal secretary up against the Nunns, Clark & Co. rosewood piano in the corner, urging them to appreciate the thickness and solidity of the wall behind it. “Built from native fieldstone and oyster-shell mortar, all the way back in 1650,” he said. “We’ve painted it, glazed it, repaired the mortar, of course — go ahead, feel it — but that’s it, the original wall put up by Oloffe and Lubbertus Van Wart three hundred and nineteen years ago.” Depeyster had been talking for three hours, and he wasn’t about to stop now — not as long as anyone was still standing. “The patroon settled in Croton, at the lower house — you know, the museum —and he built this one for his brother, but after Lubbertus passed on he alternated between the two houses. Ironically, the lower house went out of the family just after the Revolution — but that’s another story — while this one has been continuously occupied by Van Warts since the day—” he suddenly broke off and turned to Marguerite. “What did you say?”

“Peletiah. Did you hear about Peletiah?”

In that moment, secretary and treasurer were forgotten, and Depeyster felt his heart leap up. “He’s dead?” he yelped, barely able to contain himself.

The auto mechanic was watching him; LeClerc and Walter, who’d had their heads together, looked up inquisitively.

“No,” Marguerite whispered, pursing her lips and giving him a quick closer’s wink, “not yet.” She let the moment hang over him, huge with significance, and then delivered the clincher: “He’s had a stroke.”

He didn’t want to seem too anxious — the legal secretary was glancing around her uneasily, afraid to set her cup down, and the old boy from Hopewell Junction looked as if he were about to have a stroke himself — and so he counted to three before he spoke: “Is it… serious?”

Marguerite’s smile was tight, the white-frosted lips pressed firmly together, the foundation at the corners of her eyes barely breached. It was a realtor’s smile, and it spoke of quiet triumph, of the thorny deal at long last closed. “He can’t walk,” she said. “Can’t talk or eat. He keeps slipping in and out of it.”

“Yes,” Muriel said, interposing her glazed face between them, “it looks bad.”

Looks bad. The words stirred him, gladdened him, filled him with vengeful joy. So the old long-nosed land-grubbing pinko bastard was finally slipping over the edge, finally letting go … and now it was the grandson — the pothead — who would take charge of things. It was too perfect. Thirty-five hundred an acre — ha! He’d get it for half that, a quarter — he’d get it for the price of another fix or trip or whatever it was the kid doped himself up on … yes, and then he’d find himself a horse, a Kentucky Walker like his father used to have, old blood lines, blaze on the forehead; he’d refurbish the stables, lean on the town board to erect one of those horse-crossing signs up the road at the entrance to the place, and then, with his son up in front of him, he’d ride out over the property first thing every morning, sun like fire on the creek, the crush of hickory nuts underfoot, a roast on the table. …