The Hundred-Year House

IN THE FIELD: THE TRIBE

Zilla was a moving statue in the torchlight. If Eddie could, he would love her: her hair a black puddle, her teeth a broken necklace. Her white throat, thrust forward when she laughed. Viktor, though — Viktor Osin did love her, or else what was this filament between them, across the night?

There were only the eight: Samantha had stayed back.

Marlon Moore led them all to the teepees, which were just as he’d described: cloth cones in the field, big enough for all to squeeze inside just one. They passed the flask again. Vital to maintain the drunken state in which the plan was hatched, lest they sober up and discover themselves ridiculous. It was only a few drinks into the evening that Marlon had volunteered his story — dragged by a colleague’s wife to last year’s Chippeway Ball — and several drinks later that the joke had started: A true Chippeway Ball should feature more scalping and war whoops and nudity. The sun had set, additional bottles brought to the terrace, when it became a plan, when Viktor and Marlon and Eddie drove to the college where Marlon taught, and broke into the theater’s costume shop and returned with headdresses and face paint.

Across the lawn, windows full of elegant locals. Long tables, candles.

The eight undressed in the open teepee by torchlight, laughing and shushing, leaving clothes in distinct piles to speed escape. Zilla, muscled, flat as a board. Viktor — with his impossible limbs, his dancer’s limbs — staring at her like a drugged man. Ludo, pale for an Italian, a thatch of dark fur on his chest. Fannie and Josephine, the White Rabbits: one doughy, one thin as rope. Armand Cox (preposterous name!), his whole being covered in golden hairs. Marlon with his little potbelly, stretching his legs to run. Two weeks ago, Eddie hadn’t been able to keep them all straight. And now he imagined he’d know their voices to his dying day.

Another adjustment: All day long, in front of his pen or typewriter, he was as alone as he’d ever been. But at night, he was a “we.” Something he hadn’t felt since childhood, since he’d climbed in bed with his sister in the afternoons, since she’d let him wear her shoes. He was part of a first-person plural.

Some of them wore the headdresses, and the others stuck loose feathers in their hair. Their faces: red and black stripes, yellow down the nose.

Armand and Ludo, leading the parade, each grabbed one lawn torch to hold aloft.

Zilla started the war cry, hand pulsing on her open mouth, and the others joined and rode the wave of noise onto the club porch and through the open glass doors to the dining room.

The first thing Eddie saw, he told the others later, was the fat woman in the green dress, the way her fork flew from her hand, lettuce still speared on the tines.

The tribe whooped and screeched and circled the sea of tables three times. A great deal of anatomical flapping: some high, some low, all uncomfortable, all ridiculous in the electric lights, but wasn’t this the point? As the rest of them flailed and beat their chests, Viktor did actual pirouettes. He leapt over the carving table, his legs straight out like wings. The evening-gowned ladies dove into their husbands’ laps. Half the men laughed and clapped and the others stood to do something but then weren’t sure what to do.

Someone screamed, “Stop them!”

Ludo shouted, “We come for squaws!”

Two white-haired men tried to block the path, but moved away quickly when Armand and Ludo didn’t stop, as Armand even turned and shimmied backward toward them, posterior muscles twitching. The youths, boys and girls both, watched with poorly contained glee. Viktor planted a kiss on a squealing girl’s forehead and left a perfect black lip mark. On the final circuit, Eddie grabbed a dinner roll and stuffed it in his mouth.

Back into the night: some of the tuxedoed men giving chase, but only halfway across the lawn, then posting themselves cross-armed between teepees and building, shouting, guarding against further invasion.

A loud voice thinned by distance: “This is a private establishment!”

Zilla wheezing with laughter. Armand, torch abandoned, turning a cartwheel.

The artists carried clothes in armloads and ran, some back to the waiting auto, some, with Eddie, into the woods where they dressed, and then found the path to the road, and then walked the road back to Laurelfield.

ZILLA IN HER STUDIO

She has assembled seven things on the table in the Longhouse: a potted geranium, a pile of gray rocks, a hair pin, a square of yellow cotton, a Mason jar, a feather, a dead bee. She has stapled a linen to the wall.

The choosing, the starting: It’s a cliff to jump off.

She examines the feather, the way invisible hooks link each barb to the next. The way, when she pulls one strand from its neighbor, it leaves a clean gap that will not smooth together again. She doubts this cleaving can be conveyed in paint: the hooks that grip us, that tie us to each other. To place, to time. The ways we might come unhinged.

She walks to the wall and begins.

WESTERN UNION

AUG. 29–29.

SAMANTHA MAYS

CARE LAURELFIELD ARTS COLONY

HEARD OF DISTURBANCE STOP IN NY CITY ON BUSINESS STOP ARRIVE LAURELFIELD TOMORROW AFTERNOON STOP DO MAKE PREPARATIONS=

G W DEVOHR

SAMANTHA IN THE KITCHEN

It was raining all morning, dusk all morning.

From the windows of the director’s house, the main house looked reflective, all windows and wet.

Samantha laid the telegram on the middle of her kitchen table so they all could read it: Armand over her shoulder, Viktor and Zilla leaning across. “He sounds furious.”

Zilla said, “Everyone sounds furious in a wire.”

They kept their voices low. Beatrice, Samantha’s brand new office girl, was typing in the next room and needn’t be alarmed. Samantha warned her the day she started that Laurelfield was hanging by a thread, that Gamby Devohr, newly in charge of his family’s affairs, would take any excuse to oust them all.

Armand said, “We don’t even know what disturbance he means. Heard of disturbance. He could think there are real Indians in the woods.”

Viktor was playing with a spoon, spinning it on the oilcloth. “He’s not the world’s leading intellectual.”

Samantha read it again, aloud. They turned on the floor lamp, the one with no shade, and dragged it to the table. As if more light would possibly help.

Zilla said, “What can he prove? No one took our photograph. I’m sure they weren’t looking at our faces.” Zilla’s voice was calming even when there was no cause for calm. Samantha had once thought of it as a liquid voice, but lately she’d refined the image: Zilla’s voice was mercury, a bubble of mercury in a phial. Liquid but metallic too.

“He can’t expect me,” Samantha said, “to keep everyone quiet in their rooms all night. We’re not bankers. I think he’d like to run a banking colony.”

Zilla said, “At least I’ll meet the infamous Gamaliel Devohr.”

“Gamby the Great,” Viktor said.

Armand: “We’ll meet Mr. Devohr as he’s kicking us to the curb. We’ll meet the bottom of his foot.”

Viktor: “He can do that?”

Samantha: “It’s his house, still. As far as the colony, he’s just a member of the board. But he owns the property. If he kicks us out, we cease to exist.”

“How nice for the Devohr family taxes,” Armand said. “To turn your spare mansion into an artists’ shelter.”

“It’s the only charitable thing they’ve ever done. Lord knows they aren’t patrons of the ballet. And now they’d rather get the house back and sell it. I don’t believe they’ve done well since the war.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Zilla said. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Viktor stood and stretched — the man was a tree, his hands on the ceiling, pressing it away — and announced he was heading back to the Longhouse to work, and Zilla announced she would follow him. Armand and Samantha watched them go.

“Oh, Armand,” she said. He sat at the table, and she put her head on his shoulder.

“They’re in love, aren’t they? Viktor and Zilla?”

“I should think so. She’s married, though, and he’s got all those dancers, and she hates that he’s got his dancers. They always come here the same time, just to torture each other. I believe it’s an excruciatingly chaste affair. They’d never moon around like that if they’d had each other.” She folded the telegram up, as small as it would fold.

“We ought to lock them in her studio together and see what happens.”

“It’s fascinating to watch, except when it’s painful.”

“Mr. Devohr will love your new hair.”

“Ha!” She touched what was left of the blonde curls. “He might run screaming. And end our problem.”

“He’ll take you for Amelia Earhart’s younger brother. Tell me,” he said, “now we’re alone, about Eddie Parfitt.”

“He’s tremendously talented. Vachel Lindsay wrote his reference.”

“I mean — he’s been here two weeks. I’m late to the game. Is he, you know, my sort of gentleman?”

“Oh. Yes, I imagine. Ask Marlon. He’d know.”

Armand laughed. “If Marlon knows, I’m far too late.”

“He could use some bringing out of his shell, at any rate. I’ll put you in charge of it. Only don’t fall in love with him.”

Armand looked hurt, as if she’d misread him completely. But she knew him better than he thought. It was only his first visit, but Armand had been her friend for years, since the days when he was sleeping on the floor of someone’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. He’d been so young. Well, so had she. Later, when he finally had a bit of money, he’d bought her blue ladder painting. They’d worked together on the No-Jury show. And she knew, if nothing else, that he was quite similar to her. He believed that drawing the world would keep him at an ironic distance from it, keep him safe from caring deeply about things. When in fact it had the opposite effect. And she knew how Laurelfield had affected her, on her first stay — as an artist, long before she dug in her nails and managed to get hired. She’d felt exhilarated and confused, and she couldn’t eat, and she couldn’t sleep, and she mistook it all as love for an older poet, a man with a pipe and a wife. She’d thrown herself at him, and they were together awhile, until — later, back in the city — she realized she had no interest in the man at all. What she’d been in love with was Laurelfield, and everyone there, and her own work, and maybe even with herself, for the first time.

She saw that same wild look in Armand’s eyes. He was looking for someone to love. He was a transitive verb with no direct object.

She said, “Just watch your heart.”

Down at the bottom of the stairs, Alfie started barking. He ran all the way up and then all the way down, and Samantha followed him.

A woman struggled at the door, propping it open with her foot and hefting a wet valise through the frame. Behind her, a man unloaded trunks from a taxi straight into a puddle. The screenwriter wasn’t due to arrive till tomorrow, but this was obviously her. She bore that distinct look of the arriving artist: disoriented, exhausted, profoundly relieved to be there. “I’ve arrived too early!” the woman said, only she said “arrifed,” her voice thick with dignified German. Samantha scrambled to remember the name — Marcelina von Hornig, there it was, and she’d wondered if it would be a “Marcy” type or a “Lina,” but clearly this woman was above shortening — and then, as the door closed behind her and Alfie was subdued and the woman looked up into Samantha’s face, Samantha reeled. This was Marceline Horn, the film star Marceline Horn, in color, in three dimensions. The same high-bridged nose, the enormous eyes, eyelashes like window valances. She’d played Juliet and Charlotte Corday. She’d kissed Valentino. Samantha had gotten used, over the years, to speaking with artists and writers whose talent intimidated her. This was different, though, more like meeting Cinderella than the Brothers Grimm.

Samantha managed to say, “It’s not a problem. The maid was already making up the room for you. You might have to work in the — in the library. Until it’s done.”

“Oh, of course. I need a few hours to screw my head back on.”

“You’ve had a long trip.”

“Vell, I vas in Chicago a veek.”

“Yes.” The address on this woman’s papers — Beverly Hills, California — hadn’t seemed odd, since she was coming to write two movie scripts. A letter of recommendation from L. B. Mayer, himself, of MGM. Samantha had convinced the rest of the file readers that this would be a novelty, that they’d be embracing a new form of storytelling. Mayer’s letter said he’d worked with the woman in the past, but it said nothing of directing her in films, of their affair — wasn’t there an affair? She remembered something, an item in Picture Play—just that she showed great talent and needed a quiet place. And for all Samantha could tell from the script sample, she was a natural writer.

Stupidly, her lips numb: “This is Alfie. A wirehaired pointing griffon. He’s harmless.”

Marceline bent to look him in the eye. “I’m a great friend of the dogs.”

Samantha took in the woman’s outfit: the green cloche hat, the slim black frock with pearls at the hip — all regular enough, if a bit formal for mid-morning — but below that, and above her black one-straps, she wore silk stockings appliquéd with green velvet snakes that appeared to climb her legs.

Behind her, Armand crouched on the landing, peering down. He was silent — which, Samantha knew, was his particular form of shrieking. Beatrice stood behind him, her fingers to her little chin.

“Armand,” Samantha said, and he didn’t answer. “Will you be a dear and see if Maisie has finished the yellow room? And the kitchen needs to know, as well, that there will be one more for dinner. You could help with the trunks. And Beatrice, the packet. For Miss von Hornig.”

Beatrice vanished. Armand rushed past them both and out the door with no umbrella. It occurred to her that Armand might bang on everyone’s door with the news before he bothered finding Maisie, that eight noses might be pressed to the wet window within minutes, but meanwhile she had her list of things to say, her regular and memorized orientation to Laurelfield — the quiet hours, and keys, and meals — and this woman looked as thirsty and tired as any new arrival. She invited Marceline to follow her up to the kitchen. She dropped the folded telegram into the dustbin and put the kettle on for tea.

Marceline stopped her, as she crossed the kitchen, and clasped one of Samantha’s hands in her soft, strangely large ones. “I tell you, I feel like Shakespeare’s Viola, vashed up on the shore of Illyria. And I can tell this is a blessed place. A generous place. I feel it in my feet.”

“You haven’t even seen it all yet!”

“It is not something von sees.”

LUDO AND JOSEPHINE ON THE LAWN

They look at the roof, the way the sun just now, at eleven, shoots a tentative ray over the top, the last rain turning to mist. In a minute, it will be too bright to look east.

Ludo says, “No, I don’t believe. Back in Napoli, one time, I go to a séance. Is all tricks. All click-click and knocking sound and guess what someone wants to hear.” He laughs. “Is same with my music, no? Knock knock, tell you what you want to hear. I used to write symphonies. Now I make rhymings and bouncings.”

“No ghost appeared? At the séance?”

“The ghost is in our ears.”

“Marlon swears he heard something in the night.”

“I tell you what I learn: At a colony, there always come noises in the night. Howling, thumping, door slam, moaning, bang bang bang, you know. You know what is? Is not ghosts.”

“What?”

“Is people making sex.”

In Residence

UPDATED 29 AUG ‘29

Abbaticchio, Ludo (M)

Composer

*

St: Comp. Cottage

R: Southwest

*

Cadfael, Fannie (F)

Sculptor

Cleveland Hts, Ohio

St: Solarium

R: Blue

through 9/2

Cox, Armand (M)

Illustrator

Chicago

St/R: Longhouse E

through 10/4

Lizer, Josephine (F)

Sculptor

Cleveland Hts, Ohio

St: Solarium

R: Green

through 9/2

Moore, Marlon (M)

Writer

Lake Bluff, Ill.

St/R: Northeast

through 9/5

Osin, Viktor (M)

Maître de ballet

Chicago

St/R: Longhouse Cent.

through 9/16 (extended)

Parfitt, Edwin (M)

Poet

Phil, Pa.

St/R: Flower

through 9/27

Silverman, Zilla (F)

Painter

Madison, Wis.

St/R: Longhouse W

through 10/12

Von Hornig (Horn), Marcelina (Marceline) (F)

Screenwriter

Beverly Hills, Calif.

St/R: Yellow

through 9/20

Beatrice, please note:

Miss Silverman has asked use of attic in addition to Longhouse W.

Miss Lizer and Miss Cadfael are in fact sharing Green bedroom; trunks of both are stored in Blue; Miss Cadfael has that key.

Garden studio is empty if Miss Horn prefers it to working in her room.

Please remember Mr. Abbaticchio not to be listed on public documents.

WHAT WE’VE GLEANED FROM MARLON

Marlon Moore claims to know a woman who knows the Devohrs. It’s impossible, Samantha insists, because no one “knows the Devohrs.” You might know one Devohr, or another Devohr, but they aren’t an entity. It’s like saying you know all the feral cats in the woods. You’ve probably just seen the same one five times. Marlon counters that his friend knows the important Devohrs, the ones who’ve stayed sane, the ones with the houses.

—

Marlon has heard testimony, from some of the greatest living writers, that the best way to induce strange and inspiring dreams is to eat very strong cheese before bed. He himself keeps a crock of Roquefort on the windowsill in his room. He doesn’t see the problem. It has a lid! “Yes,” Josephine mutters, “but your mouth does not.”

—

Marlon knows with great certainty that back home, Ludo, our own Italian fixture, became unnecessarily political for a composer. It seems Ludo was a great friend of the Communist leader Bordiga, and wrote a song lampooning Bordiga’s rival, Gramsci, and (worse) Mussolini himself. Marlon believes he rhymed “Benito” with “finito.” (“Let’s ask if it’s true!” says Armand. “I wouldn’t,” says Viktor.) And so (Marlon fingers his moustache, adopts a tone of epic narration), by 1926, both Bordiga and Gramsci were in jail, and Ludo was on a boat to New York under an assumed name, quotas and papers be damned. How he landed at Laurelfield, where he’s stayed the past three years, is no great mystery. Bordiga probably phoned Samantha himself. Is Ludo sleeping with Samantha? Oh, everyone assumes so. Certainly. But that’s beside the point. And now Ludo has a bit of a career stateside as well, writing show tunes. “Our gain,” Fannie adds emphatically. Fannie is our greatest optimist.

—

Marlon can tell astrological signs with great accuracy. He pegs Zilla as an Aquarius, and she nods. We are duly impressed.

—

Late one night, Marlon starts giggling about Viktor Osin and his ballerinas. “They’re all French,” he says, “or Russian. Nineteen years old, eighty pounds each. Let me tell you: a line of twelve swans? He’s been under every tutu.” His giggling turns shrill. “Not a single bosom between them, but can you imagine the ways they stretch?” Zilla leaves the room.

—

Marlon wears a silk burgundy smoking jacket over his clothes. He is poised for great things.

—

Marlon has heard a rumor: Mr. Devohr is already on his way.

Civic Opera Company

Mary Garden, Director

430 South Michigan Avenue

Chicago

Aug. 28

Dearest Samantha—

Dashing this off to say Gamby Devohr has written to all the board. Received my letter this a.m.

Samantha, what’s happened? Wishing I could zip up but all is chaos here, moving to the new space, Aida, etc. Tell me if I should come, though. Do.

Devohr is requesting ad hoc meeting Sept. 3rd for what I fear are apocalyptic purposes.

Do advise if I can help, but as you know I haven’t much clout with the other boardsters, I’m the artistic quack not the purse strings.

I’m worried, Sam. Tell me you’re fine. Tell me Laurelfield’s fine.

Oh dear lord,

Mary

EDDIE IN THE LIBRARY

The hour before dinner, normally restrained — stretching writers, artists just scrubbed up, a shared bottle of gin — turned into an all-out soirée in everyone’s effort to meet and impress Marceline Horn. The party continued after the meal, the artists reconvening to the library where Viktor mixed an enormous vat of orange blossoms and Ludo played the piano. It was fortunate Ludo was kept busy. Having seen Marceline as Scheherezade (“Just scarves! No other clothings!”), he couldn’t speak to her without leering.

Viktor ladled a drink into a smudged glass for Eddie, slopping some down the side. Viktor was all arms and legs. A dancer and dance maker with hair of the most rebellious kind, each strand hating its neighbors with such static ferocity that his head achieved a perfect geometry of divergence.

Eddie sipped and tried to listen to the music, but it didn’t help. He felt sick again: a chill that had vanished a few hours the night of the Indian raid, that the August sun baked away whenever he took lunch outdoors, but that returned the moment he reentered the house. Now the dizziness was back, the feeling that he needed to leave the house soon, or else he would fall into his bed and freeze to the mattress and never rise again. Fannie and Josephine had told him, his first night, to watch for the ghost, for the long white nightgown in the upstairs hall. They had giggled and shivered, and expected him to do likewise. But the chill, he knew, was not something he’d encounter in the corridor. It had already gotten deep in his bloodstream.

There was something wrong with the house. The windows gazed in on you instead of out at the world.

And now the White Rabbits had cornered Marceline on the davenport behind Eddie, and leaned in eagerly to tell the story of Violet Devohr. “She locked herself in the attic,” Fannie said. “It’s unclear why.”

“Well, she was mad!” Josephine cried. “Why else does a woman lock herself in an attic?”

“And the old man, Augustus, the one who built the place for her, begged her to let him in, but he didn’t go so far as to kick down the door. He was too genteel. And he didn’t want the servants hearing.”

“Scandal, you know.”

“He figured she’d come out eventually. Every day he knocked, three times a day, and she told him to go away. And then he realized—”

“No, you forgot to say, it was five days! Five days she was up there. She had taken in the key. Did you say that part?”

“Yes, five days. And only then did he realize that she had no food or water.”

“And so he broke down the door. Or he called a locksmith, I’m not sure. But it was too late. She wasn’t dead yet, but she couldn’t survive.”

Zilla rejoined them in time to hear the end. “Are you trying to make her leave? She’ll run off in the night!” But her voice was so soft and rolling that it was only a joke.

“Anyway,” Fanny said, “that was Gamby’s mother. Gamby is Gamaliel, the one who’s coming to get us all in trouble. The poor dear, he was just two years old. It’s no wonder he’s always begrudged Laurelfield.”

Over at the piano, Ludo had started one of his new songs, a bouncy thing with a chorus designed to be joined by the flappers who, under more urban circumstances, would no doubt surround his piano. It had become a great joke to all of them in the past weeks that Ludo’s English could be so tortured in conversation but so smooth in lyric. He sang with tremendous verve:

Columbus spied the ocean shore

He counted natives by the score

He cried, “Exploring’s such a bore

When all of it’s been found before!”

Ohhhh — I tell you, gentle philosophers,

In these modernest of times

That history doesn’t repeat…

It merely rhymes!

There were so many layers of insulation to this one room. The leather-bound books, and then their shelves, and the walls themselves, and the outer bricks, and then the blanket of ivy that could swallow your whole hand, up to your wrist. And then the thick summer air, and the groves of mismatched trees — the legacy, apparently, of Violet Devohr’s insistence on horticultural diversity — and then the stone wall, and then the woods. It should have felt safe, but instead it was smothering and cold at once.

Marlon leaned against a standing Eddie and settled his rear on the back of the davenport, just inches from Marceline’s head. He wore, as usual, his smoking jacket, tied at the waist. He smelled of pomade. He said, “Do you believe in fate?”

“Sure.”

“The moment I saw you, I felt certain I’d seen you before.”

“I’m not sure that’s fate so much as déjà vu.”

“Ah. The French have no imagination.”

Eddie found himself smiling back but ignoring whatever else Marlon said. He watched Armand take a drink to Marceline. Armand dressed like a college boy, argyle sweater and bright argyle socks, knickers. The rumor of the afternoon had it that Marceline had been demoted from a lead actress at MGM, and sent here at the mercy of Mr. Mayer to try her hand at writing, to rework two old silent scripts into talkies. Her exquisite looks were fading, the sharp bob doing nothing for her nose, and that accent, it was true, would not go over now. Everyone was dying to ask about films, to ask if she knew Gary Cooper. Eddie heard her say to Armand, “You should go right now to Berlin. There are in Berlin the most vonderful pansy clubs.”

In the corner, Zilla and Viktor, ignoring each other.

Samantha in tweed knickers and green broadcloth blouse, rubbing Ludo’s shoulders, singing along.

Everyone coupling and recoupling around the room in laughter, like a formal dance.

Armand, hands on the White Rabbits’ shoulders, swaying by the piano. His sleeves rolled up, his arms covered in dark golden hairs. The White Rabbits sang the chorus of a new song:

Give me back my kiss,

It wasn’t for you to keep.

Eddie had languished in confusion for a full week before finally asking Zilla why the women were called White Rabbits. But he couldn’t get it out of his head yet that there was some connection to their noses, both small and pink, or to their silvering hair, or to plump Josephine’s buck teeth or wiry Fannie’s quick little eyes.

He realized that behind him, below him, on the davenport, Samantha Mays was crying quietly, and Zilla was comforting her. He had thought of Samantha as the type of woman who didn’t cry. There was something about her that was like a fourteen-year-old boy, all elbows and knees and a broad chin, and he’d always imagined she could fall off a horse and bounce. She said, softly, “But I didn’t imagine he’d written to the board. Oh, I just don’t know. He’s been looking for the slightest justification.”

Zilla’s voice, low: “But we have a room here full of tremendously creative people. I’m sure we can think of something.”

Marlon must have heard it too. He said, “Tell him we have a film star here! That’ll grab his attention!”

Samantha looked up and laughed. “Oh. Oh, Marlon, don’t listen to me. I’ll just worry you. But no, it wouldn’t help. If anything, he’ll use it as proof we’re a bunch of hedonists. We’ll have to clean up. We’ll have to hide Ludo. If anyone asks, Ludo’s been gone two years.”

—

At midnight, it was just Marceline and Armand and Zilla and Eddie. Eddie wanted to be in bed, asleep, but he didn’t want to be alone yet in his little room at the top of the stairs.

Marceline was explaining that Los Angeles was a city without attics. “Vhy vould you need them? Nothing is old there, not a single antique, except the vons brought in for display. And I am myself an antique, of course.”

A clamor of protest.

Eddie had worried she’d be haughty, but he found he enjoyed this woman, the tenacity with which she was determined to move on past the end of her particular, silent art.

“How is the life in Chicago?” she said to Armand. Another thing to admire: the instinct to steer the conversation away from herself.

Though Marceline had asked the question, Armand seemed to address his answer to Eddie. “It’s swell. I’m in Towertown, and really I think it’s better than New York. Everyone interesting in New York is actually in Paris, anyway. But Chicago’s copacetic. And there’s a lot doing for artists. Poets, too. Eddie, do you know Harriet Monroe? I could introduce you. If you were ever in the city. And you ought to be! What does Philadelphia have? You’re out of the loop there. And what life is there, even? For people like us? You ought to be in Towertown or on a boat to Florence.”

Zilla said, “Oh Armie, you made him blush!”

It was true. He was blushing at how easily Armand had read him. At Armand’s ready implications. People like us. But the heat in his face had started before that, at Armand remembering Philadelphia — at his remembering Eddie’s name at all. Eddie had grown used to assuming he was the only one in the room taking note of everything, of everyone’s habits and gestures, squirreling away the details they let fall about their lives. He’d learned long ago to reintroduce himself at least three times to people whose names and drinks and life stories he’d long since memorized. He wondered if the rest of the Chicago crowd was like Armand, like himself — not in the way Armand had meant, but wide-eyed, absorbent.

Eddie struggled for something quick to say, but just then the lamp on the piano crackled, and the room was dunked in blackness. Marceline screamed, and Zilla laughed. “There,” Zilla said. “I don’t know why the Rabbits had to go frightening you about the attic. When clearly the ghost is right here.”

FRIDAY, 10:16 A.M

Marlon stands on the wall by the road and aims his Leica at the director’s house, what used to be the coach house back when this was poor, doomed Violet’s estate. Armand Cox leans there, smoking. Alfie sniffs in quick circles nearby. The wall is narrower than Marlon expected, and it takes great effort to balance. He can’t quite focus the lens on Armand, and so he trains it on the giant oak between the houses instead. After the photo but before he can hop down, a voice from out on the sidewalk: “What is that place, anyhow?”

Marlon looks down at the speaker, a young boy with a stick. He says, “It’s an asylum for people who think they’re artists.”

—

Uncaptured by the lens:

Samantha staring from her bedroom window, listening to the calming clatter of Beatrice’s typewriter. Behind her, the smell of something burning. She wonders what on earth could be burning.

Ludo in the composer’s cottage, hitting his head on the piano keys in frustration.

Fannie and Josephine, lying like quotation marks in bed, the afternoon sun on their feet. Fannie tracing the lines of the room from one corner all around to Josephine’s shoulder, thinking about shape as sound, about silence as negative space.

Viktor in the hallway, picking Zilla’s blue earring off the rug and clipping it back to her ear, letting his wrist touch her neck, watching her eyes close. Zilla scrambling like an egg.

The bootlegger, driving slowly up the road, knowing he’ll recognize Laurelfield by the number of autos out front.

Eddie Parfitt, on the second floor, trying to remember what he’s writing and why he’s writing it, wondering what cold and congealed substance his blood has become.

John and Ralph, the two brothers who work the grounds, oiling the old wheelbarrow.

Marceline, settled now in the yellow room, swearing in German at a script never meant for words.

Gamby on the train, his daughter curled against his lap, her yellow hair spilling down his leg, her whole body expanding with every breath.

SAMANTHA IN HER ROOMS

Eddie, not knowing to let himself in, had knocked patiently at the downstairs door till Alfie barked and found Samantha. She led him up through the kitchen, and into her own rooms rather than the office, so they’d have privacy from Beatrice. She gave him the Morris chair and took the rocker herself. Poor thing, so awkward and formal. He was particularly nervous now, sucking in the lips on his little face until he resembled a gargoyle. He looked around the room, at her desk, her file cabinets, the Chinese lantern, the row of green apples ripening on the windowsill.

He took a great breath and said, “I wasn’t leaving till the end of September. But I think I might go tomorrow morning.” His palms flat on the arms of the chair. It dwarfed him.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh dear.” But she wasn’t surprised at all. He’d stayed in bed so much, was so silent at breakfast, and talked at dinner only in a rushed, anxious way. (Zilla, who noticed everything, had told Samantha to keep an eye on him. “He’s twenty-one,” she said. “Can you imagine, coming here right from school and expecting yourself to be brilliant?” “He’s already brilliant,” Samantha had protested. “He published two collections at Princeton, and everyone’s talking about him.” “Well, regardless, he’s raw. And he’s afraid of the house.”)

Samantha looked at him now, the way his face had thinned in the two weeks he’d been here. She said, “You can leave whenever you need. But I hope there’s nothing wrong.”

“I’ve been doing good work here,” he said. “Really good work. I’ve finished twelve poems, and they’re different from anything I’ve made before. They’re darker, actually. I never work this fast. No one does! But that gets at the problem. I’m not — something’s wrong with me. I feel this place is going to swallow me whole.”

“The house can have an effect.”

“It’s nothing at all about the way things are run.”

“Eddie, why don’t you see how you feel in the morning? Just enjoy yourself tonight, relax a bit, and let me know tomorrow.”

He dropped his shoulders and smiled. “I will.”

“You’ll be getting out just in time, too. Mr. Devohr arrives tonight. Lord knows what’ll happen to us all in the morning. We’ll be walking the plank, I fear.” She said it lightly, but really she’d spent the past day calculating frantically: the new artists due next Tuesday, the impossibility of sending Ludo back to Mussolini, the number of trustees who might eventually support a reconfigured Laurelfield, maybe on a farm up in Wisconsin. The finished canvases she was still storing in the basement for a painter who’d left in June. The prospect of having no home. Gamby might give her a month to clear out. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was panicking over nothing.

They stood and walked back through the kitchen.

“May I inquire what happened to your wall?” he said.

She’d already forgotten the ugly black hole beside the icebox, the size of a large fist. And around it a larger circle of blackened wall, a foot in diameter. “I’ll have to cover it before Mr. Devohr arrives. I had a lamp with no shade, and it fell against the wall this morning. When I smelled it, I thought I must have burned my lunch — and then I remembered I wasn’t cooking anything.”

Beatrice’s voice, from the office: “We ought to dig all the way through and install the world’s shortest pneumatic tube!”

Eddie laughed. “The ghost has been at the lamps lately. She snuffed ours out in the library last night.”

“That lets me off the hook, doesn’t it?”

THE DISH ON MARCELINE

She gets up early to work. Some of us saw her notes on the first script, when she left them by the coffee pot. The Aspern Papers, from a Henry James story, a failure in its first filming and sure to fail as a talkie. Because the only real characters are the old woman, her plain spinster niece, and the man obsessed with obtaining the old woman’s love letters. No part here for Clara Bow, no room for a WAMPAS Baby Star. Only, if Marceline is smart, and we think she is, she’ll show the audience some scenes from the past, when old Juliana was young and in love with the writer Aspern. But no, some of us argue: The whole point is the burning of the papers at the end, the fact that our man will never know the truth about the love affair. It would ruin it all, to show the past!

The other script, the one Marceline hasn’t yet begun, is Bluebeard. She told us at breakfast. No, not the pirate. His beard was black. Bluebeard was the killer. The one with all the wives. Remember, the key she can’t get the blood off? That one has potential.

Someone has heard that Marceline Horn once lived in sin with Ronald Coleman. Only it’s not a sin in Hollywood, is it? They have different gods out there.

Someone heard she spent two thousand dollars on a Chinese rug. We are disinclined to believe this.

ZILLA IN THE ATTIC

Up here, she could concentrate. It wasn’t so much that she had heard Viktor’s feet through the Longhouse wall, and his humming, and occasionally the phonograph, but that she could feel him there, and it made her cold and it made her blood vibrate and every day she shrank. Every noise might have been his door closing, or opening, or him tapping on her window, or a woman — one of his dancing girls, or that waifish poet who left last Tuesday — coming to see him, to untuck his shirt, to lead him to the bed in the corner. So Zilla asked Samantha for the attic key, and Samantha gave it without comment, though she knew, they all knew, who wouldn’t have known? And so for the fourth day now she was working on a piece of linen that she’d tacked right to the floor, for lack of properly lit wall space. And also for the difference it made. To stand above it, to feel she was peering straight through the linen and into the rest of the house, Fannie’s bedroom below, and what was below that? The dining room. It was a hundred degrees up here, but still she was freezing from the inside out.

She wasn’t sure what this painting wanted to be. She’d tried for petallate, frilled, wet, but ultimately she found she couldn’t, in her state, create something verdant and expectant. She found five fallen oak leaves outside, early jumpers, stuck together with rain, not brown so much as opally pink, blushing at their early demise. And this was what she wanted to express now: a stack of soft, lovely suicides.

She’d had a letter that morning from Lemuel, holed up in Madison, “drowning in silver baths and sulphite,” trying to finish the prints for his show. He wanted her home. He wanted her to keep him safe from nightmares. He said he might go up in an airplane with Kneller, which she knew was meant as a threat, as he believed all planes crashed, and believed that he, in particular, was due a fiery death. If she could, she’d stay here forever. She’d be like Ludo, minus the marooning via political unrest. She’d beg Samantha to let her stay, and then stay longer, and stay longer, until she’d become a part of the furniture. Her room, like Ludo’s, would be permanently blocked off on Samantha’s color-coded chart. Except that Lemuel would die, he truly would. He’d stop eating, like Violet Devohr.

The leaves were working out nicely. There was something new, a depth she could normally achieve only with many layers of oil, but that somehow came through now with just the thinnest washes. Now that she was this far from him, she was painting, in a sense, for Viktor. Though she’d never admit it aloud. And if he visited her studio along with everyone else at the end of her stay, why would he assume this particular pile of oak leaves had to do with him?

When she’d walked, travel-weary, into the library three weeks ago and seen him there, sitting as always, cigar and drink, legs halfway across the rug, she’d been shaken to the core, but only in the most familiar of ways. This time, she’d have been more surprised if he’d not been there. This was the third stay for both, and the third time their visits had coincided. He didn’t need to tell her he hadn’t arranged it this way: The blanching of his face was enough. It wasn’t Samantha’s doing, either — Samantha, who, in ’27, asked them in all earnestness if they’d overlapped before. Zilla had come to feel the house itself was responsible, a magnetic field drawing them both back at regular intervals.

In March of ’25, right after her first solo show, she’d come here to recover, to try to make something she didn’t loathe as much as the work she’d just stared at till she wished for blindness. When she first saw him, Viktor was arriving late to dinner. His walk from the train had half frozen him, and he hadn’t shaved in days. His hair — she’d thought it was the ice freezing it out like that in all directions. He sat next to her and said very little. She asked him for the salt without even looking at him — an elderly playwright was holding forth on hermaphrodites — and Viktor took her hand and uncoiled her fingers, tilted the shaker so the salt poured slowly into her palm. She turned, and he locked up her eyes in some kind of cage with his own, so that she couldn’t turn away. Everyone began laughing and thought it a great joke, but really something far stranger was going on, something to do with her spinal column and her entire future. Her hand grew heavy. The salt began to spill over the edges and between her fingers. It was a long time — a minute? five minutes? — till he gave the container a last shake and set it down, and there she sat, dopey, buried under a mountain of a million small things. She pinched a few grains off the top for her casserole, and sat there eating the rest of her meal with her hand still outstretched, still laden. She said nothing at all, and this became a source of tremendous amusement for the rest of the table. They tried to remember which Roman goddess it was she resembled, and whether there might have been, once, a salt-bearing oracle. For the rest of that stay, the whole group called her The Oracle. She resumed talking the next morning, and found she had become such an object of fascination to the other artists that they all wanted to hear whatever she said. They wanted to ask The Oracle their futures. “How burnt shall dinner be?” “When will my poems ever be done?” “Which painting will sell?”

But she was caught up, meanwhile, in watching Viktor. His clothes were always too small or too large, or both. His eyes bugged out, so dark a brown that you couldn’t tell iris from pupil. She’d thought him tremendously ungraceful for a dancer at first, until she understood his problem: He was meant to move in empty and infinite space, not to interact with chairs and lamps and soup spoons. Still, every muscle engaged in whatever he did. No movement was isolated to just the hand, or just the leg. Each action had behind it the force and eloquence of his entire body.

The next night there had been a storm, one of those violent Midwestern ordeals she was still unaccustomed to. They’d been gathered in the library after dinner, and midway through the first round of drinks Zilla had confessed how terrified she was of the thunder, of the lightning hitting her in bed as she slept. Viktor had rested his cigar in the ashtray, and left the room. They’d laughed about where he’d gone — he felt a dance coming on! — but twenty minutes later he was back, soaked like a shipwrecked sailor, teeth clacking, hair improbably still erect. He extended his palm, a wet, black acorn in the middle. He said, “For your windowsill. To protect you.” It was a tradition having to do with Thor, he explained, being god of both the oak trees and the lightning. The whole crowd had laughed again, but this time with — she thought she heard it — an edge of wonder and knowing and general romantic envy. This man must be in love with this woman. But we haven’t yet spoken! she wanted to say. Later they would speak. They’d spend hours on the terrace, always with others, laughing about failure and rent parties and a thousand other things.

She hadn’t thought of it till now, but this must be why she’d chosen oak leaves to paint. Of course. How dense, not to realize.

A knocking below.

“Yes!” she called. “Yes, yes, yes.”

And here, hurrying up, were Samantha and Ludo, and trailing behind was Armand, the illustrator, the sweet golden one with the odd teeth.

Samantha’s eyes were bright and wet. “We’ll need to hide Ludo up here. Tonight at dinner, and after. You know Gamby thinks he’s gone. I swore.”

“You no mind?” Ludo said. “I leave alone your paint.” He appraised the room.

Zilla took Samantha’s wrist and led her gently to the rolling stool. “Sit down,” she said. “Breathe great slow breaths.”

She found chairs for the men and a crate for herself, and they sat by an open dormer, where an electric fan fought a losing battle with the heat.

Samantha said, “I’ll offer Gamby the extra bed in the director’s house, but I’m sure he’ll stay at the hotel. Either way, Ludo should be safe to sleep in his room. I mean, just at night. I don’t imagine Gamby will stay more than a day or two. Unless he kicks us out and stays forever.”

“He won’t,” Ludo said.

“He will. He actually will.”

Ludo was a frenetic little man. It had been two years since he and Zilla had made love (love, ha!) in the composer’s cottage, since Viktor had hit him in the mouth with a dinner plate the next day — also, not coincidentally, the last day Viktor had spoken directly to her — and she could remember nothing at all about the feel of Ludo’s body, his smell, his tongue. He looked at her with equal vacancy.

Samantha said, “This morning I wrote to the board. Some are my friends, but most aren’t. I don’t know how much sympathy we have.”

Armand, quiet till now, let out a loud breath, a dragon puffing contemplative steam. “What would he take from New York? The Broadway, or the Twentieth Century? Well, no, it doesn’t matter. They both get to the city in the morning. Let’s say he’s there now, he’ll have to switch to the local, maybe he’ll have lunch first. We have a few hours.”

“To do what?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Ludo said, “I quote you Ovid, but I don’t know in the English: Fortune is not helping those who pray but those who act.”

“Didn’t Ovid get exiled?”

Armand said, “Stay here.” He vanished down the stairs, and they all stared after him, bemused, and then in seconds he came running back. He put something on the windowsill: a little monkey, carved from green jade. Loopy arms, a manic grin. “It’s the Lord of Mischief,” he said. “A relic of my dissolute years in the Orient. He’ll be our totem.”

Samantha stared at the thing. “I thought you’d be coming back with an idea.”

“Well, no.”

Zilla rubbed Samantha’s neck. She said, “We could either seduce him or kidnap him. I believe these are our options.”

Armand: “We’ll charm him.”

Samantha: “It won’t work. And what then?”

“Then, anything and everything. Desperation.”

VIKTOR IN HIS STUDIO: THE WINTER’S TALE

It is a dance to be done to a wall.

On the stage, it will be a dance to a statue, to the frozen Hermione. Leontes will dance his grief, his longing, for the wife he betrayed and killed, and then — then! — the statue steps down, Hermione lives, and there is to be the most exquisite pas de deux, all the more wrenching for their sixteen-year separation, for the age of the dancers. If only he can create the thing. But for now, in the Longhouse, he lives inside Leontes’ dance of despair, the score spread around him on the floor like icebergs. His feet bare. The music is in his head, and he dances to the western wall. Zilla is through that wall (Armand Cox is through the other) and there are times when he knows she’s standing not two feet away, facing him, brush in her left hand, a brush in her teeth, painting on her thin cloth. If there were no wall, if there were no cloth, she’d be painting the same air he is dancing in.

In sixteen years, he will not need a statue to remember her body, her face.

He dances as far as the dance is written.

He presses his hips to the wall.

FRIDAY, 1:00

Armand and Ludo, hunting down the other artists, giving them their roles.

—

Josephine at the window, to Fannie: “It’s one of the last good places in the world, isn’t it? One of the last.”

—

Viktor, walking Marlon around to sober him up. Marlon: “Have you seen those photos of Zilla? The ones her husband took? And exhibited in public! They’re — let me tell you. Let me tell you.” Viktor: “Yes. I’ve seen them.”

—

Zilla and Samantha in the kitchen of the director’s house, giggling like children, tearing at the thin plaster of the wall around the small black hole, until chunks come away in their hands and the opening is two feet square between the counter and the icebox.

“There, see? That cross beam back there,” Samantha says.

They reach carefully into the hole with the bottles they’ve brought from the library, and line them up along the exposed beam: gin, bourbon, rye, scotch, vermouth, all new and full from the bootlegger’s drop.

Zilla: “That’s the ugliest speakeasy I’ve ever seen.”

“It’ll do.”

They nail the square board over the hole, as gently as they can, so the bottles won’t fall.

—

Outside, sunshine and wind.

ARMAND AND EDDIE IN THE FLOWERED BEDROOM

He found Eddie under the desk, tucked in a ball, writing in a small black notebook. Armand understood instantly, and wanted to tell him so: that it sometimes felt better like this, tucked into something solid, hidden from the world. Instead, when Eddie scooted halfway out, what he said was, “You look like a turtle.”

Eddie laughed and nodded, but he didn’t come any farther, so Armand sat Indian style on the floor.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Armand said.

“I’m glad you did. I didn’t like what I was writing.”

Eddie was so controlled, so careful. His eyes, though — the way they pulsed around the room and then back to your face — it was as if they were taking in everything with such tremendous force, such thirst. A good chance this was the reason for his quiet. There was so much pouring in that nothing could come out.

Armand told him his role for the evening, and said nothing would go into effect till Samantha gave the word. “We might yet be wrong,” he said. “He might be paying a purely social visit. To absorb some culture, you know. Perhaps he wants to learn to paint. Ha.” Eddie didn’t say anything. “It’s not a full plan, I know, but it’s something. God, I’d love to draw you under there. The lines are fantastic. It’s just the desk and your head and your knees.”

Eddie blushed. Everyone blushed when you said you wanted to draw them. It was perhaps the most flattering thing in the world. Not the suggestion that you were beautiful so much as the implicit revelation: I see you. I really see you.

Armand said, “You’re so quiet.” And without knowing he would, he reached forward and grabbed Eddie’s jaw and popped it open like he was giving a dog a pill. He pulled a nickel from his pocket and stuck it on Eddie’s tongue. Eddie closed his mouth. Armand let go of him.

Eddie managed to say, “Why did you do that?” The coin still in his mouth. Armand heard it click against his teeth.

“I thought if I paid the nickelodeon it would make some noise. And see? It worked.”

THE WHITE RABBITS APPRAISE GAMBY

Mr. Devohr has requested dinner at five — a bad sign, surely. There will be no drinks before, no gathering in the library. When they enter the dining room at four-fifty, Gamby Devohr is already there, Samantha at his side. She’s managed to put on a dress.

Fannie whispers to Josephine: “He looks like a starfish. Stuffed in a suit and fitted out with a black wig.”

Josephine to Fannie: “He doesn’t resemble his mother one bit.”

Fannie: “Not a bit.”

They glance to where Violet hangs on the wall, darkly regarding her endless stream of uninvited houseguests.

“He’s terribly young.”

“He’s twenty-five.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“He can’t hear.”

“He flunked out of Yale, Samantha said.”

“But I thought he left to marry the girl. And seven months later, wouldn’t you know, a baby!”

“It’s amazing how quickly they grow them, these days.”

“Look, someone’s folded all the napkins like little sailboats. How swank!”

The artists file past to shake Gamby’s hand, to thank him for his generosity. Armand has traded in his knickers for ludicrous Oxford bags, a facetious nod to formality, and as he introduces himself Gamby stares, confused, at what appears to be a floor-length skirt. When Samantha introduces Marceline, Gamby turns red. “Miss Horn,” he says. “It’s a great honor. I watched you in Old Kentucky, and you were just swell. Wasn’t that you in The Statesman? In the dress, you know, that dress? I’d love to — wow, I’d love to hear some of your stories!”

Fannie can’t look at Josephine, or they’ll both laugh. Gamby is nothing more than a little boy in a suit. The silly nickname fits.

Marceline accepts the kiss on her hand. “The honor is entirely mine.”

Fannie, whispering: “His father’s been trying to boot Samantha for years, Zilla said. Only the board wouldn’t.”

“Augustus? That’s the father?”

“And he had a stroke last year.”

“He’s got something to prove, then, hasn’t he? Gamby.”

“Show up at the old man’s bedside and give him back the house.”

“Look how smooth his hands are!”

“And plump!”

They sit to eat.

Josephine to Fannie: “Wouldn’t we love to sculpt him?”

Fannie to Josephine: “I’d do it in mashed potatoes. With a little butter hat.”

EDDIE AT DINNER

The food was elegant, a stretch for the cook: consommé julienne, roast Surrey fowl with bread sauce, hearts of celery, new potatoes in cream. Eddie struggled to eat.

Gamby asked them each, cordially, about their work. Armand said, “You’ve probably seen my magazine covers and forgotten them at once. I did a lot of fadeaway girls, when that was the style.”

“I suppose they model for you!” Gamby said. “The girls.”

“Certainly.”

“And why does it help to be here in the woods? Don’t artists thrive in the city?”

Zilla said, “We are like flowers, Mr. Devohr. We might exhibit ourselves in the city, but we grow best in the wilderness.” She touched his arm with two fingertips. She wore all white.

“Huh.”

Fannie said, “We don’t even have a proper studio right now, Josephine and I. We’re trying to make enough pieces here this month to last the rest of the year.”

“What, to sell?”

“That is how artists make a living.” Samantha must have realized how sharp she sounded because she took a long drink of water and looked around the table. She wanted someone to rescue her.

Marlon said, “I’ve written a tremendous amount, this stay. A tremendous amount.”

Gamby listened patiently, and soon enough he was focused in again on Marceline, asking about the talkies. “Von must speak from farther up in the throat,” she was saying. “Or it von’t record vell. You do as if you vere talking into the telephone.”

He said, “I heard they can do gunshots now. Isn’t it true, they invented a slow-motion pistol just so it’ll record?”

“Yes,” Marceline said. “It opens many possibilities.” Brave woman, chatting so amiably about the death knells of her own career.

Zilla, seated to Gamby’s left, was the one responsible for figuring out how serious he was in his mission, how doomed they all really were. If anyone could get a man to give too much away, it was Zilla — her palpable empathy, the way she leaned into everything you said. Even Eddie relaxed when he talked to her, and the chill vanished. Being near Zilla was being near a small, smooth lake.

Eddie forced a bit of bread. He’d lost weight here. If he stayed any longer, he might vanish entirely. He heard Zilla, her voice a bit higher, more emphatic than normal: “Oh, but we don’t even interact with the town! It’s like an invisible fairy castle! This is my third stay, and I haven’t set foot off the grounds but once, when I cracked my wrist and was rushed to the doctor. I don’t suppose they think anything of us at all!”

A minute later, Gamby laughed for all the table to hear: “It goes without saying that if I’d decided to be an artist or a poet, or what have you — my father would have sent me over Niagara in a barrel.”

“Yes.” Zilla said it through her teeth. “We’re awfully lucky to do what we do.”

Viktor was rotating all the food on his plate to the left. Choreographing his vegetables. What must it have meant, Eddie wondered, to be accustomed to young dancers he could throw around — literally throw in the air! — and then to fall in love with a woman like Zilla? A woman so grounded, so unflappable (so married too), that he, Viktor, would inevitably be the one to bend and break. It would be unbearable, surely.

Gamby was saying: “So when you start a painting, do you arrange all your fruit and whatnot on a table, or do you just make it up?”

Eddie watched Armand and Marlon pretend to talk to each other. Marlon had removed his smoking jacket for once, and he might even have been sober. His moustache was waxed. Armand, beside him, his hair combed into golden waves. Armand’s teeth looked as if each had been collected from a different man’s mouth, a sort of harlequin set. Eddie remembered a toy Roman arch where, when the keystone was pulled, the entire thing collapsed. He imagined that if he pulled out Armand’s incisor, something similar would happen, the splendors of the ancient world giving way all at once.

Eddie excused himself from the table as the orange layer cake was served, and said he must lie down with his headache. It pained him to be so rude, but his one task tonight was to sneak Ludo his dinner. And then he’d pack his trunk. He wanted to leave as soon as possible in the morning.

In the kitchen, Eddie picked up the covered plate from the cook and wove past the sinks to the back exit. A small blonde girl, no more than four, sat at the counter on a stool, staring disconsolately at a plate of peas. Her milk glass was empty.

“Mr. Devohr’s daughter, Grace,” the cook whispered. “I don’t know what I’m expected to do with her.”

When he returned from the attic with the empty tray, she was there still, and she glanced up with hopeful eyes, until she saw he wasn’t her father. He wondered if anyone had considered her in the midst of all the planning. He didn’t imagine they’d found a maid to watch her, to put her to bed. He said, “I have an important job to do. There are hungry fish out back, and I’m going to give them their supper. I don’t suppose you know how to rip bread very, very small.”

Grace gave him a deep, appraising look, like an old lady’s. “Oh yes I do!”

“Well, you’ll have to help me, then. I’m afraid I’m not very good at it. The fish are always complaining. Will you come along?” She hopped from her stool, and the cook, winking, handed Eddie two slices of the dinner bread. He put one in Grace’s hand and said, “This one’s too heavy for me.”

“Are your arms very skinny?”

“Yes, quite.”

They sat on the two big rocks by the largest koi pond, and Eddie showed her how to tear tiny pieces and throw them in. They watched the fish come to gobble the crumbs, their round mouths impossibly large.

“The spotted one is my best one,” Grace said. “What is his name?”

“Oh, that’s Elwood. A terribly distinguished gentlefish.”

“Does he love bread the best of any food?”

“Almost. Almost. Do you know what he told me the other day? He wishes, more than anything in the world, for a root beer float.”

Grace looked skeptical. “It would fall apart in the water.”

“That’s precisely the problem. He’ll never get his wish.”

“But I know how to do it! Take him out with a big scoop, and put him into the root beer float. He can eat it from inside it.”

“Ha! You are an exceptionally wise young lady. I might make a poem about you.”

She threw another crumb and thought a moment. “Face.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what rhymes with Grace.”

—

He convinced her, miracle of miracles, to lie in bed with a book. He read her the story of Rapunzel from the Brothers Grimm she’d brought on the train, and he changed her into her white nightgown, and he tucked her into the spare bed in Samantha’s house, in the room behind the office that Gamby had surprised everyone by accepting. He drew the blinds against the evening sun — it was only ten to six — and told her that back in Toronto, it was nearly midnight.

“Can you remember what I just read you? You can look at the pictures all over again.”

“I can read words. I can even read the big words!”

“I shouldn’t have doubted it. Did you know, if you lie very still and read the same story ten times, you’ll have magic dreams?”

“Oh, I knew that.”

“So someone told you the secret. And Elwood will dream about root beer, and I will dream about you.”

Grace giggled and kicked her toes under the sheet. Eddie moved her water closer and kissed the top of her head. She smelled like sun and grass.

MARCELINE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Zilla dropped her spoon on the table with a clatter, and said, a bit too loudly, “Oh, how clumsy of me!” Confirmation. That Devohr was here on a euthanasia mission. That he couldn’t be charmed. Marceline hadn’t caught his exact words, but then she didn’t need to — the man’s intentions were clear. And so: They all braced themselves, ran through their parts, such as they were, and tried to continue their several conversations as if nothing had happened.

Zilla took a breath to say something, but just then there came a loud knocking above them. A series of small, hard raps that seemed to travel the whole length of the house, ending over the window.

Josephine laughed — a nervous burst.

It happened again: hard and fast, on the roof — the dining room did stick out from the rest of the house — and trailed off as if it wanted them all to follow somewhere.

Devohr scanned their faces, blinking his little eyes again and again.

Marceline wondered if this was the misfiring of some effect they’d arranged for Devohr’s benefit — akin to all the fireworks shooting off at once, before the grand finale. She perceived nothing but confusion all around her, though, and concern. Fannie and Josephine grabbed each other’s hands.

Samantha said, finally, “It’s the acorns. They’re early this year.”

So it hadn’t been the plan. What had been the plan? Zilla was to have spoken. But she just sat there, ashen, the only one not laughing now, the only one who didn’t seem relieved, and whispered into her cupped hands: “Good lord.”

Marceline had simply been told to flirt, and this she had done expertly. The high art of pantomime — quite possibly her last performance of that art. She was unfortunately hazy on other details. But she could flirt till dawn.

Mr. Devohr stretched and stood. “We should end this soirée. I’ll be heading back to Chicago quite early in the morning.”

Samantha said, “We’re finished.” But it was a question, and they all knew she wasn’t referring to dinner.

He sniffed. “You’ve had a good run, Miss Mays. I always say, it’s important to recognize when the party’s over. There’s a fine art to it.”

Armand said, out loud: “What in the hell do you know about art?”

Marceline thought for a moment they might all erupt into violence or weeping. Instead the energy slowly left the room. A leak in the balloon.

Zilla should have taken over now, but she was still glazed, still spooked.

Marlon finally spoke. “Well, what happened to the booze? If we’re giving up here, can we at least make a good night of it?” The poor man. He was twitching, positively twitching. Marlon hadn’t been in on the plan — he’d spent the afternoon sobering up, not rehearsing — but he’d inadvertently cut to the chase, skipping over Zilla’s forgotten invitation to visit the studios, skipping the slow progression that would lead them all to a nightcap and then another and another. Which would all lead, somehow or other, to Gamby Devohr’s heart.

“He’s only joking, Mr. Devohr,” Fannie said. “We don’t drink a drop here!” Marceline supposed this was part of the script, a displaced line. She felt herself back on a rooftop in Fort Lee, those embarrassing summer flickers of twenty years past, costumes pulled from theater trash, directors who’d never directed so much as bicycle traffic. Devohr was about to laugh. Marceline — finally she knew exactly what to do — Marceline stood up next to him and slid her hand down the outside of his thigh. She cocked her head and let her eyelashes fall slowly down. “Please do join us for a drink,” she said. “For a last bacchanal. How often, back in Canada, do you live like the artists do? The night is terribly young.” And she could see in his dopey eyes the affirmation of what she’d learned on her very first picture: Sex trumps a poor script and poor players any day.

Marceline walked with him, arm in arm, trailing Zilla and Samantha and Armand back to the director’s house and up the stairs. Marlon followed at a distance, apparently even less sure than Marceline of what was happening. Alfie circled their feet. They found Eddie alone at the little kitchen table, his finger to his lips. The girl, he said, was in bed.

Samantha got a hammer from under the sink and, turning it to the prong end, began prying the nails loose from the ugly square board behind her. Marceline kept Devohr talking and laughing while Armand took a turn, and then Eddie. The board broke loose from the wall, and then there was a great clatter as Eddie and Armand reached in and pulled out an improbable number of liquor bottles.

Marceline guessed from the proximity of the hammer, from the loose way the board was nailed, that this unveiling had been part of the plan all along. If Devohr thought they were letting their guard down — if he thought they’d given up entirely and were revealing their true selves — he’d maybe let his guard down, too.

Armand said, “The terrace! I’ll bring cigars!”

Eddie stayed behind to make sure the child was asleep. Marceline pulled Devohr by the hand — down the stairs, down the walk that circled behind the big house. The sun was still bright and high. When she was sure he’d been propelled in the right direction, she let go and fell back with Zilla and Armand, five bottles between them, the dog at their heels.

“How does the plan go now?”

“That was the plan. That’s as far as it goes.”

ALL OF THEM

More acorns covered the ground than should have been possible. The oaks all grew in front of the house — the smaller ones off to the left, the majestic one between the director’s house and the big house — but even so their helmeted seeds carpeted the lawn and terrace and paths out back like hail. Green still, and dangerous: Josephine went rolling forward, and Fannie caught her under the arms. “They’re good luck!” Marlon said.

“Well, we need plenty of that.”

Hazy and hot, the air still and heavy.

Viktor said, “Shall we build a fire? Back on the pile?”

“Oh, yes, yes!” Fannie said.

Everyone made it to the terrace. Even Ludo, with nothing more to lose, came down from the attic to slap Gamby on the back and say he’d teach him to drink like an Italian.

Armand took over one of the long, high tables and started mixing drinks. Someone broke into the kitchen and brought out lemons, and soon Armand was squeezing them into a glass and picking out seeds with his fingers so he could mix the juice with the gin and the precious Cointreau to make White Ladies. (“How ghostly!” Josephine cried, and Fannie rubbed her hands together. “Ooh, shall we bring out the Ouija? It’s still in the library!”)

Gamby said, “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you? Tell me this. Why’d they all die violently? Where’s the ghost of the nice old lady who died in bed from a tumor?”

“Resting in peace! It’s energy that makes a ghost, unfulfilled energy. Anger, or fear, or — or—”

“Love,” Josephine said. “Unrequited love.”

Armand said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Mr. Devohr, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Marlon and Viktor decided they were in charge of the bonfire. Marlon slipped his smoking jacket back on and ran around gathering extra sticks, while Alfie the dog scampered after in joyful brotherhood. Viktor became convinced the quality of the fire would depend on the number of matches used to light it, and took donations from the men’s pockets.

Marceline and Zilla reclined on the terrace wall, legs stretched along it toward each other. Sylphic bookends. Samantha put a chair for Gamby right in front of them, at eye level with the legs. And she sat too, and she asked Ludo to open the solarium windows and turn on the Victrola. Soon there was music, “A Shady Tree” and “Was It a Dream,” and soon Ludo was back and handing out Armand’s cigars, and Armand was passing drinks. Marceline said, “I vent to such a lofely garden party last month, at the house of Mary Pickford. Mister Devohr, do you know her films?”

“Heavens, yes!”

She lowered her voice. “And I vill tell you the real reason she cut her hair.”

Behind them, Josephine leaned against the ivy, and Fannie leaned against her, on her soft shoulder. She said, “What would we do without this place? What sort of world would this be, without refuges?”

In the distance, the fire pile began to glow. Small spots around the lower edges first, then a few thin arms of fire. Now the whole thing, a consummation. Marlon ran back to the terrace, to view his creation from a distance. “A fine fire,” he said. “The best work I’ve done here.” And it was true, he saw that now. He shouldn’t have let himself sober up. He could suddenly see his whole book, the shape of it, the bulk of it. It was a monstrosity, a tangle, a snake swallowing its own tail. He took a White Lady from Armand, and with the drink he walked slowly back down the path, back to where Viktor stood staring at the blaze.

Up on the terrace, Armand filled Gamby’s glass before it could get half empty.

Gamby didn’t seem to doubt that the high spirits were genuine. That these women would naturally want to surround him and regale him with stories. That these artists were simply dying to share their liquor.

Somone did find the Ouija board, and Marceline climbed down from the wall, pulled a chair close to Gamby’s, convinced him to press his knees into hers with the board between them. Here was some hope: If Marceline was as gifted an improviser as they all supposed, she might manage to nudge the planchette toward some helpful message. Something about ghosts of artists past, or the ghost of his mother. Saying she loved the art created here and wanted the colony to stay. But all Marceline knew of his mother was that horrible attic story, nothing personal that would shock him into compliance. She couldn’t even recall her name.

From behind Gamby’s head, Fannie mouthed it: “Violet! Violet!”

Josephine whispered, “Watch, she’ll spell it with a W.”

Gamby’s short, stout, pale fingers on the planchette, Marceline’s long ones. She said, “I haf done the Ouija von time before. At a Hollyvood party, vith my dear friend Lon Chaney. I vill tell you, he used the board to proposition me!”

Back by the fire, Marlon and Viktor. Marlon said to him, “I might burn the novel. The whole thing.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s a doorstop. I’ve sat here six weeks and made a doorstop.”

“Then burn it.” Viktor regarded him with something like spite, a look Marlon hadn’t anticipated. “Did you know, you can’t burn a dance? There are quite a few things you can’t burn, unless you burn yourself, unless you jump into the fire yourself.”

“Let’s step away from the fire.”

“Look at her up there, offering herself like—”

“Who? Sobriety doesn’t suit you. Good God.” Marlon handed over his own drink. “It’s delicious,” he said.

Viktor looked down at it. “I don’t drink.”

“You don’t?” Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. “You mixed the vat last night. And you’re always dropping things. You’re the drunkest man I know.”

“I’ve never touched the stuff. I couldn’t dance.”

“But when you were younger?”

“I started training when I was eight.” Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, “Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them — a stranger — it might be a beautiful woman — for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before.”

“Why don’t you try a drink.”

“The truth is, there’s no such thing as love. There’s only history.”

Zilla was pouring her drinks off the far side of the wall. She needed to stay clear.

Alfie ran yapping between the terrace and the fire, the terrace and the fire.

“The Ouija dates to Pythagoras,” Ludo said.

Zilla said, “Ludo’s our encyclopedia.”

Gamby laughed. “That’s funny, it says here William Fuld Talking Board Set. Was Mr. Fuld a follower of Mr. Pythagoras?” Marceline smiled up as if the two of them alone were in on the joke. Gamby addressed the board. “What horse shall I pick at Saratoga next summer?”

“No, no,” Marceline said, and she attempted to make even that one word flirtatious. “Let us ask the spirit’s name.”

She aimed for the V. She was halfway there when Gamby jerked the planchette down to the bottom, to the number 2.

“Hell of a name!” Gamby said. Pleased with his own joke. “You should get your money back from Mr. Pythagoras.”

Marceline said, “It must mean there are two spirits!”

Samantha closed her eyes.

Gamby said, “Are you men or women?”

Before Marceline had time to think, the planchette slid to the sun face on the top left, with the word YES beneath.

“Well played, Miss Horn.” Devohr waggled his eyebrows. “One of each, male and female! Are we ourselves the spirits, by chance?”

“I am not mofing the pointer, Mr. Devohr. Are you?”

Fannie and Josephine swayed to the music. Ludo changed the record, and, returning to the terrace, did a shuffling little solo dance to “I’m Saving Saturday Night for You.”

Samantha, next to Gamby but silent, relied on Marceline’s and Zilla’s social graces. She wrapped her hands around the iron arms of the chair, let the metal cool her fingertips. Or rather, her fingers transferred their warmth, electron by electron, into the chair. An important distinction. And when she was gone, when there was no visible trace of her at Laurelfield, when the lawn was filled with matrons drinking tea, her electrons would remain in the chair. That was something, and she pressed harder. That was something.

Alfie slept, at last, under her.

Zilla watched Marlon lead Viktor back to the terrace. She said, “There ought to be marshmallows.”

Viktor said nothing. He swayed a bit. Marlon had never seen a man sway from sobriety. He led him to Armand. He said, “We need to fix this fellow up.”

Marceline had asked again for spirit’s name. They all watched.

G

G

G

The planchette circled the letter like a bee on a flower.

“I think you are writing your own name, Mr. Devohr.” She wanted to push back harder on the planchette, but then the whole idea was for him to believe it had moved on its own.

“No, too many G’s!” he said. “Gagog. It sounds like a caveman. Gagog the Horrible. Gilgamesh!”

Fannie said, “Ask how she — ask how it perished. The spirit.” And they did.

S

C

R

F

C

“Scarface!” Marlon called, unhelpfully. Josephine aimed a plump elbow into his ribs, but he didn’t understand. “Maybe they’re two of the fellows Capone got! Ask if they died on February the fourteenth! Ask if the last thing they saw was a warehouse!”

Marceline tried to think quickly. “Perhaps it means sacrifice. Perhaps — it is von who sacrificed a great deal for, for the colony.”

But she was going off course, wasn’t she? Violet hadn’t had a thing to do with the colony. She felt the looks around her, a net of disappointment. She said, “Vhen did you lif?”—not certain where she’d aim the thing even if she could wrest control.

NO

Gamby said, “Well that’s terribly uncooperative! Tell us, brave spirits, when did you walk the earth?”

NO

NO

NO

GOOD BYE

The planchette stopped and stayed on that “good bye” at the bottom as if its motor had run out. Gamby lifted his fingers.

“But NO was on the moon picture!” Fannie said. “I think it meant ‘Many moons ago!’ Don’t you?”

Josephine said, “It’s useless.”

Marceline said, “Let’s gif it von more go.”

Gamby sighed and looked down. “Well,” he said. “I suppose there is one person I want to reach. It’s just that she’s been gone a long time. And she — BOO!” He slapped the board, and it flew across the terrace with the planchette, and Gamby erupted into boisterous laughter at the same moment that Fannie and Josephine screamed and Viktor fell back into the ivy. Alfie awoke and barked disapprovingly.

Ludo scrambled after the Ouija set. Marlon poured his own drink straight into Gamby’s glass while he was distracted, then fetched himself a refill.

By the time Eddie joined the party, the little girl at last asleep, or at least pretending, there was no appeal to joining the drinkers. He’d never catch up, and they made it look so tiresome. Flushed faces and stupid, shouted conversation. He ought to pack, but his room would be hot. He’d wait till the air had cooled. He leaned against the ivy, next to the White Rabbits, and together they watched Gamby.

Fannie said, “Look at him there, surrounded by beauty. What did he do to deserve any of this?”

Josephine said, “What if we murdered him? What if we threw him on the fire?”

“Josephine!”

“We could forge letters back to Canada. He’d say how he was joining the artists, how he’d always wanted to be a painter.”

“There’s that little girl!”

“Well, I’m only joking. Eddie, I’m afraid Fannie takes me awfully seriously. And I don’t deserve to be listened to for a single word.”

“She’s all nonsense, it’s true.”

Meanwhile Gamby had grown loud and shrill. “That’s ace!” he shouted.

“He’s going to lick her shoulder,” Armand whispered. “Marceline’s.”

“Do you suppose he’s corked?”

“He’s fried to the hat.”

Eddie watched Zilla, still perched on the wall, watched the way she never fully looked away from Viktor. He’d understood half of it before, but now he realized there was something he’d absolutely missed, something about the way her eyes sunk into themselves: She was bereft, or broken, or grief stricken. She stared at Viktor the way a woman on a boat stares at a man drowning in the ocean.

Marlon and Armand leaned on the makeshift bar, and Ludo soft-shoed around the terrace, but Viktor sat now, Indian style, an empty glass by one knee. He was looking out, either at Zilla or the fire. Maybe to him they were the same thing.

In one breath Eddie fished his Waterman from his trouser pocket and grabbed Viktor’s hand. Viktor didn’t seem to notice at all. He wrote across the veins, in dark blue: She loves you. He stepped in front of Samantha, in front of Gamby, in front of Marceline, who was talking about Hollywood ghostwriters and the confessional craze. He grabbed Zilla’s hand — she at least looked at him, startled — and wrote: He loves you.

He capped the pen. It was a service someone had to perform, he felt. A translation service, in a way. What was all this, but a modern tower of Babel? Here was someone speaking nothing but dance, and someone else speaking paint, and someone speaking poetry, and someone speaking music. And what were they trying to express, but the inexpressible? If there existed words, regular words, to say what they were aiming at, then why would they even need to do what they did? Why were they all living here, knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace? The ink was insufficient as anything else, but perhaps it was a start. If he’d been a sculptor, he’d have sculpted it for them: Look! There! Love.

Someone had appeared at the edge of the terrace: a small girl in a white nightgown. No one but Marceline noticed at all, until Eddie sprang across the bricks and knelt in front of her and said, “Let’s have one more story, shall we?” And he vanished with the girl, around the corner of the house. Gamby, his eyes closed in laughter, hadn’t even seen.

The sun was lower in the sky. It hovered over the trees a long time, casting long shadows toward the house.

Fannie: “If we could only slow down time, we could accomplish an infinite amount of work before this place gets the wrecking ball.”

Armand: “I’ll move very slowly when I’m near you. And you’ll believe it’s come true.”

Josephine: “You have such an honest energy, Armand. You live very close to the skin.”

And off Armand bounded, to pour more gin in Gamby’s cup.

Zilla and Viktor both squinted at the backs of their hands like confused palm readers.

Marceline, a laugh like an oboe: “Vell, can you belief, ve all thought the talkies vould mean more vork for theater actors. But instead they vant to pay youngsters something like seventy-fife a veek. And gif them leads! And star them!”

Zilla tried to focus on the same conversation: “But,” she said, “here is a place — here we’re so different from a place like Hollywood. They’ve built a city, an industry. And here we are in our studios. You understand it, don’t you, Mr. Devohr? What it is we do here, and why it matters. A man like you, a man has everything he wants, autos and servants and land — what does he do next? He buys art!”

“I do!” Gamby said. His words were garbled. “I buy art! I’ll buy it from you! You can paint me a picture of Marcelot. Of Marceline. Of — ha! — of Miss Horn.”

Eddie returned. Things felt like they’d fallen apart — the Ouija long abandoned, even Marceline and Zilla’s flirting strangely mechanical and overdone now. Samantha had turned to stone. He wished he could think of something to help. The magic words to save this place that he himself wanted nothing more to do with.

But Armand was staring at him, Armand was smiling at him, Armand was not looking away.

Any instinct on Eddie’s part to hide had been wiped away by the catastrophe of Viktor and Zilla. Did he want to end up like them, made sick by what he wouldn’t acknowledge? And so he stared back at Armand.

Ludo wove around them like a leprechaun. The music from the solarium was “Let’s Fall in Love.” Ludo pulled Zilla off the terrace wall with both hands, pulled her into a little waltz that didn’t match the music at all.

He whispered: “Where is your camera? Don’t you, somewhere, have a camera?”

“Marlon’s got a Leica.”

The August air, thick enough to climb.

Alfie, asleep again.

Eddie looked right at Armand. And — the bravest thing he’d done in his life — he slowly, slowly, stuck out his tongue to display the nickel he’d kept in his mouth since the afternoon, removing it only for dinner. Then he flipped it back in and closed his lips.

Armand did not look away. For the next five minutes, he did not look away.

Gin fractured the time. An encounter halfway down the lawn, Fannie tripping — how had they gotten there? — and one back on the terrace, surely later. Marlon would try to recall, the next morning. He’d had his smoking jacket, and then he hadn’t. Eddie had been near, and then he’d been quite far away, and then there was a bathroom floor. And then there was the fire, still burning, though someone else was in charge. The sun was low but still hot, and Viktor was crying. Why was Viktor crying? What was wrong with the man?

Gamby stumbling down the lawn, grabbing at Marceline’s chest. She was nimble. She held him by the elbow. Laughing and laughing.

Zilla had Marlon’s camera.

“Everyone together! Quick, before the last of the sun—”

Fannie, trying. Josephine pulling at her arm. “Mr. De — Mr. Devohr. Your mother, and her death. Don’t you think — don’t you think, though, she’d have wanted all this? All this art?”

“Vell, the tap dancers are doing splendidly now of course. Who could haf guessed?”

“Eddie, what’s wrong with him? Can you get Viktor some water?”

Samantha nodding to Armand. Yes, go ahead, do it, whatever it is.

“Miss Horn will join us, yes! And Miss Silverman as well! But—”

Armand’s clothes off, Gamby’s off, Zilla’s off too. Marceline backing toward the house. The sun beginning to set.

“It’s the way the natives fish!”

“Here, get your head up! Don’t drown.”

And the two of them, Armand and Gamby, out of the water. Who had kept the fire going? Laughing and laughing, and no one could stop laughing.

Armand, grabbing: “Look, I caught a fish!” Moving the other’s plump hand: “Look, you caught one too!”

Laughter and the click of the Leica and the low red sun, and the light of the fire. No one could stop laughing.

It was dark so fast, and they couldn’t remember how.

Viktor, somewhere out in the dark. No one could find him. They could hear him, but they couldn’t find him.

In the humid night, some of them stumbled together, and some stumbled farther apart.

ZILLA IN THE DARKROOM, GAMBY IN THE DARK

First she points it at the back of the big house and clicks through the rest of the film. Thirteen photos of abandoned windows, lit orange by the setting sun. Up there, the room where she slept on her first visit, before there were beds in the Longhouse. The yellow room at the other end, where Viktor once stayed. The solarium studio, Fannie and Josephine’s sculptures shining like living things. The dining room, where she’s fallen in some sort of love with every artist and composer and writer who’s ever sat across from her.

The sun is gone as she gropes her way down the path to the darkroom cabin. She’s been developing Lemuel’s prints for years, doing half his work, really, and even in this unfamiliar space it takes her little time to sort things out. All the chemistry she needs is here: a jackpot of not quite empty bottles left by departing photographers. Tanks and reels. An ancient ruby light, with a funny little door. But no photographic paper. No matter, if the negative is clear and convincing. She takes her time lining things up left to right on the counter. Developer, stop bath, fixer. She makes sure the sink works.

(At this same moment, back on the lawn: Gamby, somehow both drunker and more sober, lunges at Fannie. He says, “Hey, wait, where’s your camera? Wait!” “Good gracious, it wasn’t my camera,” Fannie says.)

She turns off the electric lamp and feels her way back to the counter. It’s a relief not to see her hands anymore, the upside-down script: He loves you. Well, yes. Eddie didn’t know what he was doing, writing on them like that. He imagined he was pointing out something they didn’t both already know.

(It has started to rain again, to pour. Marlon wakes up on the terrace and wonders why he’s in a pool, why he’s underwater, how he can breathe underwater. He goes back to sleep. Gamby is looking for Armand. He’s shouting.)

Her hands are shaking so that she can’t get the film hooked onto the reel. She has no idea if the light was enough. She has no idea if the shutter clicked at the right moment. If everything’s a blur. At last she gets it engaged, begins reeling. One long strip of gray. The images hidden under that gray, waiting. Backward through time. This first half will be empty house. Somewhere in the middle here will be Gamby and Armand, the four shots she managed. The last bit should be Marlon’s shots — yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. She finishes, and traps the whole thing in the aluminum canister, and hopes, as she pours, that the bottle of developer is correctly labeled, that it isn’t someone’s old supply of bathtub gin. It smells right at least. She closes the canister and turns the lamp back on. She sits on the counter to agitate. She goes by her watch to time the moving meditation — the front of her wrist, the back of her wrist — and the periods of rest.

(Eddie and Armand, behind the composer’s shed, in the rain. The coin has been replaced by Armand’s tongue. Eddie Parfitt, despite his considerable success, his poetry collections, his awards — Eddie Parfitt is twenty-one years old. He has lived a thousand years in those twenty-one. But he has never been in love.)

The stop bath, the fixer, the water. The water, at least, she can trust.

(Viktor, back in the house alone. Picking up the book Zilla left in the library — Keats’s letters — opening it to the middle: He smells it.)

She feels that Eddie broke something tonight. By writing it out, so starkly, so stupidly, on their hands.

(They are starting without her. Ludo walks Gamby in, drenched and confused, face like a mole forced above ground, and sits him in the solarium among Fannie and Josephine’s sculptures.)

At last, she can allow herself to look at the negatives, to see the damage. She finds scissors first, a good sharp pair hanging from a nail. She opens the canister and slowly unspools the reel. The first frames, of the house, she snips off. A blurry shot of the two men, so unclear that they might as well be monkeys. The next one, yes, as she hoped: everything clearly visible, everything anatomical and precise. Gamby’s face, as clear as a mug shot. And Armand’s as well, and his body, and the sinews of his legs. The head of his penis, fat and soft.

(Samantha says, “You’re a businessman, Mr. Devohr.”)

She cuts the good shot loose and hangs it to dry. Then she spools back through the shots Marlon’s been taking all week. A close-up of a daylily, meant to be artistic. Samantha on her balcony. The giant oak, the two houses, Armand smoking a cigarette. Eddie, smiling uncomfortably on the terrace. Fannie and Josephine walking by the fountain, but obviously posed. Perhaps because she’s already in an agitated state, perhaps because of the awkward subjects, Zilla finds these photographs all unduly chilling. What should be so troublesome about two women walking the path? Only she can’t shake the feeling that the photographs have existed all along, have been waiting in their canister for a thousand years, and that the people in them have lived their whole lives just to end up in these exact positions, just to hit their marks like dancers. Certainly this is what happened to Gamby, every moment of his life leading him right into this photograph, this trap. They got him to stand just so. They got him entwined with Armand. And he became the picture.

(Eddie’s been summoned to the solarium as a bodyguard. All five and a half feet of him, arms like — well, like a poet’s. Armand hiding in the library, for his safety. Eddie slips his coin back in his mouth, where it now belongs. Samantha, in a molten voice Eddie didn’t know she had in her: “Mr. Devohr, Armand Cox is a known homosexual.”)

Zilla realizes something, and it takes her a minute to wrap herself around the idea. She’s always thought of Laurelfield as a magnet, drawing her back again and again. But that’s just it: A magnet pulls you toward the future. Objects are normally products of their pasts, their composition and inertia. But near a magnet, they are moved by where they’ll be in the next instant. And this, this, is the core of the strange vertigo she feels near Laurelfield. This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. She doubts she can express it to anyone else, and she doubts she ought to.

(Gamby, no more blood in his face, sunken back in the chair, surrounded: “What in the hell do you people want?” Samantha still sitting, but she might as well be flying above him, Athena in the sky: “We want twenty-five years.”)

Zilla hangs Marlon’s shots next to the shots of Gamby. He’ll be delighted that someone’s done all the work for him.

(Grace, tossing in bed, turning the pillow to the cool side. Dreaming of Rapunzel and fish.)

But a moment later Zilla’s sinking, and she realizes what’s wrong, what it is. A lot of time has passed, and she’s done her job, and Viktor hasn’t followed her here. After Eddie wrote those words, there was a window of maybe half an hour when Viktor might have staggered through the dark, knocked on the door, called her name. But he hasn’t, and the night air has hardened to impenetrable glass.

(Gamby’s head between his knees. He says, “Twenty-five?” And he sits up to sign the paper they’ve made.)

Zilla and Viktor might pine for the rest of their lives, but that is all they will do. They will harden and soften into their old age, and she will paint him a hundred pictures and he will make her a hundred dances, but there will be no words, and there will be no coming together of bodies.

(It’s not till Fannie has escorted Gamby back to the director’s house that the solarium erupts in jubilation. Armand bursts in and says, “We changed fate! Do you realize what we did? It’s — what is it? The victory of art over greed! It is! We reached in and we changed fate!” But Eddie says, “Did we?” Because this whole evening he’s felt himself sucked into a whirlpool of inevitability. “Are you sure?”)

Oh, stupid Eddie with his stupid pen. And stupid Zilla, too, and stupid Viktor. She sits on the floor and stretches her legs. Lemuel is waiting for her, back in Madison. She can feel him, lying in bed awake, waiting. A different kind of magnet.

(Samantha turns a cartwheel, a full cartwheel, into the hall. The skirt of her yellow dress falls over her head like a parachute.)

After a while, the rain lets up.

And a while after that, the negatives are dry.

~ ~ ~

Dear Miss Mays,

Please, if it isn’t too late, disregard my premature attempt to leave Laurelfield.

(And do pardon my slipping this under the door. It’s early, and I’d hate to wake you.)

Everything felt wrong before, but now I know this is exactly where I ought to be, of anywhere in the world. I think I had hold of the place by the wrong end. Or it had hold of the wrong end of me. The point is, it’s all changed now. It’s right.

The batch of poems I finished — they were too dark. I’m not going to write that kind of thing again. They were haunted. I thought I was haunted, or the house was, but it was only the work. I’m going to start over.

Do you ever think of it, how as artists we can just start over? I don’t suppose a businessman could throw out his business and start fresh. But we can begin again. And that’s what I hope to do, if you haven’t given away my spot.

Sheepishly, thankfully,

Eddie

THE GHOSTS

Samantha walked the grounds. She wanted to kiss everything. The grass was soaked.

She’d stayed hidden in her rooms when Gamby stomped out of her house at dawn. So it wasn’t till noon, when she found Marlon smoking his pipe on the terrace, that she learned about the scene in the big house. Gamby had stalked in and dropped his little daughter off at the breakfast table, asking Josephine to tend to her. Josephine had told riddles, and Fannie went running around the house looking for things that might pass as toys: a pencil and paper, Armand’s little jade monkey, a hair clip.

Gamby went through the house opening doors, startling Marceline half dressed. Marlon was heading back to his room for more sleep when he heard a noise above him on the attic stairs. A thundering, a crashing. He thought of the ghost. But no, it was Gamby, descending like an avalanche. Gamby braced himself in the doorway, panting. He said, “The attic may not be used for a studio.”

“I’m a writer,” Marlon said.

“Who the hell’s been painting up there?” When Marlon didn’t speak — he would have, if he’d known the answer — Gamby exploded. “The attic is a FAMILY space! It has not been offered to you!”

“I don’t think it’s a studio.”

Gamby slammed the door and turned the key in the lock. He regarded the key with a horror normally reserved for bloody knives. He slipped it in his pocket.

“I’m just a writer.”

But by the time Marlon told this all to Samantha, Gamby was long gone. Beatrice, arriving for work, had been so cowed encountering him angry outside the director’s house that she’d fetched him both the other copies of the attic key.

—

In the library that night, Zilla was disconsolate.

Samantha said, “We can pick the lock, I’m sure.”

But this wasn’t the problem. The problem was the acorns pelting her, the words fading on her hand, the sense that Viktor — look at him in the corner, folded up like an umbrella — was a fate she’d circumvented. And that she wasn’t sure if this would be her salvation or her undoing.

Though, yes, the unfinished painting bothered her as well. She hadn’t been able to work all day. She’d sat on the fountain, nearly overflowing from all the rain, and stared at the attic dormers, and considered that part of her soul was locked up there, as surely as Violet Devohr had been locked up there. Violet, Violet, dragged here against her will. Was that the magnetic force behind her haunting? She was pulled, and so she pulled others. Toward ruin, toward redemption, toward love, away from it. Why? Because she could.

Fannie: “Doesn’t he recognize the irony? In locking the attic!”

Josephine: “I think he’s truly that dense.”

Outside, the storm was back — violently this time, lightning at all the windows. Marlon said, “In the English department, this is what we would call the objective correlative. Storms of all kinds, outdoors and in.”

And on cue there came a shattering thunder unlike any they’d heard before. The glasses clattered on the table.

When the rain finally thinned, when they could count ten seconds between the lightning strikes and their crashes, a delegation ventured out front: Zilla and Armand and Fannie — and Alfie, who needed to relieve himself. At first they saw nothing. Then Armand realized. “The oak,” he said. And he pointed to where the giant oak, the oldest oak, had stood, west of the director’s house, taller than any building at Laurelfield, older than the oldest living turtle. It was utterly gone. A ragged stump stood maybe four feet high, and a thick mulch of branches and bark and leaves had formed a carpet for yards and yards around. But there was no piece thicker than an arm bone, no piece longer than a leg. Alfie sniffed through it, barking and whimpering.

Fannie said, “Holy mother of God.”

Zilla leaned forward at the waist as if she were retching, though she wasn’t. The rain hit her back.

—

Very late that night, when they were all asleep, she left Laurelfield without saying anything. Since she hadn’t worked in the Longhouse for days, those paintings were dry enough to roll. In the morning they would find her studio empty, but for a little pile on the table: rocks, a feather, a dead bee inside a Mason jar.

—

The attic would not, in fact, be reopened until August of 1954, when, in those last, calamitous days of the colony, someone called a willing locksmith and the able-bodied hefted the desks and office machines and cabinets with forty-two years’ worth of files up the stairs. A few files were expunged at that time. Ludo’s, for one. Eddie’s, for another.

Zilla came the next year, to visit Laurelfield’s grave. She got up in the attic when Grace and George were out, but her oak leaf painting — the one held prisoner all those years — was neatly tacked beneath a window. Its absence would be noticed, and there was no telling who’d be blamed. And so she decided it ought to stay. If she couldn’t return to Laurelfield, at least part of her could always remain.

—

Out on the terrace at midnight, Marlon, terribly soused, his head finally clear: “Only oaks will do that. They always split or explode. And they draw it, they actually draw the lightning to them. Beware the oak! It draws the stroke!”

Josephine told him, fondly, to shut his mouth and write a book about it.

Viktor refused to speak.

—

In 1933, Zilla would watch him dance Albrecht in Giselle, his last performance before he vanished. She would sit in the second-to-last row and dart out at intermission.

—

From 1929 to 1954, forty novels, seven symphonies, fifteen dances, around three hundred stories, and over five thousand poems were completed at Laurelfield. Six times as many of each were begun or continued. Which isn’t to mention the concertos and memoirs, the photographs and charcoal sketches. Seventy love affairs were begun, and forty-two were ended. One woman died in the bathtub. A poet hanged herself in the woods. A violin was hurled from the roof. Eight children were conceived. Between 1938 and 1945, seven Jewish artists from western Europe were allowed indefinite stays.

Some of this is a matter of record, the Laurelfield archives having been made public in the fall of the year 2000. Other stories, other sequences of events, are known only to Edwin Parfitt’s Olympian gods (if they have survived our neglect) or to the fates, or to the ghosts who keep watch. Count it as the universe’s cruelest irony that the ghosts, who alone could piece a whole story together, are uniquely unable to tell it.

One such tale: On October 18, 1944, Lieutenant Armand Cox, a photographer with the Army Signal Corps, climbed onto a barricade in the street outside the Hotel Quellenhof, in the bloody heart of the Battle of Aachen. His interest in the shot was journalistic, not tactical: just a German soldier up in the window. The frame, never developed, captured the soldier’s arm mid-motion. The grenade killed Lieutenant Cox, not the eighteen-year-olds below him on the street. His camera landed near his right leg and was, in any event, crushed soon after. In the window boxes of the hotel, there were still geraniums.

A year later, sorting through Armand’s things in their Rush Street apartment, Eddie found, in a box in the closet, a photograph of the love of his life, naked, laughing, on the night he first fell in love with him. One of the five copies Samantha had spread throughout the world to prevent Gamaliel Devohr from simply burning Laurelfield to the ground. That night Eddie made his way up Route 41 to Laurelfield, where he stood out back, at the edge of the woods, with a pistol to the flesh behind his chinbone.

He stood there an hour, until he couldn’t feel his legs, until he’d become part of the earth, until he thought he might grow leaves. The upstairs lights came on, one by one, as the artists finished their drinks and returned to their work or their trysts. Someone staggered back to the Longhouse. It was a revelation to him, those lights, the shadows behind the curtains: There were artists still up in those rooms, making art. There was good in the world. And the world was worth living in, it truly was. It just wasn’t worth being Edwin Parfitt. He had nothing left to write, and he had no one left to love, and he had nowhere left to go. His editor at Holt, himself just returned from the Pacific, had telegraphed that the public awaited his next work, his response to the war. The only thing that could make his grief even less bearable was feeling stared at, waited for. When all he’d ever wanted was to hide inside of something, to crawl inside a piece of furniture and become a mouse.

He wondered if he could move his finger on the trigger.

But look at those lights.

He lay on the ground and put the gun in the leaves. He slept, and as he woke at dawn he remembered a woman he’d met on his last stay, in ’41. Armand was already off at training, and it was Eddie’s first visit to Laurelfield without him. Her name was Alma Nellis. Hair like grapevine tendrils. This woman would shatter plates against the fountain lip, then mortar them back together in completely illogical ways. The final plate would be vaguely round, but jagged and jumbled. She destroyed and reconstructed an entire tea set this way. Cups no one would dare drink from. “Is it always china?” he asked, and she said, “Next will be a chair.”

He wondered if a man, a broken man, could be reconfigured in the same way.

When the sun was up, he knocked at Samantha’s door. She held his face in her hands as if he were returning from the dead, as if his had been the dog tags and left arm sent back from Aachen.

Her hair was longer now, wispy. She was softer somehow. She made him toast, and they sat at her table, and they talked about, of all things, the White Rabbits, and Josephine’s new solo work, and how she’d taken over the same seventh floor studio in the Fine Arts Building where Armand had once camped out. “She’s a worthy inheritor,” Eddie said.

Samantha said, “Eddie, I’m dying. I have cancer in my breast.”

He had nothing left — the night had drained him — but she understood. She didn’t expect anything. After breakfast they walked the grounds. Eddie said, “You’ll have to move the fish in soon.”

“Eddie, it should be you. The board would hire someone awful. Why can’t it be you instead?”

Eddie thought again of the smashed-up plate. He thought of Proteus, shifting shape and evading capture.

“Wouldn’t you want to? Wouldn’t you want to live here?”

When they finally stopped, at the bench by the pond, he said, “We’ve pulled two tremendous stunts here. The Chippeway raid, and the trapping of Gamby Devohr. Let’s do one more great and ridiculous thing.”

“I doubt I have the energy.”

“It’s called The Death of the Poet Edwin Parfitt.”

—

On October 29, a small circle of poets and artists and writers — some in residence at Laurelfield at that very time, some farther flung — gave testimony to the police about a drowning by suicide in Lake Glinow, Wisconsin, and the perverse funeral that followed. The artist Zilla Silverman and the composer Charles Ives together paid the hefty fine to the town hall that was all the police could come up with by way of penalty, after their fruitless inquest.

“Proteus Wept,” published posthumously in The American Mercury, drew quite a bit of attention, as did the man’s extraordinary suicide note.

Before her death the following spring, Samantha wrote a letter to Gamby reminding him of the poet Max Perry, “whose acquaintance you made in the summer of 1929. He was the one who took such fine care of your daughter Grace when you were incapacitated. I’m afraid he hasn’t made much of himself as a poet since that stay,” Samantha wrote, “but he is devoted to the arts, and would be an exceptional steward for Laurelfield. He also has possession of a file of particular interest to you. I expect his guaranteed employment and lodging as caretaker through at least the end of our agreement on September 1 of ’54.”

As for the artists who stayed there over the next ten years — a very few were friends who recognized him, but most were not. One writer, having been acquainted with Parfitt in Chicago and having mourned his death, wasn’t sure if his heart would recover till halfway through his stay. No one left talking about him, though — they all understood the charge of silence, and admission was, after all, selective — and so to everywhere that was not Laurelfield, Edwin Parfitt remained dead.

—

Zilla Silverman, on the other hand: Zilla’s was a real suicide. In February of 1956, a note from Lemuel, saying simply that she’d poisoned herself. Eddie knew it had nothing to do with Viktor. By then there had been other men. She’d flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters. (Nor had Viktor’s breakdown had anything to do with Zilla Silverman. Except that had he found one love, one great love in his life, she might have kept him off the street, kept him warm and fed and sane. And Zilla might have been that love.) Eddie never learned what had changed for Zilla that particular February morning, beyond the obvious, beyond what one can assume about every suicide: that her unhappiness, in the end, had outweighed all the beauty of the world. Lemuel brought the ashes to Laurelfield. Josephine Lizer carved the statue of a bear that served as Zilla’s only headstone — the sculptor’s last completed work.

—

Eighty years after the oak tree exploded, the ground where it had stood was an especially fertile bed for all those small flowers that thrive in shade and rich soil: lily of the valley, trillium, Jack-in-the-pulpit, dog violet, wood sorrel. And there was a little girl named Emma Grace Herriot, whose mother and father ran the place. When her parents worked late in the director’s house she’d gather whatever was blooming and tie it together with string and, on tiptoes, leave the bundles outside studio doors. She had her mother’s curls, her father’s half smile. She believed herself to be in charge of the koi. She ran away silent from the studios, as she’d trained herself to do. She hoped the surprised artists would believe the flowers were a gift from the ghost.

—

But it was still 1929. And we were in the middle of saying: The oak tree had been blown to toothpicks. When Fannie came back to the library, drenched to her slip, she tried to tell Josephine about it. “You’ll see for yourself in the morning. I’ve never been so startled before by an absence, by a shaft of thin air! I wish we could sculpt it. But how do you sculpt something that isn’t even there?”

SAMANTHA AT HER WINDOW

There went Ralph and John, on a Sunday, bless them, carting wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of oak shreds back to the fire pile. Hours earlier there had been just a circle of ash, and now already there was a whole new heap to burn. Eddie was down there, for some reason, poking at the pile and talking to the men. He’d seemed utterly changed yesterday, pink and energized.

She plucked a ladybug off the windowsill and dropped it gently onto the leaf of her hydrangea, where it might be happier. There was a lot to do. The hole in the wall was still open, and she ought to give the maid the sheets from Gamby’s and Grace’s beds. The White Rabbits were leaving tomorrow, and three new residents would arrive the day after. She ought to telephone Zilla and make sure she was all right, that something hadn’t happened to Lemuel. And with Zilla gone she’d need to make prints from the negatives herself, the ones they’d told Gamby they already had. At the very least she could wash out the Mason jar from Zilla’s studio. She poured the dead bee into the dustbin, rinsed the jar, and left it to dry.

—

After lunch, as she walked Alfie through the mud, she noticed what looked like a water lily. A folded white flower, at the edge of a puddle. When she got close she saw it was paper. A poem, or part of a poem. Typed, with a few penciled marks. A marvelous line about a tree cased in ice. She smoothed it and took it with her to find Eddie — there were no other poets, it must be his — and then she remembered what he’d said about starting over. But he’d finished twelve poems, and surely he couldn’t mean he’d abandoned all of them.

And then, as she and Alfie continued behind the house, she thought of the fire pile, the way Eddie had been lurking there. She trudged off the path and all the way back, till she saw, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, the white rolls stuffed between the splintered oak branches. She glanced around the grounds and saw no one — she could hear Viktor’s phonograph, too loud, from the Longhouse — and began pulling them out. Some were hard to reach, and they were all damp, but she couldn’t leave them. Eddie was prone to changing his mind, after all, and in a week he might be in tears over their loss. There were more than twenty pages. The endings were signaled by his initials and the date, the beginnings by hand-penciled titles now smeared with the wet. She found one more page off by the composer’s cottage, and one by the catalpa.

She let them dry on her kitchen table, and when they were dry she resisted the urge to take them back to Eddie. She clipped them together and set them on the counter.

—

The next afternoon, when John and Ralph came in to nail the board back to the wall, she told them to wait a moment, and on a whim she folded the stack in half and rolled it to fit in Zilla’s Mason jar. She screwed the lid on tight and set the jar in the hole, on the beam where the liquor bottles had been.

John held the board and Ralph nailed it. They’d seen enough strange behavior at Laurelfield that they’d stopped asking questions years before.