The Hundred-Year House

PROLOGUE. 1900

Virgin land is a fine and great thing. The Irish farmer who’d sold it did nothing with this part, letting decades of decomposing leaves richen the soil. Augustus and his architect, Mr. Ross, walk apace where the trees will let them through. Where the way is narrow, Mr. Ross follows Mr. Devohr.

This plot feels auspicious, not like a place he’s seen before but a place he’s always been meant to see. What is the opposite of memory? What is the inverse of an echo?

“It’s flattest just beyond,” Ross says. They are less than a quarter mile back from the road, and Augustus originally imagined even more seclusion, a long ride down a private drive. Ross is right, though, about the space. They’ve stopped by a massive oak, a tree stately enough to anchor an estate. “Most of your landscape would sit behind the house, then,” Ross says. “We might clear a whole pasture, or we might put trails through the woods.”

“Violet will want some ornamentals.”

A scrawny rabbit stares at them, petrified. Augustus claps his hands and the creature darts away. The snow is long gone, but the mud cracks in brittle, icy sheets under both men’s boots. The century is only six weeks old.

Violet, after the long ride from the city, refused to leave the station. He left her sitting on the bench with her travel case, hunched against the cold, and tipped the stationmaster a dollar to keep watch, to see to her lunch. After his visit to Mr. Ross’s office, the two men stopped to see that she was still there, a seated statue, hands in her muffler. She insists he’s building her a prison in the wilderness. And isn’t he? What other choice has she left him?

His own idiocy: the failure to realize, when she abruptly stopped referring to Billy, the boy she’d left behind in Surrey, the boy who’d given her daisies for her fourteenth birthday and swam across the river for her — that it might not be a good sign, an acquiescence to marriage, but a very bad sign indeed. A Dr. W. H. Lambert showed up in Toronto that same year, a fellow Briton, and Violet saw him for her heart, and her women’s troubles, which were several in that year after the wedding. Her parents were dead before the newlyweds had even returned from Paris, and there was trouble in the grain market, and Violet lost two babies in the womb, and in short there was so much worry that Augustus was left apologizing for the Devohr curse, not thinking he ought to watch for more bad luck. It was at the Ambulance Association Ball last summer that Violet’s brother, back in town, sidled up to Augustus at the punch bowl and nodded at the doctor across the room. “Imagine old Billy Lambert showing up here in Toronto.” Augustus was a drowned man.

Mr. Ross is counting his paces, walking what he thinks might be the perimeter of the main house.

“I’d want a wall,” Augustus calls. “If we’re so close to the road.”

“And you’ll have neighbors eventually.”

When he returns to the station he’ll tell her the house will be perfect. He’ll tell her that in this new century, on this untouched earth, they will start something noble and good. What will Billy Lambert be, but a memory? What will the babies be, but things that never lived? For man is man and master of his fate. All boys ought to memorize that one in school.

And he has made the money that has made escape possible. Money is freedom, and he will explain it to her again, how this move is the triumph of money over fate and memory — which is, in turn, the triumph of hard work. For what is money but work made tangible and put into the bank?

He imagines he’ll take her back to Toronto just for the spring, for the packing of the house, and then they’ll stay in Chicago while the new estate is built. They might look, tomorrow, at the homes along Astor Street. Yesterday she said he wants to lock her up. And he said, “Would you rather I had your dear doctor shipped back in a barrel? I’m doing things the proper way.”

She looked at him level and said, “You may shut me in, but I can shut you out. There are two sides to every door, Augustus.” Her eyes were dark and sharp, and he felt, in that moment, like a lion tamer. Like a man who is only in charge because for now, for a few days more, the lions will still allow it.

He must forgive her. Billy Lambert had the prior claim on her heart. She cannot see Lambert for what he is, a fellow who deals in blood and urine all day, whose coat sleeves are always too short. And Augustus is not without sin.

Violet, maps of blue veins inside her wrists. But where can he follow them? Her eyes, too: windows to what, precisely? He thinks of the Sargent his father briefly owned — a small painting, not a great one, Mrs. de Somebody — how he himself, age twelve, would stare at her eyes, just dark and imprecise daubs of paint, and yet he knew her, he felt she might see that he alone loved her truly. And he knew what she was thinking, which changed daily. And now that he possesses a real woman, all her flesh, her eyes are nothing but opaque glass. He is slowly learning there might be greater honesty in art than in woman.

Ross has circled back. He says, “You couldn’t do better. It’s a fine plot.”

“I thought you’d be chalking it off somehow. Something official.”

Ross smiles, indulgent. “Why not break a branch to mark the front door?”

He shows Augustus the spot, and a scrubby little tree, leafless, doomed to die with its cousins when ground is broken. Augustus takes hold of a low branch, level with his own face, thin enough to snap but thick enough for the men to find again later.

“I ought to say auspicious words. Aren’t we meant to throw wine and salt?”

Ross raises his hand as if lofting a goblet. “A full moon on a dark night, and the road downhill all the way to your door!”

“That should do.” The branch breaks cleanly down with an echoing snap and hangs there, swinging, by a strip of skin. It is decided.

Ross says, “I’ll come back to mark it. A red ribbon.”

He pulls out his watch and shows it, grimacing, to Devohr. It is nearly half past three. The men sprint for the horses, and the horses, cold and unprepared, hurry as best they can back to town.

At the station, Devohr throws his bridle to Ross and dismounts and runs, but he sees, as he nears the platform, that the train is not inching to a stop but to a start. Men who have just disembarked hold their hats to their heads and wait to cross the track. And Violet is not on the bench where he left her. Instead there is a row of brown acorns down the bench arm, lined up and evenly spaced. She hoards small things, collecting them in columns and stacks: coins and pebbles and beetle wings. Once, he found it charming. Now he wonders what strange math she’s doing with the trinkets. The world is her abacus. She is calculating against him.

He searches frantically for the stationmaster, but then he sees, gliding past above, more slowly than if she were walking, Violet’s face in the window.

He shouts her name, and she looks down, but just a bit, and he isn’t sure she’s seen him. He refuses to run along the platform like a fool in a French novel. He can keep pace by walking, for at least a moment, and he thinks what can be done. He could take Ross’s horse, but it’s more than thirty miles to the city. He might track down an automobile. If nothing else, he can wire the Palmer House and make sure she arrives, make sure she’s seen to.

The train picks up a bit of speed, and he’ll trot, but just barely, not for much longer. Above him, she has put her white knuckles to the window and is knocking, slowly, listlessly. Looking straight at him now, with no expression at all. A cruel and pointless knocking: not to get out, and not to call him in. As if to demonstrate, simply, that the glass is thick.

He can almost hear the knocks, above the hiss of steam and the sound of the pistons. But he can’t, he knows he can’t. It’s in his head. The train only gets louder, and it only moves forward.

He will see her tomorrow, in the city, but this feels for some reason like the last glimpse of her he’ll ever get: staring through him, pale and inscrutable behind the glass.

Oh Violet, Violet, Violet! He wants to shout it, but he won’t.

Let me in.

Let me in.

Let me in.