The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Doesn’t weird me out.” He tried a sip of his coffee. It was vile.

  “I don’t like to say this,” said Betty, “but your old student died here, too. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”

  Jake nodded solemnly.

  “Hey, so I have to ask,” said Betty, “what was it like, meeting Oprah?”

  He told them about Oprah. They were big Oprah fans.

  “Are they gonna make a movie out of your book?”

  He talked about that, too. Only then could he try to bring the conversation back to Evan Parker, though even as he did he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. These two might live in the Parker house, but so what? It wasn’t as if they’d ever met him.

  “So my old student grew up here,” he finally said.

  “That family was in this house from the time it was built. They owned the quarry. You probably passed the quarry, driving here.”

  “I think I did.” He nodded. “Must have been a wealthy family.”

  “Back then, sure,” said Betty. “But not for a long time. We got a little grant from the state to help with the restoration. We just had to agree to put it on the Christmas house tour when we were finished.”

  Jake looked around. There was nothing he’d seen since coming inside that merited the word “restoration.”

  “That sounds fun!”

  Sylvia made an unhappy noise.

  Betty said, “Sure, a hundred strangers stomping through your rooms, trailing snow. But we took the money, so we kept up our side of the bargain. Lot of people around West Rutland were dying to see the inside of this house, and that was nothing to do with the work we’d done. People knew this house their whole lives. And the family.”

  Sylvia said, “That family had the worst luck.”

  There it was again, that phrase, only by now it didn’t strike Jake as all that surprising. By now he had the relevant information: all four of them had died, Evan Parker and his sister and their parents, three of the four of them under this very roof. He supposed they were collectively deserving of the term “worst luck.”

  “I didn’t know he’d died, till recently,” said Jake. “Actually, I still don’t know how.”

  “Overdose,” Sylvia said.

  “Oh no. I didn’t know he had that problem.”

  “Nobody did. Or at least that he still had the problem.”

  “I shouldn’t say this,” said Betty, “but my sister was in a certain anonymous group with Evan Parker. It met in the basement of the Lutheran church in Rutland. And he was a longtime member of that group, if you take my meaning.” She paused. “Lot of very shocked people.”

  “He was in trouble with his business, we heard,” said Sylvia with a shrug. “That kind of pressure, it’s probably not surprising he picked up again. And owning a bar when you’re sober, that couldn’t have been fun.”

  “People do it, though,” Betty said. “He managed it for years. Then I guess he stopped managing.”

  “Ayuh.”

  No one said anything for a moment.

  “So you bought the house from Evan’s estate?”

  “Not exactly. He had no will, but his sister, the one who’d died earlier, she had a kid. Her kid was the heir. Not the sentimental type, that one.”

  “Oh no?” Jake said.

  “She must’ve waited all of a week after her uncle died to put it on the market. The shape the place was in.” Sylvia shook her head. “If it hadn’t been for this one, nobody’d have come near it. Fortunately for her, Betty always loved this place.”

  “I used to think it was haunted, when I was a little kid,” Betty confirmed.

  “We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.” Sylvia got up to lift another cat off the kitchen counter. “Or I guess we did. We never met her in person. Just dealt with the attorney.”

  “That was no cakewalk,” said Betty. “He was supposed to get all the crap down in the basement cleared out.”

  “And the attic. And half the rooms had stuff in them. I don’t know how many times we wrote to that joker, Gaylord.”

  “Gaylord, Esquire,” Betty rolled her eyes.

  “That guy,” said Sylvia, grinning. “He put that Esquire on everything. Like, we get it. You went to law school. Insecure much?”

  “Finally we told him we were having it all sent to the dump if she didn’t come and take it away. No answer! So that’s what we did.”

  “Wait, so you just threw everything out?”

  He had allowed himself to imagine, for one tantalizing moment, that there was a box of Evan Parker’s manuscript pages, still somewhere beneath this roof. But that was quickly dashed.

  “We kept the old bed. Beautiful four-poster. Probably couldn’t have gotten it out if we wanted to.”

  “Which we didn’t!” Betty said with satisfaction.

  “And there were a couple of nice rugs we sent out to get cleaned. Probably for the first time in a century. The rest, we got in a hauler and sent the bill to Mr. Gaylord, Esquire. I bet you’ll be shocked to learn it never got paid.”

  “I mean, if my family had a house for a hundred and fifty years I’d be going through every inch of it. Even if she didn’t care about, y’know, the ‘antiques,’ you’d think she’d want her own things. Everything you grew up with? Just throw it all away, sight unseen?”

  “Wait,” said Jake. “The niece grew up here too? In this house?”

  He was trying to understand the order of events, but it all seemed to resist him, somehow. Evan’s parents had lived and died here, and then his sister had lived here and raised her own daughter here, and then, after his sister died and his niece departed—out of there, as Sally the barfly had put it—Evan had moved back in? It might be slightly confusing, but he supposed none of it was greatly surprising. At the end of the day, this house gave Jake a visual backdrop for Evan Parker’s irrelevant childhood, and, he supposed, for the final years of his life. But it didn’t explain anything else.

  He thanked them. He had them write down their address for the signed book. “Should I send one for your sister, too?”

  “Are you shitting me? Yes!”

  They were behind him when he walked back down the hall, toward the front door. He stopped to put his coat back on. Then he looked up.

  Around the inside of the front door was a clarion call from the old house’s distant past: a frieze of faded paint depicting a chain of pineapples. Pineapples. It caught him and let him go, then it caught him again, and held. Five above the door frame. Ten at least on either side, descending almost to the floor. They had been preserved in a strip of negative space, around which the rest of the wall had been repainted that Pepto-Bismol pink.

  “Oh my god,” he said out loud.

  “I know.” Sylvia was shaking her head. “So tacky. Betty wouldn’t let me paint over them. We had the biggest fight.”

  “It’s a stencil,” said Betty. “I saw the same thing once at Sturbridge Village, just like this. Pineapples all around the door and up around the tops of the walls. It goes back to when the house was built, I’m positive.”

  “We compromised. I had to leave a strip unpainted. It looks crazy.”

  It did look crazy. It was also one of the only things left under this roof that might have deserved the word “restoration.” Had it been, in any sense, restored.

  Sylvia said: “I’m going to touch it up, eventually. I mean, look at the colors. So faded! If we have to keep it at least I can overpaint them. Honestly, every time I look at my door I think, why would anybody put pineapples on their walls? This is Vermont, not Hawaii! Why not an apple or a blackberry? They actually grow here!”

  “It means hospitality,” Jake heard himself say. He had not been able to look away from them, the faded chain of them, because he was reeling. All of those disparate pieces spun around him, refusing to land.

  “What?”

  “Hospitality. It’s a symbol. I don’t know why.”

  He had read it somewhere. He knew exactly where.


  For a long moment, none of them said a thing. What was there to say? And why hadn’t it occurred to him, way back in his office in Richard Peng Hall, that Parker’s first attempt at a novel would probably describe the people he’d known best, in the house they’d once shared? It was the biggest cliché of all that a writer’s first book was autobiographical: my childhood, my family, my horrible school experience. His own The Invention of Wonder was autobiographical, of course it was, and yet Jake had denied Evan Parker even this token courtesy in the fellowship of writers. Why?

  The mistake, a product of his own arrogance, had cost him months.

  This had never been about an appropriation, real or imaginary, between two writers. This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed. What Parker had stolen was something he must have seen up close and very personal: the mother and the daughter and what had happened between them, right here, in this house.

  Of course she was angry. Not for one minute had she wanted her story to be told, not by her close relation and certainly not by a total stranger. That much, at long last, he finally understood.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 178–80

  Gab had parents: a mom who “struggled” and a dad who came and went. She had a sister with CF and a brother whose autism was so bad he sometimes had to be tied to his bed. She had, in other words, a home life so desperate and sad that even Maria’s domestic circumstances must have seemed like something out of a family sitcom. She was a year behind Maria, allergic to nuts and obliged to carry an EpiPen everywhere, dull as dishwater, and headed exactly nowhere.

  Maria, at least, was marginally nicer to be around once Gab became a fixture. Samantha credited herself for being not a prude, not a religious freak like her own parents, and not a controlling asshole in general, so she tended to see the advent of her daughter’s relationship as having a positive impact on these final years. It had all passed so swiftly that sometimes, when she was first waking up in the morning, in her parents’ old bed, in her childhood home, she actually thought of herself as the person counting down the days to departure, and then she would encounter Maria and Gab at the kitchen table eating leftover pepperoni pizzas from the night before, and remember she was a nearly thirty-two-year-old mom about to say a permanent sayonara to the only child she was likely to have. Here and gone as if none of it had ever happened, and she was catapulting backward, ten years, thirteen years, sixteen years to this same kitchen table with her mother and her father and her own lost hopes, and the classroom where she had once vomited on her problem set, and the very clean room in the College Inn where Daniel Weybridge had promised her he couldn’t get her pregnant, not even if he wanted to.

  One morning in the spring of what should have been Maria’s junior year, she got a call from Mr. Fortis, of all people, letting her know that she had to come in and sign some release so her daughter could graduate early. This was mystifying, but she went that afternoon, finding the old math teacher—he had been made assistant principal years before—more bent, more gray, and so addled that he failed to acknowledge her as a person he had ever met before, let alone a former student, let alone a gifted former student he’d failed to support when she’d been forced to drop out of school. And it was from this man she had to learn her daughter had gotten herself a scholarship to Ohio State.

  Ohio State. Samantha herself had never been to Ohio. She’d never been out of New York.

  “You must be so proud,” said Fortis, the old fool.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She signed the paper and returned home, where she went straight to Maria’s room, formerly her own room, and found the papers in a neat file marked OSU in the bottom drawer of her daughter’s old oak desk, formerly her own old oak desk. One was a formal acceptance to the Honors Program in Arts and Sciences and another was a notification of something called a National Buckeye Scholarship and something else called a Maximus Scholarship. Samantha sat there for a long time at the foot of Maria’s neatly made bed, the same cannonball four-poster she herself had slept in as a child, and dreamed of escape in, and been imprisoned in while incubating that baby she hadn’t wanted to carry, or give birth to, or raise. She had done all of those things without any outward complaint, simply because people in temporary power over her life had told her she had to. Those people—her own parents—were long gone, but here Samantha still was, even as the object of all of this sacrifice was herself preparing to fuck off forever, without a backward glance.

  Naturally, she had not been unaware of this exit, in itself; Maria was hardly going to mess up her chance the same way Samantha herself had, or any other way. From her earliest years, when she’d toddled about reading letters out loud, she was headed for college if not even farther, and some life—it went without saying—beyond Earlville and probably upstate New York itself. But there was something about that final year Samantha had been expecting, in her life as a mother, perhaps holding inside it some slim possibility of reversal, even redemption, which now was suddenly not there. Or possibly it was the way Maria had managed to get back at her for that skipped sixth grade she hadn’t given permission for. This time, under her old calculus teacher’s oblivious eye, she had signed that release, too cowed and too ashamed not to give in. It was June now. Maria, she supposed, would be gone by August, if not before.

  She did not confront her daughter. She waited to see if Maria would at least invite her to the graduation ceremony, but in fact Maria had no interest in walking across that crepe-paper-decorated basketball court, and on the day in question she was off with Gab in Hamilton, possibly at the bookstore or even cluelessly hanging out on the porch of the College Inn. (The inn was now Family run for four generations!, Dan Weybridge having died of pancreatic cancer.) The only thing she said when she got home that night was that she had ended things with her girlfriend, and it was for the best.

  The summer, a hot one, began. Maria saw no one. Samantha stayed in her office with the fan on, doing the same medical billing job she’d been doing since Maria was small, the job that had paid for her daughter’s food and clothing and doctors’ appointments. June passed, and July, and still Maria said not one word about the fact that she was about to depart, but Samantha did begin to see some incremental motion. Clothing was being bagged and taken to the donation box in town. Books were being boxed and dropped off at the Earlville Library. Old papers, tests from middle school, crayon drawings from all the way back to early childhood were being sorted and then wedged into the wastepaper basket under Maria’s desk. It was a complete rout.

  “You don’t like that anymore?” Samantha said once, pointing to a green T-shirt.

  “No. That’s why I’m getting rid of it.”

  “Well, I might keep it, if you don’t want it.”

  They were, after all, the same size.

  “Suit yourself.”

  It was early August.

  She wasn’t planning it. Truly, she wasn’t planning anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sole Survivor

  Afterward he needed to think. He drove back into town and parked outside a Walgreens for nearly an hour, head bent, hands gripping his own knees, trying to peel away the many layers of what he’d assumed he knew about @TalentedTom, and then to form some sense of what he needed most to know right now. There was much, and he was starting from a radically different place, and it was so hard not to want to hold on to his earlier assumptions about vengeful novelists and loyal MFA classmates. He had to be humble now, Jake decided, if he was going to stop this person—this, he now recalibrated, woman—before she caused him irreparable injury.

  On his phone he hastily typed a list of what he didn’t know, more or less in descending order of priority:

  Who is she?

  Where is she?

  What does she want?

  Then he stared at that for another twenty minutes, overwhelmed by the bread
th of his own ignorance.

  By two he was at the Rutland Free Library, trying to learn as much about Evan Parker’s family as he could cram into one afternoon. The Parkers had deep roots in Rutland. They’d arrived in the 1850s with the railroad, but only twenty years later the family patriarch, Josiah Parker, owned a marble quarry on the same West Rutland street—Marble Street—where he would also build Betty and Sylvia’s Italianate mansion. The house, obviously, had been a showplace for Josiah Parker’s wealth at the time of its construction, but Rutland’s fortunes, alongside those of the Parker family itself, had mirrored the area’s general decline, and the gradual extinction of Vermont’s marble industry. On the 1990 property tax rolls its value was listed as $112,000, at which time its owners were Nathaniel Parker and Jane Thatcher Parker.

  Evan’s parents. Or, more to the point, the parents of Evan and his late sister.

  A bitch and a piece of work, according to his bar friend Sally (who, to be fair, could have passed for both, herself).

  He said she’d do anything, according to Martin Purcell.

  I heard she burned up.

  There was no internet tribute page for this particular member of the Parker family, which might have spoken to her dearth of friends, or possibly just to Evan Parker’s specific lack of brotherly love (since he’d presumably handled matters after his sister’s passing). Her name, apparently, was Dianna, which was pathetically close to Diandra, the name he had given her in his “fictional” novel. And her death notice, on the same Rutland Herald obituary page that would host Evan Parker’s own a mere three years later, was basic in the extreme:

  Parker, Dianna (32), died August 30th, 2012. Lifelong resident of West Rutland. Attended West Rutland HS. Predeceased by parents. Survived by a brother and a daughter.

  No mention of what, in particular, had caused her death, not even one of the usual banalities (“sudden,” “unexpected,” “after a long illness”) let alone anything personal (“beloved”) or blandly regretful (“tragic”). No mention of the place where the death had taken place, or where the deceased person was to be buried. No listing of a memorial service, not even Evan Parker’s own “burial private” or “memorial to be announced later.” This woman had been a daughter, sister, and above all mother, and she had certainly died young after a life that was by any measure constrained and devoid of experiences. Dianna Parker hadn’t even graduated from high school, not if Jake was correctly interpreting the use of the word “attended,” and if she’d never left West Rutland, Vermont, he really did have to feel sorry for her. This was the most barren sendoff imaginable after not much of a life and—if she really had “burned up”—an indisputably horrible death.